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When you walk around the nice parts of London, you quickly come across oval blue plaques bearing the name of some historic personage who once lived at this spot. For example, the first I can remember in 1980 is the plaque for the doomed South Pole explorer Robert Scott. There really have been a lot of famous Brits and many of them lived in London at one point or another.
Of course, these days, that’s a sore spot because almost all of these famous Brits are white. How can we tolerate this history? Such knowledge might undermine the self-esteem of blacks, which, as we all know, is incredibly fragile.
From The Guardian:
Only 2% of blue plaques in London commemorate black people
Tobi Thomas, Aamna Mohdin and Pamela Duncan
Tue 5 Oct 2021 02.00 EDT
Blue plaques commemorating notable black figures still make up just 2.1% of the individuals honoured across London, according to a Guardian analysis.
More than 1,160 notable people are name-checked on the scheme’s 978 plaques. But of the those awarded plaques, 96% are white, while only 4% of figures have been from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background.
On Tuesday, a husband and wife who escaped from slavery in the US and came to Britain in the mid-19th century, where they campaigned for abolition and social reform, become the latest people to be commemorated by London’s distinctive historical markers.
William and Ellen Craft had been slaves in the southern state of Georgia before managing to escape, with the fair-skinned Ellen posing as a white man and William as “his” servant. After arriving in England as refugees in 1850, they toured the UK campaigning against slavery, before settling in Hammersmith.
Although the scheme was introduced in the 19th century, it was not until 1975 that the first blue plaque to commemorate a black person, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor [not the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge] was introduced, and a further 11 years until the next was erected at the Leyton home of South African writer and political activist Sol Plaatje.
Whose heart doesn’t pound a little faster at the mention of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Sol Plaatje?
The majority of the commemorated black figures first achieved this status in the past two decades: 81% of the blue plaques dedicated to notable black figures were erected since 2002.
Disparities also exist within the categories by which black and non-black figures are recognised. Black nominees are overrepresented in the categories that primarily commemorate music and dance, which make up almost a third (30%) of all the plaques dedicated to black people, compared with just 8% of all honourees.
The singers Bob Marley and Elizabeth Welch are both commemorated, as is guitarist Jimi Hendrix.
Other black figures celebrated by the scheme including the footballer Laurie Cunningham, cricketer Sir Learie Constantine and the nurse Mary Seacole. John Archer, the first black person to hold a senior public office in London, is represented, as is racial equality campaigner and founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, Dr Harold Moody.
The only ones of these plaques that I can imagine international tourists finding interesting are Marley and Hendrix, neither of whom were Brits. It’s almost as if blacks haven’t played much of a role in London history.
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blockquote>The majority of the commemorated black figures first achieved this status in the past two decades: 81% of the blue plaques dedicated to notable black figures were erected since 2002.
Somewhat obliquely, the Guardian is saying that True Equity can only be achieved once we have time travel.
Which will have to be discovered by a POC, of course.
? Surely we can just say it was discovered by a person of color. I thought that's how it worked.Replies: @Uncle Dan
The whole point of the plaques is that they’re a tourist attraction that draws in money for the local economy. Creating a plaques that says something like, “Lubilicious X scratched his butt here,” isn’t going to draw in big money. Most ‘famous blacks’ are made ‘famous’ only by really straining at it, and most blacks haven’t even heard of their role models. Most whites haven’t heard of ‘famous blacks’ either, so it will be a dud. For example, these black people have plaques in Britain: Elizabeth Welch, Laurie Cunningham, Sir Learie Constantine, Dr. Harold Moody. Well, I’ve never heard of a single one of them.
And that’s the problem here. In the past, white people who attainted fame in Britain did it the hard way. They kept doing things over the course of their career that, once added up, made them a public name. They became talked about, so they attained fame from being talked about. The talk created the fame. They impressed other people in some way or another so that the crowd started talking about these people spontaneously. This is the way someone like Charlotte Bronte, who didn’t even have her name on her first novel when it came out, became famous. People took note, became interested, and just started talking about Bronte their own.
But blacks? They’re trying to make blacks ‘talked about’ by force. Nobody cares about the little doings of nobodies. These blacks are all publicity department. No one talks about them because nobody cares enough about their so-called achievements to bother.
Her posthumous "rediscovery" and acclaim in recent years in an amazing phenomenon in itself and certainly worth a book or two.
The bare truth is that Mary Seacole was a Jamaican woman of mixed race who had no high opinion of Jamaican blacks; a woman of boundless energy, she was primarily a businesswoman who was skilled in Caribbean folk medicine rather than the rapidly-developing scientific medicine of Victorian Britain.
It has been claimed that Florence Nightingale adopted an Olympian attitude towards Mary Seacole, allegedly remarking that Mary's modest convalescent "hotel" in the Crimea permitted over-indulgence in alcoholic refreshment and inappropriate liaisons between Queen Victoria's soldiery and the scantily-trained female staff in the employ of Mary Seacole.
For an entertaining glimpse of a certain episode in the Crimean War, I recommend the highly-entertaining novel "Flashman at the Charge" by George McDonald Fraser.Replies: @Billy Corr
Jimi Hendrix was, according to pretty much every guitar player, a god of guitar. He was not “pretty good, for a black guy” as so many blacks are in their professions. The number of blacks who are not just good at their job, but really good at their job is minuscule, caused by affirmative action.
Come to think of it, credentialism and IQ sorting probably drastically reduce the number of people who are fantastically good at their job. Florence Nightingale, in the course of showing how important good treatment is, created several new types of charts, of ways to visually display data. One is called a Nightingale chart. Do you think she’d be a nurse today, treating patients in a field hospital if she’d been sorted by IQ? No, she’d be a neurologist or maybe a hospital administrator. She would not admit that her hospital could do things better. The American business culture has decayed to the point where admitting you were wrong is a character flaw. How can they improve anything with that attitude?
Science has been seriously hurt by the influx of people who are barely smart enough to be “scientists” and do not have the temperament to actually do science. Pretty much every social scientist is an activist. If they were not, they’d never have made it through graduate school. They are all “proving” their pet cause or theory is true. That’s not how you do science. Even in more life or death fields, the majority of findings can not be reproduced by pharmaceutical companies that try to repeat the experiment. People do a hundred trials of 20 experiments, and then they pick the one that “shows” the effect and publish, without saying that they got the 10% effect in one out of a hundred trials. Asian graduate students, for whom truth is what a superior believes, are a huge problem. They have ruined decades and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of research funding. Why can’t we produce new drugs as quickly and cheaply as they did thirty years ago? Because the “basic science” upon which innovation depends, is false four out of five times. Tons of money and time is wasted because an Asian added fas ligand to experimental culture to kill the cells. After all, that’s what made the experiment “work.”
I blame Asians, but they are not the entire problem by far. They are definitely a part that you all will accept. Lots of whites cheat, too. If only to keep up with the Asians. Publish or perish, and “chemical x does not kill cancer” is not going to be published in a good journal. So test chemical X on hundred different cultured cancers, some of which have been cultured, and therefore subject to selection, for decades. How much HeLa cells have in common with cells in cancer, much less normal human cells is a question no one seems to want to be answered.
Then there is the money available in biomed. A few decades ago, people who really wanted to help the world, help patients, went into biomed research. No people who want to get rich go in, too. That means people who have a vested interest in something can kill research that would lead to their company being worthless.
Take DRACO, using a double-stranded RNA-binding protein fused to caspase (caspase activators? I forget) fragments. The dsRNA-binding domains of multiple proteins stick to big pieces of dsRNA, 2 caspase domains activate each other (transactivate) and go and kill the cell. There’re also domains to isolate the protein from culture and get the protein into the cell.
DRACO is not perfect. The cell already has dsRNA binding proteins that activate the antiviral response. Evolution is not an optimization algorithm, or it’s a crappy one. Take your pick. Random mutation just hasn’t stuck these 2 types of domains together in a way that, um, stuck. Thing is, sticking two domains together in the same polypeptide is the sort of thing that works. Evolution does it blindly. Bio folks do it intentionally. It does not always work, but it is an established technique.
Not all viruses make dsRNA. Some are single or double-stranded DNA, the only RNA they make is either free or in a transcription bubble with DNA. So sorry, all you dudes with herpes. HIV doesn’t make dsRNA. Of those that do, viruses do try to hide it. Some dsRNA viruses have 2nd strand synthesis in a pre-assembled capsid. But human cells do not make long stretches of dsRNA. It could be non-toxic in well-above therapeutic doses.
A subtler problem with DRACO might be that apoptosis is anti-inflammatory, so it might interfere with the immune response. If so, dsRNA-binders can be fused with proteins that kill in a pro-inflammatory way.
As I understand it, the dude who created DRACO has said some inaccurate things about his research before. He published in PLoS, not Science or Nature, which is where one might expect a near-universal antiviral treatment, with in vitro evidence against several viruses and in vivo in mice against one. That he says it’d work against HIV is disturbing, but he might just not know what being a retrovirus entails.
The response from pharma and the biomedical community? Crickets. But the original researcher is not a reliable guy? The method of creating it is something almost any biology lab can do in a few days. Call it two weeks to verify. Dude had to try to raise money on GoFundMe! He failed.
If biomed funding agencies were working as intended, this is something worth testing until destruction. Try stitching some different domains together. See how far along an infection has to be before a particular dose of DRACO fails.
