So, as a palate cleanser after toxic images of hatred and ruin, I thought you might like to see some images of an archipelago off the north coast of Scotland, one that owes more allegiance in language, DNA, history, culture and nomenclature to Norway than to Scotland - they dinna wear the kilt and they dinna spake the Gaelic. No, you can't visit. The borders are closed (unless you are powerful, well-connected and unscrupulous). But they will be here until global warming causes the seas to rise and drown these islands, these mountain tops lapped by the world's ocean.
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| Yes, it's the fucking hedge |
mr ishmael on policing
An expat friend writes of Old England facing rising overt fascism and
corresponding covert repression by a pan-national New World Order and
suggests that England may endure the same level of failure and betrayal
which has brought sadistic gangsterism into Parliament in Stormont -
Christian Blairism, Peace through Knee-capping.
Last
Monday, (October, 2009) in planted questions, our laughable home secretary - why is each
appointee more risible than the last, Blind Boy Blunkett, Snot Buns
Schmidt and now this oaf, Johnson, the singing postman? - refused to
condemn the Chief Constables' description of legal protest as Domestic
Extremism, thus making an entire population potentially terrorist,
taking another step along the one-way street to nothing to hide,
nothing to fear Detention Camps. Very necessary, Mr Speaker, to retain
our ancient freedoms. The police are doing a brilliant job, as all
members will agree.
They say this in the face of
incontrovertible evidence that the police are doing the exct opposite, a
foul, ruinous job. They say this even though, by any conceivable
performance yardstick, the police are rubbish, good for fuck all, save
slapping women around and beating demonstrators to death. Detection
rates are so comically low, in single per centage figures in so many
areas that it is hard to see what harm might come to the citizen were
gobby plod disbanded. Old Bill's spare-time industry, his fencing and
burglary and drug dealing would increase beyond it's current level, for
sure but that would be a small price to be rid of his officious meddling
and his gelled-up gay bullying. Currently, your local CID thug is
happy to have his own acquisitive crimes TIC'd - taken into
consideration, ie written off - along with those of a local baby
burglar. As well as enabling plod to get his own crimes off the book,
the TIC business helps swell the already bogus clear-up figures, the
commanders know it, the Chief Constables know it, the Judges know it,
the Magistrates know it, the Probation Service and the Prison service
know it, they all know that even the derisively tiny number of crimes
cleared-up is massively inflated.
The Home Office knows
also that even its own Crime Survey figures reflect not the incidence
of crime but of reported crime and even that is pre-interpreted and
multiple offences treated as one. People terrified of being mugged or
burgled are told condescendingly by those in the Crime & Punishment
business that their fears are misplaced. Look, we have altered these
incomplete figures in such a way as to prove that crime has gone down,
even though it hasn't - even on the made-up figures upon which we base
our strategy.
Month after month, year after year, decade
after decade, innocent people are released from false lengthy prison
sentences imposed by bent judges with the collusion of bent lawyers in
prosecutions brought by bent cops; so common is this practice in these
islands that we dare not fully consider its ramifications. Month after
month, year after year, decade after decade pompous home secretaries
mouth this litany, best police force in the world, thin blue line; yet,
Fit Somebody Up was and remains Old Bill's career response to any crime. No matter how horrifying his behaviour he is never held to account, we
do not even draw the line at legalised police homicide on the street. Commander Cressida Dick* applauded and promoted for her incompetence in
authorising the death of a young, harmless Brazilian, her boss, Blair,
immediately slandering the boy, before the eight bullets in his head
were even cold. Dick has since mouthed-off that others may face the
same fate as de Menezes*, in the interests of public safety, of course.
Today, the intolerably stupid Alan Johnson applauds Old Bill for his
bent incompetence, urging that he takes to himself, doubtless via ACPO
Ltd, complete power over our lives. I would not dream of telling the
police how to describe their behaviour, says this exemplar of
over-promoted, career toadyism, as though democratic control of the cops
was an alien concept.
Having their more recent origins
in the bent, brutal, sectarian policing of the Royal Ulster Constabulary B Specials the
Ulster Troubles brought Terror's High Waters to the cities of mainland
UK.
