White. And RESOLUTELY middle class. Working class kids can't afford Glasto.
Worse, Radio 4 and Nick Robinson's now daily Glasto orgasm.
Can't understand why ANYONE would want to go...
Yours, a survivor of real festivals. Tents? Maybe a few - but what's wrong with a bin liner ? Showers? What? Loos that work? What? ATMs? Mummy and Daddy? What?
Was heading that way - Bickershaw Festival, 1972 featuring the Grateful Dead who relieved the Somme like conditions with a 4 hour set. We left, elated and covered in mud....
Great piece Ed. Also I see "post-Protestant" and "the book has a very Calvinist idea of people either being saved or damned" here and I like where all this is headed. :D
What's really uncanny valley to me as an American seeing British people bemoan the "whiteness" of things is that it's all obviously a ridiculous American import. This sludge sort of makes sense in the USA (but is still, mind you, totally fucking stupid) since we're only 60% white or 70% non-Hispanic white or 65% white-identified bodies in white spaces, or whatever, but the UK is like 85% white, 90% white outside of London, and 95%+ white outside of the handful of biggest cities, yes? And that last datapoint notwithstanding, I've already seen Brits importing America's inane "the countryside is too white" thing for the English countryside. Specifically, Black Lives Matter UK (which really shouldn't even exist; bobbies are not slaughtering black people) has complained about it.
Unfamiliar with this Lenny Henry chap but I looked him up and he's going to be playing a... wait for it... black hobbit in some woke Tolkien raping on Amazon for purposes of "representation." OK, that's enough of this stuff for one day I think. Anyway great piece per the usual!
But then, Americans also vastly overestimate their black pop.
There was an interesting post recently on UK media using the term 'all-white jury', which is a very 1990s LA sort of talking point, in the context of rural Wales.
These are areas where even Anglo-Saxons have failed to penetrate. to talk of all-white is so bizarre and meaningless, the only conclusion you can draw is that a lot of journalists are not very bright.
It's just funny from my perspective here in the USA. I mean, you guys aren't Americans, you don't have to do this stuff!
There was an attempt to try this sort of thing in Japan but it failed to thrive simply because there just isn't a critical mass of white liberals in Japan. (And if white liberals aren't interested, it won't go anywhere. All these "radical" minority activists are basically bioweapons white liberals can use as shock troops against the Wrong Kind of White Person and to provide themselves with legitimacy. It's an intra-white conflict. All of it.)
Many journalists are midwits who traffic in racial essentialism, which is simultaneously very dangerous and prestige building. Nothing shields you from your own mediocrity like virtue signaling.
In the comments to NS Lyon's substack yesterday, a reader recommended a new substack by Ron Henderson, a PhD student at Cambridge who came out of a broken foster family in the US (what a journey!). One of his other substack articles was about how luxury beliefs are new forms of status symbols: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
Worth glancing over. There's certainly some truth to the argument that beliefs have replaced status goods as distinction marks highlighting a privileged group. And I will say I've long observed that while liberal white guilt seeks atonement, it also simultaneously highlights the privileges of the said group of people, so there is an element of amour propre hidden within liberal white guilt, aka a subtle, even unconscious, smugness in being privileged enough to need to atone for it. After all, wealthy liberal whites are quite selective in where they feel guilty for their privileges, for example, rarely around poor white people....
Your mention of 'birdwatchers' is very painful for me, as being one I can remember the time when the field was literally just a 'hobby' (nothing demeaning about that) with a related 'academic' area ('ornithology'). To me birdwatching was a purely aesthetic pleasure (naturally I was in favour of preserving aesthetically-pleasing things in the kind of pleasant envrironments in which they occurred, but this was only rarely a matter of 'the political' (understandable legislated conservation of birding areas etc.)).
