I find it odd that many of the drivers still moan about safety. You don’t really get that in the bike world. My family are heavily biased to car racing and I wind them up Immensely with how limp wristed it has become ha. I have worn both hats and tbh I’m vastly better in a car than I am on a bike. But bikes are much purer of an experience. You have to respect them so much as things go wrong so easily. It’s a lot of power and not a lot of contact patch after all. So many variables and it fucking hurts. And bikes are a shit load more dangerous than f1. I’m probably more likely to die from covid than die in an f1 car bikes are still very much a raw experience. Cars are mostly piss easy to drive to the point that even a clown can do a half decent lap time in a modern car. Saddens me! Just wasn’t the case years ago. Teenagers couldn’t get in to an f1 car and drive them, especially not competitively.
.....and if you did, they’d still count it as a Covid death if you had a bit of a sniffle in the previous 28 days. Before anyone points out that I made the same joke in another thread, like Lewis, I’m merely recycling in order to help the environment
Erm yes and no. Nowt wrong with his message. I can’t speak for others, but for me, I don’t listen to the news anymore, not because I don’t want to hear the F1 results, but because I’m sick to the back teeth with the adversarial nature of every conversation that has anything to do with; Brexit Boris JC COVID BLM I want my own oasis. Is that too much to ask. H can dress as he likes (yuk!) and say what he likes, I don’t have any objection to that nor should I, just NOT AT THE BLOOMIN RACES, one of the few bits of TV I do watch. And to preempt the human rights folks. He’s on the bloomin cover or Vague for C sake, that’s a platform and a half. So he hardly needs to coerce his peers to take a knee. I bet they wouldn’t want to rock the sponsors boat by not kneeling!
I can understand that. What were your thoughts on Frankie Morbidelli (who is mixed race) doing a BLM “awareness raising” thing at the IIRC, Misano GP? Edit: wrong link: https://the-race.com/motogp/morbidelli-uses-spike-lee-inspired-helmet-for-anti-racism-stance/
Just quickly read your link. “Everyone should have a voice in the matter and use it. I don’t agree when people say athletes shouldn’t get involved with politics and just [be] entertainers. As athlete(s), we have a privileged platform and a social mission.” Again, I’ve no issues with the message, (I don’t think it helps their cause having Marxists and anti Caps as bedfellows) just keep politics off the track on race day. I didn’t see that Morbidelli had done that.
I know this isn’t the platform to say such things but I have experienced genuine racism. A fair few times especially in London coming from black mouths. I’ve got thick skin and don’t really get emotional about dick heads being dick heads. It’s weird how it’s seemingly okay the other way round though? but it does piss me off that this BLM stuff is seemingly endlessly rammed down our throats. It’s got to the point that it’s almost hard work being white. People are people for fuck sake. All this stuff is causing a divide in this country like I have never seen in my life. it’s very sad. The human race is very flawed. We’re thick as shit. There’s good and bad in all people of all nations. I personally don’t buy in to this ‘them and us’ crap that’s being peddled at the moment. I’m also not going to feel guilty about something that I have absolutely fuck all to do with. Bore off. Th kneeling thing is just unreal. I’m sure aliens somewhere are looking at us laughing ffs.
And again quickly read your edited link, ta His lid message does blur the argument. But this is about where I am. Nail head, hit. “But we’re trying to put on a show for the audience and make them feel good, so I wanted to treat the topic with some lightness, not to be too heavy.”
Me too, and my family. Harrow used to be all English 45 years ago, until a significant amount of Ugandan Asians arrived, my youngest was the only white lad in his class. Not an issue for me, but it did take a while to adapt and get used to the culture shock, but my home town wasn’t the same place any more. English character is harder to define than some. But what did wind me up was being called white trash, yep, not nice. Now Harrow has many fewer Asians and is back to white again, but not a word of English in the town centre, it’s all Eastern European now. (none of the buggers wearing masks either) So racism works both ways, and race hate also works inter race/faith/ disability/ gender Jews/blacks/ Islamists etc often won’t work with the other, I know, I used to run a multi cultural forum. Some Islamist hate gays with a vengeance, some Jews won’t have black tradesmen in their house. Stereotyping but it’s a dogs dinner. but it’s ok to be fat’ist, or Ginge’ist, or ugly’ist, cos those things aren’t on the list. for gods sake just treat folks as you find them off soapbox and breathe Apols.