The human and financial costs have been incalculable and the
eventual accommodations made in McGuinnessville are sorry enough to
shame Chamberlain and yet Blair, vile, shabby and cheesy, co-author and
legitimiser of Shock and Awe is hailed in the Councils of Power as
Can-Do man, Peacebringer and McGuinness's hard faced loverboys export
their own conflict resolution skills, globally. A move, forty years
ago, by the UK Government, towards the disbandment of the B Specials
and the introduction of one-man, one-vote democracy would have
short-circuited the whole ghastly business and left McGuinness and
Paisley and the rest as the mere witless hoodlums they are, rather than
as joint prime ministers, their henchmen operating proxy protection
rackets in the shadows, wee bit a torture now and again, keeps the boys
in line, so it does. The minds which devised this Ulster Solution now
address the matter of unrest on the English street.
Uncle
Sam's gobby, truculent generals, heedless of Ho Chi Min and General
Jiap, soundbite of forty years war, a hundred, whatever it takes and
his verbally flatulent, Sunday School teacher president blethers
endlessly as though he was a travelling salesman, extolling a product,
so brilliant and all-purpose that you will never need another Miracle,
but which never arrives; the worthless flunky, Obama, as in thrall to
WarCorp as any previous gabshiting president, War as Peace being the
only Principle these bloodsuckers understand, as banal as the pap and
bloody stupidity of The PizzaHouseOfBlood's* trickle-up Wealth Creation
philosophy, First Let's Minimise The Tax That Rich People Pay, Three
Cheers For The Rich And The Crumbs From Their Table. In our failure to
condemn the Iraq invasion lie the seeds of our oppression, doesn't
matter if it's frowning Gordon Snot reiterating his manifest genius, or
fiercely scowling David Thing, both applauded the criminal Blair to the
Rafters, both promise to punish us for their collective failure while
fuckwits without a shred of intelligence, bleat that one is superior to
the other.
*Following a misidentification of Menezes, a blameless, but Brazilian, young man on a train on his way to work, two police officers fired a total of eleven shots according to
the number of empty shell casings found on the floor of the train
afterwards. Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at close range and died at the scene. An eyewitness later said that the eleven shots were fired over a thirty-second period, at three-second intervals.
* Pizza House of Blood = the blog, order-order
Do the drunken thoughts bear
sober scrutiny, that's the thing, mine seldom do, lyrical and
adventurous though they may be? In fact, I try not to do mainline
thinking on booze; poetry's alright and ranting; some of my bits might
have a brandy or two inside them, once started, or a couple of tramadol
but that's generally it, the vast majority are written stone cold
sober, intoxicated only by momentum. I think the time for
pharmaceutically- and booze- fuelled visions went out with
Bob Dylan.
..................................................................................
mr ishmael's essay, Home Thoughts from Abroad, was drafted on 26/10/2009. His mainline, stone cold sober thinking, has astonishing relevance to today's street policing. Lookin' like a prescient angel again, mr ishmael.
By the way, did you see the American Embassy in London? It has a moat, FFS. Thinking ahead. Defensible. Good sight-lines for shooting.
We'll finish with an Evensong from Richard Durrant, who has reached Inverness in his imaginary Midsummer Tour.Again, it takes a while to load - but stay with it - he's worth listening to.
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| Inverness - a sparkling, faery city on the river Ness |
50 comments:
Thank you Mrs I. Beautiful pictures and good to see one of Harris. I think somewhere in the past we may have discussed to notion of Orkney becoming independent and claiming its oil rights? The unspeakable Cressida Dick - what can one say?
I think that back in the day Cressida was the original source of a now common theme. Interrogating the returned Robocop, she enquires:
"But why did you shoot him eight times?"
"Ran out of ammo, ma'am."
Thank you, mr mike, glad you liked the pictures. Harris is my good companion and he's going strong although he's eight years old now and has a bit of white in his moustache.
Orkney is the wealthiest of the Scottish Local Authorities, her oil reserves being prudently managed and invested in renewable energies: tidal, wind, solar. I believe the High Heejuns in the Council wouldn't be averse to Norway having us back again. We always return a Liberal Democrat and Alistair Carmichael has had the gig since the 2001 election. All this makes the SNP very cross with us and they have refused to introduce to Orkney the Road Equivalent Tariff (introduced to other island groups in 2008 to make ferry travel cost equivalent to road travel per mile).
So, messrs mike and mongoose, not comforted by the thought that Cressida has in in her hands the policing of London during this summer of riots and protests? Not happy with her record for swift and firm decision-making?
