The grooming gang debate: Navigating race, politics, and justice in the UK - Religion and Global Society Amidst recurring waves of public discourse on grooming gangs in the UK, Professor Tahir Abbas examines the construction of the problem, the role of ethnicity, the impact of media and political biases,...

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Have you written on this, on your disappointment and on your own thoughts regarding alternative translations?

Hilferding's Finance Capital

Thanks for replying, though. And you're still the best thing on radio 4.

Fair enough; I see your point but I think there are limits to what can go unchallenged and I think those were crossed today. Still, it's easy for me to criticise: I can't stand Shriver (as I think may be obvious) but, yes, how you manage it is your call.

17/ I'm done.

16/Hence my disappointment this morning. Lionel Shriver is nasty piece of work in my view; I expected better from you, and I’m sorry to say it.

15/ Tom, you’re a consummate broadcaster; I’ve been listening to Radio 4, “intensively” one might say, for around 50 years, and it genuinely (I mean it) lightens my day when you present Start the Week and Front Row.

14/ Is it? Is it the truth? Says who? Say a large gamut of far-right (neo-fascist) thinkers and doers, in fact.

14/And finally (“para colmo”, as we say in Spanish) she came out with the bizarre claim that the COVID lab-leak theory, previously dismissed for being “racist” (no: it was dismissed because it’s a deranged conspiracy theory) has turned out to be “the truth”.

13/ (arbitrary arrest, ignoring of habeas corpus, threats of and actual deportation of people with full residency rights) went without comment, as if there was, or could be, as shred of justness to all that.

11/ And then – and the contrast here with her previous position of “free speech absolutism” was astonishing – her attempt at legitimation of the Trump administration’s current crackdown on anti-Zionist activists

11/ but they are most certainly not. And this again is absolutely not a case of “being kind” or not: there is a deeply malign (neofascist) project underneath these kinds of views, and, I’m sorry, in the world we live in today, these views need to be challenged.

10/ Then that her assertions as to the nature of “intelligence” and “stupidity” are in no way accepted in general either ideologically or scientifically (look at the way that IQ testing has been used and abused over the years) just seemed to be taken as if they were common sense;

9/ It is again part of the far-right narrative (and it is completely untrue) that the kind of things Shriver believes are sanctionable in law.

8/ Her quip that it might not be “legal” for her to say what she was saying on the radio also went unchallenged; the reaction in the studio seemed to be general amusement.

7/ That the thesis of the book is exactly consonant with the current Trumpist anti-DEI drive and Musk’s notion of the “woke mind virus” went completely unchallenged, which surprised me.

6/ Then she started to talk about her book (Mania). Leave for the moment to one side the bell-curve dog whistles of the problematic it constructs (“the ‘s-word’, for goodness’ sake).

5/ That people are being unjustly imprisoned for “hurty tweets” (the narrative goes) and that this is two-tier and wrong is a narrative she was clearly referring to, and it’s a narrative propagated by neo-fascists on both sides of the Atlantic.

4/ That the big divergence (she argued) between the UK and US is that in the former it is now not possible to say things in public as you can in the latter is so egregiously false (see below) that it was astonishing it went without challenge.

3/ although the kind of thing that Shriver (and the Trump incumbents) object to having been sanctioned was not so because it was “offensive” but incitive of mass organised racist violence.

2/ (your reference to J D Vance at that point which she didn’t challenge supports this inference). The discussion then went down the path of whether it was ok to “offend” or not,

1/ Long thread coming, I'm afraid....

First of all, all this about the free speech balance having gone “wonky” in the UK is (can only be) a reference to the far-right complaints about people being sanctioned for (racist, incitive of progromist violence) social media content

hay que liberar esta tecnología del capital; si no, vamos todos a tener problemas muy gordos

@tds153.bsky.social giving #LionelShriver and her barmy neofascist weltanschauung an incredibly easy ride on #StartTheWeek @BBCRadio4 this morning...

The Radicalisation of Young Women "Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand "what is going on with young men?" posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates......

averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-...

this is a tremedous analysis