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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Weeping angels. On moving statues
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Weeping angels. On moving statues
“I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.”
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There's absolutely no doubt that the nation is much more aware of Colston's life, times and crimes, and like most of the outraged on here I imagine, I hadn't heard of Robert Milligan until yesterday. It certainly seems more a spasm of remembering than obliteration.
Much like Boris and his government.
Any thoughts on Marx and Engels?
Expect an awful lot of music to be censored on the radio. I'll start with "My dingaling" by Chuck Berry, that ticks most boxes
I wonder where this ends.....?
It was also a dry flight, so not a lot of fun.
Everybody happy now?
https://twitter.com/parents4future/status/1270343365331222532?s=19
(Technically the tweet is wrong, it wasn't the Belgian Congo until 1910, until then being a personal possession of Leopold II)
https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-bamiyan-statues-destroyed/26896782.html
Marx and Engels were political philosophers.
Actually, upsetting the Daily Mail is a worthy goal in itself, so it's a win-win.
And pulling statues off plinths so they're no longer celebrated today isn't the same as bulldozing. What we put on our plinths today should be up to the people of today.
https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1270450871546118147?s=19
You've just erased it.
Removing statues from display doesn't erase the past.
I don't think Ive chuckled as much in ages as when I saw the Oxford protests.
A sea of white privileged faces protesting about white privilege, you couldn't make it up.
So other than being wrong on everything you said . . . well done at attempting a straw man.
Patronising, nauseous, ghastly
Is the world's shittest argument.
The private tragedy is his own responsibility. The public one affects us all.
And that is not even touching on his alleged alcohol habits.
Voters expect their representatives to be reasonably robust, both mentally and physically. That cartoon only works because the man is widely understood to be a fat, lazy, complacent oaf.
Civil disorder has been a noble method of protest for hundreds of years, there shouldn't need to be civil disorder to get the right thing done though.
Campaigns frequently bring change. There has been dramatic in our lifetimes and long may that continue.
Social attitudes to race are not driven by campaigns, but by age as more people grow up with people of different backgrounds and treat them as one of us.
I am fine with civil disorder in a method that isn't violent against people or businesses. If the public want Colston back on his plinth then he can be pulled out of the river and put back on it. It shouldn't take people taking action into their own hands to get things done though and hopefully in future this can be done through legal channels.
The answer is yes. Pure and simple. It’s part of a site that is listed, and making changes to such a site without listed buildings consent is an offence. Listing is here.
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1242440
However, two caveats:
1) As there seems a non-trivial risk that if it hadn’t been removed it would have been illegally torn down, there might be a plea of necessity for removing it and placing it into storage;
2) Historic England have been clearly been intimidated by the violence of these mobs (see this statement on Colston’s statue) and are in any case in my experience highly ineffective. So I do not believe they will be taken steps to order it be put back up.
Therefore, conclusions:
1) Proper channels have not been followed in this case (we can be sure of that as there won’t have been time) and a council with a JCB have technically acted as illegally as a mob of violent anarchists;
2) Nothing will be done about it.
God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
A potential H bomb
God save the queen
She's not a human being
and There's no future
And England's dreaming
Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future
No future
No future for you
God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves
God save the queen
'Cause tourists are money
And our figurehead
Is not what she seems
Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
All crimes are paid
Oh when there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers
In the dustbin
We're the poison
In your human machine
We're the future…
The cotton he used was picked by slaves.
I can make a link there as easy as easy - far less tenuous than the one to Gladstone or Peel.
And in my lifetime we've seen remarkable changes to gay rights. I'm sure gay pride marches etc had no role to play in building up support to eventually allow equal marriage.
Continue sticking your head in the sand if you want. Even if campaigns are fruitless then using a varied form of Pascal's Wager I'd still support them - if they achieve their goals then great, if they don't then no harm done.
https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1270603243501092865
For example, the statue of Colston could be used a source to show how the corporation of late nineteenth century Bristol didn’t care about its slaving past.
