House Democrats Flock to the Exits Leading into Election Year - "With the midterms less than a year away, 23 House Democrats have already announced they will not be running for reelection to retire from the public eye for wanting to be with family, focus on health, or say it is time to move on, while some Democrats are also looking to run for a different office, such as the U.S. Senate."
Meme - "They call me 007
0 Humility
O EQ
7 mins and under for running 2.4km, you can run or not, if not just keep quiet and stop being a keyboard warrior, you all are shametul for critising me. If you want to challenge my 2.4 timing, i'm up for a challenge. Ashley why do you 'hide behind a lawsuit."
On Soh Rui Yong
Meme - "Soh Rui Yong promises social distancing at Standard Chartered Marathon by running faster than everyone else
"When you're the national 2.4km record holder, every race is socially distant by default""
What's behind the online spat between Commandos and runner Soh Rui Yong? - "the runner posted the times of his lap splits for his record-setting run, but added, “Somehow, some people still think their ‘army/commando bmt mate who smokes” ran faster,’” together with a clown-face emoji."... Mr Soh then went on to offer the following challenge: “Any Singaporean who runs sub-7:00 for 2.4km at next month’s Pocari Sweat Singapore 2.4km Run (Ground Race, 9-10 Oct) will receive $700 and 700 bottles of Pocari Sweat, both paid for by me.” Some Commandos responded saying they had nothing to prove, to which the runner wrote, “Looks like a lot of the most noisy Commandos won’t be taking up the challenge already. Classic.”"
Someone claimed this wasn't bad sportsmanship, because sportsmanship means you can't brag during a game - but you can before or after it. Ironically, he also views lying inside and outside Parliament as equivalent. And Joseph Schooling mocking Soh Rui Yong's arrogance by issuing a suspiciously similar challenge is somehow evidence that Schooling is cocky too
A tale of two runners—Soh Rui Yong will file defamation countersuit against Ashley Liew - "the marathoner was excluded from the line-up of athletes representing Singapore in this year’s SEA Games in the Philippines because he “displayed conduct that falls short of the standards of attitude and behaviour that the SNOC expects of and holds its athletes to,” according to the Singapore National Olympic Council. This resulted in him filing a writ of defamation against both SA and Mr Malik Aljunied."
Facebook - "|28 Days of Humility| In light of the Pocari Sweat Singapore 2.4km Challenge I issued, a number of neitizens have accused me of being an arrogant person. I hear you. Upon reflection, I believe that a lot of this perception comes from the intensity I bring to this sport, and the standards I expect of myself and those around me. I apologise for giving off that impression. And I would like to give the people what they want. I held a trial for myself (where I was judge, jury and executioner), and have found myself guilty of coming across as an arrogant person on social media. I have sentenced myself to 4 weeks of social media community service. For the month of October, I shall share one quote on humility a day. Though this community service, I will share more on humility and in doing so, become a more well rounded athlete and person. Today is Day 1: "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less." - C. S. Lewis"
Soh Rui Yong apologises to SNOC, says he 'could have been more respectful, sensitive' in raising issues - "Top national marathoner Soh Rui Yong on Tuesday (Feb 22) penned an apology to the Singapore National Olympic Council (SNOC) in a bid to "resolve our differences and move forward in the best interests of Singapore sports". The 30-year-old was denied a place at the May 12-23 Hanoi SEA Games by an SNOC selection committee last Wednesday, with a spokesman saying it had rejected his nomination as his conduct "fell short of the standards of attitude and behaviour the SNOC expects of and holds its athletes to". This was also the reason the SNOC had stated in 2019, when it excluded Soh from the list of athletes that went to the SEA Games in the Philippines... the SNOC and Soh had clashed on a number of occasions over issues such as the athlete's breach of regulations regarding the promotion of personal sponsors at the 2017 SEA Games and later, his initial objection to its mandatory requirement to donate 20 per cent of his $10,000 cash payout as reward for his win back to SA for training and development."
Wonder what cope his supporters will engage in now
Meme - "hey guys! i'm new here"
"Nice Photoshop FBI, but the noise levels on the forehead are not consistent with the noise levels on the skin of the arm (both of which are of the same smoothness). A warning to everyone else FBI agents on social media are real and they do try to entrap you to meet thelr quota."
