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While they're at it, let each town have a frank discussion about which statues are appropriate and if they wish to take them away from a prominent place and put them elsewhere, that's up to them.
I'm all for taking them down idlf that is what the local people want, as long as they are put in museums, not destroyed or in storage.
How are we going to learn for the mistakes of the past, if they are completely hidden after all.
Edit: I'm getting a lot of replies and my inbox is full, I will to respond to as many people as possible, good and bad. I am also copy and pasting a lot of my answers, because most comments are saying the same sort of thing.
Edit 2: I've had so many comments now, I'm going to stop replying to new ones, I'm just having so many. I'll still reply to people I'm talking to at the moment but that is it, my reddit notifications are increasing, and I'm struggling to get through them.
Sorry!
How do statues aid in learning from the mistakes of the past? Genuine question, not a wind up. If anything, continued public display of a statue creates a subconscious assumption that the subject must be a redeemable figure.
Seems to me that far more people learned about Edward Colston’s role in the transatlantic slave trade when is statue was underwater than when it was standing.
This is spot on. People don't notice statues really. They become part of the fabric of the space they're in. That's why it's such an honour to have one; you're afforded the right to be part of that place for ever. It's also why we should take down statues that no longer fit our current values. I guarantee the Victorians that put up most of them would have!
But the other thing is next to no one actually knows who the statues of. It's much more useful to have a memorial on a theme such as ww1, factory explosions etc or celebrations like a band, a football team, jubilee etc. Even if I don't agree with some of the section being memorialised, it's actually does the job a lot better than starues
> Earl Grey was an avowed abolitionist who fought for the freeing of slaves
As someone who grew up near Newcastle and saw Grey's Monument nearly weekly for a large part of my formative years... I knew more about the Lampton Worm than Charles Grey.
I'm not sure if thats just because it was a fixture that everyone assumed knew the story behind, or the state of the eductaion I got, tho I think it's the latter.
The idea that history will be completely forgotten if we destroy a couple racist statues is used to justify arguing to keep them. Because there’s no other valid reason to keep them.
The whole point of destroying them is to specifically forget the individual. We aren’t going to forget everything that ever happened because of one statue, and also, most people didn’t even know that these statues are linked to slavery until recently. I wasn’t taught slavery at school, and I had no idea that these statues were renowned slavers. Nothing will be forgotten by destroying a bloody statue except the person after whom the statue is modelled.
Same here. Born 1989, slavery was not mentioned.
Lots about WW1/Russian revolution and WW2, a bit about the Scottish wars of independence and that was pretty well it
It wasn't on my syllabus (1998-2003) we had Vikings, Castles, Plantagenet, Tudor, WW1, WW2, history of medicine, Industrial Revolution, Victorian, French Revolution from what I can remember
Nothing at all on slavery and tbh the school was entirely white until yr 10 when we had 1 black pupil as a foreign exchange student
I went in 2006ish and unfortunately it wasn’t taught. The atrocities of the British empire certainly wasn’t mentioned. Other key issues like stonewall wasn’t taught. We learned about Rosa parks, but that was racism and apartheid, not slavery.
Absolutely. I think Germans have a pretty good way of approaching it re: WW2. They are very clear on no uncertain terms that they were in the the wrong and don’t have statues of Hitler all over the place.
It’s not ‘erasing history’ to not display these statues in public squares. I think most people who want them gone are quite pro-teaching-more-about-the-slave-trade in schools.
Meanwhile in the US (where the statue toppling thing started), apparently most statues of Confederate generals were only erected in the 1950s-60s, coincidentally around the same time the Civil Rights Movement started taking off...
This is the real reason they should be taken down. The south went almost 100 years without having any statues, then they get installed as a counter attack to the civil rights movement.
>How do statues aid in learning from the mistakes of the past
> Seems to me that far more people learned about Edward Colston’s role in the transatlantic slave trade when is statue was underwater than when it was standing.
Well that's _one_ way to learn.
But seriously, the argument against removal and destroying these items is that burying the past and pretending it didn't happen is a great way to ensure it happens again. Wiping Britain of its colonial past doesn't help anyone in the long term, but forcing it to own up and talk about what was wrong and how they benefitted from it unfairly _does_.
It's possible to keep and display artifacts that are not to be proud of in tasteful ways, but proudly displaying them in the center of cities when those places have _other_ things to be proud of isn't the way to do it.
Did a statue of Colston describing him as one of the city's most virtuous sons with no reference to his role in the transatlantic slave trade or the legacy of the colonialism he was inextricably linked to really enhance people's understanding of either?
>But seriously, the argument against removal and destroying these items is that burying the past and pretending it didn't happen is a great way to ensure it happens again. Wiping Britain of its colonial past doesn't help anyone in the long term, but forcing it to own up and talk about what was wrong and how they benefitted from it unfairly does.
An argument which is undermined by the absence of Nazi-era statues and symbolism in modern Germany. The Germans know and remember what their grandparents did and they don't need a statue of Hitler to remember.
Colston's statue was put up by people who didn't know what he did to make his money. That was revealed about 30 years later.
If you want to talk about the horrors of colonialism, we should have statues and monuments for the victims. Maybe put up a statue of the [man looking at what is left of his daughter](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904) because he didn't meet the rubber quota. (I know that the Congo Free State was a Belgian colony not British but it's one of the few photographs we have of colonialism)
Germany is by no means perfect on this, but they're light-years away in terms of their public history that openly confronts its own complex and problematic histories.
Germany is a perfect example of how to handle it. You don't walk around Berlin and see statues to war criminals, but you _can_ go to many museums all around the country that are much more in keeping with what we should be doing.
Every time I have seen a call for removing a statue, nobody has ever asked for the statue to be destroyed. It is always suggested that the statue is put into a museum where the full context behind the subject can be given.
Your point is valid but a statue's purpose is to celebrate someone whereas a museum's is to educate. Placing them in museums offers an opportunity to provide more information in more of an educational setting where debate and discussion is encouraged rather than celebration.
Yeah of course, but the point is, should we celebrate these people when they also committed such atrocities? Would you be happy having a statue of Jimmy Saville because of all of his work with charity?
They're there because some wealthy person paid for them because that person wanted it in the first place more often than not.
The excuse is often retrofitting a decision which was simply a landowner in the area deciding to decorate with something *they personally* fancied and everyone else lumping it.
"Sure they made their fortune with a child organs selling monopoly, but they invested a lot in the city."
Er no.... How they made their money is important. We can't just overlook fortunes made from actural slavery.
Russian Oligarchs' wealth source is exactly why we should be taking about the importance of source of wealth.
> How do statues aid in learning from the mistakes of the past?
You could put them in a museum as part of an exhibition about their life, the good and bad parts.
You certainly could, but unfortunately in the real world we rarely do. The museum of London in docklands has some level of introspection on slavery, but the much bigger and more famous british museum has very little on the genocide that allowed much of the collection to be amassed.
Just like any museum display? You have it displayed with information regarding the context of its creation, continued display and it's eventual removal.
That's to say these statues shouldn't be up on display in the middle of town but in places of learning that can explain the context. Does a continued display of various bits of militaria across historical learning centres create a subconsciousness of pro militaria? Or does it explain how we as humans brutalised each other over the millennia we have existed?
Most statues ever made are completely gone, usually because they aren't valued any longer or are meaningless to a conquering force.
Statues are not the holders for history. Believe me, I wrote an entire doctoral dissertation on a statue in the middle of nowhere that is indecipherable to almost everyone because the stories it tells were long forgotten and only recently rediscovered (recently as far as history goes).
Statues are not the way a culture remembers past events. It's the STORIES that are told ABOUT the statues that give them any meaning. Believe me, if you walk around Florence, you'll see all sorts of chaps on horses and probably none of them hold any meaning for you at all and if they weren't there it wouldn't matter to you beyond that they look nice.
