1492 days ago
Leeds City council has done a review of all the statues that the Black Lives Matter movement wanted pulled down in this 2020 summer of madness. It established that folks like Queen Victoria, Sir Robert Peel and the Black Prince had no direct connection to slavery. The Black Prince er?
1529 days ago
David Hume was a great philosopher but, writing in 1753, he made remarks about black folks which even then were a tad offensive and today are viewed as utterly racist. Given that we now judge folks’ utterances and actions of 267 years ago by the mores of today, in the year of madness that is 2020, Hume was toast. A building named after him at Edinburgh University has been renamed. I suspect that there will be calls to remove A Treatise of Human Nature from the curriculum and so future generations will come to know the man, not as I did as a student, as a philosopher but as just another dead white racist male. So where next with the purge? Might I suggest Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns?
1548 days ago
This podcast is dedicated to my friend and a man who for more than 30 years has been a key figure in my life and for whom my admiration and love knows no bounds. That man is William Long, who lies gravely ill in a New York hospital. We might disagree on much, but on the need to call out a lie and on the imperative of original historic research and putting matters within that context we will always agree on. I thus discuss the BBC, Last Night of the Proms, what Rule Britannia actually means and refers to, its historic context, some of its critics and what motivates them and allows them to smell out racism and imperialism without reference to actual fact. I refer also to my article on Thomas Guy, another man facing erasure as we do not teach anyone our nation’s history nor care about the actual facts of it. Mentioned in this podcast are The Mrs, the great Neil Masuda, Laurence Fox, Tony Hall, Matthew Hopkins, and his true heir today Kehinde Andrews.
1619 days ago
We live in mad times. In the wider world I see that cartoon Police Dog Chase, from Paw Patrol, is about to go the way of Thomas Guy and Gladstone and become a non-person. On the stockmarket we see shares in companies that had said they are in a real mess, entering Chapter 11 in the USA, or talking to an administrator in the UK, roof it. This is all sheer madness and cannot last. I offer you two UK examples…
1623 days ago
Yesterday my Mrs attended an online union meeting at her University. Natch the statues were on the agenda. She, a person of colour, suggested that they should not all be pulled down but the middle class, white, Guardian reading, classes know what black folks really want to fight racism. Thus the Mrs was in a small minority and the Union at her left wing Madrassa now has a clear policy. Why, I wonder, are folks so angry about so many figures from the past?
There are many reasons but one is, I am afraid, ignorance. I went into some detail HERE yesterday, explaining why Thomas Guy was not really tainted by slavery at all. However, facts do not matter and his statue, at the Hospital founded with nearly all of his cash, is for the melting pot.
1624 days ago
Though, as I demonstrated earlier, he invested not a cent in slaving, the statue of philanthropist Thomas Guy is now officially for the melting pot. First they came for the statues. Then they came for the comedy. I have just played the video below to my woke Islington based daughter Olaf and she laughed loudly.
1624 days ago
I start with a few thoughts on a local statue that looks set to be melted down but commend my piece earlier on Thomas Guy in the same vein. I bring you the good news that No Gold is alive then discuss Intu (INTU), Frontera Resources (FRR), Avacta (AVCT), the merger of Bahamas Petroleum (BPC) and Columbus Energy (CERP) and Anglo African Oil & Gas (AAOG). Finally we are now almost at £40,000 on Woodlarks (with gift aid). If every bearcast listener yet top donate chipped in £10 plus gift aid tonight we would hit target. Please, please do so HERE.
1624 days ago
Goody Proctor saw Baden Powell watching Gone with the Wind. Quick let’s tear down his statue too. The hysteria mounts and among the keenest to eradicate history is Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of Stab City the lawless moral cesspit that is the capital of Airstrip One. In his sights right now is Thomas Guy who bequeathed his fortune to found Guy’s Hospital in London. The name stays, for now, but the statue is on its way out. Naturally the charges against him show a profound ignorance of history but when do the mob and half wits like Khan care about the facts?
