Litters of shiftless negro children

[Brandenburger Toro]

Litters of shiftless negro children

I don't really see a problem using terms for animals for humans - we are, after all, animals. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor.

But yeah, if he's (unconsciously) aplying those metaphors differentially, that's problematic.

[Ginger Yellow]

Litters of shiftless negro children

It's Cooke's vocabulary that does it. I don't mean his use of the word 'negro', which was simply the terminology of the time, and used in all innocence.

[Reed John]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Oh. I overlooked that.

I still don't know what shiftless means.

[WOM]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Lazy, or lacking in purpose. 'Shiftless youths, hanging about on the corner". That sort of thing. Like 'uppity', it tends to be used to convey a racial connotation.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Litters of shiftless negro children

But yeah, if he's (unconsciously) applying those metaphors differentially, that's problematic.

If he's "unconsciously" applying those metaphors, you can't call him "racist", just "uneducated".

If he's "consciously" using them, you can.

That's the difference some people don't often get. As SR acknowledged earlier, for example, that is a really fundamental difference.

I, for one, would never call Ron Atkinson or Jade Goody "racist", for example. I would call both of them "thick". Well, I'd call Ron just plain "dumb", and Jade "the dumb bits surrounding the only intelligent cells in her body, the cancerous and therefore expanding ones".

[Reed John]

Litters of shiftless negro children

And yet "shifty" or "shifty-eyed" is also derogatory.

[Wyatt Earp]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:

"the dumb bits surrounding the only intelligent cells in her body, the cancerous and therefore expanding ones".

Fucking hell.

[Duncan Gardner]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Pick on someone yer own size, Rogin.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Litters of shiftless negro children



Not racially tinged over here, as far as I know.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Tubby Isaacs wrote:

Not racially tinged over here, as far as I know.

Well, he ain't white, is he?

[N est à?]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Do the Mr Men make it to America? If that one was published over there it would trigger a second civil war.

[Er Liquidatore]

Litters of shiftless negro children

I, for one, would never call Ron Atkinson or Jade Goody "racist", for example. I would call both of them "thick". Well, I'd call Ron just plain "dumb", and Jade "the dumb bits surrounding the only intelligent cells in her body, the cancerous and therefore expanding ones".

Ron Atkinson - Racist who has used 'nigger' twice to describe black men, and who couldn't see anything wrong with gollywogs and other racist art.

Jade Goody - didn't actually say anything racist, unlike Danielle LLoyd and and that other no-mark from S-Club 7.

The rest of that paragraph - Fucking out of order.

[Guest]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Jade Goody - didn't actually say anything racist

Erm, yes she did.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Shiftless seems to be a very good word, independent of its use in a nasty phrase here. If I'd known it at the time, it would have come to mind when I surveyed the unlovely town of Margao in Goa. And it's how I imagine black American poverty, now and in the seventies. The poor, I suspect, are often very bored indeed.

[Ball Comrade]

Litters of shiftless negro children

The_Liquidator wrote:

I, for one, would never call Ron Atkinson or Jade Goody "racist", for example. I would call both of them "thick". Well, I'd call Ron just plain "dumb", and Jade "the dumb bits surrounding the only intelligent cells in her body, the cancerous and therefore expanding ones".

Ron Atkinson - Racist who has used 'nigger' twice to describe black men, and who couldn't see anything wrong with gollywogs and other racist art.

Jade Goody - didn't actually say anything racist, unlike Danielle LLoyd and and that other no-mark from S-Club 7.

The rest of that paragraph - Fucking out of order.

Twice? I heard the fucking lazy thick one, what was the other?

[Er Liquidatore]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Bill - it was the N-bomb, sorry, but in the 1990 World Cup he said something off air about the families of Cameroon players being up in trees.

[jason voorhees]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Well, to be fair Curtis Mayfield used "shiftless."

Again, after the Virginia Tech shooting thread, I come back to my experiences teaching in New Orleans.

The greatest unsaid thing in America, and potentially one of the greatest unsaid scandals in the world, is lead paint.

Lead paint stores in the bloodstream for 60 days, and goes into the bones after that. At that point, it can only be detected during a growth spurt in the child. During this growth spurt, the lead that damaged the brain the first time, gets released and damages the brain again. It take a normal, functioning brain and keeps it at a first-grade level for life.

What I'm saying is yes, urban districts have low test scores; and kids who have parents who may have had high lead levels inherit that, along with whatever substances the parents are using; but how much of it is actually fixable ?