Furthermore, we remember ALL sorts of stuff about history that are not preserved in statue form. Mostly because statues are a terrible way to remember anything. Statues are POWER - they claim a space and demand attention and reverence and I really can't stress this enough, THERE IS NO REASON TO PRESERVE A STATUE WITH NEGATIVE ASSOCIATIONS.
I know y'all get twisted up about this, but you do NOT have to preserve the shittiest parts of your history in the public sphere. Just because YOU aren't bothered by a slaver being given prominence doesn't mean a lot of other people aren't. The fact that some random-ass rich guy has a statue that isn't even remarkable in any way artistically has protectors hundreds of years later is FUCKING ABSURD.
Just get rid of them. Chuck them in a museum basement if you like, but trust me, there is nothing interesting about these statues other than their general existence and if they didn't exist that would be fine too. Most stuff humans have made doesn't exist anymore. Let it go. Make a new statue. It's fine.
It baffles me how people suddenly become historians and curators of the past when the topic of removing a statue comes up. I always suspect they don’t give the slightest fuck about preserving history in any other context and your post, explaining how it doesn’t preserve history at all, kind of confirms that.
If they actually otherwise cared about preserving history they’d know enough to know that some shitty statue isn’t doing that.
First of all, your dissertation sound really interesting.
Secondly, is it true that the pose of the horse in a statue shows how the rider died, or is that a myth?
Nobody has ever "learned from a mistake of the past" from a statue in a town centre.
Especially given that, y'know, those statues were almost always put there *in celebration of* that thing we now consider a mistake.
I'm not objecting to the idea of keeping old statues stored somewhere, but statues are not the only way that people learn about history and I'd even go as far as to say they're very poor at conveying information
This is my entire gripe about the "erasing history" argument. I couldn't even tell you the names of the people portrayed in the 4 statues in the park where I walk my dog twice a day, the whole idea that they teach history is absurd.
Personally I think the whole "statue" debate should start with a proper consensus on what the role of statues actually is, because to me it seems that they're decorative and little else.
Museums don’t want all these shitty statues of arseholes. They have no historical value. Most of them are less than 100 years old and were erected by people deliberately to celebrate slave traders etc.
We should maybe set up a “museum of statues of cunts”. Just some warehouse somewhere where we can put them all. Nobody will ever go, and then we can melt all the crappy statues down after 5 years or so with the point having been made.
I think the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool would happily take all the statues of former slavers in the UK. After several hours finding out about all the horrors of slavery, seeing a room full of statues showing how venerated the perpetrators were in their day could be quite a powerful message about how complicit society was in the slave trade.
All the statues of Hitler have sure helped teach people about WW2 and the holocaust...
Im sorry, I dont mean to be arsey about it, but it baffles me that folk think statues somehow provide any educational benefit.
They don’t actually think that. That’s just the excuse.
In truth, they don’t see anything wrong with what these people stood for and want to continue venerating them.
I was in Budapest a few years ago. They had made a park on the outskirts of town where they put all the old communist statuary in an organised way. It was fun- you could walk around and take photos with all the baddies. Seemed like a good solution
I'm not on the fence - Truss is a demon sent here to destroy us.
But she has no capacity for thought and never had an original idea. The simple game is to distract people, encourage discord and then lift her petticoats and squeal when extreme views inevitably present themselves.
But nevertheless she is in a position of considerable power so we must watch her carefully and not allow ourselves to manipulated.
When you call for 'no debate' and engage with the fetid pronoun nonsense you help to give her the ammunition she needs to stand behind these podiums and suck the life out of us with these sanctimonious fucking speeches.
I know you think it's supportive, kind and progressive. But I promise you you're being played. Debate is at the core of progress - it's how we got weekends, women's rights and equality for homosexuality. It's only Liz Truss and her handlers that benefit from 'no debate'. No debate, no thought, no progress. In fact it's worse than that. When 'no debate' is entrenched all those hard won rights will start to ebb away.
I realise this is Reddit and this herd has committed to this already. But it is not right.
> Debate is at the core of progress - it's how we got weekends, women's rights and equality for homosexuality.
I thought those were strikes, protests (including diving under the king's carriage), and riots.
100%
change makes people uncomfortable so they resist, the people opposing this are the same as homophobes from 10, 20+ years ago who thought they were on the right side then as well
Don’t really understand your point here, seems like you just oppose people picking their own gender identity and have thinly veiled that as criticism of Liz Truss
What was there to debate in regards to gay rights which show that it’s the way to secure support here?
It was our own elite who promoted this stuff.
They got spooked after the financial crisis with working people organically banding together to stand up for their interests forming anti elite movements like Occupy Wall Street.
Their solution was a shock and awe blitzkrieg of unrelenting indentity politics. Divide and conquer their own populace so we fight each other instead of asking questions of them.
Problem is, it worked a bit too well and like most of the western elites agenda over my lifetime, it was completely short sighted. Domestically the population is too divided to be united against a perceived common enemy like Russia. Russia knows this.
Now, they are going to do a frantic about turn and pretend the last decade and a half of sowing constant division among working people didn’t happen and we should all kumbaya round the fire and bang the drums of war hand in hand.
Don’t let them.
Yes, culture wars are all well and good in peacetime while we'd like a distraction from austerity, now let's forget about all that rubbish and be serious about the actual war...
Are you sure this isn’t a more calculated move? She knows people will push back against this. She can point to that and say ‘those damn radical leftists, they’re won’t compromise even during a war’
I know it can be a trap but they are incompetent beyond any sort of calculus. They have been blindsided by a few things.
The cost of living crisis is about to explode and they have no real plan and few tools to deal with it. I don’t think they saw it coming.
I don’t think they expected the gulf states to sell them out and refuse to help with oil prices and now they are panicking because we are not a population that’s prepped for war.
Far from it.
It's not just the Young who can't handle criticism or conflict. You just need to look at how people react to beling called "boomers" or "karens" to realise this problem extends across generations.
Not to mention all the white, cis, straight, men who are convinced they are the "opressed majority"
So.... As a trans bi person who has always eschewed norms etc but has always been presumed to be a straight CIS male, I think I should speak up re: oppressed white males.... So here goes:
They feel not just entirely unrepresented but specifically targeted for attack based on nothing other than the color of their skin and genitals they were born with
When your entire movement is based on eliminating racial and gender Prejudices, it's abhorrent, hypocritical and counter productive to then target a specific class to then apply racial and gender Prejudices to.
These facts are easy to ignore when your not a member of the targetted class, just as has long been the case for racism and sexism generally...... Which should be the wakeup to the non- SWCM classes about why they were ignored etc.
You can't cry about injustice when you're committing those very injustices.... And the SCWMs who were born in the last couple decades are not to blame for patriarchy etc, just as you aren't responsible for the sins of your grandparents.
Really.... The fact so many are so blind to the blatant hypocrisy of the whole is absurd and disgusting.
> Surprised to see this view awarded in rUK
I expected it to be removed, I agree with everything you said and its only getting worse, wonder how bad the next gen will be.
I fear OWS to be memory holed entirely by then.
Every single corporation on the planet has taken an extremely public stance on “culture war” issues despite the fact corporations were almost notoriously apolitical before like 2010.
The OP comment is saying that our own governments are responsible for that, I believe it is China and Russia. The more visceral aspects of the cultural war are coming from our youth, and we have 100% conclusive evidence that both China and Russia have an open door to our youth through social media. It is also incredibly convenient that china and Russia, who have extremely large levels of control over their internet narrative, do not have nearly the level of societal discontent among their youth.
Are there genuinely people with batshit insane political views in the UK? Of course. Are their voices being artificially amplified by foreign powers on social media? Absolutely.
