Why academia is offensive – when difficult questions offend
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Stereo typing
In the eyes of the ARC and others It is impossible to get it right. If you choose the image of a white man you can be accused of racial bias, if you choose the image of a black man you can be accused of racial bias. If you choose the image of an oriental you can be accused of bias even if the image is of the person you are actually representing. What are we to choose when we want to depict a man doing something? Coco was going to suggest that we use a monkey instead, but then, if the experience of Hartlepool is anything to go by, we shall only end up annoying the French even more than they are already. I suppose someone will consider that to be racist too. Hey-ho, Boney was a warrye, way, aye, yah. A warrye and terrye, John France, wah!
Rapid Alter[c]ation
Change comes quickly and unexpectedly
The remarkable speed with which the recent changes have taken place in Afghanistan reminded me of words spoken 2500 years ago in Israel:
Continue readingDiversity increases?
There was a school class which comprised only fifteen boys – it was a privileged area and the boys, unable to cope with competition from hard working girls, had been segregated – one of whom had black skin and two had brown, the rest all had white, perhaps you could say albino, but that may be misunderstood. The class was therefore racially diverse.
Continue readingWho?
Who is she?
Yesterday as the sun went down
Only one thing was in my crown;
Under the glow of the darkening cloud
In my heart a thought cried aloud:
Summer is going, with all its host,
Surrendering to autumn and winter’s frost
Hope fled away, gone without reason
Early, to feel the loss of the season.
Then, another came into view,
Ready and willing her life to renew,
Under the glow of the pinkening cloud
Even she who is you, of whom be proud.
Questions
that should not be asked
You have noticed that the French do not ask questions
Vous mangiez ici?
Vous alliez au football?
Car three
Coco’s dear old Corsa was so far out of condition.
Continue readingOf the burning of books there is no end
Dowlais – steel works
When steel matters
The events that are shortly to be related took place in a different age and a different culture, in an altogether foreign location in the broadest sense which was unknown to the people of that time, but is now known to us as a consequence of the work of Einstein in the early part of the twentieth century. It was the time of railroads, steam trains, iron mills, steelworks, coal-mines and dirty work, when undertaker meant more than the entrepreneur and entrepreneur was an unknown word. The prosperity of a municipality could be measured, at least in part by the number of railway stations that it boasted, but better by the quality of the steel produced there and it was from one of these small towns towards the upper end of one of the rolling Welsh valleys that a principle undertaker in the steel industry received a telegram from a bridge and engineering fabricator in North Africa who wished to discuss the procurement of a quantity of steel for the provision of the building of a new bridge across the Niger.
Continue readingMiserere
The penitential psalm of David
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