It would probably have to be injected, but I’d bet a lung or sinus infection could be treated with something that worked like FluMist. It could cause an immune reaction, but there would only be a few stretches of amino acids (neoepitopes) that are not human-normal. We make a lot of protein drugs.
There is a company in New Zealand started by two software guys that are trying to do a DRACO treatment for something or other. They are poorly capitalized. They do not own DRACO. If it’s a matter of IP, like he published before he patented, there must be a way to set up a charity to develop a new class of drug.
My guess is no one is much interested in DRACO because it would render products in their pipeline, if not obsolete, then not as valuable without than with a universal antiviral treatment. Wouldn’t they have to actively collude to suppress it? Not if they are smart and are playing an iterated game of prisoner’s dilemma. Besides, it is in every pharma company’s interest that that particular company does not develop it. I guess someone may be working on it hush-hush, but that is not how things usually work.
Maybe the guy who created it is a nut, and is demanding way too much upfront? Maybe there are flaws with it that I’m not seeing? Drugs not really worth developing, like interferons for cancer, were very popular. Why not DRACO. We do not have a broad antiviral. Having one might have saved lives during COVID, especially during the period where there were no treatments besides ventilators.
COVID is not the last viral pandemic we will face.
Does anyone in biomed want to weigh in on the obvious flaws in DRACO that I can’t see?
It took me too long to write this comment. Surely the thread is dead. Steve will see, though!
It’s almost as if blacks haven’t played much of a role in London history.
Well there is Stephen Lawrence, if media coverage and political posturing is anything to go by he must surely be the single most important person to have lived and died in London in the last 50 years.
Great Britain is doing its best to compete with America in the racial pandering department. Trayvon Martin's mother wasn't awarded a noble title.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @James J O'Meara, @Lurker
I dunno, I really loved “Kubla Khan.”
OT: Interesting law ‘enforcement’ development:
Why not just fight it out with some fisticuffs, like normal people?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCazGlbA17F9An1pfjISih1w/videos
Shooting in Austin, TX?
Why not just fight it out with some fisticuffs, like normal people?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCazGlbA17F9An1pfjISih1w/videos
Classical public radio program directors for a start. Over the last year, rarely does a broadcast hour go by without mention of him or William Grant Still. Following close behind in the new canon, Florence Price and Saint-Georges.
They didn’t have the heart to take down Coleridge-Taylor’s plaque after they discovered they had mistaken him for the poet, too.
Perhaps the answer is to find more existing plaques that correspond to moderately famous blacks. In addition to Samuel Taylor-Coleridge/Coleridge-Taylor, the poet Thomas Chatterton has a blue plaque in London. We could pretend that that honors the (Parisian) modern writer, Thomas Chatterton-Williams.
“with the fair-skinned Ellen posing as a white man and William as “his” servant.”
Wow… in the Guardian of all places!
Ellen clearly identified as a man but the Guardian seems to want to impose its notorious TERF perspective.
How long before the Guardian is forced to issue a correction?
Maybe the Brits should make a plaque for half-black Richard Reid, whose selfless voluntarism helped make airlines aware of bombs in shoes, forcing all of us, from 2001 through the ends of eternity, to walk through airports in our stocking feet. I can think of no greater English contribution to modern life.
Well there is Stephen Lawrence, if media coverage and political posturing is anything to go by he must surely be the single most important person to have lived and died in London in the last 50 years.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
Yes, Stephen Lawrence for sure, and his mother, Doreen Lawrence, as well. She promoted reforms of the police service and founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. As a result, she was appointed to the Order of the British Empir in 2003, and was created a Life Peer in 2013. So she is now Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE.
Great Britain is doing its best to compete with America in the racial pandering department. Trayvon Martin’s mother wasn’t awarded a noble title.
I think the penalty for dueling, in ex-manly states like VA, is that it disqualifies the survivor from government employment.
Pablo Fanque performed in London, but evidently never lived there. Too bad. But he did earn a plaque in his native Norwich:
Yes, that Pablo Fanque:
GOTTA HAVE THAT FANQUE
Also known as “The Colored Catapult,” apparently. He was actually a Trinidadian, from Trinidad and Tobago in the West Indies, though he did serve in government in London. The British empire had this convention that everyone in it was a “British subject,” subject, that is, not to the British, but to the Crown, like all Britons themselves. They didn’t have a two-tier citizenship system, and so, people like Constantine, could simply land in Britain and engage in life there.
I suppose sports fans are happy, but then, England itself has no shortage of great cricketers in its history.
The irony is that historically, the black population of London must have generally been a good deal less than two percent.
Of course, they’ve been doing a lot of catching up lately — but maybe two percent is unfair. It could be too much.
Ranking Roger? No plaque for Ranking Roger? Truly, fame is fleeting.
https://i2-prod.birminghammail.co.uk/incoming/article16033272.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/0_GPY_BEM_010916rankingroger_024JPG.jpgI'd go to Birmingham just to see that. His band is on a plaque in Coventry:https://coventryrudeboy.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/5th1.jpgReplies: @JMcG
Somewhat obliquely, the Guardian is saying that True Equity can only be achieved once we have time travel.
Which will have to be discovered by a POC, of course.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Bill Jones, @Hypnotoad666, @Hypnotoad666
‘…Which will have to be discovered by a POC, of course.’
? Surely we can just say it was discovered by a person of color. I thought that’s how it worked.
Touch the hairs, touch the hairs, O me bold Shelmalier
With your long shafted shovels from the grave?
Say, what wind from Kabul brings a refugee here
With this durge of the dusk for the slaves?
Goodly news, goodly news bring I to joven’s del rio
Goodly news shall you plant, Jargy man.
For the boys march at morn from the south to the north
Led by Biden, the boy from Rosatom.
https://norfolktalesmyths.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/blue-plaque.jpg?w=437&h=431
Yes, that Pablo Fanque:
https://public.media.smithsonianmag.com/legacy_blog/Playbill1-240x500.jpg
https://youtu.be/bJVWZy4QOy0Replies: @J.Ross, @Polistra
WE WANT THE FANQUE
GOTTA HAVE THAT FANQUE
Currently blacks only make up 3.0% of the population of the UK – a percentage itself which is an all-time high. Prior to 1900 they were probably never more than 0.1% of the UK’s population.
Before the UK opened the flood gates of immigration blacks were an irrelevant share of the population, and their contributions to British history and culture have been an irrelevant percentage of that irrelevant percentage. But, by golly, they sure do have a healthy sense of their own importance. If we didn’t have blacks who would we have to talk about blacketty black stuff?
And now every time you turn on a show set in the UK you are almost inevitably assaulted with a cast that is 20-30% black – in some cases even if the show is set in 11th Century Scotland.
I guess I’m especially pissed because, as it turns out, the Foundation series absolutely sucks. And while most of it is due to the piss-poor writing, a lot of is thanks to the utterly awful black actors they’ve decided to cast it with.
I am well and truly tired of these people’s absurdly childish demands.
We know the UK was pretty hot on who lived there, because by 1939 they were seriously concerned about foreign agents, and carried out an emergency census at the start of WW2 of the entire civilian population. I seriously doubt that many (if any) black or Asian people escaped being recorded.
https://www.1911census.org.uk/1939
By 1951 the population was 50.6m, so the 40,000 "coloureds" were 0.079% of the population.
https://youtu.be/2puubv2e0L4
Britain was of course deliberately transformed to make minority tribes feel comfortable and not stand out against a homogeneous White European British population:(Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
____________________________
But not just London—what are some 2021 Census predictions..?
Birmingham 2001: 65% White
2011: 53% White… 2021?
.
Blackburn 2001: 78% White
2011: 68% White… 2021?
.
Bradford 2001: 76% White
2011: 63% White… 2021?
.
Coventry 2001: 78% White
2011: 65% White… 2021?
.
Crawley 2001: 84% White
2011: 75% White… 2021?
.
Leicester 2001: 60% White
2011: 45% White… 2021?
.
London 2001: 60% White
2011: 44% White… 2021?
.
Luton 2001: 64% White
2011: 44% White… 2021?
.
Manchester 2001: 74% White
2011: 59% White… 2021?
.
Nottingham 2001: 81% White
2011: 65% White… 2021?
.
Reading 2001: 87% White
2011: 65% White… 2021?
.
Slough 2001: 58% White
2011: 34% White… 2021?
.
Watford 2001: 75% White
2011: 61% White… 2021?
.
Wolverhampton 2001: 75% White
2011: 64% White… 2021?
Not quite true.
Blacks have managed to make “London knife crime” a thing i’m aware of even living 5000 miles away.
I feel certain Roger will be getting his own plaque eventually. The authorities are probably just, you know, ‘saving it for later’.
I would like to give the Guardian an award for their special kind of idiocy here. Of course most of the plaques are of white people. They were probably 99% of the London population for almost all of its history. This is just adding flames to a fire which should not be burning.
I am willing to accept criticism about how white people behaved in the past. We were wrong at times, very wrong. But as I have also said and believe, during the times when we were not treating other races as we should, we also did good things.
We should not cancel the people of yesterday by applying today’s standards to them.
We certainly should not complain that they didn’t honor enough X people when there were hardly any X people there. That most Guardian subscribers and readers are in fact white themselves just makes this article both a ridiculous and perverse exercise in self-flagellation. Or maybe not. As I have pointed out before, whatever the elite says or does, they always make sure they and their friends and family get to keep what they have and acquire more.
Are articles like these what these people feel is the necessary price to keep doing for themselves what they have been doing?