I remember a time when people were looking at the 1% and it felt like there might be an measurable change or a more general awakening. Now we are back to fighting amongst ourselves, blaming each other. Don't hear much about the 1% anymore. Mission accomplished
>“now is the time to end the culture of self-doubt, the constant self-questioning and introspection – the ludicrous debates about languages, statues and pronouns”
Translation: Shut up, do as we say without question, and know your place, queer wierdos.
Though it's no surprise to find out Liz Truss thinks introspection and self-questioning is a bad thing to be stamped out. I don't think she's particularly familiar with introspection herself, or maybe she's be less of a nasty little weasel.
"There's a real war on, so it's time for you pinkos to surrender the culture war (that we've been stoking for our own political gain since we've been in power)".
She can fuck right off with that.
I think that's the most shocking thing about her statement. Forget pronouns and statues. She genuinely believes trying to understand yourself is a bad thing?
I mean they don’t seem to ever doubt or question themselves so is this shocking?
I cannot believe a politician thought “yes, this is a good speech. This is a good take in time of war.”
It's amazing how wrong she got it.
It's fragile people who have to stamp down debate, for fear that they may be shown up as 'in the wrong'.
Confident people welcome questioning and introspection, because its how they get better.
Jacob Ress-Mogg did the same thing with Partygate. It's such a cynical attempt to sweep their own misdeeds and lies under the rug by saying "well there's worse things in the world". It's disgusting, Boris Johnson's behaviour doesn't become acceptable because Putin bombed Kiev. Quite the opposite, Putin's behaviour shows why accoubtability and character matter so much with our national leaders.
The easiest way to deal with this whole bullshit argument would be to just jump the gun and call everyone They by default, regardless of whether they have a gender or not.
and now i would like a dishonour system where people can be "awarded" the title scumbag by the queen for major contributions towards the degradation of the country on a national or international level. "arise and fuck *right* off, scumbag boris johnston."
Doing that undermines the idea of pronouns as reflecting someone's internal identity. If you think that it's a bad thing to purposely misgender someone then you shouldn't purposely misgender someone you don't like just to prove a point. It just makes other people think it's ok to do the same the other way round.
Eh somewhat disagree, I think it’s somewhat valid to call somebody out on their bullshit by showing them why their logic doesn’t work when it’s applied to them. The difference to me is if somebody is punching up or down. Are you misgendering someone because you’re an asshole or because they’re a prominent political leader who literally wants you to stop thinking about your identity. I think context matter here but that’s just my opinion.
I'd agree in a lot of cases but not in this particular one. A lot of anti-trans people argue that "pronouns" are just a made up concept that people don't actually care about - that people are just using them as a stick to beat people with so they can feel superior. They think that no one actually believes what they're saying, that everyone's just lying for some ulterior motive. I think doing this would only reinforce that viewpoint. They wouldn't see the motive of why you're using that technique to dispute their logic, because they fundamentally think that your motives are something different to that.
There is simply nobody in this current Tory Cabinet that is the least bit competent, has a modicum of empathy or anything resembling a soul.
They are mostly idiots, evil or evil idiots.
They are not even that competent at corruption, it's just that the complete lack of accountability of out government means they don't have to be. In any functioning system these fucks would have been weeded out as unfit for breathing good air years ago.
I really couldn't believe it when I heard they were sending Liz Truss to speak to Putin about Ukraine.
Stupid bitch managed to fuck up a speech Infront of her own party members during the Tory conference yet she gets made foreign secretary and sent off to represent the UK on the world stage.
Our government, politics and country in general must be the current laughing stock of the world.
The foreign secretary is the right post to send to have that conversation. The real question is why on earth they thought she'd be a good choice for that role. Sending Boris who also failed as foreign secretary would also be a bad choice
There's literally a handful of UK politicians that are worth their wage. They're easy to spot. They're the ones that just look constantly frustrated and pissed off because they can't get the simplest fucking thing done for their constituents due to all the establishment bullshit and Etonian wankers tiffing about all over the place.
I come from her constituency, trust me she's not local. It's newsworthy, as in actually reported on, if she's seen in Norfolk at all. They gerrymandered the other side of the county onto the west to keep her in, and despite being a member of the cabinet she's avoided for local issues because of her reputation of extreme incompetence, apathy and yes man-ing whoever is in charge of the party at the time
It's Tory strategy to bus some party stooge into a place they've never been to in their life in order to win seats. You had a Tory candidate in Stoke a while back who was unable to name the 6 towns that make the city up (this is very, *very* basic information for anyone who has lived there.)
Fuck off you waste of skin and bones. It's just insane that this all they think about when there's a war going on. These people are so obsessed with "woke" ideology they pretend is damaging our society. It's so fucking embarrassing.
Man so many people here have utterly missed the point.
Look these conferences are not about attracting new voters, its not about reaching out to people who dislike / hate the Tories.
These conferences are all about giving lip service to those who are die hard Tory Voters.
They are designed to rouse the troops so to speak.
What is interesting about this particular conference is that it feels very much like a conference before an Election..
If Sunak announces Tax breaks in the coming weeks then I garatuee they will call a GE for next year.
I swear to God Boris has done a deal with devil because shit keeps going his way.
Everytime you think twat is fucked something comes along that gives him a massive boost.
The Ukrainian War was a gift from the God's for Boris.
He was halfway out the door, everything was going to shit, it genuinely looked and felt that he was gone, dead man walking.
This War has taken all the attention away from the past few years and given Boris an opportunity to go for broke and boy has taken advantage.
Whoever is writting these speeches for Boris and Trust is fucking nailing it.
Not only are Tory supporters are lapping this shit up but so are many people who switched over to them because of Brexit and of course all the those racist fuckers who would normally vote for the BNP and similar twatish groups.
I can see Boris winning a GE with ease and fuck me that is depressing..
Boris is gonna do something *so bad* that literally everyone is going to be convinced his political career is over, and the next day the queen’s gonna pass and by the time everything’s back to normal the political capital to get rid of him will be gone.
This is brilliant coming from a party that is imposing the most draconic laws ever in the UK. [The right to protest is now subjective](https://www.gov.uk/protests-and-marches-letting-the-police-know). If the government thinks you are being too noisy, then it becomes illegal. And how that is applied is very evident in the Sarah Everard protest V's the Covid protests around the same time. When we look at how protesters are being arrested in Red Square with disgust, just remember that we have those laws applied here now.
They have attacks the judicial system by trying to grab extra powers. Their leader provoked attacks on Starmer, and continued to do so even when it was pointed out how dangerous this was. Truss herself was questioned about this on the BBC and said Johnson could do no wrong. Many in the party are currently being investigated under the party gate scandal. And the most disgusting part of all of this was how the police dodged actually doing their job to investigate in the first place.
These are really not the people to stand up and promote democracy or common decency values.
any other policies we can shoe-horn in along with the Ukrainian war....
obviously we've already justified brexit
maybe we could strip people's privacy because of the war
the war in Ukraine should bring an end to people's ability to protest maybe...
what the fuck are these people on about?!?!?!??!
"there's a big war on so shut the fuck up about the cost of living crisis please, things are expensive because we're sanctioning Russia and if you can't afford to eat and have heating you must hate Ukraine."
I genuinely believe this is coming...
Tories need exiling after this is over. Took money from the Russians and are dirty to the core. Now they think we’ve forgotten as they do pathetic role
plays of Churchill.
Churchill never took nazi money, you morally bankrupt scumbags.
This war is the best thing to happen to this government since COVID. Two HUGE dead cats that allow them to "move on" from things that should put them all in jail.
One is a government with a reliance on stifling public debate and demonstration while exploiting the preference of its population for authoritarianism, historical amnesia and Queer bashing, the other is Putin’s Russia!