"Account suspended"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, How and why we educate - "‘The Education Secretary says we are training people for jobs that don't exist, and a significant proportion of young people fail to gain much advantage from going to university at all. In fact, he said, those who did a paid two year technical apprenticeship ended up on average earning more than those who did a three year bachelor degree that can cost upwards of 30,000 pounds. Other say sending half our youngsters to university is a great social and moral achievement, as well as an educational landmark. And that education is about more than grades, acquiring technical skills and being useful to employers. In response, the critics say the country is losing out. We have half as many technically well qualified people as Germany, and so are our youngsters. We're pretty much the only developed country in the world where young people's literacy and numeracy is no better than the over 55s’...
‘The standard method of education at the University still is the lecture. Now a lecture started because books cost more than a year's income before Gutenberg. It was cheaper to actually hire somebody to read the one very expensive book to a roomful of people. These days, it's vastly cheaper to buy everybody a copy of the book and they go off and read it themselves. Yet we are still organized with lectures in a university, the technology of 1000 years ago’...
‘The fact that we have 106 universities in the United Kingdom at the moment, might mean we have too many. 13 going bust might not be enough going bankrupt. So that is making exactly that difference that you're saying, between the aim of higher education, that everybody gets to flourish, that they get to develop their intellects as far as they possibly can, and the specific institutions that we currently use to try and achieve that target, the current university system’
‘So you're not actually against higher education, you're just talking about the systems and the spaces of higher education can be reassessed’
‘Look. Being against higher education is like being against mom and apple pie. Of course, I'm not against it.’...
‘Who decides? First of all, who decides, oh these courses aren't worth studying anymore. They're useless to the economy, they should be done away with? Who decides then the individual aspiration of people who want to go to university to do those very courses? Because that's what they've dreamt of all their life. But somebody tells them then, oh, no, these aren't worthy courses because they don't contribute to the economy’
‘The definition of who should do what course is who wishes to do what course. That's the same as any other part of life. The only important question for society is whether society has to actually pay the cost of supporting that set of institutions that allows the people to do that. I argue, no, society shouldn't be carrying that cost. Just at exactly the same moment that I argue that if somebody wants to go and study, I don't know, colour recognition in tiddlywinks to PhD standards, then why shouldn't they? Glorious. Have fun. It's your life. Spend it how you wish.’...
‘I went through a comprehensive system at a time when there weren’t league tables. It was very hard really to to tell how similarly appointed schools in relatively similar areasm, if one was being very well run and getting good results. Another one wasn't, it was very hard to compare. So it's quite good to have them, isn't it for the sake of transparency?’...
‘SATs as a measure of children's progress is pointless, that they are just an accountability for schools and teachers. We do know from our league tables that actually it's more likely to reflect an income level and the house price of the catchment around the school than it is the children’... ‘I was talking to you about comparisons. This is often a charge that’s raised but I think it's, one can easily ask another question, which is, you certainly can compare schools with a similar socioeconomic intake, right. So that's a bias that you can take out of the system. If we don't have that information in some form that parents can understand, that teachers know that others are being able to do something better, and they might be curious as to how they raise their own performance. Wouldn’t you argue that transparency was better than the days when the only people that had that information with teachers if they chose to share it?’