The problem isn't talking about white crimes, per se. The problem is that those other people never want to talk about their own crimes. They don't even want to acknowledge the insanely high rates of crime in the black community today.
The first plaque I really noticed in London was that for Benedict Arnold.
That’s a start, let’s extend it to all government benefits.
No, you’re thinking of Kubla Kangs
https://norfolktalesmyths.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/blue-plaque.jpg?w=437&h=431
Yes, that Pablo Fanque:
https://public.media.smithsonianmag.com/legacy_blog/Playbill1-240x500.jpg
https://youtu.be/bJVWZy4QOy0Replies: @J.Ross, @Polistra
Too damned funny that they included a John Lennon quote to explain why we should have heard of this guy, even though we haven’t.
This would solve all those problems:
https://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/roberto-blanco-wants-body-exhumed-racial-dna-test/
The headline should read: “Only 96 percent of blue plaques in London commemorate white people”. Black non-entities boosted by the media are commemorated alongside giants like Newton and Shakespeare, and now the Guardian wants even more of them.
Hendrix seems to have impressed a lot of people in London, including the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, who provided one of the most entertaining trials of the 1970s when he was charged with hiring someone to murder his former homosexual lover.
Is this the earliest sighting of a proto-soyface?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7St6Za4ieVs
L'Affaire Thorpe, concerning his nocturnal maneuvering with towels and Vaseline aimed at sodomizing a house guest, one Norman Scott, produced the finest, then and yet, headline to ever grace an English newspaper, and The Sun no less:I laughed like a drain and what? 50 years later it makes me smile.Replies: @Polistra, @Rob McX
https://web.archive.org/web/20140904065630/https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/aug/06/past.politics
The 1939 population was just under 48m, so before the war the “coloured” population, which would have included Indians and “lascars” (Malays and other South East Asians) was 0.015%.
We know the UK was pretty hot on who lived there, because by 1939 they were seriously concerned about foreign agents, and carried out an emergency census at the start of WW2 of the entire civilian population. I seriously doubt that many (if any) black or Asian people escaped being recorded.
https://www.1911census.org.uk/1939
By 1951 the population was 50.6m, so the 40,000 “coloureds” were 0.079% of the population.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/12/04/23BEC17500000578-0-image-m-2_1417732280043.jpg
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4750650.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/Jeremy-Thorpe.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p06js680.jpgReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @JMcG, @S Johnson, @Bill Jones
“So you’re leader of the Liberal Party, huh? I thought your hair would be bigger”
Is this the earliest sighting of a proto-soyface?
Somewhat obliquely, the Guardian is saying that True Equity can only be achieved once we have time travel.
Which will have to be discovered by a POC, of course.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Bill Jones, @Hypnotoad666, @Hypnotoad666
Once it is, it will be.
“It’s almost as if blacks haven’t played much of a role in London history.”
Well we’ll just see what netflix has to say about that!
And that's the problem here. In the past, white people who attainted fame in Britain did it the hard way. They kept doing things over the course of their career that, once added up, made them a public name. They became talked about, so they attained fame from being talked about. The talk created the fame. They impressed other people in some way or another so that the crowd started talking about these people spontaneously. This is the way someone like Charlotte Bronte, who didn't even have her name on her first novel when it came out, became famous. People took note, became interested, and just started talking about Bronte their own.
But blacks? They're trying to make blacks 'talked about' by force. Nobody cares about the little doings of nobodies. These blacks are all publicity department. No one talks about them because nobody cares enough about their so-called achievements to bother.Replies: @PseudoNhymm, @Hannah Katz, @Henry's Cat, @Billy Corr, @Rob
I dunno…. we tend to talk about Chicago gun violence quite a bit
Question for all: whose side do we take in the battle between moo shu pork-eating Jew Mark Zuckerberg and Nordic Iowan Frances Haugen? Is it a case of a
poxmalware on both their houses?She's eye candy right out of a superhero comic, but don't let that sway you.Replies: @Wilkey, @Bardon Kaldian, @duncsbaby
“The only ones of these plaques that I can imagine international tourists finding interesting are Marley and Hendrix, neither of whom were Brits.”
Technically speaking, because Marley was born in Jamaica beforev 1962, when Jamaica gained its independence from the UK, that would mean that since Jamaica was a colony of Britian at the time, that Marley was in fact technically a British subject.
“It’s almost as if blacks haven’t played much of a role in London history.”
It’s almost as if blacks per se weren’t part of the UK for thousands and thousands of years. But facts don’t matter. All that matters is what they say they want and want it right now.
As you quote Orwell from time to time, “The future is a boot stamping on the face forever.”
You’re right. They were part of the British Empire for a couple hundred years.
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/munitions-of-the-mind/2017/06/05/imperialists-like-us-british-pamphlet-propaganda-to-the-usa-in-the-great-war/
Great Britain is doing its best to compete with America in the racial pandering department. Trayvon Martin's mother wasn't awarded a noble title.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @James J O'Meara, @Lurker
At least Doreen Lawrence is a decent person. The most frivolous appointment of a Baroness of colour is the race hustler Floella Benjamin, whose main claim to fame is as a former TV presenter on Play School (a show for pre-school kids).
Mr Lawrence, Stephen's father, is a decent person, not so sure about his mum. One has to make allowances for her having her son murdered, but she does seem to have an antipathy to all white people.
At least Floella in her Play School days was probably the first black woman us youngsters found attractive.
Whether she too was stoned this confession doesn't reveal. Irie !
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139887/Marijuana-like-cornflakes-Former-presenter-Rick-Jones-reveals-drug-taking-rife-childrens-TV-favourite-Play-School.html
Well done!
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/12/04/23BEC17500000578-0-image-m-2_1417732280043.jpg
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4750650.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/Jeremy-Thorpe.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p06js680.jpgReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @JMcG, @S Johnson, @Bill Jones
HE’S TOUCHING HER HAIR!!!!
Of course, they've been doing a lot of catching up lately -- but maybe two percent is unfair. It could be too much.Replies: @Gordo
Historically the balck population of London rounded to nil.
And that's the problem here. In the past, white people who attainted fame in Britain did it the hard way. They kept doing things over the course of their career that, once added up, made them a public name. They became talked about, so they attained fame from being talked about. The talk created the fame. They impressed other people in some way or another so that the crowd started talking about these people spontaneously. This is the way someone like Charlotte Bronte, who didn't even have her name on her first novel when it came out, became famous. People took note, became interested, and just started talking about Bronte their own.
But blacks? They're trying to make blacks 'talked about' by force. Nobody cares about the little doings of nobodies. These blacks are all publicity department. No one talks about them because nobody cares enough about their so-called achievements to bother.Replies: @PseudoNhymm, @Hannah Katz, @Henry's Cat, @Billy Corr, @Rob
Reminds me of a show that was on while I was connecting an antenna. A black woman was saying something to the black host about there being “…not enough black people in Italy…” I would have like to ask her if there are not enough White people in Nigeria. Just curious.
MUHAMMED SHABAZZ AL-UTAAK
The first Mauritanian Black
To be held in this gaol
For possession and sale
Of two centilitres of crack
This reflects that degenerate SJW mentality which is, I’d say, authentic. Surely, Joseph Conrad has his plaque (although, when in England, he lived most of his life in Kent & Canterbury). But- this is horror, horror…and I think he shouldn’t have. He was such a horrible racist.
When I skimmed through reviews of “Heart of Darkness” at Goodreads, one highly rated review caught my attention. It was written by some English SJW lesbian whatever. It perfectly depicts that mentality. Here are the best parts:
From 1885 to 1908, an area in Africa now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium, experienced an intense genocide. Through the Red Rubber system, the people of the Congo were essentially enslaved to harvest rubber. Those who failed to collect enough rubber had their hands chopped off. Some died from disease brought on by the terrible conditions, while others were just flat-out murdered.
………………
On the surface, this book can be read as anti-colonialist, a narrative that decries the brutality with which King Leopold II and other rulers allowed African people to be treated. This reading is comforting to us. It feels right. How can we read of their deaths and not feel ashamed? How can we see the heads of so-called rebels on pikes and not find ourselves filled with horror? How can we read a scene in which people walk in a chain gang and not find our deepest sympathies with them? How could Conrad not have felt the same?
But I do not believe that is the intent, or, to be quite honest, an accurate reading of the narrative of this book. Conrad’s descriptions and depictions of black people are dehumanizing to their core. No black character in this book feels real, feels like a person we may empathize with and care for. It is in the descriptions of Kurtz’s black mistress, of the slave-boy whose only contribution to the narrative is the line “Mistah Kutz, he dead” – Conrad does not share our empathies. Our horror at their fate and in their suffering is our own, not the narrators.
The thing about this book is that it’s not a criticism of colonialism, and while reading it as such feels viable on the surface, looking deeper into the narrative makes this book feel odder and odder. This book is a look at the depth of human evil and how that can be brought out when society breaks down. Notice the end of that sentence? Because the reason Africa is the subject of this book is because this narrative fundamentally believes that Africa is a primitive, uncivilized, immoral landscape. Which I find to be an inaccurate and frankly immoral view of Africa. The historical record of our time shows that pre-Colonial (and pre-slave trade) African civilization was filled with the same life as European civilizations, and populated by strong kingdoms. Conrad emphatically believes otherwise. And while I am willing to understand on some level that this was an ingrained belief of European colonists, this book pushes this message to a very high degree – it’s irrevocably tied to the message of the book – that I found impossible to ignore.