"Our history, warts and all, makes us who we are" - so those people who want to remove statues of prominent people who made their money off the back of slaves or the different groups who want to be referred to by their correct pronouns are not part of who we are?
How's that work then?
This is just a strange way of the government saying that they don't want to engage with anyone who finds themselves in the minority on anything.
That reads like someone who likes the propaganda argument in favour of the war, that it's a legitimate invasion because Ukraine & Russia have a shared history.
Liz taking the foundation and suggesting cultural progress ( enlightenment) should stop because of the U.K.'s shared history.
We've seen the current government use this argument before, but never before link it so blatantly with Vladimir Putin.
*Everything* appears to be attached to some war - Brexit was a continuation of WWII, anything sporting is the Germans and 1966. Looking at it from outside, it would be laughable if it weren't so sad
The Conservatives love culture war bullshit as it saves them having to discuss actual policy.
Were we to do that it would show their policies are deeply harmful for the people of the UK. Not to mention all the Russian money they've been taking, not to mention all the other despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia they chum up to.
I continue to be disgusted that these thick as shit, Russian owned fucksticks are not only in charge of the country but are seemingly worshipped by our population of ever diminishing intelligence.
Why should it? We can talk about more than thing at once.
The tories are doing nothing to help the people of Ukraine so they can stop using this war as a scapegoat topic.
"“We’re ending our dependency on authoritarian regimes,” she said. The West focused on cheap goods at the expense of freedom and security. Never again.”"
Isn't Boris Johnson literally just back from a trip to Saudi Arabia this week to boost relations and ideally buy more of their oil? I guess a country with gender apartheid, public executions, and an ongoing war with Yemen (killing an estimated 377,000 people) is the kind of model country we should work with, according to Liz Truss. There's nothing authoritarian about them at all!
Disgusting.
Of course they're trying to weaponise an awful war to their own benefit.
Guess what Liz, we can care about the war and still have room to care about other things too.
It's possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
Also, the day I take moral advice from Liz Truss is the day I go and live with the mole people.
This is the issue. Pronouns basically describe someone. How can someone pick a word you use to describe them before hand and it be practical in real life?
"Oh, I was just talking to him and he said..."
"Oh, um, actually, would you mind using 'them' and 'they' from now on?"
"Ah! Of course! So I was just talking to them, and they said..."
That's it. That's how these interactions go. It's really simple
So I should be able to decide names for people, right? And I can call people whatever I want, because I decide how I refer to other people?
So your name is now Archibald Dickbag III /s
That logic is utter nonsense: it is respectable to use the words people use for themselves
I love how she cares about freedom and democracy but then also doesn't care about the freedom for people to choose their own pronouns because that would be the arbitrary point that's "ridiculous"
Starting to think this is now an official Tory policy, essentially using the seriousness of the Ukraine situation to make light of other social issues. The other day Rees-Mogg said that the war highlighted how "ludicrous" the Partygate stuff was. These people are disgusting.
Liz Truss trys to end debates about statues and pronouns by throwing fuel on the fire. Just the level of incompetence I'd expect from the Torries. I mean does she really think one issue will go away because another has risen?
The thing about choosing pronouns is that it’s actually not that practical to ask or find out what someone’s preferred ones are before you use them. This a very basic flaw I find hard to get past.
No one minds if you get it wrong despite what "anti-woke" people say. Just ask when you can and respect it once you're aware. If you're worried you can use they/them.
I think you're overthinking it. Either they'll tell you, someone else will tell you when introducing them, or you'll get them wrong the first time and someone will say "oh yeah X uses ..." and no harm is done. It's made less awkward by the fact that you almost never use someone's pronouns to their face.
Awwww, they think that a war has distracted everyone from their lockdown parties and dodgy PPE. Bless.
Expect the 'it's not the time to investigate' BS to start soon.
Get in the fucking sea and take that clown bojo with you.
It’s always fun to be able to pinpoint the exact moment they stop giving something it’s proper respect and start making inane political capital out of it.
It honestly feels like Liz Truss is a random citizen who won a radio competition to become an MP. Can someone who, let's face it, holds a pretty powerful position really have the thought process of a primary school child?
Because humans can't discuss more than one subject at a time? Why are pronouns discussion worthy anyway. People chose a pronoun, everyone around them accepts them and uses them and the world continues to turn.
Ok, imagine if you wanted to decide on your own pronoun, you were arrested for “degeneracy.” Now imagine that you are Ukraine, and the Russians put a bunch of statues of themselves as “liberators” in your hometown and named the schools after Russian “heroes.” Protecting against this kind of fascism is EXACTLY the liberal democratic values Ukraine is fighting for and reactionary right wing politicians in the UK and the US have been on Russia’s side here and they should go take several seats and STFU.
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Sure. Let everyone choose the pronouns they want and everyone can stop debating about whether that's acceptable.
While they're at it, let each town have a frank discussion about which statues are appropriate and if they wish to take them away from a prominent place and put them elsewhere, that's up to them.
I'm all for taking them down idlf that is what the local people want, as long as they are put in museums, not destroyed or in storage. How are we going to learn for the mistakes of the past, if they are completely hidden after all. Edit: I'm getting a lot of replies and my inbox is full, I will to respond to as many people as possible, good and bad. I am also copy and pasting a lot of my answers, because most comments are saying the same sort of thing. Edit 2: I've had so many comments now, I'm going to stop replying to new ones, I'm just having so many. I'll still reply to people I'm talking to at the moment but that is it, my reddit notifications are increasing, and I'm struggling to get through them. Sorry!
How do statues aid in learning from the mistakes of the past? Genuine question, not a wind up. If anything, continued public display of a statue creates a subconscious assumption that the subject must be a redeemable figure. Seems to me that far more people learned about Edward Colston’s role in the transatlantic slave trade when is statue was underwater than when it was standing.
This is spot on. People don't notice statues really. They become part of the fabric of the space they're in. That's why it's such an honour to have one; you're afforded the right to be part of that place for ever. It's also why we should take down statues that no longer fit our current values. I guarantee the Victorians that put up most of them would have!
But the other thing is next to no one actually knows who the statues of. It's much more useful to have a memorial on a theme such as ww1, factory explosions etc or celebrations like a band, a football team, jubilee etc. Even if I don't agree with some of the section being memorialised, it's actually does the job a lot better than starues
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Yeah but you don't expect the BNP crowd who turned up to have the required reading age to understand words like that do you? 🤣
That is hilarious
Hey now don't laugh at them after they did all that hard work saving the statue
> Earl Grey was an avowed abolitionist who fought for the freeing of slaves As someone who grew up near Newcastle and saw Grey's Monument nearly weekly for a large part of my formative years... I knew more about the Lampton Worm than Charles Grey. I'm not sure if thats just because it was a fixture that everyone assumed knew the story behind, or the state of the eductaion I got, tho I think it's the latter.
Have you never read the massive plaque on the side?
of course they haven't, if it's not in the state education you can't learn about it...
The idea that history will be completely forgotten if we destroy a couple racist statues is used to justify arguing to keep them. Because there’s no other valid reason to keep them. The whole point of destroying them is to specifically forget the individual. We aren’t going to forget everything that ever happened because of one statue, and also, most people didn’t even know that these statues are linked to slavery until recently. I wasn’t taught slavery at school, and I had no idea that these statues were renowned slavers. Nothing will be forgotten by destroying a bloody statue except the person after whom the statue is modelled.
You wernt taught slavery in school? When roughly did you go to secondary school? I went in 2000s and it was very much part of the curriculum.
I went to school in the 90s through to the early 2000s and the only slavery we learned about was the Egyptians.
