A small thing, but interesting
There was a demonstration in Dover today. A group turned out to support the truck drivers who have the extremely unfun job trying to move goods from Calais to Dover without arriving covered in illegal immigrants, like a mama ‘possum.
The group protesting illegal immigrants is described as “far right” for no obvious reason except they always are described that way. The counter protesters who turned up are always described as “anti fascist” — which is the way they choose to describe themselves. If those twits get to self describe, shouldn’t the ‘far right’ people get to do the same? They’d probably rather be described as patriots or something, don’t you think?
Unite Against Fascism (UAF) are a buncha Occupy-style peripatetic thugs, by the way. It looks like they outnumbered the righties, and it looks like the cops outnumbered them both. So this was not a big deal. A little deal. An interesting little deal that shows some of the cracks forming in our multicultural society.
The report speaks blandly of “arrests”. Eyewitnesses (scroll down to the comments) said all the violence and all the arrests were from the UAF types. Also note the way the votes are going on the comments.
Anyone can vote, by the way. You don’t have to register. Go on, try it! It’s fun!
January 26, 2015 — 10:42 pm
Comments: 14
A masterful troll
Oh, well played, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. Well played.
To be fair, they didn’t actually say they were shutting down Page 3, but they strongly suggested such. Then they went all modest (if underthings and bikinis can be called modest) for a couple of days. And now, the titties are back! (Link does not go to titties. Link goes to a Telegraph sister getting her knickers in a twist. I told you the Telegraph had gone downhill).
It’s been dee-lightful to watch this play out all day.
First the howling shrews of the Perpetually Offended Brigade were all like WE WON! And then they were all like, we won, I guess, but it doesn’t feel that satisfying, really. And now they’re all like WTF! WE DIDN’T WIN!?
The sweetest part? Today’s titties ran under the headline CLARIFICATIONS AND CORRECTIONS. I wouldn’t have realized this if Uncle B hadn’t told me: that’s the header from the ultra-lefty Guardian‘s correction column.
Sweet troll.
January 22, 2015 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 21
There they are!
The picture that ran with the news article I read about the SotU showed and over-the-shoulder shot of Obama apparently reading his speech from a notebook. In a panic, I flipped through news photos until I found one showing his teleprompters, safe and sound. Whew!
I wonder if he has names for them. Gumby and Pokey. Mulder and Scully. Lefty and Other Lefty.
No, I didn’t watch. I couldn’t. And not just because I can’t bear the sound of Obama’s droning mediocrity.
The State of the Union speech has been a humiliating spectacle for decades. I held my breath for Poppy Bush (he used to trip over his words a bit, remember?). Bill Clinton was the biggest gasbag in history. Gee, that guy could go on. Remember his farewell speech? Hours and hours. He was still talking when they bundled him into a car. W wasn’t as awful as he might have been, but I still held my breath for flubs.
But that’s not it. It’s the whole spectacle of the thing. I actually hate the SotU more when ‘our’ guys are in power, because their behavior reflects on me even a little tiny bit. All that jumping up every twenty seconds, every time your guy says anything at all, barking and clapping like a troupe of trained seals. And the other guys sit and sulk unless The Guy says something so patriotic they kinda have to join in.
Awful. Just awful.
The speech is a big useless pile of applause lines and huge laundry list of junk that is never, ever going to happen and everybody knows it. Nobody even pretends to take it seriously. It has long since outlived its grownup purpose.
Can we kill it, please?
January 21, 2015 — 9:13 pm
Comments: 14
Look at these three tits.
Feminist politicians in the UK think it’s terribly important to prevent heterosexual men from enjoying titty pictures in the newspaper. Or something.
Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper (it’s never mentioned in print without the Rupert Murdoch part) has featured a Page 3 girl for more than 40 years. That is, on the third page of the newspaper, there’s a girl baring her tits. It’s tacky, it’s embarrassing, I’m not the target audience, so what the hell business is it of mine? Working class men liked it (I guess), many of the models went on to lucrative careers in…being pretty girls with huge tits, so it had to be stopped. And it has.
It took three years of concerted bitching and moaning, but the Perpetually Outraged Brigade finally hounded it out.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. The internet is full of free porn of the vilest kind. The world is full of genuine and horrible repression of women. And this — this — seemed to somebody worth fighting for. A lot of somebodies. A lot of stupid, shallow, deeply unserious somebodies.
Oh, Page 3 is still there, in (Rupert Murdoch’s PBUH) Sun. It’s now pretty girls with big tits wearing bras and bikinis, so…way to win one for the sisterhood, ladies!
Y’all probably don’t remember, but this blog used to feature Page 3 Weasels. No, really:
January 20, 2015 — 8:37 pm
Comments: 19
Two things that are dangerous
Two dangerous things about the Guardian article circulating today: the one that says 50% of all property is owned by the richest 1% of the world’s population.
The first dangerous thing is, it’s just a press release from Oxfam. I mean, literally, there was no reportage going on here. They basically ran with a shorter and slightly reworded press release, quotes and bullet points and all.
If you think I’m shitting you, here’s the press release. Also note, the chairman of a thing called the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism is a woman named Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Say, did you just hear the theme to the X-Files?
It’s shocking how much journalism is that and only that these days. How valuable a service is a press release aggregator, really?
The second thing is, they’re playing with fire. How very fucking easy it is to whip up class envy. Almost no-one on this earth — including some incredibly wealthy bastards — doesn’t look at some other wealthy bastard who has a few kgilliion more and think it’s not fair. The guys in first class you walk past to get to your miserable seat? They’re all thinking to themselves, “public transportation sucks. Why don’t I have a private jet?”