Yes, the idea is also pushed that the people of Europe are really no different from the people of the Congo. I am fully aware that Joseph Conrad is getting at the idea that none of us are so evolved and none of us are so civilized ourselves and white society cannot put itself totally above others. Conrad is explicitly attempting to put black people and white people on an equal level of brutality. But this narrative is still fundamentally flawed. The white characters in this book are evil colonists, but they are depicted as people. The black characters of this book are “savages.” They are rebels. At best, they are the helmsman, unnamed in his own narrative and dying ten pages in. At worst, they are literal cannibals. The narrative shows a fundamental dehumanization of each “savage” character, undermining any sort of anti-colonialist or pro-African message.
And I find that fundamentally disturbing. If I cannot feel any horror within the narrative for a genocide, a time in which culture was destroyed and the environment strangled and thousands slaughtered for the profit of an empire, how can I garner anything from this book? How can I, in good conscience, enjoy or recommend this book?
……………..
And beyond that, I do not believe this is at all a surface reading. It’s been pushed in the minds of many that reading this book as racist is a surface-level interpretation, but I genuinely believe that the racism is what you get upon close reading.
Literary analysis of racist historical works is a polarizing and complex topic, and I recognize that many will feel antagonistic towards this viewpoint. I also fully admit that this book makes good use of an unreliable narrator and is one of the most gritty classics I have read as to its depiction of the human soul, and I have nothing against those who enjoyed it. But I cannot enjoy this for those and erase the flaws. I cannot appreciate the literary merit of a book that lacks a fundamental understanding of the humanity of black people. And I’m not sure I believe that I should.
The irony is that for the time, Conrad wasn't particularly racist. I'm thinking of various stray remarks and characterizations in Lord Jim and Typhoon. He's perfectly capable of appreciating the humanity of his various non-white characters, and of gently ridiculing assumptions of racial superiority. See, for example, the scene in Typhoon where the young mate is showing the leader of the Chinese passengers around the Nan Shan. He also doesn't seem to have any particular objection to misogyny -- albeit he tends to avoid sex in general. However, Almayer's Folly, his first novel, basically revolved around a marriage between a Malay and a White, and the child of that union, and at least three inter-racial couples go by in Lord Jim -- two of them viewed approvingly.
I think Conrad judged people for what they were. But if they were fantastically ignorant savages, he didn't pretend otherwise.Replies: @Colin Wright
“At least Doreen Lawrence is a decent person”
Mr Lawrence, Stephen’s father, is a decent person, not so sure about his mum. One has to make allowances for her having her son murdered, but she does seem to have an antipathy to all white people.
At least Floella in her Play School days was probably the first black woman us youngsters found attractive.
Whether she too was stoned this confession doesn’t reveal. Irie !
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139887/Marijuana-like-cornflakes-Former-presenter-Rick-Jones-reveals-drug-taking-rife-childrens-TV-favourite-Play-School.html
This is just a completely OT interruption, so I apologize in advance, it’s just an odd bit of business that popped into my mind, can’t explain why, but I thought your readers might enjoy it for some bizarre reason.
I once worked (I was just sort of an assistant, really) as part of the New York Hospital medical examiner’s investigative team, and one time we were looking into the death of Andy Warhol, to see if there was any malfeasance involved. So I had to go rather deeply into the coroner’s assessment of Andy Warhol, it was kind of weird to find myself discussing the state of his internal organs with a sort of clinical distance, but this is what I was listening to on my headphones, the entire time I was dissecting Andy Warhol…..
I think he would have thought it was kind of funny. I have another personal Andy story, but it sort of takes too long to set up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Wxi15x7ssReplies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/12/04/23BEC17500000578-0-image-m-2_1417732280043.jpg
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4750650.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/Jeremy-Thorpe.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p06js680.jpgReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @JMcG, @S Johnson, @Bill Jones
For that matter where’s Rinka’s blue plaque? Justice for dogs!
Nonsense, such famous black men as Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Grieg, Elgar and Mary Shelley are all honoured.
The real problem is the whitewashing and dead naming of many brave transmen of colour from the past, all done in this article by the Guardian. As any London native knows, the blue denotes “of colour” while white plaques are for people who had no colour. The fact that there are no white plaques proves that white people have been a hindrance to the progress of Britain throughout all of our history.
I would really expect better from the “Guardian”, or should I say the “Supremacist”.
Do you affect your speech with a Mid-Atlantic accent?
British author Simon Webb is currently doing a series of videos on Youtube pointing out the ludicrous lengths the British are going to celebrate black contributions to the country. Today he talks about an article in the Metro that covers “black heroes” whose contributions are ignored. One of the people included is a reggae singer named Smiley Culture who had a couple of hits in the 80s and committed suicide after being arrested for smuggling cocaine into the country. The article also includes the laughable claim Queen Charlotte was black. This craze shows no signs of letting up in Britain.
https://metro.co.uk/2021/10/04/black-history-month-black-british-icons-who-deserve-tv-shows-and-films-15362006/#metro-comments-container
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/statue-wurzels-frontman-adge-cutler-4271416Rob McX - don't forget the headline "Body Found In Cemetery"
I’ve been saying for awhile there must be some huge oversupply of black actors. I’m guessing at auditions in the US/UK half the people who show up are black, which makes it harder for showrunners to justify appropriate casting for the era/setting. What percentage of blacks pursue acting at some point? It must be exponentially higher than the number of whites, Asians or Hispanics.
There would still be diversity casting regardless, but it probably would not be as exaggerated if it weren’t for the sheer numbers of black actors milling around and willing to work for cheap.
I do notice that the shows that are most diverse tend to be worse than shows that aim for authenticity. Truly great directors demand excellence in all aspects of their productions. They won’t hire an inferior cast or crew member just to satisfy demands for “diversity.”
What have you got against poor Floella? At least she always bubbly; Doreen Lawrence casts a pall wherever she goes.
And that's the problem here. In the past, white people who attainted fame in Britain did it the hard way. They kept doing things over the course of their career that, once added up, made them a public name. They became talked about, so they attained fame from being talked about. The talk created the fame. They impressed other people in some way or another so that the crowd started talking about these people spontaneously. This is the way someone like Charlotte Bronte, who didn't even have her name on her first novel when it came out, became famous. People took note, became interested, and just started talking about Bronte their own.
But blacks? They're trying to make blacks 'talked about' by force. Nobody cares about the little doings of nobodies. These blacks are all publicity department. No one talks about them because nobody cares enough about their so-called achievements to bother.Replies: @PseudoNhymm, @Hannah Katz, @Henry's Cat, @Billy Corr, @Rob
If that ever was part of the equation, I very much doubt it is now. I’ve seen dozens of the things, from central London to the suburbs, and never noticed anyone else taking pictures, or local patrons selling T-shirts and the like. Probably 90% of the honourees are anonymous to most Londoners.
If there’s any financial motive, it’s English Heritage itself. Perhaps some of the property owners who agree to the plaques think it will increase their value.
Uganda was once a British possession … at one point, Idi Amin’s widow and son lived in London. How about a plaque commemorating the last king of Scotland?
This Ugandan TV interviewer deserves a plaque for his tireless efforts to promote awareness of LGBTTQQIAAP issues:
Somewhat obliquely, the Guardian is saying that True Equity can only be achieved once we have time travel.
Which will have to be discovered by a POC, of course.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Bill Jones, @Hypnotoad666, @Hypnotoad666
Plaques for “famous people you’ve never heard of.”
Just had an idea of what we could do with time travel.
Somewhat obliquely, the Guardian is saying that True Equity can only be achieved once we have time travel.
Which will have to be discovered by a POC, of course.Replies: @Colin Wright, @Bill Jones, @Hypnotoad666, @Hypnotoad666
That plaque was worth it just to know what that Beatles lyric was, and what it was talking about. Is there a plaque in London somewhere for the Walrus. Cu cu cha choo.
He was their PT Barnum!
“rarely does a broadcast hour go by”
This is true for my local public radio classical station. It’s background music in my house, so I’m familiar with the work of Still and Coleridge-Taylor. Their music is non-offensive and bland. If a piece by Debussy or Sibelius is played afterward you notice the difference.
The real problem is the whitewashing and dead naming of many brave transmen of colour from the past, all done in this article by the Guardian. As any London native knows, the blue denotes "of colour" while white plaques are for people who had no colour. The fact that there are no white plaques proves that white people have been a hindrance to the progress of Britain throughout all of our history.
I would really expect better from the "Guardian", or should I say the "Supremacist".Replies: @SunBakedSuburb
“of colour” and “‘of colour’”
Do you affect your speech with a Mid-Atlantic accent?
Syon[redux], did you lose another account here?
Question for all: whose side do we take in the battle between moo shu pork-eating Jew Mark Zuckerberg and Nordic Iowan Frances Haugen? Is it a case of a
poxmalware on both their houses?She’s eye candy right out of a superhero comic, but don’t let that sway you.
So far as I can tell, Haugen is a far left loon whose biggest complaint is that Facebook hasn't banned every right-wing post from the site.
Good grief ... https://www.google.com/search?q=Frances+Haugen&client=firefox-b-e&sxsrf=AOaemvIDuSyqbGjAyEO4mjXdCorF1rVwOA:1633556344268&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB5_rM37bzAhXso4sKHaUtB3MQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1280&bih=857&dpr=1
And more important, she's so completely SJW crazy that Zuck is, in comparison with her, a white supremacist.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
https://www.bbntimes.com/images/articles/society/Frances_Haugen_.jpegReplies: @Jim Christian, @Reg Cæsar
Not in London– he was a Brummie. With a neat backyard studio there:
I’d go to Birmingham just to see that. His band is on a plaque in Coventry:
How many Placks for Whites in Kampala?