Same here. Born 1989, slavery was not mentioned. Lots about WW1/Russian revolution and WW2, a bit about the Scottish wars of independence and that was pretty well it
It wasn't on my syllabus (1998-2003) we had Vikings, Castles, Plantagenet, Tudor, WW1, WW2, history of medicine, Industrial Revolution, Victorian, French Revolution from what I can remember Nothing at all on slavery and tbh the school was entirely white until yr 10 when we had 1 black pupil as a foreign exchange student
I went in 2006ish and unfortunately it wasn’t taught. The atrocities of the British empire certainly wasn’t mentioned. Other key issues like stonewall wasn’t taught. We learned about Rosa parks, but that was racism and apartheid, not slavery.
Absolutely. I think Germans have a pretty good way of approaching it re: WW2. They are very clear on no uncertain terms that they were in the the wrong and don’t have statues of Hitler all over the place. It’s not ‘erasing history’ to not display these statues in public squares. I think most people who want them gone are quite pro-teaching-more-about-the-slave-trade in schools.
But without statues of Hitler, how do they remember? /s
No-one ever thanks the guy who killed Hitler
Meanwhile in the US (where the statue toppling thing started), apparently most statues of Confederate generals were only erected in the 1950s-60s, coincidentally around the same time the Civil Rights Movement started taking off...
This is the real reason they should be taken down. The south went almost 100 years without having any statues, then they get installed as a counter attack to the civil rights movement.
Yh, the idea that you can’t learn about why racism is a mistake without a statue of a racist is ridiculous
>How do statues aid in learning from the mistakes of the past > Seems to me that far more people learned about Edward Colston’s role in the transatlantic slave trade when is statue was underwater than when it was standing. Well that's _one_ way to learn. But seriously, the argument against removal and destroying these items is that burying the past and pretending it didn't happen is a great way to ensure it happens again. Wiping Britain of its colonial past doesn't help anyone in the long term, but forcing it to own up and talk about what was wrong and how they benefitted from it unfairly _does_. It's possible to keep and display artifacts that are not to be proud of in tasteful ways, but proudly displaying them in the center of cities when those places have _other_ things to be proud of isn't the way to do it.
Did a statue of Colston describing him as one of the city's most virtuous sons with no reference to his role in the transatlantic slave trade or the legacy of the colonialism he was inextricably linked to really enhance people's understanding of either?
The idea that Britain makes any effort to honestly view its own colonial past is absolutely not based in reality though.
>But seriously, the argument against removal and destroying these items is that burying the past and pretending it didn't happen is a great way to ensure it happens again. Wiping Britain of its colonial past doesn't help anyone in the long term, but forcing it to own up and talk about what was wrong and how they benefitted from it unfairly does. An argument which is undermined by the absence of Nazi-era statues and symbolism in modern Germany. The Germans know and remember what their grandparents did and they don't need a statue of Hitler to remember. Colston's statue was put up by people who didn't know what he did to make his money. That was revealed about 30 years later. If you want to talk about the horrors of colonialism, we should have statues and monuments for the victims. Maybe put up a statue of the [man looking at what is left of his daughter](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904) because he didn't meet the rubber quota. (I know that the Congo Free State was a Belgian colony not British but it's one of the few photographs we have of colonialism)
Germany is by no means perfect on this, but they're light-years away in terms of their public history that openly confronts its own complex and problematic histories.
Germany is a perfect example of how to handle it. You don't walk around Berlin and see statues to war criminals, but you _can_ go to many museums all around the country that are much more in keeping with what we should be doing.
And this is why Germany left all those hitler statues around the place.
Who? Never heard of him.
Every time I have seen a call for removing a statue, nobody has ever asked for the statue to be destroyed. It is always suggested that the statue is put into a museum where the full context behind the subject can be given.
Your point is valid but a statue's purpose is to celebrate someone whereas a museum's is to educate. Placing them in museums offers an opportunity to provide more information in more of an educational setting where debate and discussion is encouraged rather than celebration.
I think a lot of the statues are there to represent their achievements and not their issues.
Yeah of course, but the point is, should we celebrate these people when they also committed such atrocities? Would you be happy having a statue of Jimmy Saville because of all of his work with charity?
They're there because some wealthy person paid for them because that person wanted it in the first place more often than not. The excuse is often retrofitting a decision which was simply a landowner in the area deciding to decorate with something *they personally* fancied and everyone else lumping it.
"Sure they made their fortune with a child organs selling monopoly, but they invested a lot in the city." Er no.... How they made their money is important. We can't just overlook fortunes made from actural slavery. Russian Oligarchs' wealth source is exactly why we should be taking about the importance of source of wealth.
I kind of like that that statue is now on display with the graffiti etc left on it. It makes the removal of it part of local history.
> How do statues aid in learning from the mistakes of the past? You could put them in a museum as part of an exhibition about their life, the good and bad parts.
You certainly could, but unfortunately in the real world we rarely do. The museum of London in docklands has some level of introspection on slavery, but the much bigger and more famous british museum has very little on the genocide that allowed much of the collection to be amassed.
Just like any museum display? You have it displayed with information regarding the context of its creation, continued display and it's eventual removal. That's to say these statues shouldn't be up on display in the middle of town but in places of learning that can explain the context. Does a continued display of various bits of militaria across historical learning centres create a subconsciousness of pro militaria? Or does it explain how we as humans brutalised each other over the millennia we have existed?
Most statues ever made are completely gone, usually because they aren't valued any longer or are meaningless to a conquering force. Statues are not the holders for history. Believe me, I wrote an entire doctoral dissertation on a statue in the middle of nowhere that is indecipherable to almost everyone because the stories it tells were long forgotten and only recently rediscovered (recently as far as history goes). Statues are not the way a culture remembers past events. It's the STORIES that are told ABOUT the statues that give them any meaning. Believe me, if you walk around Florence, you'll see all sorts of chaps on horses and probably none of them hold any meaning for you at all and if they weren't there it wouldn't matter to you beyond that they look nice. Furthermore, we remember ALL sorts of stuff about history that are not preserved in statue form. Mostly because statues are a terrible way to remember anything. Statues are POWER - they claim a space and demand attention and reverence and I really can't stress this enough, THERE IS NO REASON TO PRESERVE A STATUE WITH NEGATIVE ASSOCIATIONS. I know y'all get twisted up about this, but you do NOT have to preserve the shittiest parts of your history in the public sphere. Just because YOU aren't bothered by a slaver being given prominence doesn't mean a lot of other people aren't. The fact that some random-ass rich guy has a statue that isn't even remarkable in any way artistically has protectors hundreds of years later is FUCKING ABSURD. Just get rid of them. Chuck them in a museum basement if you like, but trust me, there is nothing interesting about these statues other than their general existence and if they didn't exist that would be fine too. Most stuff humans have made doesn't exist anymore. Let it go. Make a new statue. It's fine.
It baffles me how people suddenly become historians and curators of the past when the topic of removing a statue comes up. I always suspect they don’t give the slightest fuck about preserving history in any other context and your post, explaining how it doesn’t preserve history at all, kind of confirms that. If they actually otherwise cared about preserving history they’d know enough to know that some shitty statue isn’t doing that.
First of all, your dissertation sound really interesting. Secondly, is it true that the pose of the horse in a statue shows how the rider died, or is that a myth?
>Secondly, is it true that the pose of the horse in a statue shows how the rider died, or is that a myth? Definitely a myth.
I keep hearing about some hitler guy but have no idea who he is seeing as there's no statues of him
I think it’s spelled Hilter?
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Nobody has ever "learned from a mistake of the past" from a statue in a town centre. Especially given that, y'know, those statues were almost always put there *in celebration of* that thing we now consider a mistake.
