For our American friends out there, your next bumper sticker:
Courtest of Captain Capitalism.
Trevor Phillips
What’s the difference between progressives and liberals/conservatives/libertarians? The difference between the left and the rationally observant?
Often, just time. In Trevor Phillips case, about 20 years.
I’ve read a number of articles about his apparent damascene conversion, and there is nothing he is saying which has not been said a thousand times before, just not by him.
Well, at least, someone with impressively impeccable progressive credentials is now speaking the obvious, and apparently backed with equally impressive research data.
Frankly, I can’t see this being a game changer, there are too many influential people with too much invested in the fanciful narrative of Islam being both supremely tolerant of others, and a Religion of Peace. It is just too hard to halt this particular juggernaut, certainly not on a dime. However, normal people are not stupid, and change is emerging – albeit slowly:
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Abraham Lincoln
We are now well past ‘some of the time’, and people are aware of the extent of the snivelling dishonesty, deceit and craven multicultural submission of those who claim to be our leaders.
As to Islamaphobia, which term Phillips apparently popularised? How to counter that charge? Simple, be honest; attack as abusive anyone who uses the term. Treat the accusation with the contempt it deserves, point out the truth to them, to wit:
In a free society I have the right to analyse, criticise, satirise, mock, lampoon and ridicule any belief and opinion to any extent I see fit, without let or hindrance. ‘Islamophobia’ is a fatuous and intellectually junk term whose combined purposes are to smear the target, deceive listeners and protect Islam from this critical analysis, placing it above all other belief systems in this society – a position to which it has no entitlement.
The sole legitimate role the state has in the matter is to ensure both my freedom to do this, and my security following.
Don’t bother explaining how a dislike of Islam isn’t a phobia, an irrational fear. Just go straight in, and point out, by virtue of their using the term, the reality of their demonstrating contempt for and seeking to breach your human rights – I find progressives often just can’t cope with that, it makes them go all defensive. If people cannot defeat your position through rational argument, they have no argument to put.
Speaking of lampooning:
Oompa Trumper
This is not a post about abortion per-se and I hope any comments reflect that. No, this is about the moral vacuum that is Donald Trump and of the many, many reasons he should never be President his flip-flops on the subject are just one. But one hole is sometimes enough and this should be enough. If you want the full sp then reason has it here. It is a good article. I shall not quote from it directly because I had independently come to much the same conclusions. Great minds think alike? Not really. These are obvious observations.
My distinct impression in the abortion “debate” in the US is that there is usually very little middle-ground and that is why it rages on with immense passion on both sides of the fence. Now, that might seem a bad thing and in some ways it is. My point being that that is because it is something that people’s opinions on come right from the core of their moral being. It is something that whether “pro-choice” or “pro-life”* people care about with a passion. I understand that. I understand why people care fundamentally about either the autonomy of the woman or the rights of the embryo/fetus. It is an important moral question and should be treated as such but The Donald managed to change between five different positions in three days. On such a fundamental issue that is remarkable even by Trump’s lamentable standards. It goes without saying that on something that is also a major political issue in the US and has been for a long time (Roe v. Wade was 40 years ago for example) that is to be, at my most generous, politically naive. No wonder the US Christian Right can’t stand him any more than a fervently “pro-choice” atheist Democrat does.
So what makes The Donald like this?
Well, recently there was a documentary on C4 presented by Matt Frei about the Trumpster. It included an interview with Mr Trump’s ex-butler who now runs a shop in Miami selling high-end tat of the sort that Elvis would have considered tacky for his Jungle Room at Graceland. Frei asked if Trump visited and the answer was in the affirmative. Frei followed up by asking what in particular Trump bought most. The answer was, “mirrors”.
And just like that I knew! Most of us take our moral positions from some sort of basis whether it be the Bible or Marx, The Book of Mormon or those of Ayn Rand. Whatever. It means that we believe in something external to ourselves. Or put it another way our morality is comes from something other than ourselves.
Some people believe in God (for example) and try to follow Him.
Trump though believes he is God. And a capricious one at that. What is right is what is good for The Donald and because He is the supreme being so he can make it up on the fly. I mean who dare question God himself because whatever God says is right is right by definition. Trump is a malignant narcissist. And that more than anything else is why he should never be President of the USA.
*I dislike both those terms.
German taxpayer funded
Seriously, this paen of hatred towards Germans was funded by their own cash.
I truly don’t get it, this obsession so many progressives have with spitting hatred and abuse towards those they disagree with, while at the same time preaching tolerance and diversity.