It is blasphemy to consider that rich (smart) parents might have smart children
Episode 41: Lord Selkirk’s Tea Party - "For British Commissioner Lord Selkirk, Lee’s fatal flaw was his character. He was insecure, mentally fragile, obsessed with Lim Chin Siong to a dangerous degree. Selkirk, too, had attempted to convince Lee to moderate his tone and to adopt a more open consultative style, only to be brushed off. On 15 July 1961, David Marshall triumphed at the Anson by-election. In his victory speech at Anson, Marshall called on Lee Kuan Yew to resign, saying, “Resign, and may you in your retirement learn humility and humanity so that in the years to come your undoubted ability may unselfishly and honestly serve our people.”... Selkirk called this plan ‘unsavoury’ and ‘objectionable’, and stating the British ‘could not be party to a further lie’. He reported to his boss in London, Secretary of State for the Colonies Iain Macleod, that ‘Lee is not himself prepared ultimately to face the music’, but was ‘asking for the British and Federation to take the public odium.’ Selkirk was particularly upset because one of the paramount principles of the Internal Security Council was confidentiality... Similarly, the Tunku was highly offended by Lee’s deceit, and even more so by Lee’s eagerness for the Federation to take responsibility for Lee’s action. He derided Lee as ‘spineless’ and declared that if Lee would not stick to the rules, then Federation would withdraw from ISC. The Tunku declared that ‘I can never trust that man again’... When Lee Siew Choh reminded Lee of his pledge to free all political detainees, Toh Chin Chye responded by tabling the August 1959 ISC paper. Toh implied that it was the British and the Federation who had blocked further releases of detainees, and as such releasing the detainees would jeopardise merger. He did not mention that it was Lee who had asked the Council to veto his own paper. Lord Selkirk was furious, livid, but – with London’s concurrence – stayed silent. Lee’s actions also caused great anger among British officials in Malaya, with High Commissioner Geofrey Tory referring to the PAP leaders as ‘highly-educated but completely unscrupulous thugs.’ It also sent the normally genial Tunku into a massive fury. The Tunku angrily told the British that ‘Lee was making unscrupulous use of us in order to save his political skin.’ This had strengthened his conviction that Lee was not to be trusted. ‘Get rid of that fellow…and then we can get on with it,’ he declared."
Episode 42: Hobson’s Choice - "Singapore would be transferred from one colonial master to another, from London to KL, and locked into a form of quasi-colonialism, with fewer rights in Malaysia than we enjoyed under self-government. Under the terms, citizens of Singapore could only vote in Singapore. This would “quarantine” Singapore from Federation politics, effectively keeping the two territories separate. Singapore would also be under-represented in the Federal Parliament, having 15 instead of the 24 or 25 seats that it should have, based on population size. This meant that a federal government in which Singapore was only partially represented would control internal security. If the manifestation of colonialism in Singapore was a lack of democratic control of internal security, then the proposed terms would lock Singapore into a perpetual state of colonialism... Lee Kuan Yew said, don’t worry. He promised what he called a ‘Hobson’s choice’: he would ensure that all alternatives to the PAP option were inferior, leaving the public with no real choice. The British called this ‘a dishonest manoeuvre’ and the Tunku ‘a dirty game’, but they wanted merger, so they both stayed silent... as any Singaporean will tell you, when the PAP has to go to the public for a vote, it always accompanies this with a sudden surge in performance. 1961 was no different. Checked by a vigorous opposition in the Assembly, the PAP generally governed capably, responsibly, and successfully... The PAP, by contrast, not only hammered home a single message, that option A was the best possible outcome for merger, but it also strained its campaign to the legal limit. It freely used public money and government facilities to promote Alternative A. It deluged the state with radio broadcasts, advertising jingles, posters, and pamphlets, including 200,000 free copies of Lee’s The Battle for Merger. It mobilised the ostensibly non-political People’s Association and Works Brigade to canvass voters and distribute campaign material. On the ballot paper, the Singapore flag was placed next to Alternative A and foreign flags next to Alternatives B and C. On information posters, all hands were seen putting a cross next to Alternative A. On polling day itself, the Singapore flag was hoisted outside the centres. Election officers used Alternative A as an example when instructing voters how to mark their ballots. Rumours flew that, through the use of serial numbers on the ballots, voters who cast blank votes would be identified and lose their citizenships. Goh Keng Swee sent out 40 trucks fitted with loudspeakers to warn people that blank votes would be considered Alternative B, which would cause Singaporeans to lose their citizenship... to save himself, Lee made critical compromises. He gave away an important chunk of Singapore’s sovereignty in order to ensure that he could stay in power. It was a betrayal of the people of Singapore, but cleverly presented as their salvation. He agreed to a highly flawed form of Malaysia where Singapore would be quarantined, would be unequal, would be in a quasi-colonial status. He agreed to a form of Malaysia in which it was assumed that Singapore and Singaporeans could not be trusted and had to be held separate from the rest of Malaysia. All to keep himself in power in Singapore."
