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Cake day: June 1st, 2024

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  • I get you, but English is the only language required throughout the UK because of similarly xenophobic policies in the past.

    My argument isn’t meant to be the final gotcha and suddenly Keir will reverse policy, it’s to give another perspective, another point of attack, another reason on top of all the others as to why this is a bullshit policy. A reason not likely thought about by monolingual English speakers.

    Gaelic was exterminated through various government policies. Yes it was slowly, naturally, losing to English anyway but instead of allowing a bilingual society to thrive it was stamped out through force, both at the end of a gun and at the end of a belt in classrooms.

    Cornish, Welsh, Irish, are all as native a language to this island as English. Why does English get priority? Because of colonial oppression. And this is another oppressive policy. More authoritarian policy from a supposed left wing Labour party. More pandering to racists like Reform.


  • Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

    • Jean-Paul Sartre

    https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre







  • A feudal baron seizes on a fertile valley. But as long as the fertile valley is empty of folk our baron is not rich. His land brings him in nothing; he might as well possess a property in the moon.

    What does our baron do to enrich himself? He looks out for peasants — for poor peasants!

    If every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, if he had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labour, who would plough the lands of the baron? Everyone would look after his own. But there are thousands of destitute persons ruined by wars, or drought, or pestilence. They have neither horse nor plough. (Iron was costly in the Middle Ages, and a draughthorse still more so.)

    All these destitute creatures are trying to better their condition. One day they see on the road at the confines of our baron’s estate a notice-board indicating by certain signs adapted to their comprehension that the labourer who is willing to settle on this estate will receive the tools and materials to build his cottage and sow his fields, and a portion of land rent free for a certain number of years. The number of years is represented by so many crosses on the sign-board, and the peasant understands the meaning of these crosses.

    So the poor wretches swarm over the baron’s lands, making roads, draining marshes, building villages. In nine years he begins to tax them. Five years later he increases the rent. Then he doubles it. The peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones elsewhere; and little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord’s wealth. And it is not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers swoop down upon the villages, multiplying as the wretchedness of the peasants increases. That is how things went in the Middle Ages. And to-day is it not still the same thing? If there were free lands which the peasant could cultivate if he pleased, would he pay £50 to some “shabble of a duke”[2] for condescending to sell him a scrap? Would he burden himself with a lease which absorbed a third of the produce? Would he — on the métayer system — consent to give the half of his harvest to the landowner?

    But he has nothing. So he will accept any conditions, if only he can keep body and soul together, while he tills the soil and enriches the landlord.

    So in the nineteenth century, just as in the Middle Ages, the poverty of the peasant is a source of wealth to the landed proprietor.

    Seems familiar…