andrewducker | Interesting Links for 24-04-2023

I've always been a bit confused by the starting point of Abbot's (apparant) position, that real racism only exists as perpetrated by white people on people of colour. Racism seems to be the word we've always used for a prejudice, usually negative, associated with a person's membership of a group defined by some collection or combination of nationality, ethnicity, culture, language, physical features, aspects of religion, domicile and the heritage of those. I'm not sure what other word we would use.

Given that race is pretty much a bogus concept (there being more genetic variation between individuals and population groups in Sub-Saharan Africa than in all of the groups of people who passed through the migratory genetic bottle-neck) I don't see how there could be a real racism that is different from common usage of the word.

And I don't see what else we could call things like the behavour of the Japanese towards the Koreans during their imperial adventures, or the behaviour of the Chinese towards the Quighers or Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from uganda.

I'm not suggesting that people of colour haven't experienced racism differently but I'm not sure what you would otherwise call this type of prejudice to distinguish it from sexism, sectarianism, agism, classism and so on.

Yup. It's very clearly racism.

There's scope to talk about what kinds of racism different peoples have encountered, how much it affected them, how much of it still exists, and what forms. I'd put up for "Black people have had it worse than Irish people", although making it a competition doesn't seem like a great approach. But "Racism is only what happens when white people systematically oppress black people." seems like the kind of take you'd get from Tumblr, not what I'd expect from a politician with years of experience in the world!

"race == skin colour" is a standard american view on the subject, that's clearly been exported like so much else.

Which is why I say I pass as white. But as soon as they find out I'm Jewish, I'm not white anymore.

"Racism is only what happens ..." is a common position in the US. See Robin DiAngelo e.g. There may be historical reasons this wouldn't apply in the UK, but the UK had black chattel slavery too, just not en masse domestically. The claim is still what was said of Abbott's remarks: it's an attempt to establish a league table of racism.

Also, Abbott wasn't talking about just the UK. Didn't she speak of "back of the bus"?

Yup.

And the UK, although it did eventually ban the slave trade, also made a lot of money off of it first. (Chunks of Edinburgh are named for people connected to the slave trade, and there are many black people out there with Scottish surnames because of the people who owned their ancestors. NK Jemisin springs instantly to mind.)

Particularly Diane Abbot, who despite her reputation for gaffs is actually pretty smart and pays attention to things like the nuances of racism.

I'm not sure what is gained by making a competition of it. That seems counter-productive if anything then. That's energy which is probably better put in to combatting racism.

I once did a comparison of the human suffering involved in the Holocaust and the chattel slavery in North America and it came out too large and awful to comprehend on both sides. So I'm not sure what I achieved.

1. Having both traveller (Romani) and Jewish ancestry I did find myself wondering precisely that.

Diane Abbott is someone I used to have bucketloads of respect for. :o(

Yeah, I'd love to know what happened here, and what she really believes.

#4 Thanks for the link. Medication does little for me so I'll give this a try.

It's a study size of 1. But it seems worth a try!

sadly i can't see myself remembering to do it for several months straight, given i can't remember/bother to do other exercises at home...

I only remember to do that kind of thing thanks to a plethora of reminder apps.

I wish there were a photo or drawing. The description of the exercise itself is a little hard to follow.

I have now tried it - I do the exercises 6 days a week by eating a bowl of muesli and kneeling on my sofa with my elbows on the floor to swallow. I can report that in just under two months, my reflux has cleared up to the point where I not only no longer need my wedge pillow but I can also lie on my stomach while bending up one knee (used to be my favourite going-to-sleep position, hasn't been possible for years). The confounding factor is that when I read the article, I had just had covid, which significantly worsened the reflux, so it may be that there was some inflammation involved which has now died down, but the improvement has been so dramatic (in that the reflux is more non-existent than it was pre-covid) that I'm inclined to say that the exercises must have played a role. I'm going to keep going until the end of July and then see what happens once I stop. Fingers crossed! And thank you very much for a life-enhancing tip!

That is excellent! I'm really glad it worked.

I was confused by all of you and the first point because in the US, anti-Black racism is different from the type of prejudice that other groups face, and a lot of people in the US talking about racism against the Irish really are racists trying to erase the fact that chattel slavery as practiced in the US was far worse than what most other people, other than the Indigenous people experienced.

The problem with saying that Jewish people don't experience racism is that it is erasure of Black Jewish people, who do exist. But I have also seen Jewish people who are engaging in anti-Black racism, so this is all pretty complicated.

In the USA people talking about anti-Irish racism are quite possibly doing that. Over here, there was definite anti-Irish racism, primarily from the country adjacent to theirs who had previously colonised a chunk of it.

I don't think it's *that* complex that people can have racism inflicted against them while also being racist towards others. Seems like the kind of thing I'd expect.

Shorter summary: "bigotry is fractal".

Being the victim of racism does not immunize you against racism.

(As for where Abbott's comment came from ... I'm wondering if she's had COVID in the not too distant past? The Palace of Westminster has a new ventilation system apparently, but was badly designed for disease control and is full of shouty unmasked anti-vaxxers -- this sort of gaffe is typical of the sort of cognitive impairment that goes with the disease. Because she's definitely sharp enough to know better when she's fully functional.)

Abbott has diabetes which I *think* she has suggested contributed to the couple of incidents of her being not fully on top of her brief.