Episode 47: The 1964 Political Riots - "eyewitness accounts suggest that much of the initial violence was, if not premeditated, at least deliberate. Othman Wok, for example, noted a group of Malay youths on Victoria Street who shouted “Hidup Cina, mati Melayu” as the PAP contingent marched past them, which is a very strange thing for a group of Malay youths to shout... the initial violence was started by a group of Malays attacking the Chinese policeman, then proceeding onwards to further violence down Kallang Road. Despite all the eyewitness accounts, no one was able to identify any of the initial attackers, suggesting that they were not locals. Third, what all sides agreed was that the riots were not caused by racial antagonism, but by the political environment and the inflammatory racial rhetoric. UMNO leaders blamed Lee Kuan Yew; PAP leaders and the British blamed UMNO leaders, particularly Syed Ja’afar Albar... Was it deliberately instigated to discredit the PAP? Or was it just a group of youths who had been antagonised by the inflammatory rhetoric of the past few months? Under pressure from Singapore, an official commission of inquiry was convened in KL in March 1965, but it was held in secret and its findings remain classified... In Singapore’s official history, the riots have been depicted as racially, not politically motivated, because in the immediate aftermath of separation, the government needed to create a narrative which supported its actions throughout Malaysia. It needed to create this idea that the PAP was right to call for a Malaysian Malaysia. It needed to draw distance between us and Malaysia. It needed to rally people under the idea that we are alone, that the world is dangerous, that we need the PAP and we need its repression to keep us safe. Most of all it needed people to forget who was really to blame for the riots: our political leaders, who were supposed to keep us safe but irresponsibly risked our lives for their own political gain. Indeed, if the risk from racial antagonism was so great, why was it not till 1997 that the government introduced Racial Harmony Day on 21 July. If racial tensions were such a big issue, why did it take the PAP 33 years to start Racial Harmony Day? Because 1996 was the beginning of National Education, and the PAP wanted to support its core theme of its authoritarianism being necessitated by racial fragility. And the fact that the PAP is manipulating the events of 1964 to further its political agenda suggests that the subsequent generation of political leaders has not been taught the lesson of 1964. Without this manipulated narrative about the 1964 riots, we realise that Singapore has never had a riot caused by racial antagonism, by racial hatred [the Maria Hertogh riots were anti-colonial]. Never. Do we have race problems? Yes! But this myth prevents us from dealing with it properly. Until you understand the problem, until you are free to discuss the problem, you cannot deal with it properly."
Episode 48: The Chinese Ultra - "On 14 August, the Tunku returned to Malaysia, where he addressed a crowd on the riots, and broke down. A young Musa Hitam, who was in attendance, described how, ‘with total sincerity and in the Malay words a father would use to admonish quarrelling children, the Tunku struck chords of deep emotion here.’ Between sobs, the Tunku said, ‘I have always reminded leaders to be careful when they speak and to be cautious in wording their speech so that disturbances would not occur among the people of the country.’ It was a masterful display of political theatre, which the Tunku repeated a few days later in Singapore. In attendance was Lee Kuan Yew, who observed first hand the power of a leader weeping in front of his people. Lee was very impressed...
Tun Razak reportedly commented, “Lee Kuan Yew wanted to see bloodshed between the two friendly communities for his own political ends”...
the turning point, I think, is 4 May. On that day, he made a controversial speech to the PAP party cadres. In a pseudo-academic vein, Lee examined the pattern of Malay migration and concluded that none of the three races in Malaysia could claim to be more native than any other because all their ancestors came to Malaysia not more than 1,000 years ago. He argued, therefore, that Malaysian rights had to be based on shared citizenship, not birthright or indigeneity. But this is a clear and deliberate attack on the most sacred belief underpinning Malay identity, that they were the indigenous people of Malaya, that Malaya was their homeland. On these beliefs rested their claim to special privileges, Bahasa as the national language. Whether or not Lee was right is irrelevant, because to bring this up at a time of such great racial tension was a petrol bomb on a raging inferno. It’s an act of utter political stupidity, utter folly, utter irresponsibility. And even if we ignore all that, it was extremely poor political tactics. Indeed, because it is an attack on the constitution, it is arguably seditious. People had been detained under the Internal Security Act for less than what Lee was saying. And the only reason he wasn’t, I believe, is because doing so would have destroyed Malaysia’s international reputation, and especially Malaysia’s relationship with Britain and its Commonwealth allies, undermining Malaysian defence against Konfrontasi.