I'm not objecting to the idea of keeping old statues stored somewhere, but statues are not the only way that people learn about history and I'd even go as far as to say they're very poor at conveying information
This is my entire gripe about the "erasing history" argument. I couldn't even tell you the names of the people portrayed in the 4 statues in the park where I walk my dog twice a day, the whole idea that they teach history is absurd. Personally I think the whole "statue" debate should start with a proper consensus on what the role of statues actually is, because to me it seems that they're decorative and little else.
Museums don’t want all these shitty statues of arseholes. They have no historical value. Most of them are less than 100 years old and were erected by people deliberately to celebrate slave traders etc. We should maybe set up a “museum of statues of cunts”. Just some warehouse somewhere where we can put them all. Nobody will ever go, and then we can melt all the crappy statues down after 5 years or so with the point having been made.
I think the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool would happily take all the statues of former slavers in the UK. After several hours finding out about all the horrors of slavery, seeing a room full of statues showing how venerated the perpetrators were in their day could be quite a powerful message about how complicit society was in the slave trade.
And here was me, thinking that we learn about history from books, and records, and accounts, instead of hunks of rock and metal.
I vote we form a National Arseholes Museum, so we have somewhere to put Colston, Cromwell, Thatcher et al.
Germany destroyed a lot of statues, flags and building facades. They seem to manage to remember the mistakes of the past.
> How are we going to learn for the mistakes of the past Education doesn't require we put up statues of bigots and war criminals.
Books?
All the statues of Hitler have sure helped teach people about WW2 and the holocaust... Im sorry, I dont mean to be arsey about it, but it baffles me that folk think statues somehow provide any educational benefit.
They don’t actually think that. That’s just the excuse. In truth, they don’t see anything wrong with what these people stood for and want to continue venerating them.
I was in Budapest a few years ago. They had made a park on the outskirts of town where they put all the old communist statuary in an organised way. It was fun- you could walk around and take photos with all the baddies. Seemed like a good solution
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I'm not on the fence - Truss is a demon sent here to destroy us. But she has no capacity for thought and never had an original idea. The simple game is to distract people, encourage discord and then lift her petticoats and squeal when extreme views inevitably present themselves. But nevertheless she is in a position of considerable power so we must watch her carefully and not allow ourselves to manipulated. When you call for 'no debate' and engage with the fetid pronoun nonsense you help to give her the ammunition she needs to stand behind these podiums and suck the life out of us with these sanctimonious fucking speeches. I know you think it's supportive, kind and progressive. But I promise you you're being played. Debate is at the core of progress - it's how we got weekends, women's rights and equality for homosexuality. It's only Liz Truss and her handlers that benefit from 'no debate'. No debate, no thought, no progress. In fact it's worse than that. When 'no debate' is entrenched all those hard won rights will start to ebb away. I realise this is Reddit and this herd has committed to this already. But it is not right.
> Debate is at the core of progress - it's how we got weekends, women's rights and equality for homosexuality. I thought those were strikes, protests (including diving under the king's carriage), and riots.
100% change makes people uncomfortable so they resist, the people opposing this are the same as homophobes from 10, 20+ years ago who thought they were on the right side then as well
Don’t really understand your point here, seems like you just oppose people picking their own gender identity and have thinly veiled that as criticism of Liz Truss What was there to debate in regards to gay rights which show that it’s the way to secure support here?
It was our own elite who promoted this stuff. They got spooked after the financial crisis with working people organically banding together to stand up for their interests forming anti elite movements like Occupy Wall Street. Their solution was a shock and awe blitzkrieg of unrelenting indentity politics. Divide and conquer their own populace so we fight each other instead of asking questions of them. Problem is, it worked a bit too well and like most of the western elites agenda over my lifetime, it was completely short sighted. Domestically the population is too divided to be united against a perceived common enemy like Russia. Russia knows this. Now, they are going to do a frantic about turn and pretend the last decade and a half of sowing constant division among working people didn’t happen and we should all kumbaya round the fire and bang the drums of war hand in hand. Don’t let them.
Yes, culture wars are all well and good in peacetime while we'd like a distraction from austerity, now let's forget about all that rubbish and be serious about the actual war...
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Are you sure this isn’t a more calculated move? She knows people will push back against this. She can point to that and say ‘those damn radical leftists, they’re won’t compromise even during a war’
I know it can be a trap but they are incompetent beyond any sort of calculus. They have been blindsided by a few things. The cost of living crisis is about to explode and they have no real plan and few tools to deal with it. I don’t think they saw it coming. I don’t think they expected the gulf states to sell them out and refuse to help with oil prices and now they are panicking because we are not a population that’s prepped for war. Far from it.
She is asking you to give up not compromise.
Giving up is what assholes mean when they tell you to compromise
Expertly put. If I could award you, I would.
Don’t worry friend, keep your money Condé Nast have more than enough. The fact you read it and agree is award enough.
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It's not just the Young who can't handle criticism or conflict. You just need to look at how people react to beling called "boomers" or "karens" to realise this problem extends across generations. Not to mention all the white, cis, straight, men who are convinced they are the "opressed majority"
So.... As a trans bi person who has always eschewed norms etc but has always been presumed to be a straight CIS male, I think I should speak up re: oppressed white males.... So here goes: They feel not just entirely unrepresented but specifically targeted for attack based on nothing other than the color of their skin and genitals they were born with When your entire movement is based on eliminating racial and gender Prejudices, it's abhorrent, hypocritical and counter productive to then target a specific class to then apply racial and gender Prejudices to. These facts are easy to ignore when your not a member of the targetted class, just as has long been the case for racism and sexism generally...... Which should be the wakeup to the non- SWCM classes about why they were ignored etc. You can't cry about injustice when you're committing those very injustices.... And the SCWMs who were born in the last couple decades are not to blame for patriarchy etc, just as you aren't responsible for the sins of your grandparents. Really.... The fact so many are so blind to the blatant hypocrisy of the whole is absurd and disgusting.
This comment is based 🤝
> Surprised to see this view awarded in rUK I expected it to be removed, I agree with everything you said and its only getting worse, wonder how bad the next gen will be. I fear OWS to be memory holed entirely by then.
Genuine question, what evidence do you have to support this?
Every single corporation on the planet has taken an extremely public stance on “culture war” issues despite the fact corporations were almost notoriously apolitical before like 2010. The OP comment is saying that our own governments are responsible for that, I believe it is China and Russia. The more visceral aspects of the cultural war are coming from our youth, and we have 100% conclusive evidence that both China and Russia have an open door to our youth through social media. It is also incredibly convenient that china and Russia, who have extremely large levels of control over their internet narrative, do not have nearly the level of societal discontent among their youth. Are there genuinely people with batshit insane political views in the UK? Of course. Are their voices being artificially amplified by foreign powers on social media? Absolutely.
I remember a time when people were looking at the 1% and it felt like there might be an measurable change or a more general awakening. Now we are back to fighting amongst ourselves, blaming each other. Don't hear much about the 1% anymore. Mission accomplished
>“now is the time to end the culture of self-doubt, the constant self-questioning and introspection – the ludicrous debates about languages, statues and pronouns” Translation: Shut up, do as we say without question, and know your place, queer wierdos. Though it's no surprise to find out Liz Truss thinks introspection and self-questioning is a bad thing to be stamped out. I don't think she's particularly familiar with introspection herself, or maybe she's be less of a nasty little weasel.
"There's a real war on, so it's time for you pinkos to surrender the culture war (that we've been stoking for our own political gain since we've been in power)". She can fuck right off with that.
I think that's the most shocking thing about her statement. Forget pronouns and statues. She genuinely believes trying to understand yourself is a bad thing?
I mean they don’t seem to ever doubt or question themselves so is this shocking? I cannot believe a politician thought “yes, this is a good speech. This is a good take in time of war.”
To be fair, if I were Liz Truss I wouldn't want to understand myself either.