As far as honesty in their presentation goes, I am sure that most Jews, en mass, would be happy to take the hand of friendship with Arabs, en mass, but unless there is a major change in Arab kulcha it ain’t gunna happen.
Fog in Atlantic – United States cut off
In British comedy, especially satire as practised by the late Peter Cook and co., the judge is commonly portrayed as a senile old fool out of touch with modern times and quite often reality itself, but it is not just the judges that are being held up for mockery this week, it is the whole British legal system.
A Court of Appeal judge allowed an injunction sought by PJS and although the couple’s identities were revealed on Wednesday by an American newspaper British media outlets remain banned from publishing the names.
But the British court’s ruling has been mocked, with critics saying it has made “an ass out of the law” as the celebrities’ names were revealed scores of times on Twitter and social media.
On Friday, the man who had the threesome with the top entertainer’s partner told The Sun: “The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous.
“We have been threatened with perjury, contempt of court and prison – all for telling the truth about this threesome.
“We have had endless calls and emails from the star’s lawyers, and even had a threatening letter hand-delivered letter through our door.
“The famous couple don’t deny that it happened. But they have used the courts to cover up what the partner has done in a way they should not be used.
As a UK resident, I could be fined and possibly even jailed for contempt of court if I were to reveal who this “celebrity couple” are, SOÂ I WILL NOT DO SO, but our American readers simply have to go to their local news-stand, pick-up a copy of the most scurrilous weekly tabloid and the scandal is there for all to see.
Having had my curiosity piqued by the injunction itself (as the “Streisand effect” could have predicted would happen), I went directly to Google and within a few minutes was looking at the headline that was being otherwise denied to British residents, my reaction at the scandal itself could best be described as “meh“.
If the allegations were both damaging and untrue, then perhaps an injunction would be understandable, but it appears that the allegations are substantially true. The reason that the injunction is being upheld is allegedly to “protect the couples young children” (aged 5 and 3 respectively).
Yeah. Right.
I have no problem with the “celebrity couple” having sexual intercourse with any number of consenting adults of either sex, but I do object to this abuse of the British legal establishment to shield what is essentially the dirty laundry of their private lives from public view.
Throughout this blog posting, I have avoided mentioning the couple concerned so that I am not in contempt of court*, but I have nothing but contempt for any court that supports this sort of draconian 19th century bullshit.
* -Â as well as the fact that to reveal their names would be an abuse of Cats hospitality, which I respect.
PLEASE DO NOT NAME THE “CELEBRITY COUPLE” IN QUESTION, ANY COMMENTS DOING SO WILL BE REDACTED OR DELETED (AS APPROPRIATE)
Cultural appropriation
From the Fairfax womens pages:
“Namaste is my way of greeting Hindi speaking elders in my hometown Melbourne or a way of saying hello to most people back in India. But hearing namaste chanted by the white yoga instructor to a predominantly white class was unsettling. Really? If the yoga class itself wasn’t white-centric enough, she really had to place the appropriative cherry on top.â€?
An Indian immigrant in Australia, clearly speaks English, and presumably uses machine woven artificial fibres, electronics, communications equipment and modern transport.
What truly fascinates me about her, and her ilk, is the apparent complete absence of introspection. No evidence she has any concept of how self absorbed, ignorant, irrational, racist or xenophobic this article shows her to be – she uses ‘white’ thirteen times, making it clear skin colour is a decisive factor in her thinking.
I thought, in a multicultural society, we were supposed to learn from one another. What possible value would such learning be if we are not permitted to make use of anything we do absorb?
After my father died Lee, my mothers new partner, was Burgher from Sri Lanka. Was that cultural appropriation on her part? His extended family, their friends, and their extended families, were a range of colours, and all the women, brown through white, wore sari or western clothes as the mood or circumstances dictated – the men very seldom wore sarongs. As to their colour, am I going to give you some nonsense about how we were all colour blind? No, of course not. How could you not be aware of the colour of the person you were talking to? We just didn’t give a flying monkeys.
Lee introduced us to Sri Lankan style cooking, and I still prepare it, nearly 40 years later. Was that, and is that currently, cultural appropriation? If it isn’t, why isn’t it? And if it is, why should I care? Should I cease cooking mas ismoru (beef pot roast simmered in curry spices and coconut milk)? How about curried cashew nuts, kiri bath cooked with cinnamon sticks or stringhoppers?
My wife is Chinese, and her entire wardrobe is western style, as is that of both her sister and her friends. Should I get all hoity-toity and demand she show respect to my kulcha and wear only Chinese style clothing?
Really, what a whiney human being this woman is. Can’t she see any real problems in this world?
