Lewisham born and bred| Essayist| Bylines in @Telegraph @NewStatesman @unherd @spikedonline @spectator |Member of St Peter's Church, Brockley
London, England
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First proper piece of my "Black Belonging" series. My legacy to the next generation.
See following tweet for full piece.
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The inability of human beings to abide by the basic moral truth of “treat others as you would like to be treated” is one of the things that convinced me of the reality of sin. It’s remarkably simple to understand, yet extraordinarily difficult to live by.
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I think far more people are gifted than we realise. We’ve collapsed giftedness into broad measures of “raw cognitive ability”, when gifts can be remarkably narrow and specific. The better question imo is often: what do you perceive or do unusually well?
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What he is trying to say is that Jewish peoplehood did not originate as a modern racial classification grounded principally in visible phenotype. But his wording collapses “race” and “ethnicity” in a way that creates confusion.
Since this question is raised all the time on here, it should be clear that Jewishness is not a racial ethnicity. Jews may be a people, but what binds them is a history, a culture and a religion, not a racial identity.
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So much discourse is just category error masquerading as argument. The existence of a biological dimension does not make sex, race, ancestry and ethnicity equivalent kinds of categories. Social reality contains history, culture, meaning and function too.
Drawing a false equivalence between sex and race. Insanity. Funnily enough, scientific racists and ethnonationalists with their ridiculous trans comparison have been making the same argument (albeit from a racist vantage point).
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In terms of sheer popularity, I don’t think any wrestler quite matches The Rock between 1999 and 2002. He certainly benefited from the WWF/E’s extraordinary convergence with mainstream pop culture, but he also became one of its defining figures.
The Rock was so over that he had three SmackDown games named after things he said.
Know Your Role.
Just Bring It.
Shut Your Mouth.
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Another problem with commentary is people opining strongly on matters they’ve barely encountered personally. You’ll hear someone speak confidently about “Black Brits” despite never knowing a black person familiarly. Their insight comes from a distance, often through caricature.
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There is a kind of knowledge that comes from sustained, ordinary familiarity with people: friendship, colleagues, neighbours, family connections etc. It exposes you to internal differences, contradictions and mundane realities that abstract commentary often misses.
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I don’t think he is that stupid. He must have been aware of the risk of uploading footage of himself slashing an inflatable boat. I suspect the spectacle itself was the political action, with the resulting legal jeopardy becoming part of the performance.
Daniel Thomas arrested for criminal damage and reckless endangerment | Searchlight searchlightmagazine.com/2026…
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In our literal, empirically dominated social world, poetry, music, art and story are unusually important. They can communicate metaphysical realities without first requiring someone to assent to a metaphysical system.
Poetry is perhaps one of the few things which can express this and the culture no longer really does poetry.
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I did actually write about this in an essay (excerpt below) on the theme of "re-enchantment".
jideehizele.substack.com/p/c…
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Evidence that football has become thoroughly middle-class coded? We’ve gone from treating football crowds as a unique public-order problem to asking why fans can’t enjoy a pint in their seats like they do at the cricket. How times have changed. 😃
🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham is set to scrap the law that bans football fans from drinking in the stands
"I don’t see how it can be fair that some supporters of one sport can be treated differently"
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You can respectfully engage with people, listen to them and uphold their dignity without respecting their opinions or what they stand for. I’m pretty hard-lined on this. There are plenty of people on this app whose company I simply wouldn’t choose to keep.
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Another challenge with the ethnicity debate is that if we don't grasp its metaphysical dimension, we miss much of its fullness. Our contemporary understanding of ethnicity is often impoverished in this respect.
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I think we underestimate how modernity has shaped our sense of self, rights and freedom. Mass movements require some surrender of individual preference to a common cause. Yet online, everyone feels there is something uniquely important about their opinion. Consensus is harder.
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I missed this thread. Very interesting. I find accents fascinating because they give cues about one's formation (geography, class, profession etc). This is where generative AI can be a very interesting tool. I once asked ChatGPT to describe my accent based on some speech samples.
Micro accents of London (my person observation because I'm too inna and like to record stuff I notice) a thread 🧵:
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