And what is a fair and just solution to kids who have absolutely no chance of being Johnny Cochoran or Sean Combs or the founder of B.E.T, due to the fact that there is an impairment to their brain development because of a household item that everyone used for hundreds of years ?

Is it worth going back to a vocational training model that was used for decades (and as Kanye West kind of endorsed in his first album ?) Is it a decision that can be made for someone's career for their entire lives, when one may be capable for so much more ? Is it worth it to make choices for kids lives, to give them a skill for a trade (instead of laying where the bums have laid - Run DMC) or source of employment ?

It's a hell of a thing, this poverty and racism and drugs and social/enviornmental shit. How much is real ? How much can be fixed ? How many issues need the courage to change the things that can be fixed, the serenity to change the things that can't, and the wisdom to know the difference ?

[Incandenza]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Alessandro Nesta Mahdi wrote:

Do the Mr Men make it to America? If that one was published over there it would trigger a second civil war.

Not sure if the books did. Certainly not that one.

I've seen the characters, but mostly only on shirts at Baby Gap.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Litters of shiftless negro children

I’m onto the early 1970s now, and he’s talking about Vietnam. Specifically, the reaction to it back home (protests and riots, for which Cooke has barely-concealed contempt), and the coverage of it in the media (too much and too instant, for his liking).

I’ve uploaded this one too - here - but if you don’t want to listen to it all, here’s how it ends.

After detailing the devastation of the Somme (a quarter of a million British dead for the sake of eight miles of land), Cooke asks:

Is it conceivable that if there had been a population of British viewers to see and hear this sort of thing that they would have simply shaken their heads and gone off to the railroad stations to wave their boys off on the troop trains? The Pope, who knew these things, begged the combatants in that year of 1916 simply to stop, “while there are any young men left in Europe”.

(Note that, to Cooke’s mind, the idea that an educated, enlightened and informed British public might rebel against the lunacy of the Great War is self-evidently appalling.) He continues:

Ninety-one years ago, a commencement speaker stood up before the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy. This is what he told the newly-fledged soldiers, in the confident High Noon of the Victorian age. “War is, at best, barbarism. I’m tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It’s only those who’ve neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and the groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell.” The speaker was the man who, fourteen years before, had desolated the cities of the South. A man whose name cannot be lightly pronounced south of the Potomac river even to this day. He was General William T Sherman. You’ll notice that he waited fourteen years to speak these passionate lines. Philip Gibbs waited four years to report the despair of the men in Flanders. The young American correspondents in sweaty T-shirts in Vietnam see and hear it in the morning, and tell us that night. There is no gap now between the battlefields and the memoirs. I don’t think it possible to exaggerate the shattering capacity of television to tell it now. And what is shattered, I suspect, is morale - both at the front and at home. It puts a crippling burden on the generals and the politicians who, in a democracy, are trying to conduct any war. Field Marshall Haig could assure all and sundry that the morale of his men was splendid, since we were not in touch (nor, by the way, was he) with the feelings of the hundred thousand men moving up into the graves of 238,000. It raises the profound question of whether any nation not under a dictatorship can ever again fight a long war with a steady spirit. And this, I believe, is something new under the sun.”

Those poor generals and politicians, eh, doing their best to wage long wars, but pesky democracy and the pesky media keep getting in the way…

[Wyatt Earp]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Hmm. I'm not sure he's as much of a cheerleader for Haig as you read him, there. He seems to sympathise with the Pope's plea, in fact. He's making a rather Macchiavellian point about the effect of free reporting on morale in wartime. And in this he's absolutely correct, which is why in no subsequent war has reporting been allowed to be as free as it was in Vietnam.

[wingco]

Litters of shiftless negro children

Isn't it a myth that TV coverage of Vietnam turned the tide of public opinion against the war?

[Amor de Cosmos]

Litters of shiftless negro children

I think it's hard to measure that type of thing and it's impossible to separate the footage from Vietnam from the the way it was seen within the US itself. At the time, the change in attitude of evening news-readers on the three networks was regularly analysed and commented on, Walter Cronkite's in particular, and assumed to be highly influential. During the early 70s the coverage was a relentless triple-decker of bombs and blood from Vietnam, protests from campuses across the country, and an increasingly beleaguered Nixon adminstration. Old uncle Walt just looked and acted increasingly fed-up with it all. How much of that reflected and/or fed middle-class opinions across the country is hard to say.