Not nice mate. I’ve been called all sorts. Was in London in my early 20’s and a group of black lads blocked me off and pinned my ex against a wall. You’ve never heard racial hatred like it. I thought they were going to rape her. Luckily despite me looking like a taller Version of Justin Beiber I can actually handle myself and worked my way out of it. but that’s just one occasion. There’s been numerous. I’m not angry at black people. It was just a bunch of wankers who happened to be black. some of the worst acts of racism I have ever seen has been from the black community. Not always toward ‘white’ people either. Sometimes toward Asian or Middle Eastern people. ive witnessed some truly astonishing things
Where’s my tiny violin... While incidents like that are disgraceful and distressing, they're isolated and exceptional. I bet you’ve never been denied decent housing, work, education etc or have been unfairly picked on by police, then if arrested, treated more aggressively and then if charged, face a more serious offence because of your race. Remember a number of posts ago you said something about your face “needing to fit” in order to get a racing scholarship and, if I’m not wrong, detected a hint of bitterness “I could have been a contender” type of resentment? Extrapolate that to your almost every aspect of your everyday existence where you’re not treated quite as well as your peers and don’t get a fair shake of the stick for no justifiable reason.... Racism/discrimination isn’t all “Whites Only” signs and people burning crosses on your lawn. Often it’s much more about being unconsciously excluded from opportunity, not because the person who is in control of the opportunity is a BNP bigot but simply because people tend to favour or feel more relaxed around people who look, talk and act they do. So, in many situations, like the scholarships scheme, a “face doesn’t fit” because it’s the wrong colour and subtle unconsciously transmitted little signals are sent out (sociologists call them “micro aggressions”) and also no doubt the unconscious attitudes come into play when, eg: an employer has to decide between two candidates for a job, or a letting agent is deciding which tenant to recommend to the landlord of a luxury flat etc etc. Again - it’s not because they’re consciously and deliberately racist but because that is how human nature operates and because Britain is a majority white country, those decisions are usually being taken by white people. I’ll give you an example - my family moved to the rural (100% white) village about a year ago and for a while whenever my black girlfriend or mixed race sons would walk through the village, curtains would twitch, people would stop talking as they passed by, we were not invited to the village WhatsApp group for 7 months (in contrast to when white families move in and are invited on within days/weeks), when we went to the pub for Sunday lunch you could have heard a pin drop etc etc. Now, the villagers are not bad people - just the opposite in fact and only this evening one of them saw my son and I struggling after our trolley full of foraged firewood picked up a flat tyre a couple of miles from home, so he stopped his pick up, loaded up our logs and dropped us back. We’ve also had free advice from the local vet when our dog was ill, people have taken parcels in for us, and there have been other small neighbourly gestures. But there was a stand-offishness that took a while to break down and is noticeably absent when white families move in. Then there are the legacy effects of structural racism which held back people of colour so that they have been under represented in the professions, the police, politics, judiciary etc and don’t have access to the levers of power. Again, while there have been class based barriers to those upper echelons of society, POC faced the double whammy of race and class based prejudice. Thankfully that’s changing but we aren’t there yet. There have also been plenty of studies which show that black youths are much more likely to be viewed with suspicion by police officers, they’re more likely to be batoned, tasered or handcuffed and on identical facts are more likely to be charged with more serious offences and if convicted, more likely to receive a harsh sentence. I remember one blatant example of that from my own work where a fight kicked off between a group of black and a group of white young men in a cinema. The CCTV showed that they were all as bad as each other, yet most of the white guys got charged with s.4 Public Order Act (6 months max) while the black lads were charged with violent disorder (5 years max). I doubt the person who made the charging decision was a dyed in the wool racist who decided to do it out of hatred, but rather they brought their unconscious preferences and prejudices to bear when doing so, but because of that decision the white guys will have received community orders while the black guys ended up in jail.
But we agree on something, rather important though it is.. why can’t folks just get on with each other (except on the track of course!)
Well you will never get a conclusion to that one. People are always compared with previous generations and always will be, Pele, Maradona, Ali, Tiger Woods, Rossi etc. Fact is you can only compare with your contempories, everything else is just opinion.
