Interesting Links for 21-02-2019

[andrewducker]

Edinburgh dad's anger as parents block sick child from lessons

(tags:children illness robots education OhForFucksSake edinburgh )

On YouTube, a Network of Paedophiles Is Hiding in Plain Sight

(tags:youtube paedophilia )

I'm not one for pointing out out plot holes in kids books, but this is too funny not to make fun of Harry Potter over

(tags:funny harrypotter )

Shamima Begum is not a Bangladeshi citizen

(tags:citizenship UK OhForFucksSake )

Just 13 Percent of British Jews Say They Will Vote For Labour and Jeremy Corbyn. Here's Why.

(tags:Jews labour )

Dad reflexes. (Still impressed by the time I caught her one handed upside down when she back flipped off a table)

(tags:fatherhood dangerous video )

How New Orleans Reduced Its Homeless Population By 90 Percent

(tags:homelessness usa )

Germany refuses to bow to UK pressure to resume arms sales to Saudi Arabia

(tags:saudiarabia uk military trade )

Just Eat to ban takeaways given rating of zero for hygiene

(tags:food safety uk restaurant )

Comments

[cmcmck]

As a former special needs teacher of extremely sick kids, I can only join you in your OFFS! I'd have loved having access (or rather for some of my kids to have had access) to something like this!

[alithea]

Yeah, seems like a marvellous idea!

Shame the parents are so anti when I bet a bunch of the kids have mobile phones which are anything but secure.

[nickys]

I'd be interested to hear what you think about the accusations against Corbyn.

[andrewducker]

I don't really have an opinion. The article seems reasonable.

I think that Corbyn has a lot of fellow travellers who have unpleasant opinions. But I also think ideological purity can be counterproductive. Sometimes you need to work with unpleasant people to prevent unpleasant things.

I don't know enough about the specifics to make a call. I'm happy for others who are more attached to a Jewish identity to make the call they feel comfortable with.

[chess]

Friends I know who a) are Jewish and b) know the Jewish community with which Corbyn has celebrated Seder for years are pretty clear that this is because:

1) most of the UK Jewish community are well-off and somewhat right-wing

2) the Israel-supporting lobby is very keen for everyone to conflate anti-Israel (or even just anti-illegal-land-occupation and anti-killing-Palestinians) sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment

rather than because Corbyn has done anything especially offensive to all Jews.

The Labour party does indeed have a bunch of people who like to indulge in occasional antisemitic signalling, but nowhere near as much as the Conservative party does.

[calimac]

I'm Jewish, but I'm not British and I'm not right-wing, so I'm asking this in a spirit of inquiry, not condemnation:

But the article states clearly that Corbyn has associated with extreme anti-semites without calling them out. Other pieces on Corbyn have pointed out his extreme fastidiousness about his political associations in other contexts. That looks pretty offensive to Jews in general. So what is inaccurate about the resulting picture?

You write, "the Israel-supporting lobby is very keen for everyone to conflate anti-Israel (or even just anti-illegal-land-occupation and anti-killing-Palestinians) sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment." That can be true. But 1) "anti-Israel sentiment" is a much different thing from the criticism of specific Israeli policies that you put in parentheses; 2) the Israel-denouncing lobby is exceedingly and overwhelmingly keen on hiding anti-Jewish sentiment under the guise of anti-Israeli policy sentiment. But I keep seeing the bubbling lava peeking out from underneath.

[chess]

I'm very aware that I am conveying opinions second-hand here, so I might not be adequately representing them.

I imagine that there are problems at both ends of the Israel debate; all I can say is that my friends encounter a lot of 'Jews must support Israeli foreign policy' attitudes that they are thoroughly fed up with.

I hadn't seen these specific accusations before and I don't know whether my friends have either; I don't really want to directly bring it up with them because they're pretty sick of 'Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic' stories, given how much he has supported _their_ left-wing Jewish community.

The first three links appear to be to Daily Mail stories, which is not exactly the greatest bastion of accurate reporting.