And another thing, it is not for me to comment on the daftness of the young. Youngsters are meant to be daft and one is a long time old and sensible. If they want to stand on the edge of Bristol dock rolling a large piece of metal towards the water while holding ropes and squirming about in front and around the beast that is entirely their business. Covid19 will not be the highest of the dangers these eegits will face. Charlie Darwin will carry many of those folk off before their time.
Cressida Dick. Well, you wouldn't have to be Freud to figure out that she is over compensating for that name. The mind runs riot over what must have been going on when she was in the junior ranks. So, to get where she is, she wouldn't have thought twice about giving the kill order on an innocent Brazilian. And the robocops knowing her reputation would have thought about promotion first and foremost when putting in the kill shots. We can only hope that hell truly exists and Satan is waiting to embrace her.
I think, years ago we were talking about Gnasher or Alec MacMugabe getting independence for Scotland and saying to Mr Ishmael; tell the skirt wearing bailiffs to bugger off from your Orcadian fastness and run up the Norwegian flag. Sauce for the goose, etc. I live in bloody Devon and I`m thinking about doing it, if it`ll get me away from this shower running things down here.
Certainly worth drifting further away from the mothership, Mrs I. There is nothing to be told for our comfort in the land of Dame Dick. I think we are past the tipping point.
The mongoslings are nice people - woke but sensible and open to the odd fact or interesting bit of data. Which ethnicity alone in the UK, children, suffers a greater proportion of deaths in police custody that its proportion of the detained population? White people. It means nought except that it is to be rejoiced that Robocop is a pretty much an equal opportunity killer.
But still they were astonished. In this otherwise rather benign society Wikipedia tells me that in the last year for which they have data, the police in the UK killed but three people. That's quite good. Almost daycent, so it is, or at least so I thought. And the we find that another 160-odd were dieded in custody. One every other day.
Here I am, been busy with the garden and stuff, but back now. Oh, mr mongoose, the mower is back from its service, had its filters and spark plugs and oil changed, belts tightened, blades sharpened - so no excuse now!
I'm sure the mongoslings are nice people with a dad like you - did you tell them the other part of that statistic about white deaths in police custody that seems so anomalous - namely that white people as a proportion of the detained population are not representative of the proportion of white people in the general population. Black people are more likely to be stopped, arrested, detained, charged and sentenced to imprisonment than white people. Every stage in the criminal justice journey has favoured white people and has correspondingly disadvantaged black people. So, from that, you can assume that the white people who are in cells are likely to have particularly provoked Robocop. And the other thing you can deduce - but I'm not a statistician - failed O level maths, me, is that percentages and proportions get a bit dodgy when dealing with small numbers. So, if you have ten white people in cells and 5 of them die, then that's 50%. Doesn't mean that Robocop is an equal opportunity killer. Just that you need to correct for the relative population sizes that you are working with.
The photos of the young people taking direct action against the statue of the slave trader were quite stirring, weren't they, and not a little reminiscent of fundamentalist Islam - and showed some bravery - facing off abainst Covid-19, the perils of having a large lump of metal rolling on one, fetching up in the harbour, drawing down the wrath of Robocop.... and we look to our young for ideals, passion and energy. You may deplore direct action - and, when it gets right down to it, I probably do - too mature, too comfortable, to put my money where my mouth is and getting out on the streets in protest is bloody dangerous - I've seen streets smeared with blood. But it has brought the debate right into every sitting room - what is our society doing, when it condones statues of men who we should be deploring? Pretty Patel said that this lawlessness is disgraceful. I'll tell you what is disgraceful - honouring the life of someone who grew very wealthy indeed by buying and selling other human beings - other human beings. That's right, other human beings. Never mind putting up little explanatory interpretation notices, historically contextualising these actions. Never mind artistic merit. If there is any artistic merit in these effigies, which I doubt, haul the effigies off to some dark museum basement for the scholars of the future to tut-tut over. Don't leave them out on their plinths, where familiarity breeds indifference to the atrocities these effigies commemmorate. Revisionism? Okay, maybe we are getting wiser and we are embarassed and ashamed. That's fine. Are there any statues of Hitler, by the way?