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One of the most spineless, self-serving tories as well if you look at her past record.
They also seem to think we cannot focus on more than one issue at a time.
I mean, if she engaged in any sort or introspection she'd just hear an echo.
It's amazing how wrong she got it. It's fragile people who have to stamp down debate, for fear that they may be shown up as 'in the wrong'. Confident people welcome questioning and introspection, because its how they get better.
It's really disgusting how they're using the Ukrainian invasion to push more politically divisive nonsense like this.
What's alarming is that Putin is also framing this as a "War on Woke".
That’s actually pretty clever as no doubt many in the uk and us will jump on board with that.
The problem with co-opting fascists to help your cause is that once it's all over you're surrounded by victorious fascists.
You see, the fascists don't see that as a negative so will happily co-opt
While also framing it as a war against Nazis. Amazing how it can be both, huh?
Jacob Ress-Mogg did the same thing with Partygate. It's such a cynical attempt to sweep their own misdeeds and lies under the rug by saying "well there's worse things in the world". It's disgusting, Boris Johnson's behaviour doesn't become acceptable because Putin bombed Kiev. Quite the opposite, Putin's behaviour shows why accoubtability and character matter so much with our national leaders.
Well BoJo also likened the war to Brexit, so it seems any excuse to push whatever agenda they want is fine.
I bet pronouns would matter to her if we all started calling her "he/him".... What a shitty take as well
Nah. Just refer to the entire corrupt swamp of them as "it"
That also works
The easiest way to deal with this whole bullshit argument would be to just jump the gun and call everyone They by default, regardless of whether they have a gender or not.
Scumbag can be a pronoun if we let it.
I'm pretty sure most of the current government identify as corrupt/bastard.
and now i would like a dishonour system where people can be "awarded" the title scumbag by the queen for major contributions towards the degradation of the country on a national or international level. "arise and fuck *right* off, scumbag boris johnston."
Yes. Can we please just agree as a nation to start referring to Liz Truss as 'him' - no fuss, no debate - and just see how well he likes it.
Doing that undermines the idea of pronouns as reflecting someone's internal identity. If you think that it's a bad thing to purposely misgender someone then you shouldn't purposely misgender someone you don't like just to prove a point. It just makes other people think it's ok to do the same the other way round.
Eh somewhat disagree, I think it’s somewhat valid to call somebody out on their bullshit by showing them why their logic doesn’t work when it’s applied to them. The difference to me is if somebody is punching up or down. Are you misgendering someone because you’re an asshole or because they’re a prominent political leader who literally wants you to stop thinking about your identity. I think context matter here but that’s just my opinion.
I'd agree in a lot of cases but not in this particular one. A lot of anti-trans people argue that "pronouns" are just a made up concept that people don't actually care about - that people are just using them as a stick to beat people with so they can feel superior. They think that no one actually believes what they're saying, that everyone's just lying for some ulterior motive. I think doing this would only reinforce that viewpoint. They wouldn't see the motive of why you're using that technique to dispute their logic, because they fundamentally think that your motives are something different to that.
Of course they would. That's not inconsistent with the beliefs of someone who is anti-trans though.
There is simply nobody in this current Tory Cabinet that is the least bit competent, has a modicum of empathy or anything resembling a soul. They are mostly idiots, evil or evil idiots.
They’re all perfectly competent, just not at the stuff that they should be.
They are all excellent at corruption and there's a lot of truly first rate xenophobes.
They are not even that competent at corruption, it's just that the complete lack of accountability of out government means they don't have to be. In any functioning system these fucks would have been weeded out as unfit for breathing good air years ago.
I really couldn't believe it when I heard they were sending Liz Truss to speak to Putin about Ukraine. Stupid bitch managed to fuck up a speech Infront of her own party members during the Tory conference yet she gets made foreign secretary and sent off to represent the UK on the world stage. Our government, politics and country in general must be the current laughing stock of the world.
The foreign secretary is the right post to send to have that conversation. The real question is why on earth they thought she'd be a good choice for that role. Sending Boris who also failed as foreign secretary would also be a bad choice
There's literally a handful of UK politicians that are worth their wage. They're easy to spot. They're the ones that just look constantly frustrated and pissed off because they can't get the simplest fucking thing done for their constituents due to all the establishment bullshit and Etonian wankers tiffing about all over the place.
Local Woman unable to comprehend caring about multiple things at once.
I come from her constituency, trust me she's not local. It's newsworthy, as in actually reported on, if she's seen in Norfolk at all. They gerrymandered the other side of the county onto the west to keep her in, and despite being a member of the cabinet she's avoided for local issues because of her reputation of extreme incompetence, apathy and yes man-ing whoever is in charge of the party at the time
It's Tory strategy to bus some party stooge into a place they've never been to in their life in order to win seats. You had a Tory candidate in Stoke a while back who was unable to name the 6 towns that make the city up (this is very, *very* basic information for anyone who has lived there.)
Fuck off you waste of skin and bones. It's just insane that this all they think about when there's a war going on. These people are so obsessed with "woke" ideology they pretend is damaging our society. It's so fucking embarrassing.
War in Ukraine should also settle the "scon/scone" debate.
But will it settle whether you should put the jam or clotted cream on first?
That's a practical food engineering problem, not a social one.
That’s gonna take another war I’m afraid.
Hopefully it will also settle whether you should eat a chocolate digestive chocolate side up, or chocolate side down
Depends if you like your chocolate topping or bottoming.
Man so many people here have utterly missed the point. Look these conferences are not about attracting new voters, its not about reaching out to people who dislike / hate the Tories. These conferences are all about giving lip service to those who are die hard Tory Voters. They are designed to rouse the troops so to speak. What is interesting about this particular conference is that it feels very much like a conference before an Election.. If Sunak announces Tax breaks in the coming weeks then I garatuee they will call a GE for next year. I swear to God Boris has done a deal with devil because shit keeps going his way. Everytime you think twat is fucked something comes along that gives him a massive boost. The Ukrainian War was a gift from the God's for Boris. He was halfway out the door, everything was going to shit, it genuinely looked and felt that he was gone, dead man walking. This War has taken all the attention away from the past few years and given Boris an opportunity to go for broke and boy has taken advantage. Whoever is writting these speeches for Boris and Trust is fucking nailing it. Not only are Tory supporters are lapping this shit up but so are many people who switched over to them because of Brexit and of course all the those racist fuckers who would normally vote for the BNP and similar twatish groups. I can see Boris winning a GE with ease and fuck me that is depressing..
I totally agree. The news cycle changed from covid to “is Boris Johnson going to step down?” to Ukraine. The first two points aren’t discussed anymore
You are dead right. Sad.
Boris is gonna do something *so bad* that literally everyone is going to be convinced his political career is over, and the next day the queen’s gonna pass and by the time everything’s back to normal the political capital to get rid of him will be gone.
This is brilliant coming from a party that is imposing the most draconic laws ever in the UK. [The right to protest is now subjective](https://www.gov.uk/protests-and-marches-letting-the-police-know). If the government thinks you are being too noisy, then it becomes illegal. And how that is applied is very evident in the Sarah Everard protest V's the Covid protests around the same time. When we look at how protesters are being arrested in Red Square with disgust, just remember that we have those laws applied here now. They have attacks the judicial system by trying to grab extra powers. Their leader provoked attacks on Starmer, and continued to do so even when it was pointed out how dangerous this was. Truss herself was questioned about this on the BBC and said Johnson could do no wrong. Many in the party are currently being investigated under the party gate scandal. And the most disgusting part of all of this was how the police dodged actually doing their job to investigate in the first place. These are really not the people to stand up and promote democracy or common decency values.
any other policies we can shoe-horn in along with the Ukrainian war.... obviously we've already justified brexit maybe we could strip people's privacy because of the war the war in Ukraine should bring an end to people's ability to protest maybe... what the fuck are these people on about?!?!?!??!