The Independent story is about Corbyn having met and been photographed near someone, which is not exactly proof of a close relationship - people do end up on stage with such types without necessarily supporting their views when doing anti-war campaigning, due to exactly what you say about the bubbling lava.

The Telegraph is slightly more reliable than the Mail although still rather right-wing in bias; the actual story behind the two seems to be rather more complicated than they present (e.g. see https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-bomber-who-never-was-1187295.html).

[calimac]

"my friends encounter a lot of 'Jews must support Israeli foreign policy' attitudes that they are thoroughly fed up with."

This is probably more of an issue in the UK than the US, as Jews do not trend so much right-wing in the US as in the UK. But from those who are right-wing out here, we certainly get it.

I and most of my friends do not like the current Israeli administration at all. But then, we don't like the current UK administration either, and we certainly don't like the current US administration. (I'm trying to think of a country whose current administration I don't dislike. Canada? I'm just rather disappointed in them.) But we don't confuse disapproving of the current administration with opposition to the country.

[liv]

The "Jews won't vote for Corbyn" article is talking about the 2017 general election. Articles don't have to be up-to-the-minute to be interesting, but I think a 2017 article about the UK political landscape is totally obsolete by now.

I definitely know Jews who have always been historic Labour supporters but who won't vote for Corbyn. There are some Jews who lean Conservative, yes, but it's by no means "most of" the UK Jewish community. I don't know whether the Jews who have resigned their Labour membership because they are so worried about Corbyn's lack of response to anti-semitism are right, but they certainly exist.

It's not the "Israel-supporting lobby" that conflates anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Jewish sentiment. Lots of people who are in fact anti-semitic use the language of being anti-Israel or anti-Zionist because that sounds more acceptable. The conflation comes from them, and yes, it does mean that critics of Israel who are not prejudiced are unfairly suspected of being anti-Jewish.

Recent example: Essex Uni Student Union tried to ban the creation of a student Jewish society. Because the Student Union don't agree with Israel's politics, therefore English Jews can't take part in student life and get together with their friends. And the FB page discussing the proposed ban is full of Holocaust denial, links to far-right articles about the international Jewish conspiracy, etc. (This is not Corbyn's fault, to be clear, it's just an example of the conflation.)

The Jewdas anarchist crowd who invite Corbyn to their seder are like all other anarchists: they're convinced that everybody hates them because everybody is too right-wing and capitalist and neo-liberal. But that's not really about being Jewish or being anti-Israel or whatever, it's the natural complaint of all anarchists that everybody else is too right wing.

[nickys]

I'm inclined to the view that if Mo Mowlem hadn't talked to the IRA then we wouldn't have had the Good Friday Agreement.
So Corbyn having talked to people on the unpopular side of a conflict should be welcomed, not condemned.

[calimac]

Leaving aside the question of what Corbyn has actually done, there's a difference between negotiating with dubious parties and cozying up to them.

Besides which, dealing with the IRA was Mowlam's job. Corbyn isn't the Secretary of State for Negotiating Peace in the Middle East.

[nickys]

... we don't have a Secretary of State For Negotiating Peace In The Middle East.
Nobody in the current government is doing anything constructive at all.

The cynical among us may perhaps feel that lobbying from the State of Israel, and the demonising of anyone who even talks to Palestinians has resulted in our government turning a blind eye to a situation that really seriously needs a lot of international scrutiny.

[calimac]

"we don't have a Secretary of State For Negotiating Peace In The Middle East."

That was kind of my point.

However valid your other observations may be, one can't defend talking to dubious people -on the grounds that- Mowlam did it. That's all.

[nickys]

So, how exactly do you resolve conflicts without talking?

Completely wiping out the other side is kind of frowned on, on account of genocide being an international war crime.

[calimac]

I didn't say you don't resolve conflicts! I said that formal government negotiations are a different thing from cozying up to unsavory people.

