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Not Reading The Room

October 8, 2025 88 Comments

From the Stage pages of the Guardian, a reminder of which concerns – and by extension which citizens – simply don’t matter:

A compelling drama about refugees living in Britain could be one way to defuse the rising anger and anti-migrant sentiment in the UK, according to the award-winning actor Jonathan Pryce, who said great TV or film could “open up” the issue.

As if the issue weren’t already foremost in a great many minds, perhaps due to unhappy first-hand experience. Note, too, the conflation of migrants and refugees. As if those arriving in vast numbers, welcome or otherwise, legally or not, were some homogenous mass of human sorrow, and thus, rather conveniently, impossible to refuse.

Pryce told the Guardian that at present the British public has no idea about the day-to-day realities for people living in migrant hotels. “People aren’t aware of the facts… concerning immigrants, legal or otherwise. And so this sort of fear and anger builds up about something they don’t really know anything about,” he said.

Readers are welcome to marvel at the conceit that objections to current policy – an effectively borderless nation – can only be the result of ignorance. No other possibilities being conceivable, it seems. And so, the flow of information, of views to be considered, and any expectations of listening, seem likely to travel in one direction only.

Readers will also note the assumption that the indigenous proletariat – those low-status citizens daring to be angry at the downgrading of their home – merely need to have their objections corrected. By drama of a very particular kind. As if concerns regarding rapid demographic transformation and a loss of cultural common ground could only ever be wrong.

As if there were no substance to their fears. No basis for their anger or sense of betrayal. As if it weren’t their neighbourhoods, not those of the luvvie set, being transformed rapidly and against their will – and very often for the worse.

As if they simply have to be told in a slightly different way.

A curious definition of an issue being opened up.

“It’s an issue that does need to be opened up and explored to a greater extent, and it has to be through drama, which is often the best way to tell somebody’s emotional story.”

Whether our award-winning actor would be quite so enthusiastic about a compelling drama conveying the “emotional story” and “day-to-day realities” of someone whose home has been degraded and made alienating by the assumptions of people much like Mr Pryce remains unclear.

Though readers are welcome to guess.

Update, via the comments:

EmC adds,

They’ll try anything except listening to the voters.

Indeed. It’s not as if feelings on the matter have not been made clear, many times, quite loudly. Governments have been ousted because of this issue. And it’s not as if the consequences of ignoring those feelings are particularly difficult to foresee. Yet somehow the option of just doing as you’ve been told doesn’t appear on the form.

Mr Pryce and his peers seem to imagine that they live in a society without practical limits, or any troublesome human nature, as if the patience of those on whom these demographic fantasies are being imposed were infinite. As if no ugliness could ensue.

The idea that there may be very real physical constraints on some favoured policy – that reality may not comply with half-baked theory – seems entirely alien to those who would lecture us on our ignorance.

Says Rafi,

Stop noticing things. Consume fiction instead.

The disconnect – the inability to read the room – is quite something. And so very Guardian.

It scarcely needs saying that Mr Pryce, like so many of his likeminded peers, is unlikely to find his own neighbourhood enlivened by Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes, a tool now fashionable in educational establishments, and I doubt that he’ll find his own doorstep literally being shat on.

And I think we can assume that Mr Pryce has no recent first-hand experience of public transport and the, shall we say, challenges it can now present.

Likewise, I think it’s safe to say that Mr Pryce has not had the experience of visiting a busy high-street optician and realising that he was the only white customer, the only one fluent in English, and the only one paying for their treatment. Now, you might think that people shouldn’t notice such things or draw any conclusions from them, because that would be beastly and mean or something.

But people will, and people do, and wishing otherwise is both immaterial and perverse.

The irony being that those like Mr Pryce, who wish to project an air of piety and kindness, of infinite caring – entirely at others’ expense and while in reality disdaining their own countrymen – are risking a society much less to their own liking. And possibly yours.

A multicultural, multiracial society very much depends on the host population not feeling too imposed upon. The natives must feel respected and secure, not – as is now the case – that the piss is being taken. If the percentage of newcomers rises too high, or too sharply, or with no regard for assimilation and cultural common ground, friction will ensue and rapidly escalate.

The rate at which new arrivals materialise, their sheer numbers, will have an effect on how well, or how poorly, those new arrivals adapt to the customs and values of the host society. Indeed, it will have an effect on whether those new arrivals feel inclined, or obliged, to make any such attempt.

And at the moment we’re way past the point at which the alarm started flashing. And the longer that friction continues, and the more that the concerns of the natives are dismissed or denounced or made taboo, the uglier the pushback is likely to be.

Again,

Stop noticing things. Consume fiction instead.

And so, we arrive at the claim that a suitably loaded drama, a fiction, about refugees “could defuse anti-migrant anger,” because “people aren’t aware of the facts and realities for people living in migrant hotels.” As if that would outweigh all of the things, seen daily, that we’re not supposed to consider. Or consider important. Things regarding which one might have an opinion.

