Rogers Randomness

Radio 3 Triviality Breakfast

Details: Category: Rants

Hi Feedback,

I wonder if you could report on the reasons for the recent direction of Three Breakfast. It seems to be drifting towards ever increasing levels of triviality - if I want disc jockeys and chat with music I could listen to Radio 2, and if I want propaganda news and speculation there is Radio 4.

I used to listen to the Today programme on 4, but a couple of years ago switched to 3 Breakfast for a much better start to the day - however recent changes are really undermining its value and destroying the distinctive character of the station.

poc Marked

Details: Category: Rants

I recently came across a new to me abbreviation in a post on a Green Party forum - "poc". ...." if our members don't vote a single poc candidate to the list's top three". Apparently it stands for person of colour and is subtly different from (to?) BME or BAME and means only the black

To me it sounds like the worst sort of mealy mouthed linguistic contortion and abuse of language. If you mean black, say black. If you mean people with a skin colour more than two standard deviations away from the mean skin colour of the UK population in the direction of a dark chocolaty brown [insert pantone reference here] then say so - though why you would want to draw that line is beyond me. My family all used to be shades of grey until the mid sixties when we acquired a range of pale pinky yellow reddy colours according to the photographic record.

If you actually mean people at least two of whose grandparents were born in sub-saharan African or the West Indies then say so.

And as for having quotas for candidate selection then that is the worst sort of liberal sticking plaster covering up a deeper problem. We should be treating the underlying problem (not enough members and not 'enough' credible candidates coming forward reflecting the balance of skin tones or ethnicity in the communities they seek to represent), rather than the sympton [bad spelling] of the candidate list as selected.

On Protests

Details: Category: Rants

Last month hundreds or thousands or a million people "marched" against climate change. I'm sure climate change is quaking in its boots and will stop changing the climate forthwith. To be fairer they marched for their "leaders" to take "effective" action to stop climate change. I'm sure the leaders were duly impressed and have taken note.

I attended this "march" in Bristol, which I think was pretty typically of all the other more or less simultaneous marches around the world. 350, Avaaz, 38degrees, and all the other inside-the machine "environmental" organisations hailed it as the "biggest climate march ever" which "made history".

Meat or Miles

Details: Category: Rants

A response to a hand-waving post on the GP members website saying how 51% (figure open to debate if anyone cares) of anthropogenic carbon emissions are caused by animal agriculture and so we should focus on policies to promote less meat eating. Typical tree seeing wood missed stuff...