For the third time in his career, Lee was saved by the British...
Lee dropped yet another bombshell when he suggested that Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak would secede and seek to convince Penang, Malacca, and maybe even Johor to come with them. He did not use the word “partition” but that was what he implied. The British High Commissioner, Lord Head, privately called him “rash”. And rash it was. In Parliament they next day, the entire Alliance heaped scorn and anger on Lee. Shouts of “traitor!”, “sit down!”, “get out!”, and “shame!” rang out in the house when Lee tried to speak. Minister after Minister denounced him, including, for the first time, Dr Ismail. And the Tunku? With great difficulty, he forced himself to sit and say nothing... Lee has been so politically flexible over the years. He’s been on both sides of nearly every issue. He’s been for and against democracy; for and against eugenics; for and against socialism...
During the summer of 1965, Lee was frustrated, exhausted, and mentally at his wit’s end. His colleagues later revealed that in this period Lee was dangerously dependent on drugs, needing tranquilisers, sedatives, and pep pills to help him sleep, wake him up, and get him through the day... he found it increasingly difficult to exercise self-control in front of a microphone and because of this made increasingly outrageous and inflammatory speeches, which Toh Chin Chye later admitted were anti-Malay"
Episode 49: “Separation” - "Lee, a Peranakan Chinese, convinced the UMNO leaders that Chinese cannot be trusted, that they have to be controlled, that they will seek to undermine the peace and stability of Malaya. Then, once merger happened, he proved that Chinese cannot be trusted, by taking the PAP north in defiance of the agreement. And over the next two years, he and the Malay extremists engage in a battle of mutual destruction, which ends with Lee and Goh taking Singapore out of Malaysia and abandoning their allies. So Lee took what had been a stable multi-ethnic arrangement in the Federation, which was not perfect, but it was stable and worked on the basis of mutual trust between the races, and wrecked it with his actions, and more importantly wrecked the trust that existed before. Lee Kuan Yew enabled the rise of the Malay extremists. Lee’s rhetoric, and his actions, legitimised their existence. His reckless brinkmanship gave them the enemy they needed to rally their supporters to their divisive ideology. Without Lee, the Tunku and Razak and Ismail would have been able to control them. But Lee Kuan Yew was the enemy who legitimised the hard right extremist wing of Malaysian politics. That is the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew in Malaysia. And once he had wrecked it, he walked out and left behind Malaysians to deal with the consequences. Without Lee Kuan Yew, we would not have the same racial polarisation of Malaysia, we probably would not have the race riots of the 1960s, and we certainly would not have had 13 May 1969....
We still have the oppressive colonial laws today. We retain on our books oppressive colonial laws like the Internal Security Act despite the fact that they were meant to be temporary. Despite the fact that communism was defeated a long time ago, they are still retained, and have become part of the fabric of the Singaporean experience. Because of the victory of the right-wing, pro-colonial nationalist forces, today we still retain what is fundamentally a colonial system of governance. And the maintenance of the colonial system requires the same laws and oppression that the late colonial state introduced into Singapore. This includes, for example, the continued use of colonial laws designed for control and oppression, the fixing of elections, the policing of language and culture, the attempts to define illiberalism as normative to the Singapore identity. Indeed, since separation, the PAP has continued and exceeded the practices of the post-war British colonial state. They have sought to normalise colonialism in Singapore through a selective reading of history, via a national narrative that celebrates the evils of colonial rule as a positive force in Singapore, that emphasises the role of the PAP in Singapore’s development, and asserts the superiority of the PAP leadership. Colonial policies of control that were once condemned by the PAP in opposition have been implemented or reintroduced, including the suppression of Chinese-language education, the imposition of English as a unitary language, and the use of conservative and essentialist interpretations of race to control and divide us. But the PAP state has gone even further than the colonial state ever dared in taking away our civil rights and liberties. The 1966 Vandalism Act, for example, discarded the principle that a punishment should be appropriate to the crime in order to use the humiliation of caning to enhance control and oppression; the 1974 Newspaper and Printing Presses Act exceeded colonial policing of the media by curtailing freedom of expression, imposing a new two-tier structure of ownership and, later, gazetting the foreign press; the 1986 Legal Profession (Amendment) Act removed the independent ability of the Law Society to comment on legislation; the 1991 Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act removed freedom of organisation, expression, and movement."