As Rmok and others note in the comments, what Mr Pryce advocates does seem very much about putting a thumb on the scale. As revealed by the implied disregard for indigenous objections – the assumption that objections to being swamped with the flotsam of the world, or suddenly being reduced to a racial and cultural minority in one’s own neighbourhood or village, one’s own home, is something to be educated out of you.

By your betters and their stories.

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Reading time: 5 min
Written by: David
Free-For-All Interviews Politics

But We Can All Feel Pious While Freezing In The Dark

September 30, 2025 67 Comments

In discussions of Net Zero, I’ve previously mentioned the pleasingly hard-nosed energy analyst Kathryn Porter.

Here she is being interviewed by the chaps at Triggernometry:

This Isn’t Science, It’s Ideology – Kathryn Porter

Watch the full episode with @KathrynPorter26, right here on X. pic.twitter.com/SLQB9l9Evb

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) September 28, 2025

“Excuse my language, but are they fucking mental…?”

“Yes.” 

It’s ninety minutes, but time well spent and dense with information. Much of it of an eye-widening kind.

Ms Porter’s YouTube channel can be found here.

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Written by: David
Academia Anthropology Politics

Not Entirely Similar

September 16, 2025 109 Comments

For those with an interest in recent history, and indeed surrealism, a catalogue of progressive cancel culture.

Among the sins punished with both swiftness and eyebrow-raising severity – questioning the benefits of rioting; questioning overt racial favouritism at the University of California, Los Angeles; saying that George Floyd wasn’t actually a moral exemplar; liking tweets in support of Donald Trump; questioning the methods of Black Lives Matter; showing the 1965 film of Laurence Olivier’s Othello to students at the University of Michigan; and teaching students of Chinese how to pronounce Chinese words.

And regarding the above, this:

And also, from recent comments, this by Mr Wanye Burkett:

The position I took with a lot of cancel culture was that it just kind of made no sense to want to get people fired from whatever job they happened to have for statements that were really pretty unrelated to whatever work they were doing, often pretty innocuous, and in many cases from decades before…

Maybe the principle here is that this is so unbecoming of a public school teacher [to publicly exult in the murder of someone with different political views] that not only should they lose this specific job, but maybe they shouldn’t work in another public school ever again. Maybe they’re just not suited for that kind of work.

That’s not punitive. That’s much more logical, instrumental. The idea in this latter case is that people have revealed themselves to be unsuited for a particular kind of employment.

Readers may wish to ponder whether the sins mentioned above – expressing doubts about rioting, or teaching Chinese pronunciation to students of Chinese – exist on the same level of inaptness as, say, a public-school teacher showing ten-year-olds shockingly graphic video of a man being shot in the neck, and killed, in front of his family, and showing that footage repeatedly, “numerous times,” while hectoring those same ten-year-olds on the merits of so-called “anti-fascism.”

Answers on a postcard, please.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the example immediately above, John D adds,

These people don’t just need firing, they need medication.

It does, I think, invite questions as to the vetting of public school educators and the kinds of personalities the job seems to attract in high concentrations. It also invites questions as to what kind of environment, what kind of workplace assumptions, might make a teacher of ten-year-olds think that such behaviour would be considered acceptable.

I mean, if nothing else, and even absent any conventional moral inhibition, you’d think that one of the obvious considerations for a teacher of ten-year-olds might at least be the assumption that parents will find out. In this case, when their children arrive home bewildered and distressed. And to therefore behave accordingly. And yet.

Update 2:

Regarding this,

It also invites questions as to what kind of environment, what kind of workplace assumptions, might make a teacher of ten-year-olds think that such behaviour would be considered acceptable.

Liz adds,

Because a lot of the people they work with are exactly the same?

Or sufficiently sympathetic, politically, to not mind too much, or maybe just accustomed to politicised overreach and inapt behaviour in general. Those would seem to be among the more obvious inferences. And as so often, it appears that shocked parents, rather than colleagues, were the ones to object.

On the subject of parents being shocked to discover, belatedly, what their children are actually being taught, these three incidents came to mind. Among many others. Note, in the third link, the casual invention of a fake curriculum – yes, a fake curriculum – so as to deceive any curious parents.

And all while insisting, “This is not being deceitful.”

In light of which, the “anti-fascist” snuff-video session mentioned above doesn’t exactly scream anomaly or aberration, or some unfortunate misreading of the room, so much as a ratcheting upwards.

With a hat-tip to Darleen.

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Written by: David
Free-For-All Politics

Some Big Boys Made Me Do It

August 19, 2025 105 Comments

Apparently, and this may be news to you, littering isn’t a moral shortcoming of the people actually dropping the litter:

Which seems awfully convenient, for a certain kind of person, if not entirely convincing.

Litter – and its inegalitarian distribution – is a topic we’ve touched on before. From which, this came to mind:

[Urban Studies lecturer, Peter Matthews] also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” Meaning more street cleaners, cleaning more frequently. He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to, “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.”

But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.

The report that Mr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour.