Take them all down by all means (if only to stop the BBC repeatedly referring to "statues of slave-traders", as though that's why they were celebrated in the first place) but please leave the plinths and alcoves empty unless work as good as sculpture by Jacob Epstein or Elisabeth Frink is found to fill the gaps - if it's wall-to-wall Gormley or the likes of Maggi Hambling's Oscar Wilde, my vote goes to Empty Space very time.
v./
With respect, mrs i, and I have never failed a maths anything, I merely present you with three bits of tatty data:
a) last year available 3 people killed by police officers in the uk,
b) last year available 160-odd people died in uk police custody,
c) same year as b, if x% of said detained persons share an ethnicity, only one ethnicity has a %age of deaths in custody greater than x.
All else is commentary.
My comment was that the mongoslings were surprised to find which of the ethnicities it was. If you asked a hundred people... That would be worth doing. Ask a hundred TV presenters while you're at it. Ask Joe Biden, in whose interest the current violence occurs, the blood-soaked bastard. Protest? It's not a protest - it's a TV show!
NB If you think about it - whites being in a large majority - if they are over-represented, it is almost certain that the others must be under-represented.
Evensong for Priti Patel.
With you on this, mr verge, some of these plinths could display some fine work instead of these dead white males. I'd add Barbara Hepworth to your tally.
Up near my end of the world, down the road in Golspie, controversy has raged since the 1990s with various attempts to demolish and vandalise a particularly controversial Victorian statue. The statue depicts George Granville Leveson-Gower, the first Duke of Sutherland, and a landowner who was responsible for the most notorious of the Highland Clearances in the 19th century. The sculpture was erected at the summit of Beinn a’ Bhragaigh near Golspie in 1837, following the Duke’s death in 1833, by "a mourning and grateful tenantry" to "a judicious, kind and liberal landlord". It is an extravagant tribute to a man who valued profit more than the lives of his tenants. The monument is made up of a 76 foot high pedestal, and a 24 foot high statue of the Duke of Sutherland. It is so tall that it can be seen from several miles away. Attempts have been made to blow it up, to undermine it - and, in 2010, the word "monster" was sprayed on it in green paint.
Sorry, mr mongoose, I'll bow to your better understanding, and admit that I must sit at the back of the class. Told you I didna get me maths o level, so I'll shut up.
Thank you for that, mr anonymous, for an Evensong link to Bob Dylan performing "Only A Pawn In Their Game" at March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963 - an impossibly young Bob Dylan, and equally almost impossible to understand the lyrics, so here's an extract:
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
Sorry, mrs i, that was me "anonymous" linking the Bob gig. The point of which was to show the video. Bob sang his rather fine and somewhat arch song but the black people in the audience looked to me as if they were unmoved, as if they thought he didn't really understand. ANd he probably didn't, although he meant well and was also singing a song too much for a street protest, which he has been doing all his life btw. And then Bob was ushered offstage like a nobody and we moved on to the next political event of the day.
We should all of us resist being just pawns in the limp mob game. Let us use our brains such as they are given to us each, and sift the evidence as closely as we are blessed able, and then speak the untwittered truth so as to draw and encourage outcomes ever more closely towards our liberal, generous desires. We here in ruin's lens share these thoughts. I know that we do.
A message of hope from the bush:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/this-is-our-family-mountain-how-one-bushman-found-william-callaghan-20200610-p551bv.html
I thought it might have been you, mr mongoose, as our house Dylan Scholar, but I didn't want to presume. Yes, all those things you just said.
mr mike, how very nice that the little boy survived and was found, thanks for giving us an optimistic moment.
Mr Mongoose, I share the thoughts but I have no hope, at least not for any foreseeable future. We have become utterly degraded and we have lost our minds and souls. There is a monstrous enemy abroad which I find very difficult to define but it has found its moment. Were I still a religious man it might be easier to give it a name and I might be praying for deliverance. I don't expect liberalism to prove our salvation.
Mr BB: liberalism is at the root of the problem (and its twin globalism). Once a society loses its identity it loses its purpose. There are many contributing factors (at home and abroad) that contribute and are different facets of the same thing: unfettered immigration, the myth of multiculturalism, the dumbing down of education, femisism, political correctness, the breakdown of institutions, the demise of religion....I could go on. A mixture of causes and effects, but the end result is the destruction of a cohesive society which turns on itself. The end of the rule of law, the breakdown of Government, and every man for himself. Look across the Atlantic to where you are heading.
The damned internet, gentlemen, is also a player. What did they say iin the days of old - "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on"? Well, now we see where that gets us.