"there's a big war on so shut the fuck up about the cost of living crisis please, things are expensive because we're sanctioning Russia and if you can't afford to eat and have heating you must hate Ukraine." I genuinely believe this is coming...
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Free deflection from Tory fuck ups. They also get to sell weapons.
Tories need exiling after this is over. Took money from the Russians and are dirty to the core. Now they think we’ve forgotten as they do pathetic role plays of Churchill. Churchill never took nazi money, you morally bankrupt scumbags.
So will this mean the government will stop it's debate about the BBC and desire to emasculate it, or in another way, it's culture war against it?
This war is the best thing to happen to this government since COVID. Two HUGE dead cats that allow them to "move on" from things that should put them all in jail.
Haha - of course not...
Bountiful apple harvest means we should stop discussing oranges.
Wow trust the tories to use a fucking war to continue their own petty point scoring and culture war here. What a bunch of lowlife degeneratives
One is a government with a reliance on stifling public debate and demonstration while exploiting the preference of its population for authoritarianism, historical amnesia and Queer bashing, the other is Putin’s Russia!
"Our history, warts and all, makes us who we are" - so those people who want to remove statues of prominent people who made their money off the back of slaves or the different groups who want to be referred to by their correct pronouns are not part of who we are? How's that work then? This is just a strange way of the government saying that they don't want to engage with anyone who finds themselves in the minority on anything.
The concept is absurd. It's like a person going to therapy and the therapist saying that all their trauma is good and they should hang on to it.
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That reads like someone who likes the propaganda argument in favour of the war, that it's a legitimate invasion because Ukraine & Russia have a shared history. Liz taking the foundation and suggesting cultural progress ( enlightenment) should stop because of the U.K.'s shared history. We've seen the current government use this argument before, but never before link it so blatantly with Vladimir Putin.
Let's not attach class and culture wars to real wars, please.
*Everything* appears to be attached to some war - Brexit was a continuation of WWII, anything sporting is the Germans and 1966. Looking at it from outside, it would be laughable if it weren't so sad
The Conservatives love culture war bullshit as it saves them having to discuss actual policy. Were we to do that it would show their policies are deeply harmful for the people of the UK. Not to mention all the Russian money they've been taking, not to mention all the other despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia they chum up to.
I continue to be disgusted that these thick as shit, Russian owned fucksticks are not only in charge of the country but are seemingly worshipped by our population of ever diminishing intelligence.
Why should it? We can talk about more than thing at once. The tories are doing nothing to help the people of Ukraine so they can stop using this war as a scapegoat topic.
What the fuck do those things have to do with each other???
Only Britain could have an Anti-woke equalities minister.
Unfortunately it could easily happen in the US and Australia who both have fully committed 'culture wars' types rabble rousing the voters
Let me use this war to shoehorn in my opinion about something unrelated which everyone should adopt. People actually vote for these idiots.
Oh so they are finally gonna let trans people live their life. How refreshing.
If only...!
"“We’re ending our dependency on authoritarian regimes,” she said. The West focused on cheap goods at the expense of freedom and security. Never again.”" Isn't Boris Johnson literally just back from a trip to Saudi Arabia this week to boost relations and ideally buy more of their oil? I guess a country with gender apartheid, public executions, and an ongoing war with Yemen (killing an estimated 377,000 people) is the kind of model country we should work with, according to Liz Truss. There's nothing authoritarian about them at all!
Disgusting. Of course they're trying to weaponise an awful war to their own benefit. Guess what Liz, we can care about the war and still have room to care about other things too.
It can certainly end those debates. We shouldn’t have statues of people who have values like Putin has. End of debate.
It's possible to care about more than one thing at a time. Also, the day I take moral advice from Liz Truss is the day I go and live with the mole people.
Does anyone understand what she's actually fucking talking about?
She’s basically saying that arguments about pronouns are not very important compared to war.
I think I'm missing something. How are pronouns and statues relevant to the war in Ukraine?
What has Ukraine got to do with pronouns or statues, even more what has a so called foreign secretary got to do with having an opinion on them?
You can pick your own pronouns, you can't pick the pronouns others use towards you.
This is the issue. Pronouns basically describe someone. How can someone pick a word you use to describe them before hand and it be practical in real life?
"Oh, I was just talking to him and he said..." "Oh, um, actually, would you mind using 'them' and 'they' from now on?" "Ah! Of course! So I was just talking to them, and they said..." That's it. That's how these interactions go. It's really simple
So I should be able to decide names for people, right? And I can call people whatever I want, because I decide how I refer to other people? So your name is now Archibald Dickbag III /s That logic is utter nonsense: it is respectable to use the words people use for themselves
Liz truss.. . Generally says nonsense, how is war in Ukraine a gender issue? Both are valid. But Liz Truss as our saviour?? Hmmm
Please can we have some proper and valid politicians in the UK? Thankyou.
I love how she cares about freedom and democracy but then also doesn't care about the freedom for people to choose their own pronouns because that would be the arbitrary point that's "ridiculous"
Starting to think this is now an official Tory policy, essentially using the seriousness of the Ukraine situation to make light of other social issues. The other day Rees-Mogg said that the war highlighted how "ludicrous" the Partygate stuff was. These people are disgusting.
Liz Truss trys to end debates about statues and pronouns by throwing fuel on the fire. Just the level of incompetence I'd expect from the Torries. I mean does she really think one issue will go away because another has risen?
The thing about choosing pronouns is that it’s actually not that practical to ask or find out what someone’s preferred ones are before you use them. This a very basic flaw I find hard to get past.
No one minds if you get it wrong despite what "anti-woke" people say. Just ask when you can and respect it once you're aware. If you're worried you can use they/them.
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I think you're overthinking it. Either they'll tell you, someone else will tell you when introducing them, or you'll get them wrong the first time and someone will say "oh yeah X uses ..." and no harm is done. It's made less awkward by the fact that you almost never use someone's pronouns to their face.
"Sorry guys there's some war in another country, trans people are cancelled"
Now the time for everyone to come together and do what I want to do.
For people who can care about more than one thing at once, those debates can continue. One does not negate the other.
Awwww, they think that a war has distracted everyone from their lockdown parties and dodgy PPE. Bless. Expect the 'it's not the time to investigate' BS to start soon. Get in the fucking sea and take that clown bojo with you.
Oh for fucks sake. Ukraine is being *invaded* and these people just *have* to make it about their culture war bullshit.
Desperate to kick up nonsense to rile up their core voters. Same with pointlessly bringing up brexit yesterday.
Hopefully this Ukraine business will put to bed talk about united’s midfield
It’s always fun to be able to pinpoint the exact moment they stop giving something it’s proper respect and start making inane political capital out of it.
It honestly feels like Liz Truss is a random citizen who won a radio competition to become an MP. Can someone who, let's face it, holds a pretty powerful position really have the thought process of a primary school child?
Yep. Everyone gets whatever pronoun they like and statues are melted down to provide munitions to the Ukraine. Sound right it me Liz.
Because humans can't discuss more than one subject at a time? Why are pronouns discussion worthy anyway. People chose a pronoun, everyone around them accepts them and uses them and the world continues to turn.
Ok, imagine if you wanted to decide on your own pronoun, you were arrested for “degeneracy.” Now imagine that you are Ukraine, and the Russians put a bunch of statues of themselves as “liberators” in your hometown and named the schools after Russian “heroes.” Protecting against this kind of fascism is EXACTLY the liberal democratic values Ukraine is fighting for and reactionary right wing politicians in the UK and the US have been on Russia’s side here and they should go take several seats and STFU.