Perhaps the Guardian will dispatch one of its crack reporters to find out.
I am willing to accept criticism about how white people behaved in the past. We were wrong at times, very wrong. But as I have also said and believe, during the times when we were not treating other races as we should, we also did good things.
We should not cancel the people of yesterday by applying today's standards to them.
We certainly should not complain that they didn't honor enough X people when there were hardly any X people there. That most Guardian subscribers and readers are in fact white themselves just makes this article both a ridiculous and perverse exercise in self-flagellation. Or maybe not. As I have pointed out before, whatever the elite says or does, they always make sure they and their friends and family get to keep what they have and acquire more.
Are articles like these what these people feel is the necessary price to keep doing for themselves what they have been doing?Replies: @AnotherDad, @Wilkey
Of course, white people have done stupid nasty stuff. We are people–not gods.
But listing the really stupid stuff white people have done, our mistakes–in the net–didn’t hurt non-whites, they’ve hurt us!
My list:
4) Colonialism. Should have traded, but stayed out of running other people’s nations. And colonialism super-charged …
3) Lots of stupid unnecessary wars killing each other. (Some is inevitable but way, way more than necessary.)
2) Allowing Jews to live to live in white nations without integrating. Allowing this single separate non-integrating tribe to exist and flourish. Just a source of continual contention and ill-feeling.
1) African slave trade. Peopling America with blacks. The greatest unearned demographic expansion in the history of the planet. The Western Hemisphere at your feet … and this is what you do? Think of what could have been. The worst own-goal in human history.
Until …
0) Letting minorities invade white nations. Never before in human history has there been such a mismatch between invaders and invaded. But whites just … let the invasion happen. Civilizational suicide.
The bottom line here: minorities ought to be tipping their hat to white people. The people white people need to apologize to are ourselves.
I am willing to accept criticism about how white people behaved in the past. We were wrong at times, very wrong. But as I have also said and believe, during the times when we were not treating other races as we should, we also did good things.
We should not cancel the people of yesterday by applying today's standards to them.
We certainly should not complain that they didn't honor enough X people when there were hardly any X people there. That most Guardian subscribers and readers are in fact white themselves just makes this article both a ridiculous and perverse exercise in self-flagellation. Or maybe not. As I have pointed out before, whatever the elite says or does, they always make sure they and their friends and family get to keep what they have and acquire more.
Are articles like these what these people feel is the necessary price to keep doing for themselves what they have been doing?Replies: @AnotherDad, @Wilkey
I’m not.
The problem isn’t talking about white crimes, per se. The problem is that those other people never want to talk about their own crimes. They don’t even want to acknowledge the insanely high rates of crime in the black community today.
https://i2-prod.birminghammail.co.uk/incoming/article16033272.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/0_GPY_BEM_010916rankingroger_024JPG.jpgI'd go to Birmingham just to see that. His band is on a plaque in Coventry:https://coventryrudeboy.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/5th1.jpgReplies: @JMcG
Thanks- I have relations in Birmingham- maybe someday.
That number will only get ‘worse.’
What percentage of people who’ve lived in London since the Romans or Alfred the Great have been black?
Technically speaking, because Marley was born in Jamaica beforev 1962, when Jamaica gained its independence from the UK, that would mean that since Jamaica was a colony of Britian at the time, that Marley was in fact technically a British subject.
"It’s almost as if blacks haven’t played much of a role in London history."
It's almost as if blacks per se weren't part of the UK for thousands and thousands of years. But facts don't matter. All that matters is what they say they want and want it right now.
As you quote Orwell from time to time, "The future is a boot stamping on the face forever."Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Corvinus
Yes indeed, both Bob Marley and George Washington were British subjects.
WQRS, the “classical” station in NYC, has made Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (along with Florence Price) their go-to composer for black content. I’d say they have him on at least one playlist everyday. He’s actually pretty good — though Price’s First Symphony is more memorable — not someone I’d turn off, but no better than 100s of 4th or 5th rate composers (if, say, Beethoven or Bach was 1st); it’s clear he wouldn’t be recorded or play as much if not for the AA factor.
Question for all: whose side do we take in the battle between moo shu pork-eating Jew Mark Zuckerberg and Nordic Iowan Frances Haugen? Is it a case of a
poxmalware on both their houses?She's eye candy right out of a superhero comic, but don't let that sway you.Replies: @Wilkey, @Bardon Kaldian, @duncsbaby
Yes, let it sway you…to go see an optometrist. Haugen isn’t exactly ugly, but that hardly qualifies her as eye candy.
So far as I can tell, Haugen is a far left loon whose biggest complaint is that Facebook hasn’t banned every right-wing post from the site.
Interesting. Dueling, along with slavery, “Anglican bigotry” and “an infantile cult of women”, is one of the reasons Schopenhauer gave for what he called “The United States of North America” being a textbook example of the foolishness of democracy.
Great Britain is doing its best to compete with America in the racial pandering department. Trayvon Martin's mother wasn't awarded a noble title.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @James J O'Meara, @Lurker
When will they start appointing horses to the House of Lords?
Handel and Hendrix were neighbours separated by years.
https://www.dorchestercollection.com/en/moments/a-walking-tour-of-mayfairs-blue-plaques/
25 and 23 Brook Street, Mayfair.
I grew up near a historical plantation mansion that had a plaque saying George Washington stayed there. Maybe that was too much for a quick pop in for a founding father. Yet the fact that a yank Jimi Hendrix lived in some British flat for year is now deserving of a plaque just shows us how far the self loathing white west will go to debase itself & whitey.
Question for all: whose side do we take in the battle between moo shu pork-eating Jew Mark Zuckerberg and Nordic Iowan Frances Haugen? Is it a case of a
poxmalware on both their houses?She's eye candy right out of a superhero comic, but don't let that sway you.Replies: @Wilkey, @Bardon Kaldian, @duncsbaby
Eye candy?
Good grief … https://www.google.com/search?q=Frances+Haugen&client=firefox-b-e&sxsrf=AOaemvIDuSyqbGjAyEO4mjXdCorF1rVwOA:1633556344268&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB5_rM37bzAhXso4sKHaUtB3MQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1280&bih=857&dpr=1
And more important, she’s so completely SJW crazy that Zuck is, in comparison with her, a white supremacist.
Anyway, the networks and major sites are on her side, thus offering us only the most flattering shots. Wikipedia gives her birthdate as "(born 1983/84)", which is vague for them.
Technically speaking, because Marley was born in Jamaica beforev 1962, when Jamaica gained its independence from the UK, that would mean that since Jamaica was a colony of Britian at the time, that Marley was in fact technically a British subject.
"It’s almost as if blacks haven’t played much of a role in London history."
It's almost as if blacks per se weren't part of the UK for thousands and thousands of years. But facts don't matter. All that matters is what they say they want and want it right now.
As you quote Orwell from time to time, "The future is a boot stamping on the face forever."Replies: @Jonathan Mason, @Corvinus
“It’s almost as if blacks per se weren’t part of the UK for thousands and thousands of years.”
You’re right. They were part of the British Empire for a couple hundred years.
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/munitions-of-the-mind/2017/06/05/imperialists-like-us-british-pamphlet-propaganda-to-the-usa-in-the-great-war/
Enough for what, I wonder.
Auberon Waugh did his bit to have Rinka commemorated, by standing against Thorpe in the 1979 election as a member of the Dog Lovers’ Party that he had founded for the purpose. Thorpe obtained an injunction to stop his campaign.
“When will they start appointing horses to the House of Lords?”
They’re phasing it in gradually. For some time now they’ve been appointing the hind quarters.
When I skimmed through reviews of "Heart of Darkness" at Goodreads, one highly rated review caught my attention. It was written by some English SJW lesbian whatever. It perfectly depicts that mentality. Here are the best parts:
From 1885 to 1908, an area in Africa now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium, experienced an intense genocide. Through the Red Rubber system, the people of the Congo were essentially enslaved to harvest rubber. Those who failed to collect enough rubber had their hands chopped off. Some died from disease brought on by the terrible conditions, while others were just flat-out murdered.
..................
On the surface, this book can be read as anti-colonialist, a narrative that decries the brutality with which King Leopold II and other rulers allowed African people to be treated. This reading is comforting to us. It feels right. How can we read of their deaths and not feel ashamed? How can we see the heads of so-called rebels on pikes and not find ourselves filled with horror? How can we read a scene in which people walk in a chain gang and not find our deepest sympathies with them? How could Conrad not have felt the same?
But I do not believe that is the intent, or, to be quite honest, an accurate reading of the narrative of this book. Conrad’s descriptions and depictions of black people are dehumanizing to their core. No black character in this book feels real, feels like a person we may empathize with and care for. It is in the descriptions of Kurtz’s black mistress, of the slave-boy whose only contribution to the narrative is the line “Mistah Kutz, he dead” - Conrad does not share our empathies. Our horror at their fate and in their suffering is our own, not the narrators.