I have recently effectively quit an online forum simply because now all discussions are loaded with ''GlastoMan' and all of the associated prejudices of the type. The same pattern of self-righteous anger and refusal even to just listen to dissenting arguments is now the norm. People who fly or drive 400 miles from S England to see one rare bird will lecture people about 'emissions' and 'global warming', entirely unaware of their hypocrisy (sacrifice seems to be exclusively for others).
remember there was a big ho-ha about birdwatching being too white last year, or the year before, and then someone in the bird watching community was accused of something sexually inappropriate. and it turned out to be yet another harmless community, like knitting, at the mercy of mental people.
The very word 'community' the way it's used today exemplifies the problem. I never considered that merely by watching birds I was involuntarily being enrolled in any 'community' with fixed parameters for 'behaviours'. To me all 'community' is chosen (and by definition 'exclusive'). There is no 'human community' because being human is not a matter of choice. There isn't a 'birdwatching' community simply because huge numbers of birdwatchers express political views I (and others) disagree with, and I am not inclined to worship in that (assumed) global church.
Good comments, Arnold Grutt. I also enjoy looking at birds, and I don't agree that this one fact defines a whole constellation of other facts about me or enrolls me in a "community."
This 'included without active consent' move is pretty much tacitly universal in liberal politics. You might as well describe a set of bus passengers as a 'community' because they're all on the same bus. The implication is always identical sets of beliefs. However these have to be chosen to be valid in terms of a real 'community'.
'Rambling' and trespass (in England, no such law exists in Scotland - just employed bully boys that stop you if you stray on to private land as I have done twice) was a prominent leftist movement in the 1930s. Google 'Kinder Scout Trespass', which was not merely about 'rights to roam' but was the froth on the pint of Communist/Socialist nostrums.
Sorry. Don't know what came over me. The Kinder Trespass is actually one of my personal favourite moments, but I'm still a socialist at heart (who very much enjoys Ed - how funny is that) :)
White. And RESOLUTELY middle class. Working class kids can't afford Glasto.
Worse, Radio 4 and Nick Robinson's now daily Glasto orgasm.
Can't understand why ANYONE would want to go...
Yours, a survivor of real festivals. Tents? Maybe a few - but what's wrong with a bin liner ? Showers? What? Loos that work? What? ATMs? Mummy and Daddy? What?
'eff off.
https://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/artefact/4588/BICKERSHAW_FESTIVAL_PHOTOGRAPH_1972
yikes. you sure that's not a humanitarian crisis?
Was heading that way - Bickershaw Festival, 1972 featuring the Grateful Dead who relieved the Somme like conditions with a 4 hour set. We left, elated and covered in mud....
Great piece Ed. Also I see "post-Protestant" and "the book has a very Calvinist idea of people either being saved or damned" here and I like where all this is headed. :D
What's really uncanny valley to me as an American seeing British people bemoan the "whiteness" of things is that it's all obviously a ridiculous American import. This sludge sort of makes sense in the USA (but is still, mind you, totally fucking stupid) since we're only 60% white or 70% non-Hispanic white or 65% white-identified bodies in white spaces, or whatever, but the UK is like 85% white, 90% white outside of London, and 95%+ white outside of the handful of biggest cities, yes? And that last datapoint notwithstanding, I've already seen Brits importing America's inane "the countryside is too white" thing for the English countryside. Specifically, Black Lives Matter UK (which really shouldn't even exist; bobbies are not slaughtering black people) has complained about it.
Unfamiliar with this Lenny Henry chap but I looked him up and he's going to be playing a... wait for it... black hobbit in some woke Tolkien raping on Amazon for purposes of "representation." OK, that's enough of this stuff for one day I think. Anyway great piece per the usual!
British people vastly overestimate the black % here because they just watch so much American discourse and assume it's the same https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/why-do-people-overestimate-the-size
But then, Americans also vastly overestimate their black pop.
There was an interesting post recently on UK media using the term 'all-white jury', which is a very 1990s LA sort of talking point, in the context of rural Wales.
https://sw1forum.substack.com/p/free-siyanda
These are areas where even Anglo-Saxons have failed to penetrate. to talk of all-white is so bizarre and meaningless, the only conclusion you can draw is that a lot of journalists are not very bright.
It's just funny from my perspective here in the USA. I mean, you guys aren't Americans, you don't have to do this stuff!