As conservatives, we are naturally disinclined to steal from our neighbor even if we do think he’s got nice stuff and more of it than he deserves. Plus, we know well the inviolable rule of wealth distribution — those that do the distributing get the wealth. And even so, it’s not too hard to get us hating on the rich folks.
But heed this statistic from the article: the world’s poorest 80% own 5.5% of the wealth. You know what that means? If you live in the West and have a basic middle-class existence, you’re almost certainly in that top 20%. And if you think the great sucking black hole of socialism will hit that top 1% and leave you and me — the rich bastards in the following 19% — alone, you haven’t been watching how it works.
January 19, 2015 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 16
Matter of perspective
Heh. An anonymous commenter sent me a link to this picture (thank you, masked stranger!) showing our fearless leaders kicking off the Unity March in Paris. Originally posted by this blog.
I actually did a little due diligence trying to authenticate it. “En direct” is just “live” in Spanish, but I did try to pick out individual figures (people wearing slightly different colors) in the top picture and match them to the bottom picture. Turned out not to be necessary, as the Independent has picked up on the story.
Oh, now, I understand dozens of heads of state can’t really mix in a giant, milling crowd of strangers in a city on super duper high terrorist alert. The security services would never allow it, nor should they. I understand completely.
But they tried to give that impression, and that pisses me off no end. Couldn’t they say “heads of state convened in Paris to wish the marchers well” or summat? Noooo, they had to be photographed on the street, arms linked, ‘leading’ the parade.
God, our leaders are phonies and mediocrities. And, worse, they assume we must be dumber than they are, if they’ve got the big offices with the comfy chairs.
Okay, not a huge point. But fair’s fair…everybody’s giving that poor ultra-Orthodox paper shit for P’shopping out all the wimmins (a move so pointlessly stupid I can’t even…). Leaderofthebandgate is something a little less benign, if only because it’s a lie to a much, much bigger audience.
January 15, 2015 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 11
…about that march…
I’d feel a whole lot better about this march thing if I knew for sure what the marchers thought they were marching for. I’ll bet you a shiny new Euro the majority of them thought they were marching in favor of multiculturalism. I don’t know when it started to be called the March for Unity, but it did. Dunno about you, but when I watched the Paris atrocity unfold, my first thought wasn’t, “what’s needed here is to open up a can of Unity.”
Maybe I’m just cynical. Maybe it was the sight of all those international scoundrels (the ones with very dodgy track records on freedom of the press) locking arms and looking pious and butter-wouldn’t-melt at the head of the procession.
Mahmoud Abbas? Really?
Maybe it was the people playing John Lennon’s Imagine out the window while the crowd roared.
Srsly. Imagine is my trigger. Whenever I hear the monotonous strains of that braindead puddle of toddler puke, my my eyeballs throb and my vision blurs and I am truly not responsible for what happens next.
It’s easy enough to turn out for the message, “I’m for nice things and against murder ‘n’ stuff.” It’s hard to decide what you’re going to do about it. I saw thousands of those “Je Suis Charlie” posters, and not a single picture of Mohammed. So, really, how Charlie were they?
Now, the PEGIDA thing. That’s getting interesting.
January 12, 2015 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 13
Zombie Mo
I think this is my only drawing of Mo, ever. I did it for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day in 2010. Making fun of religious people isn’t really my favorite thing (except Druids; that shit makes me break out in sarcasm). But, you know, got to do my bit.
I’d feel a lot better about those solidarity marches if they hadn’t held up “Je Suis Charlie” but had held up pictures of Mohammed instead. That is the only way you would truly be Charlie Hebdo.
January 8, 2015 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 7
This is my favorite of the cartoon reactions. The artist is Joep Bertrams. Onsterfelijk means immortal.
I like the sentiment. Sadly, I don’t believe it. In every instance I can think of, terrorism worked. Works. Works exactly as intended.
If they keep Charlie Hebdo going, and it keeps publishing enthusiastic blasphemy, I’ll be impressed and encouraged. But the point stands. Hesitant people will hesitate even more, and there will be more hesitant people.
The Financial Times has *already* run a “now, I’m not condoning terrorism, but…” article (link goes to HotAir because FT is behind a firewall). Western media are blurring out the offending images in reports about the incident. (Here’s the Telegraph. Here’s the New York Daily News (scroll down).
The AP’s sniffy, sanctimonious press release describing how they avoid all controversial images hilariously exploded in their faces when the Washington Examiner discovered them selling prints of Piss Christ on their web site. You remember — Andres Serrano’s photo of a crucifix submerged in a jar of old pee. (Btw, hate to admit it, always sneakingly thought that was a really haunting and beautiful image. Shame about the pee).
Point is, it’s probably going to work. This is probably not the tipping point. That depresses me as much as the murders.
January 7, 2015 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 6
I guess it’s a plan
This has made the rounds of the right-o-sphere, so I’m sure you ‘wingers have seen it: the anti-police protesters in New York City yesterday who decided to disrupt…brunch.
Brunch! Because eating restaurant food at ten in the morning is a white people thing, I guess. That picture, it’s a genuine candid shot of brunchageddon. Four sulky brown people confront a white couple just tryin’a enjoy a cup of joe of a Sunday morning. Guy on the right is reading a list of black people killed by cops. No, wait…that piece of paper isn’t big enough. Must be the gal on the far left.
I love everything about this picture, though it makes me clench harder than an episode of I Love Lucy.
All progressive movements eventually descend into self-parody. Eh, probably all political movements, come to think of it.
Anyway, I particularly love the logic behind this thing. So you think this guy is a violent racist cracker who doesn’t give a shit about murdered black people, and your solution is to bug him while he tries to eat? Somebody hoping for martyrdom, or have they simply not thought this through?
January 5, 2015 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 21