Trying to force racial equality onto the racist cannot end well
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Does comfort food really comfort us? - "‘In one experiment, she asked people to think about a fight they'd had with someone. Those who then ate their comfort food, potato chips, in this case, felt more satisfied by it than those who didn't. But if we're not always aware of those connections to childhood memories, why do we feel better?’
‘The reason that these foods have an emotional impact for us is because when we ate them at that time and we had these positive experiences, we encoded all of that information together.’...
'Guilt could be more common in women than men. A 2005 Cornell University survey of a little under 300 people found that men tended to eat comfort food as a reward, whereas women saw it as a guilty indulgence'...
‘So some of us may have been reaching for more comfort food during the pandemic. I put the emphasis on some because other researchers repeated Jiro’s [sp?] work in the Netherlands and didn't find an association between comfort food and reduced feelings of loneliness. In fact, the researchers noted that the Dutch didn't have a comparable word for comfort food. And perhaps that suggests something about the role and meaning of comfort food in other cultures.’...
‘In Scandinavia, this, it's not really a term that's used in Scandinavia’...
‘My Italian friends, I asked about comfort, they were, they just simply look, you know, food is always comfort and always pleasure and it's a joyful thing’…
‘Regardless of where we're from, when we're sad or lonely, we seem to be drawn to foods that are rich in carbohydrates, fat or sugar’...
‘We found that these fatty infusions made them less sad when we induced sad moods in these people. And we know that fat is doing a lot of things. Even though we use the low dose, it is going to stimulate specialized cells in our stomach and our small intestine. And these cells are basically made to produce different types of hormones. And then we know that these hormones through various ways, through the blood, by connecting with different nerves that are connecting the brain and the gut, that these are going to regulate whether we're hungry or satiated. And this is happening primarily in small region of the brain called the hypothalamus.’
‘Presumably it's the feeling full hormone here that's at play and so these cells excrete it, it goes in our blood and then up to our brain. But why would that feeling full hormone make us feel happy? Is it something to do with our past and our evolution?’
‘Yes. In the past, of course, food and particularly fatty foods, sugary foods were sparse. And because of that, of course, evolution designed this in a way that, that people get strongly motivated to eat fatty foods. And these hormones that they release are part of that, that evolutionary mechanism and it also motivated to go all searching for them when they're not available.’...
‘Lucas tells me he's been looking into fibre found in whole grains like wheat and oats, and in pulses like chickpeas, lentils, and beans, as well as root vegetables.’
‘These fibers, we can actually not digest them ourselves. They end up in the large intestine and the large intestine is full of millions of bacteria. And these bacteria use the fibre as a source of energy. So they ferment fibre. And as a result of this fermentation, they produce a number of products or metabolites, as we call them, that can reduce inflammation. But also they produce a number of metabolites where we know that they can actually, in various ways interact with the brain.’
‘Lucas knows this because he published a study on it just last month. They fed men pills containing these metabolites and compared them to volunteers who took placebo pills. And guess what?’
‘And we actually saw that after a week of ingesting these capsules, people got less sensitive to stress’"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Food media's moment of reckoning? - "'Tammy's a freelance food and drinks writer based in New York City and known for being very vocal on Twitter. She's not afraid to write about the world as she sees it, riff with other food journalists. And as it turns out, make some pretty serious allegations. The first of those was against Adam Rapoport, editor in chief at Bon Appetit, a magazine which is read by millions and has a hit YouTube channel called The Test Kitchen. Two things happen in quick succession. A Puerto Rican food writer shares on social media that Rapoport was dismissive of her pitch about Afro-Puerto Rican food. Not long after, Tammy sees a photo from 2004, where he and his wife are dressed up as, well, Puerto Ricans… This is what's known as brownface, a variation on blackface, where someone imitates a person of color, be it through makeup, hair dye or clothing. It evokes racial or cultural stereotypes and is considered racist'…
'Adam Rapoport had released this statement on behalf of Bon Appetit in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, you know, as a lot of brands were doing, but Bon Appetit’s statement hung a little bit hollow. And I think like employees at that time were starting to push back on that'...