The thing about this book is that it’s not a criticism of colonialism, and while reading it as such feels viable on the surface, looking deeper into the narrative makes this book feel odder and odder. This book is a look at the depth of human evil and how that can be brought out when society breaks down. Notice the end of that sentence? Because the reason Africa is the subject of this book is because this narrative fundamentally believes that Africa is a primitive, uncivilized, immoral landscape. Which I find to be an inaccurate and frankly immoral view of Africa. The historical record of our time shows that pre-Colonial (and pre-slave trade) African civilization was filled with the same life as European civilizations, and populated by strong kingdoms. Conrad emphatically believes otherwise. And while I am willing to understand on some level that this was an ingrained belief of European colonists, this book pushes this message to a very high degree - it’s irrevocably tied to the message of the book - that I found impossible to ignore.
Yes, the idea is also pushed that the people of Europe are really no different from the people of the Congo. I am fully aware that Joseph Conrad is getting at the idea that none of us are so evolved and none of us are so civilized ourselves and white society cannot put itself totally above others. Conrad is explicitly attempting to put black people and white people on an equal level of brutality. But this narrative is still fundamentally flawed. The white characters in this book are evil colonists, but they are depicted as people. The black characters of this book are “savages.” They are rebels. At best, they are the helmsman, unnamed in his own narrative and dying ten pages in. At worst, they are literal cannibals. The narrative shows a fundamental dehumanization of each “savage” character, undermining any sort of anti-colonialist or pro-African message.
And I find that fundamentally disturbing. If I cannot feel any horror within the narrative for a genocide, a time in which culture was destroyed and the environment strangled and thousands slaughtered for the profit of an empire, how can I garner anything from this book? How can I, in good conscience, enjoy or recommend this book?
.................
And beyond that, I do not believe this is at all a surface reading. It’s been pushed in the minds of many that reading this book as racist is a surface-level interpretation, but I genuinely believe that the racism is what you get upon close reading.
Literary analysis of racist historical works is a polarizing and complex topic, and I recognize that many will feel antagonistic towards this viewpoint. I also fully admit that this book makes good use of an unreliable narrator and is one of the most gritty classics I have read as to its depiction of the human soul, and I have nothing against those who enjoyed it. But I cannot enjoy this for those and erase the flaws. I cannot appreciate the literary merit of a book that lacks a fundamental understanding of the humanity of black people. And I'm not sure I believe that I should. Replies: @Colin Wright, @Henry's Cat
‘This reflects that degenerate SJW mentality which is, I’d say, authentic. Surely, Joseph Conrad has his plaque (although, when in England, he lived most of his life in Kent & Canterbury). But- this is horror, horror…and I think he shouldn’t have. He was such a horrible racist.’
The irony is that for the time, Conrad wasn’t particularly racist. I’m thinking of various stray remarks and characterizations in Lord Jim and Typhoon. He’s perfectly capable of appreciating the humanity of his various non-white characters, and of gently ridiculing assumptions of racial superiority. See, for example, the scene in Typhoon where the young mate is showing the leader of the Chinese passengers around the Nan Shan. He also doesn’t seem to have any particular objection to misogyny — albeit he tends to avoid sex in general. However, Almayer’s Folly, his first novel, basically revolved around a marriage between a Malay and a White, and the child of that union, and at least three inter-racial couples go by in Lord Jim — two of them viewed approvingly.
I think Conrad judged people for what they were. But if they were fantastically ignorant savages, he didn’t pretend otherwise.
I dated an actress (local actress, not Hollywood) my last year of college and for a year or two after. I didn’t notice an over abundance of blacks in the profession. This was a while ago, but not so long ago that I would think much has changed. I think it has more to do with various leftists in the business, and with the unwillingness of others involved in a production to say no. Plus pressure from the executive suites to be more “diverse.”
I do notice that the shows that are most diverse tend to be worse than shows that aim for authenticity. Truly great directors demand excellence in all aspects of their productions. They won’t hire an inferior cast or crew member just to satisfy demands for “diversity.”
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/12/04/23BEC17500000578-0-image-m-2_1417732280043.jpg
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article4750650.ece/ALTERNATES/s1227b/Jeremy-Thorpe.jpg
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008xn/p06js680.jpgReplies: @YetAnotherAnon, @JMcG, @S Johnson, @Bill Jones
Thanks for the reminder.
L’Affaire Thorpe, concerning his nocturnal maneuvering with towels and Vaseline aimed at sodomizing a house guest, one Norman Scott, produced the finest, then and yet, headline to ever grace an English newspaper, and The Sun no less:
I laughed like a drain and what? 50 years later it makes me smile.
If we’re to believe Mary Blackbeard, British history should be pulsating with the dusky doers of divine deeds.
As for the cited Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: He “was born in 1875 in Holborn, London, to Alice Hare Martin (1856–1953),[2] an English woman, and Dr Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Creole from Sierra Leone, of mixed European and African descent. They were not married, Alice Hare Martin herself being an illegitimate child.[3] Daniel Taylor returned to Africa by February 1875 and did not know that he had a son born in London.”
Sounds about right: a black has a child with a white woman he doesn’t marry, then pisses off.
When I skimmed through reviews of "Heart of Darkness" at Goodreads, one highly rated review caught my attention. It was written by some English SJW lesbian whatever. It perfectly depicts that mentality. Here are the best parts:
From 1885 to 1908, an area in Africa now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium, experienced an intense genocide. Through the Red Rubber system, the people of the Congo were essentially enslaved to harvest rubber. Those who failed to collect enough rubber had their hands chopped off. Some died from disease brought on by the terrible conditions, while others were just flat-out murdered.
..................
On the surface, this book can be read as anti-colonialist, a narrative that decries the brutality with which King Leopold II and other rulers allowed African people to be treated. This reading is comforting to us. It feels right. How can we read of their deaths and not feel ashamed? How can we see the heads of so-called rebels on pikes and not find ourselves filled with horror? How can we read a scene in which people walk in a chain gang and not find our deepest sympathies with them? How could Conrad not have felt the same?
But I do not believe that is the intent, or, to be quite honest, an accurate reading of the narrative of this book. Conrad’s descriptions and depictions of black people are dehumanizing to their core. No black character in this book feels real, feels like a person we may empathize with and care for. It is in the descriptions of Kurtz’s black mistress, of the slave-boy whose only contribution to the narrative is the line “Mistah Kutz, he dead” - Conrad does not share our empathies. Our horror at their fate and in their suffering is our own, not the narrators.
The thing about this book is that it’s not a criticism of colonialism, and while reading it as such feels viable on the surface, looking deeper into the narrative makes this book feel odder and odder. This book is a look at the depth of human evil and how that can be brought out when society breaks down. Notice the end of that sentence? Because the reason Africa is the subject of this book is because this narrative fundamentally believes that Africa is a primitive, uncivilized, immoral landscape. Which I find to be an inaccurate and frankly immoral view of Africa. The historical record of our time shows that pre-Colonial (and pre-slave trade) African civilization was filled with the same life as European civilizations, and populated by strong kingdoms. Conrad emphatically believes otherwise. And while I am willing to understand on some level that this was an ingrained belief of European colonists, this book pushes this message to a very high degree - it’s irrevocably tied to the message of the book - that I found impossible to ignore.
Yes, the idea is also pushed that the people of Europe are really no different from the people of the Congo. I am fully aware that Joseph Conrad is getting at the idea that none of us are so evolved and none of us are so civilized ourselves and white society cannot put itself totally above others. Conrad is explicitly attempting to put black people and white people on an equal level of brutality. But this narrative is still fundamentally flawed. The white characters in this book are evil colonists, but they are depicted as people. The black characters of this book are “savages.” They are rebels. At best, they are the helmsman, unnamed in his own narrative and dying ten pages in. At worst, they are literal cannibals. The narrative shows a fundamental dehumanization of each “savage” character, undermining any sort of anti-colonialist or pro-African message.
And I find that fundamentally disturbing. If I cannot feel any horror within the narrative for a genocide, a time in which culture was destroyed and the environment strangled and thousands slaughtered for the profit of an empire, how can I garner anything from this book? How can I, in good conscience, enjoy or recommend this book?
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And beyond that, I do not believe this is at all a surface reading. It’s been pushed in the minds of many that reading this book as racist is a surface-level interpretation, but I genuinely believe that the racism is what you get upon close reading.
Literary analysis of racist historical works is a polarizing and complex topic, and I recognize that many will feel antagonistic towards this viewpoint. I also fully admit that this book makes good use of an unreliable narrator and is one of the most gritty classics I have read as to its depiction of the human soul, and I have nothing against those who enjoyed it. But I cannot enjoy this for those and erase the flaws. I cannot appreciate the literary merit of a book that lacks a fundamental understanding of the humanity of black people. And I'm not sure I believe that I should. Replies: @Colin Wright, @Henry's Cat
There are blue plaque schemes outside of London too.
Great Britain is doing its best to compete with America in the racial pandering department. Trayvon Martin's mother wasn't awarded a noble title.Replies: @James N. Kennett, @James J O'Meara, @Lurker
Yet . . .
These days its all plaque, plaque, plaquety, plaque.
https://blackhistorycollection.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/dsc00578.jpg
Of course sir, but I think this is more a matter of wealth than skin color. Black people didn’t have the same educational opportunities than whites in the past and this fact of course makes a difference. In the last decades we have seen more and more prominent black people in several fields and this will continue. Education is the key. I suppose 100 years later it will be hard to know if a name on a plaque belongs to a white or a black.
