Whats amused you (in the news) today ?

Numeracy ain't wot it was, either.

Grenadier Guards ‘want Kate Middleton to replace Prince Andrew as new colonel’


No s**t Sherlock. I'm sure she would a much better job of getting them to 'stand to attention'.

The analogies are not comparable, on any level. Cuisine has "appropriated" from other cultures forever. Cuisines around the world have always assimilated other cuisines. Its analogous to the spread of ideas between civilisations. To condemn particular dishes because of "cultural appropriation" is ridiculous. Its food. We cook, we eat, we share. Hell, I might open a bottle of wine later, and have some olives with it - while I'm at it, I'll drink a glass to the Romans that introduced it to ancient britain.

The B/W minstrels may have seemed "right" at the time, to a large cohort of white british people who thought it was amusing (including my parents, and potentially including me who would have been very young at the time). But it is evidently utterly demeaning: then and now. It appealed to a generation such as my mother who thought it was a terrible injustice that she could no longer buy thread in "n*****r brown": why not, that was what it had always been called ? 

The analogy with statues of the likes of Colston is also a false one. I am relatively ambivalent about Colston and co. (in terms of statues), however the argument that "we can't change history" which is so often trotted out by those who decry such things is so obviously fallacious that it is laughable: the topic iss worthy of a separate thread. But regardless. statues of people in most places - that is certainly in the last 3-400 hundred years - are about celebration of that person's achievements : veneration of the individual. Putting them on a pedestal both figuratively as well literally. Its an age old adage, but none the worse for it: those that are victorious are the ones that write the history. So it's hardly of any surprise that those that have gained significant wealth and consequent power through a practise as abhorrent as slave trading was - even then, not just through a 21st century lens - got himself permanently celebrated in public statue(s). Giving him the veneration he sought/ Achieved through the wealth accumulated through inflicting deaths and misery on thousands. Lets not delude ourselves that their goodness was their primary point, and their involvement in slavery was simply a second order inconsequential inevitable result of the times they lived in.

It is up to those of us in the present to choose who we venerate by way of current statues in celebration of them. Choosing to remove any specific current one doesn't "change history". What it does do is change who it is from the past we currently choose to celebrate by way of publicly putting them "on a pedestal". And in making such decisions, we in effect define ourselves and our current values. 

Still, where was I ? Oh, the idea that misappropriation of culture through cuisine was an utter nonsense, as the entire world history of cuisine has involved the free exchange, adoption, and  adaption of other cultures cooking. I'm sure the Spanish will raise a toast of Roman wine to the amalgamation of Moroccan cuisine into their own. 

To you maybe, but think of the poor souls offended.  And there's no mileage in trying to bring logic to the table, as you are here.  We've allowed the permanently offended to dictate how things must be and there's no going back.  We meekly accepted the absurd banning of blackboards and dustmen, and all kinds of other nonsense, and now food has come into silly season.  You'll just have to roll with it...  

Except for the minor detail that they haven't been banned by anybody. It's just a typical Mail-believer kneejerk beloved by a demographic who haven't been near a school for decades...

...because, if they had, they'd know that blackboards, with chalk, simply don't exist in schools any more.

They've long been replaced by dry-wipe whiteboards, or by modern smart boards and laptop projection.


"Dustmen" is a truly antiquated term anyway, they've been "binmen" since at least the 70s...
The term "binman" is still very much in use. Here's a selection of news articles from the last year...
inews.co.uk/news/binman-pleads-for-respect-from-public-amid-baseball-bat-and-knife-attacks-1326466
metro.co.uk/2021/07/07/binmen-sacked-after-being-filmed-fighting-shoppers-in-the-street-14889763/
www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/binman-goes-swear-fuelled-rant-22190076
www.herefordtimes.com/news/19049812.hundreds-call-council-give-binman-destroyed-snowman-job-back/ - bonus points for "snowman"?

And they aren't all men any more. So, along with firemen and postmen and policemen, why not reflect that minor detail by simply changing the job title...? It's not like there's any downside to that... If a man worked providing school lunches to pupils, would you be insisting he was called a "dinnerlady"?

Interestingly, in French, the use of a single term for the job is deprecated because it's seen as sexist, due to it being a gendered language. "Facteur" for postie is deemed to exclude women - so there's a feminine-gender term, "factrice". Yet, in English, "actress" is deprecated as implying a lesser role, and both men and women are now referred to as actors. Even the fossils of the Academie Francaise agreed as much a few years ago...
www.france24.com/en/20190228-french-language-academie-francaise-feminisation-professions
www.rfi.fr/en/france/20190301-french-language-authority-feminise-job-titles-academie-francaise

"Political correctness gorn mad", or simple basic respect, providing the simplest recognition that both halves of the population can do the job just as well as each other?

I suspect the people who rail hardest against it might simply not like that last detail...

I obviously can't comment on what you did during the supposed "war of the blackboards", but I can safely say I never "meekly accepted" any such thing. Not least because to my knowledge it was never for any practical purpose actually happening. Or at least, not outside the confines perhaps of some "position paper" written by an overly elevated, self important and certainly overpaid council employee*. Which was subsequently ignored by virtually all. Or rather ignored by all other than elements of the popular press that can't pass up on any opportunity to whip up popular fury at such utter tosh, regardless of how manufactured it is. While of course counting the pounds from increased copy sales.

I do know that the use of chalk - and therefore also the use of blackboards - went out with the ark. And also that I have never heard anyone object to the term "whiteboard" on the grounds it doesn't give equal opportunity to "blackboards", or offends non-white people because of the implied lack of diversity in the domain of vertically oriented physical ideation capture media.

*Overpaid if they were writing such things, I should clarify.