‘She thinks that where Rapoport went wrong was his narrow editorial vision for the magazine’
‘It started to come out that a lot of their coverage was ultimately a white idea of cool and it was a urban Brooklyn gentrifier kind of idea of what a restaurant should be. And it didn't center workers. It didn't talk about issues facing agricultural laborers. It didn't make any statements around sustainability or anything like that.’...
'There is some power shift and there is more discussion about how racism can manifest in media and how representation only as a measure of diversity is a shallow metric'...
‘Lately, I think things have changed a bit in that people have been willing in mainstream food media in the United States to talk about identity politics. But that has been the only way in which people have opened up the, the world of food writing. It's still not about agricultural policy. It's very little about restaurant labor. You'll still see a restaurant critic even during the pandemic, write about going to a restaurant, and they will make no mention of the server or make any moves to interview the server about how safe they feel doing this work during a crisis such as COVID-19 has been’
‘This type of coverage is something former sommelier Stephen Satterfield is sick of reading about too’
‘Best new chefs. Best new restaurants. You know, quick and easy this overnight that or week night this or that, you know what I'm saying. But just like a very narrow scope of coverage.’
‘Like Alicia, Stephen believes that we need to change the conversation from best new chefs and the quick and easy recipes to cover the bigger questions around food.’
‘It has a really, really powerful untapped potential, maybe more than any other prism or vantage in that it is our only shared global experience. You know, it's it really becomes a potent way to think about agriculture, to think about climate change, the ways that our die are connected to the soil, who is actually doing the harvesting. What are the migration patterns of the people doing the harvesting. I mean, once you start to go down the rabbit hole, every single news item that is on a one of every single country's newspaper is a food story.’
‘But nobody was talking about it much and he felt the editors of these glossy magazines didn't have an appetite for it. So Stephen decided to set up his own magazine Whetstone in 2017. It's the only black owned food print publication in the US.’…
‘Stephen spoke to indigenous Americans who are preserving their ancestors way of eating.’
‘One of the things that we did was to you know, remove colonial ingredients and try to really focus on regional flavors. So cutting out things like dairy and wheat flour and cane sugar and beef, pork and chicken on because those ingredients didn't exist’...
‘I think it's really imperative for all of us to grapple with the reality that, you know, black people in the US have only served as labor in the white imagination and then the white reality. Since we arrived in this country, the sole purpose of our arrival was labor. And we don't have any history in this country in any moment in which exploitative labor has not been central to the black experience and central to the interpersonal relationships between black and white people. And I think it's really important that we have the intellectual honesty and the courage to talk about these realities in such plain terms’
The slippery slope has slipped again. I remember only a few years ago, when it was considered alright to dress up as another culture - as long as you didn't change your skin colour. But of course virtue signalling always needs a new target, so the list of sins becomes ever longer at an accelerating pace
So much for the 'myth' of the slippery slope
More evidence that virtue signallers are actually guilty of the sins they accuse others of (e.g. male feminists)
Apparently urban Brooklyn gentrifiers don't deserve to have a food magazine; if no one wants to consume your cultural products which peddle the messages you want, just hijack existing products, turn them into propaganda factories and ruin them in the process. SJWs are like viruses
We were told that it was about 'representation'. But that was a trojan horse for the slippery slope
God forbid that food writing be about food! At least the second guy set up his own magazine (hopefully not after trying to force others write about what he wanted)
Is focusing on 'indigenous' food xenophobic?
When liberal gaslighting is "intellectual honesty". Presumably black people being used for labour today means they're working for white people. So to prevent this "exploitation", all black people need to quit their jobs and just live off the dole
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, One election, two farmers - "‘The American root is thought to have different properties to its Chinese cousin.’
‘Asian ginseng is young, it's hot, fiery, stimulating. American ginseng is actually the exact opposite. And American ginseng is ying, it's cooling. It's tonifying. Chinese people use American jinxing to help boost their immunity, as a tonic, and as a daily restorative’"