And that’s even before I go into art history.
So whilst I fully understand the move to get rid of statues of Leopold and am surprised they even exist, I do get the impression that it is something akin to displacement activity designed to avoid a proper programme of confronting what happened in Belgium's name in the past.
At least in Britain we do teach our secondary school kids quite extensively on Empire and look at both the good and bad aspects of it as well as the drivers behind it.
No need for it to be on a plinth to do that.
1. Taking down statues and putting them into storage is very different from bulldozing the Colosseum. In one case, the artefact is preserved, in the other, it is not.
2. Within the bounds of the relevant laws (which it would appear have not been followed), it is clearly elected politicians who should choose which statues are on display. The mob doesn't get to overrule Bristol Council. Likewise, if (following proper procedures) the Mayor of London or Tower Hamlets (or whoever is responsible for the statue in Docklands) chooses to remove a statue of Mrs Thatcher or Mao or whoever, then that is there perogative. It's not like (see 1) that the statue is being destroyed. The elected politicians of the past got to choose which statues were on display, it seems odd that we should strip that right from the elected politicians of today.
3. Statues don't exist forever in a vacuum. Imagine if there was a statue of Jimmy Saville outside a children's hospital. Now, it may well have been that Jimmy was instrumental in getting the hospital built. Would any of us object to removing his statue? I was pretty shocked to discover there were Leopold II statues in existence, and I'm pretty sure that Leopold II was worse than Jimmy Saville.
The fact it was on that plinth, in that location, is part of the context. As most people in Bristol understood.
That’s why I’ve been saying the solution is to leave it there and put a bigger statue of Paul Stephenson and his fellow boycott organisers opposite, with a series of information boards in between.
But there’s no explaining it to some people.
"MPs and peers including former education secretaries demanded to know why the Government appeared to be focused on getting non-essential shops open rather than prioritising opening schools for more primary and secondary school children."
Telegraph.
That's a pretty nasty slur.
The debate is about what we put on our plinths.
I agree that the Government have got just about every single thing wrong in this crisis. But using NZ as an example is just dumb.
What happens next is up to the people of Bristol. If the people of Bristol want to put the statue back and put a statue of Stephenson etc opposite they can do. Their choice.
Would you like a prize?
https://youtu.be/1pEGqF3TIt4
It is unclear how he himself actually voted, or if he even did.
He told the Metro in 2016 that to leave the European Union would be "insane and suicidal".
"We're never going to go back to that romantic delusion of Victorian isolation, it isn't going to happen," he said. "There'll be no industry, there'll be no trade, there'll be nothing - a slow, dismal, collapse. It's ludicrous.
"It's an act of cowardice really, it's running away from issues instead of solving them."
yes.
Disney aren't out trying to hustle hardware. They have content. They want as many people to buy their content as humanly possible. Which means making it work on *everything*. So my household watches Disney on Firestick, on Xbox, on Android. Now tv? Need Sky, or their stick to watch it on a TV screen. Err no.
If Biden does win then it needs to be a clear win in the electoral college , that might be the only way things don’t unravel .
They were making the ludicrous claim that pulling down the statue would deny the average man in the street a source of information about Colston, slavery and his time period.
And that's garbage because
a) it was put up over 150 years after he died
b) it is entirely hagiographic with zero mention of slavery
So sure it tells you a bunch about attitudes in the late 1800s but it tells you fuck all about Colston and doesn't need to be standing now.
Edit. And incidentally NZ is also highly urbanised, with a slightly higher % of people living in urban areas than the UK.
If that is true, it was a political assassination. Stig Enström was an active Moderate (Conservative) who despised social democrat Palme.
If the polls continue to deteriorate, and it begins to look like Trump will drag them all down, then you might see Republicans up for election this cycle abandon Trump in a bid to save themselves. That would make it much harder for him to come back later in the campaign.
But, at the moment, Trump still polls better than many Republicans (see, for example, Iowa and Kentucky), so that still seems very unlikely.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23795655