Laird set the terms for the Ploo’men so the Ploo’men had to exploit the women
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » General Edinburgh
Dundas plaque
(140 posts)-
Posted 4 years ago #
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The Tory Christian and Scotophobe Samuel Johnson, who detested Hume's atheism, opposed slavery. Opinions differed among the intellectuals of the day.
Posted 4 years ago # -
I spent a lot of time in the Joseph Black building but I never gave the guy's politics a thought. Turns out he was pals with Hume, so he may have been a racist as well as the discoverer of carbon dioxide.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Somewhat ridiculously, one of the Joseph Knights laywers in the case to show slavery was not compliant with/not enforeable under Scots law was the very same Henry Dundas of this thread and at the time lord advocate.
No mention on the plaque however..
Posted 4 years ago # -
Th pro-Dundas camp has made much of his role in Knight (which is certainly significant), but he also delayed abolition, while they would portray him as a pragmatic pro-abolitionist.
The conference linked at the top of the thread is worth watching for the Knight case legal history alone.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Does every time I (well my computer) calculate a numeric correlation provide succour for eugenicists?
Posted 4 years ago # -
“
A report laying bare the extent of connections that National Trust properties have with colonialism and slavery is just the beginning of a process to better examine history that is often “complex, nuanced and messy”.
The trust on Tuesday published research it commissioned a year ago to explore in more detail than ever before what are sometimes less palatable links to the past.
“
Posted 4 years ago # -
@Murun
There are some really bad ones out there. When someone is lost at sea, after a while, the emergency services say they are looking for a body rather than the person.
They know with great precision how long people last in water of varying temperature because the Nazis did the actual experiments in a big steel tank. (And may Satan dine on their livers for all eternity.)
But we still use the data, which are more then tainted.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@murun
Godfrey Thomson at Moray House challenged Spearman back in the day for his move from a psychological g to a biological g
Is that what you were meaning!
Ian Deary found Godfrey’s data (all Scottish children tested at the same time) and followed them into old age. Excellent canapés and wine at that particular lecture. Where husband of a professor told me his prep school taught Intelligence as an actual subject. Tends to help with IQ tests
Posted 4 years ago # -
@gembo was mainly thinking of Pearson especially and Galton, but the cap may fit Spearman also
Posted 4 years ago # -
@ murun yes all the correlation dudes were interested in applying g in a bad way
Posted 4 years ago # -
“
Edinburgh University’s decision to remove Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s name from its tower block in the city’s George Square overlooks how he saved humanity from dogmatic thinking, writes Professor AM Celâl Şengör
“
Posted 4 years ago # -
If we think David Hume was wrong about racism, it is because we have learned from him not to take any claim to be beyond criticism, writes Professor AM Celâl Şengör
Perhaps there we have a hint as to the reason some people want his name expunged? Putting claims beyond criticism is a thing lots of people are keen on. The whole basis of the Enlightenment tradition and science is that every claim is up for criticism.
Posted 4 years ago # -
The Oatmeal's Backfire Effect strip [NSFW]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
I collected my first set of Edinburgh residence keys from DHT lecture theatre 2, but I've probably been to as many Fringe shows in its undercroft as tutorials in its tutorial rooms. I've always referred to it as just DHT and didn't know much about who it was named for, learning relatively recently that the equivalent statue was the one with the lucky toe on the High Street. For all the buildings which are renamed there will remain hundreds or thousands which will not be, so I like that those that will be will raise awareness.
Apart from the Darwin library and the Rutherford building I had generally not (at the time) even heard of the people for whom buildings I studied in were named. After the new Swann building was built I remember seeing something explaining who Swann had been in the atrium we would wait in outside the new lecture theatre, but it's not something I would have sought to discover, no matter how disruptive the construction of the building had been to molecular microbiology classes.
As with an extra plaque on a statue, a note somewhere around any renamed building explaining what was originally named but why and when it was changed might inform more people than just leaving the original name and leaving visitors to do their own research.
Even if a university had an entire campusful of buildings named after pleasant discoverers of beneficial phenomena it might bear pointing out the proportion of whom were rich white guys, of the 'gentleman scientist' tradition who were only in a position to dedicate themselves to scientific discovery due to sitting near the top of the power structure which allowed them all their free time and extracted all the money to commission the manufacture of elegantly-crafted brass and walnut measurement apparata through the exhaustive servitude of others.Posted 4 years ago # -
@wingpig, exactly and that is why this sort of symbolic gesture is pretty much meaningless. Generates much heat, but no light, and leaves everything pretty much unchanged.
Almost as though it suits those in power to tinker with these minor tweaks rather than addressing wider issues.