It's all kinds of different all over the place. For example, the British colonial administrators had a view that people from India were ethnically or racially very good at trade and administration so they encouraged Indians to move various parts of the British Empire to take up clerical roles in the colonial service or run small businesses. That's an assumption based on racial prejudice.

(Ghandi lived for 21 years in South Africa from the 1890's owards working as a lawyer).

Those groups of Indian-Africans were treated as second-class citizens by white folks in South Africa and Uganda and were also subject to racially motived violence by black African in things like the Durban Riots in 1949 or the Expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972.

Irish economic migrants to the industrial areas of Scotland suffered a lot of prejudice. Partly sectarian, partly political, partly racist. There are still marches in the city I live in in Scotland by British Scottish Protestants against British Irish Catholics. Prejudice by Ulster Scots Presbyterians against Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland lead a civil rights campaign culminating in a civil war. The bombing and shooting campaigns related to the complex history of English, Irish, Scots and British involvement on the island of Ireland seems to have mostly stopped since I was a boy but when active it killed nearly 3,000 people.

Thank you!

I grew up in Glasgow in the 70s and 80s, went to uni with many NI people in the late 80s early 90s, worked in London in the 90s. I'm not forgetting the horrible racist and sectarian prejudice and violence or its effects on so many, any time soon.

I saw less of it in Aberdeen in the mid-90s but I had girlfriend and a good number of pals from Nothern Ireland and they got talking in the pub one night with me in tow about the experiences. It felt like they all knew someone who'd been murdered or beating up or had themselves experienced death threats. It was eye opening and hair raising.

As

andrewducker says, racism in the UK can express itself differently. Here's a good short article on racism and anti-Irish prejudice in Victorian England, mentioning Charles Kingsley.

Go back further, and you have Edmund Spenser shaping conceptions of the Irish with his A View of the Present State of Irelande.

It maybe isn't a great jump to look at this tradition, and look at the Irish Potato Famine, and draw a line.

I've been working with quite a bit of Robotic Process Automation software, which is a "no code" way of, eh, automating processes. It takes the programming out of most situations where you want system A to talk to system B, and it's great.
But the complexity is not in writing the actual code. The complexity (and the craft!) of making software (either the software itself, or making a piece of software do what you want it to do automatically) is knowing what you're doing and why, and all of the tiny variations that can pop up, and how to deal with them. Once you know that, you will have your "very detailed spec" and it's just a matter of either writing the code or drag-and-drop chaining of activities.

I'd argue that "visual code" is still code. It's just shown to you in a different way.

It's great how much easier that modern systems can make the coding though. Huge libraries of behaviours to chain together are very handy.

One of my previous employers also had an RPA product in their portfolio. The team that was responsible for the actual chaining of activities, maintained that they were making a programming language -- and they were right, of course. But requiring people to conform to a rigid syntax adds so many barriers that prevent otherwise competent people from programming, it's not even funny anymore. The big benefit RPA systems and other visual programming language bring, is to reduce these barriers.

But yes, it's still programming.

Oh yes, tooling (including visual tooling) can make programming a lot easier.

Oddly, my housemate is in climate control for large buildings (think Amazon data centers), and he's seen the software they use go from a drag n drop GUI to pretty much just code. He says it means most of the devs now are software engineers, with very little to no mechanical background or understanding. He's gone into a supervisory and post install checking role, as he's the opposite, very good on the mechanical understanding side but not a hardcore coder - and he finds lots of real messed up stuff because of misunderstood or misexecuted requirements. The domain knowledge is missing, as I'd interpret it. (From my analyst/developer background)

Edited 2023-04-24 15:34 (UTC)

Yes, the crux is in having the domain knowledge and to know what it is you're automating. No matter how great a programmer you are, if you don't know what problem you're trying to solve, you'll never produce a program that solve it.

The real trick (and fun) of my profession is winkling out of people what problem it is we are trying to solve!

I always think that the people who optimistically say "we can just write the spec and then the code can be autogenerated" are probably a bit confused about what a spec looks like.

They say "specification", in situations like this, but I suspect what they really mean is "incomplete and vague set of requirements". What they want to write is about the level of detail of "Let me manage my finances visually; make it easy to see [this or that kind of report]; under no circumstances [make some particular UI goof that really pissed me off in the last program I tried]".

By the time you've translated that into a full specification of what the program will actually do (as opposed to what it won't do, and/or how the user will feel about the experience), you're at least most of the way to code. But I think that is part of what the optimists want to have done for them – they not only want Magic AI to do the boring stuff like unit testing, debugging and wrangling arcane syntaxes and type systems, they want to wave their hands and airily foist off on Magic AI the whole problem of making their only-half-described desires precise in the first place!

Yeah, I think your "spec"/"vague set of high-level requirements" confusion is at the root of a lot of this.

Somewhere in my gigantic (~750) box of Nancy Buttons is one that IIRC goes,

"Writing a program that conforms to the spec is easy. Writing a spec that says what you mean is impossible."

4.Having his stomach about two to three inches higher than his throat when mending the roof was a big deal. But that seems a lesser inversion than the exercise itself.

How did he manage the exercise without spilling his stomach back into his oesophagus ?

I suspect it did the first several times while he started.

I can't see how this exercise wouldn't make it worse in the first place, which would certainly put me off continuing.

Interesting Links for 24-04-2023

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