And so poor old JK Rowling finds herself cancelled for the absurdity called transphobia, and the story has flown regardless of what she actually said - which I will not paraphrase here but was about the reality of the binary of humanity, that sex isn't a spectrum.
My thoughts, not hers: 99.98% of the world has the bits to make either sperm or eggs. Whether those bits work or do not or will work one day or used to work once is irrelevant. It's the inventory of bits which is binary. There is no spectrum - they are either-or, men or women. (What these people think they are in their heads and who they want to shag is also irrelevant.) 0.02% of the world - 2 in every 10,000 are intersex and have non-standard inventories of, it is true, various manifestations. But that isn't a spectrum. It's two great piles, one of what we used to call men and the other of what they used to call women, and a few intersex folk - just as deserving of our respect and politeness as every other of our fellow human beings. But apparently one can no longer say this. It has been decreed sin, it is heresy. It is religion that they are about.
Now these are the numbers and the above is the truth. And there are many examples of such that are no longer sayable. The British Empire, for instance, through its engine the Royal Navy was the power that almost single-handedly eradicated slavery in the early nineteenth century, and indeed waged war upon many of those who would not give it up. Lincoln then put the tin hat on it. And if the empire was so bad, why do so many of the countries once part of it still practice the laws and customes that the British established there?
We have unfettered deceit - some deliberate and some just stupidity - and rewarded ignorance and we allow it to overpower reason and the truth. What would Orwell have made of Twitter, eh?
All this sex spectrum stuff, Mr mongoose, is (IMHO) because ugly people cannot accept the fact they are not sexually attractive.
And now the poor woman has to publicise her marital past so that she can rejoin society as a victim. It is too disgusting for words.
Indeed Mr mongoose. Being a victim is now the new black. Surely we are very near the end point?
It gets better - the new, prevailing virtue-signalling ethos replaces gratitude with grievance: a young author tops the charts. She thinks this is appalling, and a terrible indictment of the publishing industry. Honest, not invent:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52993678
v./
Some good stuff here, chaps, chapesses and everybody else.
mr bb, are things really any worse than before-before, or do we just know about them now, thanks to social media, mass communication, mass literacy, every person a war photographer, uploading to Youtube and Facebook? And aren't those things good things? The Devil that is abroad is the human race, in all its diverse, faceted, glorious and inglorious duality - capable of soaring art, music, architecture but also of Guantanamo, Auschwitz, the Inquisition.
Do not despair - one of the thieves was saved
Do not presume - one of the thieves was damned.
mr mike, your litany of causes and effects, leading to the destruction of a cohesive society turning on itself - that is one conclusion and very well argued and may well be absolutley correct. I have to disagree with you, of course - not in your masterly identification of facets of ruin, but in the unspoken assumption that this is a bad thing. Was it a cohesive society, and when was that? War, famine, pestilence, poverty, ignorance, the rule of a privileged elite at the expense of the majority of the population, priests and royalty living off the labour of the poor and telling them they would have their reward in heaven as long as they shut up and got on with the hard work and short commons, religious persecution unto death... and on and on.
Sitting here on top of the year of Ruin that is 2020, it is easy to don the old rose-tinted specatcles of nostalgia and look back on every decade since the end of the Second World War as being superior. For sure, Britain achieved amazing things, having won the War but lost the Peace. Health care free at the point of use. Universal Education resulting in almost universal literacy for the first time ever. Massive increase in house building by local authorities and speccy builders, resulting in the decanting of the popuation from the slums and prefabs. An income for those unable to work in consequence of illness, disability or unemploynment. Enough food. Free contraception and free abortion, thus freeing the people from the exhaustion and poverty of continuous child-bearing and the nation from over population. The work houses transformed into care facilities for the physically and learning disabled and the frail elderly. All good stuff, albeit with some associated negative impacts, people being what they are - the breakdown of family, with responsibility for non-contributing family members being shuffled off to the state, for example.
I woud suggest that here, in the year of ruin 2020, we are not seeing the end of something, but the continuing evolution of a country making its uncomfortable and bloody way towards a society that is more egalitarian and less likely to be built on social divide and the exploitation of the majority of a controlled and economically disadvantaged population by an entitled elite.
Just a thought.
