I Identify as African American. #REPARATIONSNOW!
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Incubus retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Incubus retweeted
A US paedophile diplomat working at the US Embassy was secretly removed from the UK after US authorities raided his flat in Putney, South London, and found indecent images of children.
Despite having no legal power of arrest in the UK, US officials took him by military convoy to RAF Fairford, flew him out on a chartered Boeing 747, and took him to a US military base in Delaware.
The Metropolitan Police were only informed after he had left the country.
Is this another case of the US protecting another paedophile and attempting to cover it up?
Incubus retweeted
One moment to leave my box then I'll get back in it.
If you're uneducated enough to have an issue with the British government rightly making this statement, lemme put it very simply:
-49,000 slave owners, approx 0.19% of the population at the time, were given money to buy them out of owning slaves. British taxpayers paid to free the slaves.
-For decades during the 19th century, Britain dedicated 1/6th of it's entire Navy specifically to seek and capture other nations' slave ships to free the slaves on board. The economic cost was bore by the taxpayer. 2,000 British sailors lost their lives.
-During the US Civil War, Pres Lincoln blockaded Cotton exports from the USA. This put more than half a million working Britons out of already very poorly paid work. After months, the mill owners worked a deal with the US govt to reopen trading. More than half a million working class Britons voted AGAINST the deal citing that they didn't ever want to work with goods produced from slavery again.
About half as many (24,000 ish) Brits died from malnourishment, disease etc in the affected cotton factory communities as a direct result of that action as ever owned slaves.
-Britain paid £400,000 to Spain to convince it to stop its slave trade. It also placed diplomatic pressure on France to stop them too.
Of every empire that ever took part in slavery, Britain is the ONLY ONE that grew a conscience, stopped its own, and then set out to stop everybody else without any outside encouragement.
And it is also the only one that has maintained a successful and genuinely beneficial diplomatic network to lift up and empower its former territories- the Commonwealth- which has helped ex-colonies outperform their peer nations in almost every way ever since.
Not to mention endless and unwavering humanitarian relief when a hurricane rips through their islands every season, or when an earthquake buries their brothers and sisters under their own houses.
The British taxpayer has bore the cost of all of that. Britons voted in favour of that responsibility in the 19th century, decades before anybody else grew a conscience of their own- even African Kingdoms such as the Asanti Empire who only stopped slaving when Britain took over Ghana and made it illegal.
You reparationsit types don't harass modern-day Turks over the 6-8 million slaves that passed through the Ottoman Slave trade, or modern-day Ghanaians for the millions that the Ghana and Asanti empires captured, abused, and traded in the Trans-Sharan and Transatlantic trades. You don't even get on at the Arab and African countries who still enable slavery today. Why?
There is no other demographic/nation/country for which people feel so empowered to blame the crimes of the most miniscule proportion of its ancestry, which were undone and atoned for by exponentially more of its ancestry, on an entire diaspora that has lived for generations with no direct culpability in said crimes.
Every population in the world has been a victim to another population at a given time. The following paragraph should be the one that sticks from this whole rant:
The working class, poor, destitute British man and woman who rotted in workhouses for centuries had more in common with their African slave counterparts than they ever did their compatriot masters. That's exactly why they bloody well did something about it. British people en masse stood WITH the slaves. Not with their feet on their necks.
Reparationism towards the British nation is just politics of division, meant to absolve commonwealth governments of their own failures towards their people at the expense of a population who have never committed the crime they are demanding reparations for, and whose ancestors paid the human and economic price for for the last 2 centuries.
This is the last post I'll make on the matter.
🚨 BREAKING
The UK Government says it “does not and will not pay reparations” for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade.
The remarks were made today by a spokesperson for Prime Minister Andy Burnham as Jamaica steps up its campaign for reparatory justice.
#Reparations #Jamaica #JamRadioNews #AndyBurnham
Incubus retweeted
You forgot to mention Coventry. As of tomorrow, it'll have been exactly a month since you've mentioned your city on X.
In comparison, every other tweet since then has mentioned Palestine.
Incubus retweeted
I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.