There was an attempt to try this sort of thing in Japan but it failed to thrive simply because there just isn't a critical mass of white liberals in Japan. (And if white liberals aren't interested, it won't go anywhere. All these "radical" minority activists are basically bioweapons white liberals can use as shock troops against the Wrong Kind of White Person and to provide themselves with legitimacy. It's an intra-white conflict. All of it.)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gq3g/why-the-black-lives-matter-movement-fell-flat-in-japan
Many journalists are midwits who traffic in racial essentialism, which is simultaneously very dangerous and prestige building. Nothing shields you from your own mediocrity like virtue signaling.
In the comments to NS Lyon's substack yesterday, a reader recommended a new substack by Ron Henderson, a PhD student at Cambridge who came out of a broken foster family in the US (what a journey!). One of his other substack articles was about how luxury beliefs are new forms of status symbols: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
Worth glancing over. There's certainly some truth to the argument that beliefs have replaced status goods as distinction marks highlighting a privileged group. And I will say I've long observed that while liberal white guilt seeks atonement, it also simultaneously highlights the privileges of the said group of people, so there is an element of amour propre hidden within liberal white guilt, aka a subtle, even unconscious, smugness in being privileged enough to need to atone for it. After all, wealthy liberal whites are quite selective in where they feel guilty for their privileges, for example, rarely around poor white people....
Your mention of 'birdwatchers' is very painful for me, as being one I can remember the time when the field was literally just a 'hobby' (nothing demeaning about that) with a related 'academic' area ('ornithology'). To me birdwatching was a purely aesthetic pleasure (naturally I was in favour of preserving aesthetically-pleasing things in the kind of pleasant envrironments in which they occurred, but this was only rarely a matter of 'the political' (understandable legislated conservation of birding areas etc.)).
I have recently effectively quit an online forum simply because now all discussions are loaded with ''GlastoMan' and all of the associated prejudices of the type. The same pattern of self-righteous anger and refusal even to just listen to dissenting arguments is now the norm. People who fly or drive 400 miles from S England to see one rare bird will lecture people about 'emissions' and 'global warming', entirely unaware of their hypocrisy (sacrifice seems to be exclusively for others).
remember there was a big ho-ha about birdwatching being too white last year, or the year before, and then someone in the bird watching community was accused of something sexually inappropriate. and it turned out to be yet another harmless community, like knitting, at the mercy of mental people.
The very word 'community' the way it's used today exemplifies the problem. I never considered that merely by watching birds I was involuntarily being enrolled in any 'community' with fixed parameters for 'behaviours'. To me all 'community' is chosen (and by definition 'exclusive'). There is no 'human community' because being human is not a matter of choice. There isn't a 'birdwatching' community simply because huge numbers of birdwatchers express political views I (and others) disagree with, and I am not inclined to worship in that (assumed) global church.
Good comments, Arnold Grutt. I also enjoy looking at birds, and I don't agree that this one fact defines a whole constellation of other facts about me or enrolls me in a "community."
This 'included without active consent' move is pretty much tacitly universal in liberal politics. You might as well describe a set of bus passengers as a 'community' because they're all on the same bus. The implication is always identical sets of beliefs. However these have to be chosen to be valid in terms of a real 'community'.
Good summary.
Another great article, Ed. Nothing to add, really. Just grateful for the insights, which are many.
thank you!
We need to talk about hillwalking. If no one has written that one yet I’d be surprised.
'Rambling' and trespass (in England, no such law exists in Scotland - just employed bully boys that stop you if you stray on to private land as I have done twice) was a prominent leftist movement in the 1930s. Google 'Kinder Scout Trespass', which was not merely about 'rights to roam' but was the froth on the pint of Communist/Socialist nostrums.
Sorry. Don't know what came over me. The Kinder Trespass is actually one of my personal favourite moments, but I'm still a socialist at heart (who very much enjoys Ed - how funny is that) :)
BUT THERE ARE NO BLACK OR BROWN PEOPLE ON THE HILLS AND THAT MAKES IT RACIST