As you know, messrs mongoose and mike, mr ishmael was much exercised by these issues of changing sex, the brutality of surgery to reassign gender, and the semantic, philosophical and practical knots we tie ourselves in, having created non-sexed persons by, as he put it, cutting off a chap's meat and potatoes, turning things inside out and topping off with massive doses of hormones, and, conversely, cutting off breasts and creating ersatz male bits for transitioning women. If that's what they do. I don't know.Professor Germaine Greer was soundly trashed for saying much the things that J.K. Rowling is now being trashed for. There's some essays in the drafts about these matters, which I may dig out for a post.
Myself, I take the view that the problem arises in our society because we are too binary in the gender behaviours that we ascribe to the two different sexes. (I say two, but know that there are some babies born with incompletely developed male and female sexual organs, and that surgical intervention to establish the dominance of one sex has been routine for some considerable time). Big difference between sex and gender. Gender describes those behaviours, clothes, roles, even jobs, expected of each sex. Person measures themselves against a male or female stereotype, sees that this is not how they are, and concludes they are a woman in a man's body or vice versa and some surgeon had better sort it out, quick. Whereas, more gender fluidity - which is evolving in response to pressures - particularly in feminist thought and masculinities theorists, would allow individuals to identify with a spectrum of male or female behaviours and save them the agony of brutal surgery, unsatisfactory post-operative bodies and a lot of mental distress.
And, mr mike, ugly/handsome/pretty/sex appeal - I don't think those are fixed attributes, either.
Thanks for the link, mr verge. Here's a quote from the article:
"Fellow author Dorothy Koomson this week posted an open letter to the publishing industry, in which she called it an "extremely damaging" environment for black authors."Black writers do not want special consideration, we do not want special treatment," she wrote."We want a level playing field, an equality of opportunity, and the chance to write books and explore as many subjects and genres as our white counterparts.""
As far as I understand it, the publishing industry is a crock of shit, and white writers also can paper their walls with rejection slips. Do you know that Punch magazine? They rejected mr ishmael.
Mrs I: I accept your reproach. I'm of an age, for good or bad, when things were indeed binary. Black or white, and any suggestion of grey was a reflection of poor vision. Now we live in a more nuanced world. My view is that the nuances are largely a chimera, and the proof of the pudding is that the world is now fucked.
Well, Punch's loss was our gain, I reckon. Stupid bastards - hope Judy dishes out a good smack in the chops, followed by a protracted rub-down with a house-brick.
v./
“the publishing industry is a crock of shit,” I can agree with that. Like the music industry and film
I got a gift of a novel by a new young author (Female.. I don’t know if authoress is allowed anymore)
Consigned to the bin after the first page…utter shite.
It was so bad that I went to Amazon to read the reviews for a laugh. And laugh I did. The 5 star reviews are so obviously planted by the publisher.
It got good reviews on Goodreads as well. Everything that is on media and up front and forward is promoted.
Reviewers of films, books and music.
I believe the discussion forums in IMDB were removed because too many ordinary folks were opining too truthfully.
The riots are promoted as protests but promoted all the same. They can’t be organic. All those SJW’s possieing up and taking to the streets en masse? Pull the other one.
There are legions of people with nothing to do and no sense of worth and their grievances, imaginary or otherwise, are promoted by media and mobilised by 5th columnists.
I enjoy your writing Mrs Ish and the contributions by chaps and chapesses here.
Sometime the sanity is overwhelming.
You'll get no argument from me on any of that, mrs i, but the prohibition of the simple truth of the binary nature of the human form is now all but complete, and only because dim-witted or otherwise agenda-driven people conflate it with sexuality and/or the psychology of gender. About which I will only say that a human being should be allowed to identify as whatever strikes its fancy, and endeavour to shag or not to shag likewise, wearing whatever togs and calling itself by whatever terms meet with its favour. But that there is small 0.018% of folk who do not have just one of the two standard issue sets of naughty bits should not demand that JK Rowling is not allowed to say that "woman" is a real term that means something singular, definable and understood. Psycho-sexual and identity spectra there are but the notion of a physical spectrum that everyone inhabits is simply false, and saying so isn't being mean or dismissive of anybody or anything.
And on the other matter, why should I apologise to anybody about anything that happened 150 years before I was born, and while, it should be added, the Brits were casually, though probably through carelessness rather than design, starving my white and apparently privileged ancestors? WTF? As the children say.