A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”

And Mr Matthews, our Urban Studies lecturer, is educating teenagers. Telling them how it is.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Food and Drink Politics

He Saw It Through A Different Lens, You Know

August 18, 2025 100 Comments

From the pages of Metro, some highly emotional news:

It was endless – and deeply unsettling. I genuinely felt shaken and that emotion caught me off guard. I picked up the phone and called my mother in Jordan…

As soon as I heard her voice, I started sobbing. She heard me sniffling and, in true tough-love fashion, said, “Ah, you must’ve caught a cold from that British weather?” “Yes, Mama,” I mumbled. “Just a cold.” I couldn’t bring myself to verbalise my shock and disgust because I didn’t yet have the words to describe it.

I do now, though. My mind couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that my culture – houmous – was being culturally appropriated. It makes me sick.

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves. What with the brutality of it all. Namely, a supermarket aisle with – and I quote,

An entire shelf stacked with all kinds of wild, colourful houmous.

Apparently mere proximity to such a thing – again, a shelf of houmous in a supermarket – can traumatise grown men of a progressive persuasion. Including Mr Amro Tabari, whose dip-induced agonising unfolds before you now:

I grew up in Jordan but my family is actually from Palestine. Before I was born, they were forced to flee in 1948 and we became refugees.

No, the relevance escapes me, too. Perhaps something will be made of this later, given sufficient contrivance.

Despite this, I had a happy childhood with my parents and older sister. Throughout it all, houmous was a staple. In fact, we’d have it as a family every Friday as part of a breakfast ritual. Mum would make it from scratch and we’d sit around the table sharing it.

I go for the red pepper variety, myself. Hey, I’m just sharing, too.

It wasn’t until I moved to the UK in 2013 to pursue a Master’s Degree in Renewable Energy that I began to see houmous through a different lens.

No laughing at the back. This is a tearful tale.

In supermarkets, I was stunned: all different types of houmous ‘fusions’ – many without chickpeas at all.

Stunned by houmous options. When not sobbing, I mean, or filled with a sickening outrage. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Mr Tabari’s emotions, or professed emotions, incline towards the operatic. One might say baffling.

Sure, culinary innovation is great. But sometimes what looks like fusion is actually confusion – or worse, erasure.

I suspect an explanation of a sort may be looming.

The reason I felt so shocked in that supermarket aisle was because I was lamenting what had become of my culture. My houmous. To me, houmous isn’t just a recipe; it’s an identity rooted in the Levant, long before modern political borders were drawn.

Ah, the aforementioned contrivance. Houmous as a political identity. I think this is where the credulous are meant to feel guilty, or deferential, or something.

Once I realised how far houmous had been taken from its roots, I turned to a Lebanese-Palestinian friend of mine and asked for his mother’s recipe… Now I try to share my authentic houmous with anyone and everyone I meet – and they love it. In Brighton, where I live, café baristas, flower shop owners, food critics, and even fellow amateur theatre actors have all tried it. They all listen to me when I tell them about the history of houmous, what it means to me.

I would guess that at least some of those baristas, flower shop owners and amateur theatre actors are just being polite. Not everyone needs a sermon with their dip. Even in Brighton.

I have even made huge pots of it and brought it to pro-Palestine marches with me.

You see, that’s where we’re going. Because of course we are. He’s had photos done and everything.

Whenever I offer my houmous to people, they often ask me: “What’s your secret?” “Palestinian love,” I reply with a smile.

This is starting to sound like one of those fabulist anecdotes in which the speaker is supposedly always being asked, “But how do you cope with being so slim and pretty and loved by everyone?”

Houmous… tells stories across generations. When it’s commercialised without context or origin, something sacred is lost.

One more time. Dip.

It feels that houmous is colonised, butchered, brutalised. When heritage is repackaged and resold – especially while communities tied to it are struggling – it becomes an insult. It’s not just houmous; it’s history, belonging, and pride.

And finally, inevitably, the demand:

Stop the cultural appropriation.

Or you could just, you know, dial back the pretentious, self-involved whining. Three or four notches should do it.

Update, via the comments:

John D quotes this bold claim,

my culture – houmous

And adds, drily,

My culture – teabags.

Liz asks,

How do these clowns even make it through the day?

It does seem to involve a lot of needless drama. Such that one can be traumatised and outraged, reduced to sobbing, by the availability of a savoury dip. It all sounds exhausting. And I think we’re expected to admire this emotional self-indulgence and the cack-handed attempt to manipulate.

And ComputerLabRat speaks for many with this:

Ye gods these people are tiresome.

I suppose we might, in theory, feel sorry for Mr Tabari, whose time in leftist circles has led him to believe that his self-involved dramas are a basis for being taken seriously. As someone for whom houmous is an identity and a basis for attention and deference. Someone who invokes the alleged injury of “cultural appropriation” and consequently bursting into tears, as if this would be a good look. A basis for status and applause.

I mean, to imagine that this is the look to go for, in a national newspaper, where people can see, does suggest a level of loserdom.

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.