H/T Andrew Bolt
Schadenfreude in the Panama Papers
The Panama Papers are an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian and the BBC.
What do they reveal?
The documents show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes. Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.
Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur DavÃð Gunnlaugsson.
An offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents to sign its paperwork. The fund has been registered with HM Revenue and Customs since its inception and has filed detailed tax returns every year.
As a libertarian and someone who believes that all tax is theft, I have some measure of sympathy and indeed support for those who go to extraordinary lengths to avoid taxation and government meddling in the private affairs of citizens, for example Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin who paid a 15% exit tax on his US assets to expatriate to Singapore in 2011.
Those who are unworthy of such libertarian acclaim are those who use illegal means to hide wealth arising from bribery and corruption or who enforce taxation on the little people, but evade it themselves.
Traditionally, this has been 3rd world dictators or the governors of oil rich provinces in Nigeria and such places who essentially steal the wealth of their own populace / electorate. So it was not surprising to find these “usual suspects” in the Panama papers.
Even Vladimir Putin is not someone that I am particularly surprised at given that he has ruled Russia as President and proxy for nearly 20 years.
The sorts of names that you don’t expect are the legislators of modern Western countries such as Iceland’s PM (but not I suspect for long), Sigmundur DavÃð Gunnlaugsson. Bastards like this who illustrate Leona Helmsley’s view that “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes”* should face the full force of the law.
[EDIT: and as predicted, less than a day later he's quit]
For UK politicians and business leaders, it is not just tax evasion that the Panama papers might reveal, but also crimes committed under the Bribery Act 2010 and earlier criminal statutes. For example, those cosy little 3rd world arms deals so recently brought to life in the BBC’s adaptation of John Le Carre’s “The Night Manager”.
I suspect that quite a few of the worlds elite will be having sleepless nights over the revelations and since the papers go back 40-years, I expect we will be pissing on the graves of quite a few ex politicians and members of the elite as well. GOOD!
* – Leona Helmsley disputes that she ever said this.
Progressive hypocrisy
Ok, so I was right, the bloke is an asshole.
He has drunk the kool aid, and drunk it deep; young Cory Goldstein is fully in accord with this whole cultural appropriation schtick. He makes it clear in the first few sentences he has no problem with the principle behind the racist assault he was subject to yesterday, he simply objects to personally being the target. What he does is different, see, because more peoples than American blacks have sported dreadlocks, therefore he is entitled to a free pass, although others aren’t.
One would have hoped the experience would have helped him see how rotten the whole concept is, but no, not yet.
Oh well, slowly slowly catchee monkey. (Was that racist?)
This is what white privilege is worth
Apparently, her name is Bonita Tindle and some reports claim she is an employee of the University.
Things to be concerned about here, she was using an accusation of ‘cultural appropriation’ to bully some poor bloke. I don’t care if he, personally, was a complete asshole, in this context she was the bully, and the one abusing her power over him.
Power over him? Yep. She was black, and the one whose ‘culture’ was being so called appropriated, and in the febrile atmosphere permeating some Universities today if he had reacted in any way other than as he did he was dead meat… Anything else he did would have had him excoriated as a racist, and possibly expelled. She was also a woman, and he was a male, putting him in the same position as black v. white. Again, anything other than a pacific response makes him dead meat.
Look at her face throughout this, she knew her power in this context, and she was loving it.
Thing is, if this had escalated in any way she could have reported him to the university authorities, accusing him of any number of offences against the progressive orthodoxy. In that event his career at the university would be over, and his future would be blighted – and she just didn’t care, she simply kept pushing.
The bloke, Cory Goldstein, was facing the possibility of personal destruction, and she was playing with him like a cat with a mouse. To the cat it is fun, to the mouse it is life and death.
She comes across as a pleasant, beautiful, and unspeakably vile young woman. She is arrogant, she is ignorant, she is racially bigoted, and she is vicious in her abuse of the tiny quantum of power her sex and skin colour gives her over her victim.
As we see here, cultural appropriation is nothing but a weapon which is used to beat ‘the other’ into submission. And what about the power of his white privilege? In this dispute his race and gender put him at the bottom of the power structure, and she knew it. So did he.
Should she be sacked? My instincts say no, just ridiculed, but it was progressives wot made the rules. If a conservative, or a white male, had behaved in this manner the uproar would be deafening, and they would be out the door post haste. Progressives have to get used to the idea that the rules they have created apply to them no less than they do to others. So, like Melissa Click,this woman must go. Like Melissa Click, I have no doubt this result will be every ones fault bar hers alone, but so what? Let her moan.