Incubus retweeted
It’s hard to describe just how far out in front of us is China 2026. Luckily record numbers are checking out for themselves. Increasingly visa-free travel makes it easier than it’s ever been. I’ve just been on a “High-speed train” which description fails to do justice. It travels like the wind. If you closed your eyes you wouldn’t know you were moving. China has 50,000 miles of it. It links cities so far better than ours it brings me to tears. Clean. Crime free. The cops don’t carry guns and their cars don’t have sirens, only flashing lights. Prices are so cheap I’m scared to tell you. A slap up lunch £2.50. Shirts £12. Deluxe taxis (BMW electric) £4. And this in a Tier 1 City (Beijing Shanghai Guangzhou Shenzen). It’s cheaper elsewhere! The shops are tumbling with goods from the west (at Chinese prices) from the east and from a home manufacturing base easily the biggest in the whole world. Nobody litters or jaywalks, nobody lays in shop doorways, nobody begs. Vertiginous towers of bewildering variety arise everywhere. At night these cities don’t even look real. I have a young wife. When she was born Shenzen was a one-horse town nobody outside had ever heard of. Today it is a Wonder of the World. One of dozens. If you deny it, you’re a fool.0
Incubus retweeted
Every engagement farmer on this app just felt a cold shiver. The free money era is ending
Day 9 in SHU (special housing unit)
This is punitive housing for people who murder their cellmates.
No commissary, no phone calls, no yard time.
The worst possible conditions the US gov provides to terrorists and psychopaths.
I am an innocent until proven guilty extradition detainee.
I’m wanted by a foreign state.
I am an American citizen.
WHY AM I HERE?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
SHU is not used exclusively as punitive housing for those who murder their cellmates, terrorists or psychopaths. Federal Bureau of Prisons data indicates most SHU inmates are held in administrative detention for safety and security reasons.
bop.gov/about/statisti… federalcriminaldefenseattorney.com/prison-life/so…
Incubus retweeted
𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦
Jeremy Clarkson has never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is
Brutally honest. No oil painting. A pot belly, a lifelong smoker, a drinker. Not exactly the modern alpha male or is he?
And somehow that is the whole point
I have watched him for most of my life
First as a motoring journalist who could make you want a car you would never own and never need
Then as something bigger
The loudest, funniest, most unfiltered mouthpiece the ordinary person ever had
A man who said the thing everyone was thinking while the rest of television tiptoed around it
From Top Gear he built something that should not have worked
Three middle aged men, The Stig, a track and a chemistry you cannot manufacture
James May the patient one
Richard Hammond the brave one
And Clarkson the force of nature dragging both of them into chaos and somehow back out again
When it all fell apart at the BBC he could have disappeared
The fracas was not his finest hour and he never pretended it was
He owned it, apologized and carried on
No reinvention, no groveling tour, no carefully managed comeback
He just kept being himself and let the work speak
The move to Amazon and The Grand Tour proved something I think a lot of people missed
The format was never the magic
The men were
You can take three friends out of a studio and drop them anywhere on earth and the loyalty between them travels with them
But it is Clarkson's Farm where the whole picture finally comes into focus
Here is a man with nothing left to prove walking into a field he barely understands and refusing to fake competence he does not have
He has run that farm at break even and then at an outright loss in full public view
No editing it into a success story
No pretending the numbers work when they do not
His farm manager hands him one brutal truth after another and he sits there and takes it
A whole season swallowed by drought even after he leaned into robotics and the most advanced farming money could buy
Technology was supposed to be the answer and the weather did not care
He showed that too
Most people would have cut it
And through all of it he has done something quietly remarkable
He has dragged the plight of the British farmer into the light
The paperwork, the council, the margins that vanish, the weather that ruins a year of work in a week
People who had never thought about where their food comes from suddenly cared because he made them care
And then there is the part nobody warned me about
Men who raise animals for meat and still love them
Who name them, worry about them, sit with them
Who treat them with respect and dignity right up to the moment they cannot keep them
And feel the full weight of sending them off
He does not hide that
He lets the camera sit in the discomfort of it
The grief of a man who knows the deal he made and still finds it hard
That is not weakness
That is honesty most people are far too afraid to show
We live in an age that rewards the polished, the curated, the carefully built personal brand
And here is a scruffy, swearing, chain smoking farmer who has done the opposite of all of it and won
He stayed exactly who he was while the world begged him to become a product
That is the whole secret
There is no act
There never was
And that is exactly why we keep watching
Praying for a full recovery mate, looking forward to another season of Clarkson's Farms!
Incubus retweeted
The past 48 hours has been nothing but millionaires and billionaires complaining about trillionaires.😂🤣😂
Incubus retweeted
Ladies and gentlemen,
Green Party leader Zack Polanski.
Defending terrorists and terrorist acts against the British police force.
Incubus retweeted
Amid all the predictable seething jealousy and bitter resentment to this news, I’d like to congratulate @elonmusk on an astounding achievement. He’s got there by being the most driven, creative, hard-working and ambitious business genius in history. Salut, Elon! 👏👏