Good grief ... https://www.google.com/search?q=Frances+Haugen&client=firefox-b-e&sxsrf=AOaemvIDuSyqbGjAyEO4mjXdCorF1rVwOA:1633556344268&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB5_rM37bzAhXso4sKHaUtB3MQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1280&bih=857&dpr=1
And more important, she's so completely SJW crazy that Zuck is, in comparison with her, a white supremacist.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Maybe not in Hollywood, but certainly in Iowa. Been to a Walmart or Target in the Hawkeye State?
Anyway, the networks and major sites are on her side, thus offering us only the most flattering shots. Wikipedia gives her birthdate as “(born 1983/84)”, which is vague for them.
The solution? It comes from Asia:
You must be new here. Welcome aboard.
? Surely we can just say it was discovered by a person of color. I thought that's how it worked.Replies: @Uncle Dan
After all, Joe Biden said “a black man invented the light bulb,” so there’s that.
Because nothing boosts white appreciation of black accomplishments like posting plaques of black nonentities next to a plaque for Shakespeare.
Question for all: whose side do we take in the battle between moo shu pork-eating Jew Mark Zuckerberg and Nordic Iowan Frances Haugen? Is it a case of a
poxmalware on both their houses?She's eye candy right out of a superhero comic, but don't let that sway you.Replies: @Wilkey, @Bardon Kaldian, @duncsbaby
The eye candy standards have taken a dive.
Am I the only one to notice?Replies: @JMcG
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ca9acce9846bdb971cc60636cc39297ffc69580f/124_125_2846_1708/master/2846.jpg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=89ad7af310bbaf9236b85bef9171e05b
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/SKW2QBV7AAI6XERKYQGJO5F4JA.jpg
And that's the problem here. In the past, white people who attainted fame in Britain did it the hard way. They kept doing things over the course of their career that, once added up, made them a public name. They became talked about, so they attained fame from being talked about. The talk created the fame. They impressed other people in some way or another so that the crowd started talking about these people spontaneously. This is the way someone like Charlotte Bronte, who didn't even have her name on her first novel when it came out, became famous. People took note, became interested, and just started talking about Bronte their own.
But blacks? They're trying to make blacks 'talked about' by force. Nobody cares about the little doings of nobodies. These blacks are all publicity department. No one talks about them because nobody cares enough about their so-called achievements to bother.Replies: @PseudoNhymm, @Hannah Katz, @Henry's Cat, @Billy Corr, @Rob
Mary Seacole was forgotten for years, usually a mere footnote in eye-witness participant accounts of the Crimean War.
Her posthumous “rediscovery” and acclaim in recent years in an amazing phenomenon in itself and certainly worth a book or two.
The bare truth is that Mary Seacole was a Jamaican woman of mixed race who had no high opinion of Jamaican blacks; a woman of boundless energy, she was primarily a businesswoman who was skilled in Caribbean folk medicine rather than the rapidly-developing scientific medicine of Victorian Britain.
It has been claimed that Florence Nightingale adopted an Olympian attitude towards Mary Seacole, allegedly remarking that Mary’s modest convalescent “hotel” in the Crimea permitted over-indulgence in alcoholic refreshment and inappropriate liaisons between Queen Victoria’s soldiery and the scantily-trained female staff in the employ of Mary Seacole.
For an entertaining glimpse of a certain episode in the Crimean War, I recommend the highly-entertaining novel “Flashman at the Charge” by George McDonald Fraser.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mary+Seacole&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiwiOXbxbfzAhUIgJQKHVV7AacQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=Mary+Seacole&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6CAgAEIAEELEDOgsIABCABBCxAxCDAToECAAQQzoICAAQsQMQgwE6BQgAELEDOgoIABCxAxCDARBDOgQIABADUPSBlAJYlrCUAmDaspQCaABwAHgEgAGIAogB7BeSAQYwLjEzLjSYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ7ABAMABAQ&sclient=img&ei=i4JeYfCWL4iA0gTV9oW4Cg&bih=657&biw=1366&hl=EN#imgrc=xREZYh8Fl3pVDM
Her posthumous "rediscovery" and acclaim in recent years in an amazing phenomenon in itself and certainly worth a book or two.
The bare truth is that Mary Seacole was a Jamaican woman of mixed race who had no high opinion of Jamaican blacks; a woman of boundless energy, she was primarily a businesswoman who was skilled in Caribbean folk medicine rather than the rapidly-developing scientific medicine of Victorian Britain.
It has been claimed that Florence Nightingale adopted an Olympian attitude towards Mary Seacole, allegedly remarking that Mary's modest convalescent "hotel" in the Crimea permitted over-indulgence in alcoholic refreshment and inappropriate liaisons between Queen Victoria's soldiery and the scantily-trained female staff in the employ of Mary Seacole.
For an entertaining glimpse of a certain episode in the Crimean War, I recommend the highly-entertaining novel "Flashman at the Charge" by George McDonald Fraser.Replies: @Billy Corr
The blue plaque, the controversial statue and the oil painting depicting Mary Seacole wearing medals to which she was – perhaps – not actually quite fully entitled are here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mary+Seacole&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiwiOXbxbfzAhUIgJQKHVV7AacQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=Mary+Seacole&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6CAgAEIAEELEDOgsIABCABBCxAxCDAToECAAQQzoICAAQsQMQgwE6BQgAELEDOgoIABCxAxCDARBDOgQIABADUPSBlAJYlrCUAmDaspQCaABwAHgEgAGIAogB7BeSAQYwLjEzLjSYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ7ABAMABAQ&sclient=img&ei=i4JeYfCWL4iA0gTV9oW4Cg&bih=657&biw=1366&hl=EN#imgrc=xREZYh8Fl3pVDM
As for the cited Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: He "was born in 1875 in Holborn, London, to Alice Hare Martin (1856–1953),[2] an English woman, and Dr Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Creole from Sierra Leone, of mixed European and African descent. They were not married, Alice Hare Martin herself being an illegitimate child.[3] Daniel Taylor returned to Africa by February 1875 and did not know that he had a son born in London."
Sounds about right: a black has a child with a white woman he doesn't marry, then pisses off.Replies: @duncsbaby
The same went for Phil Lynott’s parentage. He was born in England but raised in Dublin by his Irish grandparents. FWIW, Phil always thought of himself as Irish and didn’t play up his Black heritage at all. He was no rock’n’roll legend but he had one great album w/Jailbreak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Lynott
Sounds like something some idiot said in 1921.
L'Affaire Thorpe, concerning his nocturnal maneuvering with towels and Vaseline aimed at sodomizing a house guest, one Norman Scott, produced the finest, then and yet, headline to ever grace an English newspaper, and The Sun no less:I laughed like a drain and what? 50 years later it makes me smile.Replies: @Polistra, @Rob McX
No one would even get the joke now.
If you check the biographies of a lot of these blacks they want to celebrate, you’ll find a similar story – white mother, black father who disappeared early, child brought up by white side of family.
L'Affaire Thorpe, concerning his nocturnal maneuvering with towels and Vaseline aimed at sodomizing a house guest, one Norman Scott, produced the finest, then and yet, headline to ever grace an English newspaper, and The Sun no less:I laughed like a drain and what? 50 years later it makes me smile.Replies: @Polistra, @Rob McX
Thanks, that ranks up there with “Headless Man Found in Topless Bar” and “Freddy Starr Ate My Hamster”.
I once worked (I was just sort of an assistant, really) as part of the New York Hospital medical examiner's investigative team, and one time we were looking into the death of Andy Warhol, to see if there was any malfeasance involved. So I had to go rather deeply into the coroner's assessment of Andy Warhol, it was kind of weird to find myself discussing the state of his internal organs with a sort of clinical distance, but this is what I was listening to on my headphones, the entire time I was dissecting Andy Warhol.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OylJq6L-Wd0
I think he would have thought it was kind of funny. I have another personal Andy story, but it sort of takes too long to set up.Replies: @Gary in Gramercy
Not this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPgGjUSEWss
god rest those guys, they were all such maniacs, but i hope God luvs 'em despite their faults.
https://www.bbntimes.com/images/articles/society/Frances_Haugen_.jpegReplies: @Jim Christian, @Reg Cæsar
I had that hearing on for awhile, c-span or some such. She was doing the weird trick of “voice fry”, the grind that these insufferable cunts put in the tone of their lower octave than normal voices to make themselves sound serious. That started about 5 or ten years back at the same time as an equally ridiculous feminist prop came out, the huge-framed ‘problem solving glasses’, most of them non prescription, just a prop, propped on either low on their beaks, or on top of their heads. Voice fry and problem solving eyeglasses make of the women using either ridiculous, unserious, unimportant cunts rather than serious people to be considered or consulted. I see a lots of faggy men on the news wearing the Smart Girl glasses now, another idiocy.
Am I the only one to notice?
I’m not sure Smiley Culture is worthy of a plaque for one good novelty record. “Cockney Translation” was amusing at the time, though. If he got a plaque, the late Adge Cutler should have several.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adge_Cutler
While Adge, the uncrowned king of “Scrumpy and Western”, may not have a plaque, his statue reveals him to have been black.
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/statue-wurzels-frontman-adge-cutler-4271416
Rob McX – don’t forget the headline “Body Found In Cemetery”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Wxi15x7ssReplies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
No, but this somehow seems more appropriate, je n’en sais quoi……..
god rest those guys, they were all such maniacs, but i hope God luvs ’em despite their faults.
