Black Sheep Beer


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Posted by Jock on January 04, 2006 at 01:13:26 from 84.64.131.122 user Jock.

In Reply to: Re: Editing AR (was Bowlderising AR was Political Correctness was AR v HL) posted by Jock on January 03, 2006 at 12:56:43:

Pax Peter, I wasn't being facetious. I treat my drinking very seriously indeed. I guess you are not a drinking man and therefore have not been motivated to click your way through the Black Sheep Brewery WWW pages to which I provided a link. If you had, you would have read that the Theakston's family had brewed beer in Masham for five generations. In 1988, the family sold the business to Scottish & Newcastle Breweries together with the all important Theakston brand. The contract included all sorts of penalty clauses intended to make it next to impossible for the family to start brewing in Masham again. When, in spite of all these difficulties, Paul Theakston decided to start a new brewery in Masham he incurred the wrath of his family elders, becoming a 'black sheep of the family' in exactly the sense that Ed had in mind.

Actually, being a member of a minority myself, I have a great deal of empathy with your starting point of compassion for minorities particularly those who have (or are still being) discriminated against. I would never advocate treating anyone whose skin colour was different to my own any differently to the way I would want to be treated myself. This was once put to the test when it was put to me in no uncertain terms by an American colleague that I should remove a gifted account manager from his responsibilities solely because our customers might take exception to his ethnic background. I refused.

The reason why I feel so strongly about this is that I believe one of the important lessons that we should be taught at an early age is that before we take offence at anything we should take the intention of the perpetrator into account. There is a world of difference to using 'n' as a racial slur post 1960 and the usage by AR in the early decades of the 20th C. The danger to AR's books are not overzealous librarians, but rather that as society races on blindly persuing its growth-based economic creed, the books will become increasingly obscure to future generations of youngsters.


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