Quite possibly…
…the single most asinine thing for The Guardian to publish ever. Enjoy…
This is probably a result of watching too much Downton Abbey over the years, but every day, as I sit through back-to-back episodes of Peppa Pig with my kids, I increasingly find myself wondering: did Mummy Pig marry down?
I ask because both she and her parents have notably posher accents than Daddy Pig. He is in the middle; Mummy Pig is slightly posher than him; and Grandpa and Granny Pig – particularly Granny, who is a kind of porcine Felicity Kendal – are super-posh. Peppa, meanwhile, mimics her mother’s more than her father’s voice. I see her years from now, sporting a blazer and straw boater, bellowing one of her signature boasts into the face of a school chum.
“The question is, what does Daddy Pig do for a living?� says my friend Oliver, when I turn this over to him.
“Works in an office. He might be an accountant. There are spreadsheets.�
“Hmmm.�
Peppa Pig is one of the few kids’ shows that bears repeat viewing. Unlike Barney the dinosaur – which within five minutes makes one question the wisdom of having had kids at all – or even Sesame Street, which can get pneumatic [!?] after the fifth consecutive viewing, it is beautifully made, with lots of sly nods to viewing parents. It is also genuinely funny.
But over-exposure in adulthood to even good cartoons can bring on some unfortunate thought spirals [Yes, it clearly did. That or the sud-editor needed to fill space]. It doesn’t do to look too closely at the positioning of the Pig family’s eyes in relation to their noses, which suggests something off in the family tree.
And what of the animal stereotyping among Peppa’s classmates? Freddy Fox’s dad is a sly old geezer who tries to shift three-for-two special offers out of the back of his van. Wendy Wolf’s dad, Mr Wolf, has a lascivious look about him. And then there’s Kylie Kangaroo.
If it ever comes to an Animal Farm-type uprising, I have a feeling Daddy Pig is going to discover his inner Marxist. Meanwhile he plods along, offering tantalisingly slight insights into his zen inner life and surely building towards some kind of breakdown.
To those who do not know “Peppa Pig” is a popular BBC cartoon series for young children. For the pity of the absolute living fuck!
Meanwhile… erupted over C5′s decision to show “Watership Down” on Easter Sunday. God help us all. I saw that as a kid. I’m OK – I mean I have to wear a tag but generally OK. I really like the film. The relay-running bit is pretty cool and the air-support from Kehaar. Well, I first saw it at primary school (the Head loved it and he was a Methodist). The entire class fell about when Kehaar said, “piss off”. Naughty. Yes, it is disturbing but so is life. So is crossing the road even if you have one of those modern baby buggies that look like they were designed by Lockheed Martin. It’s not just that every human will have to face the checkout but everyone (including kids sometimes) have to face.
Often with more courage and sense than adults.
Pope Francis
"Three days ago, there was a gesture of war, of destruction, in a city of Europe by people who don’t want to live in peace," he said.
"Behind that gesture there were arms manufacturers, arms traffickers, who want blood, not peace, who want war, not brotherhood," he said.
In a reference to the Brussels attackers, Francis condemned "those poor creatures who buy weapons in order to destroy brotherhood," comparing them to Judas Iscariot, the apostle who the Bible says betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.
I’m sorry, Popey old babes, but these particular adherents to the Religion of Peace, to which you make reference here, made their own bombs, in their own domestic premises. So, unless you can make a serious case for lumping agricultural chemicals manufacturers in with the artillery manufacturers, and can demonstrate how purveyors of nitrogenous fertilisers have the same motivations as the lowest forms of arms traders, you are speaking a load of horse shit.
If you want to maintain respect for your office in this world, you are going to have to seriously lift your game.
Really, how did this bloke get the job? He really is just another lefty, spouting the usual boilerplate bromides and platitudes.
Easter Sunday interlude.
By the way, changing the subject completely, this is my gobsmacked face.
Introducing Miss Angelina Jordan, then aged 8. Just relax, indeed, chill out, and enjoy the beauty.
If your eyes are dry following this performance I don’t want to know you.
Remember folks, the Religion of Peace wants to ban both females performing in public, and music.
Update: I suppose for Easter the jazz pop of the precocious young Miss Jordan, while mind blowing, isn’t as appropriate as Handel’s Messiah. So have both.
Some progress at least
I don’t know if you have noticed, but on this occasion not a single one of our World Leaders has leaped to a microphone to assure us that “Islam is a religion of peace�.
I guess they are starting to understand that we are aware of the extent to which this piece of bilge is an insult to our intelligences.