One of the best rock shows I ever saw was Thin Lizzy opening for Queen on the A Day at the Races tour in 1977.
https://www.bbntimes.com/images/articles/society/Frances_Haugen_.jpegReplies: @Jim Christian, @Reg Cæsar
Politics is Hollywood for ugly people. She’s appearing before the US Senate. It’s all relative:
Am I the only one to notice?Replies: @JMcG
I haven’t watched my local news in donkey’s years, but I saw a few minutes of it at work the other day. Every single male on camera was gay. It was quite jarring.
The irony is that for the time, Conrad wasn't particularly racist. I'm thinking of various stray remarks and characterizations in Lord Jim and Typhoon. He's perfectly capable of appreciating the humanity of his various non-white characters, and of gently ridiculing assumptions of racial superiority. See, for example, the scene in Typhoon where the young mate is showing the leader of the Chinese passengers around the Nan Shan. He also doesn't seem to have any particular objection to misogyny -- albeit he tends to avoid sex in general. However, Almayer's Folly, his first novel, basically revolved around a marriage between a Malay and a White, and the child of that union, and at least three inter-racial couples go by in Lord Jim -- two of them viewed approvingly.
I think Conrad judged people for what they were. But if they were fantastically ignorant savages, he didn't pretend otherwise.Replies: @Colin Wright
…for ‘misogyny’ read ‘miscegenation.’
White British already a shrinking minority of 44% in London a decade ago (only 80% of England); adding all White immigrants, London still only 59% White in 2011 Census. After 2010s mass-migrations, doubtful Whites a majority at all in Sadiq’s Khanate. 1967 London was “A Whiter Shade of Pale”—can that Londinium ever return? 2021 London not any shade of white nor pale—now everyone just a darker shade of turd: diversity.
Britain was of course deliberately transformed to make minority tribes feel comfortable and not stand out against a homogeneous White European British population:
(Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
____________________________
But not just London—what are some 2021 Census predictions..?
Birmingham 2001: 65% White
2011: 53% White… 2021?
.
Blackburn 2001: 78% White
2011: 68% White… 2021?
.
Bradford 2001: 76% White
2011: 63% White… 2021?
.
Coventry 2001: 78% White
2011: 65% White… 2021?
.
Crawley 2001: 84% White
2011: 75% White… 2021?
.
Leicester 2001: 60% White
2011: 45% White… 2021?
.
London 2001: 60% White
2011: 44% White… 2021?
.
Luton 2001: 64% White
2011: 44% White… 2021?
.
Manchester 2001: 74% White
2011: 59% White… 2021?
.
Nottingham 2001: 81% White
2011: 65% White… 2021?
.
Reading 2001: 87% White
2011: 65% White… 2021?
.
Slough 2001: 58% White
2011: 34% White… 2021?
.
Watford 2001: 75% White
2011: 61% White… 2021?
.
Wolverhampton 2001: 75% White
2011: 64% White… 2021?
Does Pocahontas have a plaque?
And that's the problem here. In the past, white people who attainted fame in Britain did it the hard way. They kept doing things over the course of their career that, once added up, made them a public name. They became talked about, so they attained fame from being talked about. The talk created the fame. They impressed other people in some way or another so that the crowd started talking about these people spontaneously. This is the way someone like Charlotte Bronte, who didn't even have her name on her first novel when it came out, became famous. People took note, became interested, and just started talking about Bronte their own.
But blacks? They're trying to make blacks 'talked about' by force. Nobody cares about the little doings of nobodies. These blacks are all publicity department. No one talks about them because nobody cares enough about their so-called achievements to bother.Replies: @PseudoNhymm, @Hannah Katz, @Henry's Cat, @Billy Corr, @Rob
Probably rap and AA hurt blacks in the fame department these days.
Jimi Hendrix was, according to pretty much every guitar player, a god of guitar. He was not “pretty good, for a black guy” as so many blacks are in their professions. The number of blacks who are not just good at their job, but really good at their job is minuscule, caused by affirmative action.
Come to think of it, credentialism and IQ sorting probably drastically reduce the number of people who are fantastically good at their job. Florence Nightingale, in the course of showing how important good treatment is, created several new types of charts, of ways to visually display data. One is called a Nightingale chart. Do you think she’d be a nurse today, treating patients in a field hospital if she’d been sorted by IQ? No, she’d be a neurologist or maybe a hospital administrator. She would not admit that her hospital could do things better. The American business culture has decayed to the point where admitting you were wrong is a character flaw. How can they improve anything with that attitude?
Science has been seriously hurt by the influx of people who are barely smart enough to be “scientists” and do not have the temperament to actually do science. Pretty much every social scientist is an activist. If they were not, they’d never have made it through graduate school. They are all “proving” their pet cause or theory is true. That’s not how you do science. Even in more life or death fields, the majority of findings can not be reproduced by pharmaceutical companies that try to repeat the experiment. People do a hundred trials of 20 experiments, and then they pick the one that “shows” the effect and publish, without saying that they got the 10% effect in one out of a hundred trials. Asian graduate students, for whom truth is what a superior believes, are a huge problem. They have ruined decades and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of research funding. Why can’t we produce new drugs as quickly and cheaply as they did thirty years ago? Because the “basic science” upon which innovation depends, is false four out of five times. Tons of money and time is wasted because an Asian added fas ligand to experimental culture to kill the cells. After all, that’s what made the experiment “work.”
I blame Asians, but they are not the entire problem by far. They are definitely a part that you all will accept. Lots of whites cheat, too. If only to keep up with the Asians. Publish or perish, and “chemical x does not kill cancer” is not going to be published in a good journal. So test chemical X on hundred different cultured cancers, some of which have been cultured, and therefore subject to selection, for decades. How much HeLa cells have in common with cells in cancer, much less normal human cells is a question no one seems to want to be answered.
Then there is the money available in biomed. A few decades ago, people who really wanted to help the world, help patients, went into biomed research. No people who want to get rich go in, too. That means people who have a vested interest in something can kill research that would lead to their company being worthless.
Take DRACO, using a double-stranded RNA-binding protein fused to caspase (caspase activators? I forget) fragments. The dsRNA-binding domains of multiple proteins stick to big pieces of dsRNA, 2 caspase domains activate each other (transactivate) and go and kill the cell. There’re also domains to isolate the protein from culture and get the protein into the cell.
DRACO is not perfect. The cell already has dsRNA binding proteins that activate the antiviral response. Evolution is not an optimization algorithm, or it’s a crappy one. Take your pick. Random mutation just hasn’t stuck these 2 types of domains together in a way that, um, stuck. Thing is, sticking two domains together in the same polypeptide is the sort of thing that works. Evolution does it blindly. Bio folks do it intentionally. It does not always work, but it is an established technique.
Not all viruses make dsRNA. Some are single or double-stranded DNA, the only RNA they make is either free or in a transcription bubble with DNA. So sorry, all you dudes with herpes. HIV doesn’t make dsRNA. Of those that do, viruses do try to hide it. Some dsRNA viruses have 2nd strand synthesis in a pre-assembled capsid. But human cells do not make long stretches of dsRNA. It could be non-toxic in well-above therapeutic doses.
A subtler problem with DRACO might be that apoptosis is anti-inflammatory, so it might interfere with the immune response. If so, dsRNA-binders can be fused with proteins that kill in a pro-inflammatory way.
As I understand it, the dude who created DRACO has said some inaccurate things about his research before. He published in PLoS, not Science or Nature, which is where one might expect a near-universal antiviral treatment, with in vitro evidence against several viruses and in vivo in mice against one. That he says it’d work against HIV is disturbing, but he might just not know what being a retrovirus entails.
The response from pharma and the biomedical community? Crickets. But the original researcher is not a reliable guy? The method of creating it is something almost any biology lab can do in a few days. Call it two weeks to verify. Dude had to try to raise money on GoFundMe! He failed.
If biomed funding agencies were working as intended, this is something worth testing until destruction. Try stitching some different domains together. See how far along an infection has to be before a particular dose of DRACO fails.
It would probably have to be injected, but I’d bet a lung or sinus infection could be treated with something that worked like FluMist. It could cause an immune reaction, but there would only be a few stretches of amino acids (neoepitopes) that are not human-normal. We make a lot of protein drugs.
There is a company in New Zealand started by two software guys that are trying to do a DRACO treatment for something or other. They are poorly capitalized. They do not own DRACO. If it’s a matter of IP, like he published before he patented, there must be a way to set up a charity to develop a new class of drug.
My guess is no one is much interested in DRACO because it would render products in their pipeline, if not obsolete, then not as valuable without than with a universal antiviral treatment. Wouldn’t they have to actively collude to suppress it? Not if they are smart and are playing an iterated game of prisoner’s dilemma. Besides, it is in every pharma company’s interest that that particular company does not develop it. I guess someone may be working on it hush-hush, but that is not how things usually work.
Maybe the guy who created it is a nut, and is demanding way too much upfront? Maybe there are flaws with it that I’m not seeing? Drugs not really worth developing, like interferons for cancer, were very popular. Why not DRACO. We do not have a broad antiviral. Having one might have saved lives during COVID, especially during the period where there were no treatments besides ventilators.
COVID is not the last viral pandemic we will face.
Does anyone in biomed want to weigh in on the obvious flaws in DRACO that I can’t see?
It took me too long to write this comment. Surely the thread is dead. Steve will see, though!
That, my man, is an epic comment. From Jimi Hendrix to anti-virals. Thanks for taking the time. I completely agree about corruption in the sciences as well, though I’m not equipped to understand your example. Everything really is broken. Good luck to you!