u/Direct_Appointment99

I work in a professional services firm, in the marketing department.

I currently have a manager with less experience in this sector than me, who seems entirely steeped in corporate jargon. I will luckily be transferring away from her in the next month, but I would really like to offer her some feedback.

In one example (I am Jewish, which she knows), she ended a meeting with "and there is something else I want to say..." (in that pause, I thought it was going to be that I was fired), "I and [company name] want to say that our thoughts are with you at this difficult time for the Jewish people." - context being a recent attack in London.

I responded with a thanks, but it just felt like such an inappropriate thing to say, as if she had used ChatGPT to figure out a response. I would have felt much more comfortable if she had just said nothing.

And in work situations, or when offering constructive criticism, she always hides behind policy which she can never talk about in plain English. It always has to be corporatised.

How can I feed back to her that her approach is grating? That she needs to understand that although words may seem neutral to her, that they can mean different things to different people, which is why it is safer to treat employees as individuals.

I do think she would benefit from some feedback, but I'm not sure about thr best way to go about it!

So we finally have the byelection, but how will Burnham campaign?

This is an election for someone to challenge the PM, which puts him in a potentially awkward position and is something we haven't seen before.

Will he be putting forward national policy? Campaign on local issues? Will the Labour Party fund this election?

And will the press play along?

Reform can't say "vote for us to remove Starmer" at least.

I am often in Berlin, where my Grandparents came from. I can still feel the ghosts of the past, particularly when speaking to activists about their experiences with German institutions, as they grapple with "philosemitism".

The German state actively tells us that we belong in Palestine and censors anyone who dares to challenge this or even speaks about the genocide of Palestinian people.

+++++++++++++++++++

"It would be hard to surpass the absurd spectacle of a Jewish philosopher being blocked from speaking at a German Holocaust memorial because he intended to say that the lessons of “never again” should be applied universally. And yet such perverse distortions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’ have become ubiquitous: there are hundreds of such cases.

Sometimes these absurdities will catch the world’s attention, as happened this February when the Berlin film festival was once again convulsed by panic over Palestine. There had been much international bewilderment two years earlier when the Israeli and Palestinian directors of No Other Land, a shocking account of Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank, collected the festival’s award for best documentary.

Most of the German media treated the award ceremony as a scandal: when Claudia Roth, then Green Party minister of culture, was criticised for clapping, she claimed with a straight face that she had only been applauding the film’s Israeli co-director, not his Palestinian partner."

"One of the paradoxes of memory culture is that it seems to require greater and greater efforts to police and repress a rising tide of antisemitism – which memory culture is supposed to have already eliminated. Since 2018, Germany has appointed “antisemitism commissioners” at the federal, state and local level. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they are taking over public discourse to the extent that internationally recognised German Holocaust historians and highly qualified experts on antisemitism and the Middle East are being sidelined, as their views are less suited to a certain political agenda."

The extremists in the British Jewish community are reasserting themselves, acting willingly as vessels for any opportunistic politician or journalist who will help them silence dissent on Palestine.

This isn't a bad thing, but I have noticed that guys have been a lot more up-front about safe sex and I have been wondering about the reason.

I'm in London and with access to PrEP, free sexual health checks, vaccines, easy and free access to treatments etc, people tend to be A LOT more relaxed about their sexual practices. But that seems to have changed recently.

Is it because worldwide sexual health is more precarious with funding cuts by the US? Or are people suddenly better educated? Or is there another reason?

For me, its very noticeable.