There's no "completely wiping out the other side" going on here. Israeli government policy towards the Palestinians is bad enough without laying ludicrous charges on top of them. The only attempted genocide going on is the hysterical anti-Israeli declarations of some Palestinian leaders, but they can't possibly achieve this goal; all they can do is terrorize the Israeli populace at a level that would be outrageous in London or New York, but which gets brushed aside by certain Western voices when it occurs in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

[nickys]

Well, what is your suggestion for resolving conflicts when the government has no interest in resolving them?
Is nobody else allowed to do anything at all?

[calimac]

When the conflict is on this large a scale and with this degree of intractability? Then get the government interested. That's no more implausible a course than hoping that some schlub from Islington is going to bring peace to the Middle East. (It doesn't have to be the UK government in this: the US has been actively involved with negotiating Middle East peace for decades.) Private diplomacy by persons with no governmental authority who are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as biased towards one side ain't gonna help.

[nickys]

Erm... there are loads of examples of private interventions and private diplomacy (and indeed negotiating with people considered criminals by those in power) leading to the ends of conflicts.

[calimac]

Did you read the first sentence of my comment? Piddly conflicts. Not at the scale and intractability of Palestine/Israel, or Northern Ireland.

[nickys]

I did, but I think you've failed to grasp some pretty fundamental stuff, and there's a limited amount of point in engaging with you.

You don't seem to know, for example, that Mo Mowlem didn't start the dialog in NI... there was lots of talking going on before her. Against the wishes of the government of the day.
Same with South Africa.

[calimac]

That's a strange thing to say. Constructive dialogue on the Irish question, going back to the start of the Troubles in the 1960s and even back to the 19th century, has always been facilitated by the UK government of the day, and usually the Republic of Eire government, once that existed. I know all this perfectly well, and have only fixed on Mowlam because that's the comparison you made.

Attempts by individual, non-office-holding, well-meaning but ineffectual UK politicians, to make friends with, say, Gerry Adams back when "terrorist" was generally considered the first word in his job description - which is the equivalent of the other side of your comparison - have never been considered helpful, except by other well-meaning but ineffectual types. Perhaps you are one of those.

Your method of argumentation seems to be to keep rephrasing your original badly-chosen and inept comparison in hopes of evading it crashing headlong into reality. Doesn't work that way.

[calimac]

It's not clear to me what the other parents think a hacked robot would do, but as soon as the father says "impossible to crack" or "impossible to record" I lose all sympathy for him. Nothing is impossible to hack. That's been proven time and time over again.

Where was all this stuff about Corbyn's associations with anti-Semites when he was first elected leader and I was reading every explanation of who he was that I could find?

[chess]

It took some time for the right-wing press to carefully sweep it out of corners and turn a little dust into a respectable-looking pile of dirt.

Whenever I do a little research around any of the accusations, they tend to have pretty obvious and understandable causes (e.g. you do tend to bump into a bunch of antisemitism while opposing Israel's treatment of Palestinians, but that doesn't mean it necessarily rubs off on you).

[calimac]

Good answer. Mind, I'm getting a little tired of unquestionably genuine problems only being unearthed after the choosing of candidates is over, but you're offering a reason for it in this case.

[nickys]

Yup, basically what Corbyn's accused of is objecting to the policies of a nation state (Israel).
There's no actual anti-Semitism in that.

[calimac]

Not true.

Whatever the truth of the allegations, what Corbyn is charged with is affiliating with actual anti-Semites. Not just people who "object to the policies of a nation-state." There's a huge difference, which these anti-Semites are trying to disguise in order to give themselves respectability. See the comment by liv above on this post.

[j_v_lynch]

That youtube paedophile article is extremely disturbing.

[ninetydegrees]

Such a robot would probably also be problematic in my country. We are forbidden to photograph, film and broadcast any picture or video of minors without their legal tutors' permissions. Adults also have to rights to refuse to be photographed or filmed. Minors are also theoretically not allowed to photograph or film any other minors without their legal tutors' permissions. The robot is awesome but it is also problematic in this day and age. Not acknowledging that is not the way to reassure parents...