Lewis Hamilton moment

People these days are offended by nearly everything they hear or see and feel the need to ram their offendedness down everyone else's throats. If it's not on social media it's shouting in the street with a placard, but the ones smashing up shops and firebombing cars are another thing entirely. They're just the 21st century version of football hooligans. Those guys didn't go to matches to watch the game or support their team, they went there for a punch up and didn't give a fuck about normal fans who got caught in the middle.

Is it cos you is black Jeffers?
I hadn't read this thread until now.

I think what's happening in the US is shocking yet unsurprising. I'd love to think it will unseat Trump, but I am too cynical by now to think that there is a strong chance this will really happen. It will probably be another one of those occasions where good men and women to do nothing and thus wickedness triumphs.

Most Americans I've ever met, and with whom the topic has happened to come up, have commented that racism in the UK is nowhere near as bad or as commonplace in the UK as it is the US.



I don't know whether that's necessarily true or not. However I cannot help noticing that America has a much bigger rural and suburban black population, whereas the UK's black population is overwhelmingly urban. Since urban attitudes tend to be more liberal and progressive than rural and suburban attitudes, that might explain the difference as much as anything else.


America also has a president who may or may not actually be an out-and-out racist, but certainly is a massive narcissist whose apparently sole interest is in getting himself re-elected for another ego-fuelling power trip of a second term. As such he appears to display no interest in any voter unless that voter might vote for him. Trump relies on the rural and suburban vote for his core voters. He lost the majority of the black vote and the liberal vote pretty much from the get-go, so he sees himself as having nothing to lose by aggravating that portion of the electorate. He also sees that the portion of small-town America which is racist and into white supremacy and similar nonsense, nurses a deep grievance about what they see as the loss of their birthright privileges and is thrilled to have a president that they feel finally stands up for them, so he gets their undying and vociferous support. What that does for the cohesion or health of US society is something about which Trump apparently absolutely couldn't give the slightest shit. And most of the rest of America's so-called "Grand Old Party" is debasing itself by its abject collusion in that.

Derek Chauvin has been charged with what the baying crowds were calling for. There is no need for these criminals (they're not protesters) to be rioting and looting whatsoever. It's nothing but opportunistic thievery disguised as protest. If he were to be acquitted in the future, then and only then would there be good reason to kick off...

The crowds were out in force this afternoon. I got up in it driving home from Mayfair around 3ish. There was a big stream of protestors walking down the middle of the road along Park Lane on their way to Victoria to protest against the black railway worker who died when she caught Covid having been spat at by sonewheon knew they had symptoms. None of them were social distancing although quite a few had face masks or scarves on. If there's not a second spike of Covid after this I'll be surprised. They have now descended on no 10. I suspect that rioting and looting will flare up as the evenings draws on. I'm driving back in to the city tomorrow morning. Not sure what the place will look like.

This is far from being just about the death of George Floyd. That's just been the latest lightening rod for much wider societal issues.

Ignore that if you want to. Focus on the criminality if you want to. But I don't understand why you would want to.

Agree. Some of the protesters I saw were chanting Steven Lawrence's name so theres a lot of pent up anger.

I saw last night that Trump's secretary of defence (soon to be ex-secretary) has disagreed with his plan to call in the army.
The former secretary has also stood up and 'denounced' Trump.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52915816

It almost looks as if they're distancing themselves in anticipation of him being beaten by Sleepy Joe!

Ignoring violence (which I do not condone), I think it's great that people are prepared to protest about things that don't affect them directly. Only being interested in that which affects us personally isn't saying anything great, to my way of thinking.

They didn't have a catchy slogan you can put on a placard. 

These are the fuckers I'm mainly talking about in my earlier posts.

"look how much I care about everything and I'm going to shove it in your face"

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of racism in all forms (let's organise a march through Hyde Park for Zimbabwean white farmers) the UK is so far removed from the USA and much of Europe that the kind of march seen in London is little more than virtue signalling and causing upset for the sake of it. People in the UK largely haven't got a clue about racism in the USA. I remember hearing a recording of an interview with Jimi Hendrix saying when he went back to the US in the late '60s having been a celebrity in the UK he couldn't rent a room in many hotels when he got to his home country and that was a period when the UK was hardly a bastion of integration - but even then my mum was born in Cape Town in 1940 and came to the UK in 1962. Like I said - racism in the UK is abhorrent but not acceptable to society. 

^^ This. Absolutely.

Like I say, I have zero time for virtue signalling. But I have equally zero time for people using the term "virtue signalling" as a way to stifle legitimate protest and dissent.

I don't look at the current protests and think "oh look at those awful virtue signallers". That didn't even enter my mind. It was a cause worth protesting about and I perfectly well understand people doing so, especially if they are black. 

I did look at the looters and, as ever, despaired at the ability of certain sections of society to thoroughly shoot their brethren in both feet by feeding the prejudices of the easily prejudiced. But it does not de-legitimise the problem or the protests.

And I fail to see what that's really genuinely got to do with Uighurs and child abuse in Rotherham. All three are all causes worth protesting about and again I perfectly well understand people doing so. But people are generally roused to protest about things that cut closest to home for them. And frankly it doesn't surprise there are way more people in both this country and the US for whom that is true than there are for Uighurs and child abuse in Rotherham. Both of the latter are horrific and I am not in any way belittling either, but they don't directly touch the lives of as many people here or in the US. 

My personal take on this point is that relations between the UK police and the UK's BAME population is an absolute minefield of an area in which I'm not sure any of us on here is especially well qualified to cast informed and definitive views. 

The protest was triggered by events in the US. What have the UK police forces done to deserve what they got yesterday? Stephen Lawrence resulted in massive changes, it's not perfect but I don't think it's fair to say the Met is institutionally racist any longer. Protests demand change but in this case what are the demands?