Posted 4 years ago # -
I don't think it's meaningless - it raises awareness, flushes out the privilege-blind and so on. It might be a drop in the ocean, but what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?
Posted 4 years ago # -
David Hume could out consume Schopenhauer and Hegel.
Posted 4 years ago # -
"flushes out the privilege-blind"? How does de-naming a building do that exactly?
This is an attempt to symbolically disown or disassociate from a philosopher based on what?
Literally a footnote in history. Why are they doing this? So as not to "cause offence" apparently.It's farcical. Purely a symbolic gesture, and yes, largely meaningless. As for the drops/ocean hypothesis, why not de-name all the buildings in the world, all the streets too. What will be achieved? Symbolic erasure, nothing more.
The Dundas plaque is a different kind of gesture, one that adds meaning rather than trying to hide or erase it.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Edinburgh University has the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, funded by a £16m grant from the Prince - a member of the Saudi royal family. The fact that University management are happy to have a building named after a member of the Saudi royal family but not David Hume is, how can I put this, extraordinary.
Posted 4 years ago # -
David Hume was the Assassin’s Assessor in the Poker Club (fireplace not Texas Hold ‘em) one of only 3 office Bearers.
Members were all of the Enlightenment thinkers including Dundas.
Dinner was at 2. Wine restricted to sherry or claret. Closed at 6. You can still read the minutes.
The Cape Club which was similar but more for artists and poets including Runciman and Fergusson was in fact restarted in the 1960s and still going. Also featured pokers. In the National museum of scotland. Also with minutes.
The dept I was in Cognitive Science grew out of Epistemics which grew out of a dining club of the 1960s. No pokers.
Posted 4 years ago # -
What's wrong with symbolic gestures, if they draw attention to a greater point? There will be people who notice, read, discover, then think a little more about what they never usually have to think about due to whatever position of privilege they occupy. A little raised awareness isn't going to end racism/topple the patriarchy/destroy capitalism in a single blow but it'll let someone educate their children/support their friends/improve their own tiny fragment of society a little.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Ignore the title and skim read to after pet re-location from Hong Kong.
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/09/26/to-hume-it-may-concern/
...the President and his wife owned literally hundreds of enslaved plantation workers. Naturally this calls for another petition – the capital of the United States of America really must be renamed – and here it is (https://www.change.org/p/university-of-edinburgh-and-us-government-reinstate-david-hume-tower-or-rename-washington-dc)
Posted 4 years ago # -
“
The British empire offered the largest reparations bounty of all to its former slave owners: a total of £20m in 1833, which represented 40% of the national budget, along with the statutory re-enslavement, or “apprenticeship”, of emancipated people for a subsequent four years. More than 44,000 enslavers living in the Caribbean and in Britain benefited from this feeding frenzy. Some of the reparations payments were paid in cash, but a segment was rendered in financial assets that paid dividends for decades afterward. The reparations payments were so large that the British state opted to take out a loan from the Rothschild banking syndicate to raise the funds. Over the past nine months, I have contacted the Rothschild Bank six times for comment about this loan. Initially, they acknowledged receipt of my queries and promised a response. Since July, all my follow-up inquiries have been met with silence. What is clear is that British taxpayers paid back the financiers of slave-owner reparations for 180 years, a public obligation that ended only in 2015.
“
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/oct/06/long-fight-for-slavery-reparations-evanston-chicago
Posted 4 years ago # -
Similarly in Ireland the Irish Government paid back the Anglo Irish Toffs when their mansions were targeted by. The !RA 1919-23. The money was initially meant for rebuilding but very few of the mansions were rebuilt. Oliver St John Gogarty’s pile down in Connemara was but it is a hotel now. Of note mansions of some families (Guinness, Shackleton) were not burnt as the families were popular. ANd in some instances the IRA helped some families remove their valuable before burning the mansions.
Posted 4 years ago # -
“
Such attacks work both as headlines and in the polling booths. They are effective, in part, because they play on pre-existing presumptions. The politicians involved understand two things. To those accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression. And to nations accustomed to hearing only comforting myths of exceptionalism, simple, irrefutable historical fact can sound like slander. Enough now, surely, of the comforting myths.
David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster
“
Posted 3 years ago # -
Excellent quote from David Olusoga. He does that programme on the telly about all the different owners of a house. Down through the ages.
I think the Bristol House and the Liverpool House both linked to the slave trade.
Should do one in Edinburgh
The whole Point of the Darien Scheme was to give Scotland its own Slave Trade.
Posted 3 years ago # -
That is a good notice
Posted 3 years ago #
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