I wanna be a Pirate, always have, ever since watching Captain Pugwash when I was a child - would they allow that children’s show now?
I want rNHS to pluck out one eye for an eyepatch, I want rNHS to cut off one hand and install a hook, an chop off one leg an fit an NHS approved prosthetic wooden peg. Will they pander to my minority view? Will they fuck, an rightly so, should section me and throw away the key, so they should.
LGBTers can call themselves and pronounce themselves whatever they want but don’t complain if I laugh or take the piss and certainly don’t make it a breach of the law to do so.
Oh, and all lives matter, equally. Well perhaps there could be an exception for the Hermans an maybe the French.
mr inmate, there is a thing,a psychological affliction known as “Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” or BIID. The condition causes otherwise healthy people to view one or more of their own limbs as a foreign object, and is often accompanied by the urge to amputate these limbs in order to feel “whole.” People with BIID often intentionally harm themselves out of the desire to lose unwanted arms and legs. Occasionally, a doctor is prepared to perform the amputation.
Here's a link to a 2012 article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2012/may/30/1
and another one to a 2017 article:
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/08/02/lose-a-leg-find-yourself
So, maybe the NHS wouldn't fuck you off - now there's a name for it. Now it is a thing. A psychological affliction thing, to be cured by radical surgery.
Sorry, mr mike, was I lecturing again? No reproach, just a different point of view, or POV as the young people say.
Thank you, mr verge. Swift rub downs with half bricks all round.
So, in the middle of a viral pandemic, the economy cold soaked, public debt and dole queues rising, services and education fucked, society fragmented, Christ knows how many cancer sufferers will die in agony because of postponed treatment yet the most important thing is to topple the statues of some blokes engaged in historic evils ? Yet not so historic because if the bedwetters clocked on to the website of Wilberforce`s Anti Slavery Society (it still exists) they`ll see BAME lives still don`t matter; very often to BAME exploiters.
As Mr Mongoose says, the Royal Navy anti slavery patrols off west and east Africa in the nineteenth century did more to to end slavery than anything else. Thousands of British matelots died, mostly of disease but some in hand to hand combat with the slavers.
Thank you so very much, mr shoulders. I'm pleased you enjoy my writing - but I'm really just continuing to provide a cybercorner for like-minded folk to hang out together and chew over the chronicles of ruin - just as mr ishmael wanted. I'm afraid I am wholly unable to channel the sustained tirades of scatological righteous indignation and invective of mr ishmael - no sucking on the cheesy knobs of the unrighteous and ungodly, I fear. But, whenever two or three are gathered here in ishmaelia, when we don't know what to do, we can come here, sit down, have a chat, and raise a glass to mr ishmael, the only true and perfect satirist.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Really? Goodreads is fixed? Nooooooo......
What about Rotten Tomatoes?
Ah, mr mongoose, my dear, I am really seduced by your argument that "a human being should be allowed to identify as whatever strikes its fancy, and endeavour to shag or not to shag likewise, wearing whatever togs and calling itself by whatever terms meet with its favour."
Togs? Amazon sells items designed for "cosplay". I had to look it up on google. It is a contraction of "costume" and "play", originating from the costumes fans wear to attend Comicon - itself a contraction of "comic convention", where you might meet a host of invented and beautiful characters, which, of course, inevitably transposed into couple intimacy "togs".
And I am reminded that Sir John Betjeman, in later life, when asked if he had any regrets in life, his response was frank: "Yes. Not enough sex." which may have been a surprise to his wife, his mistress and his lover, with whom he maintained intimate and simultaneous relations. But there we go - poets, eh? What are they like?
However, while accepting that all this life-affirming frivolity is a great good, and just the thing to divert from Ruin (Sex and Death, always sells) I do find myself stepping back from mr mongoose's liberal stance.
Because the sexual impulse is also dark, devouring, addictive and escalating. Because the degradation, mutilation, humiliation and murder of the submissive partner - not necessarily, but usually, female, is a constant in "literature", crime fiction, film, TV.
Because Hollywood's film output has two strands - the "Mainstream" and "Porn" and they both do actually award themselves red carpets, honours and statues and it is all about profit. And where does one end and the other begin? (Grooming of the nation)
Because the young and vulnerable are traded, multiply abused and irreparably damaged - you do know that you can order, for a price, particular perversions to be perpetrated, live, on a young child as you watch on your laptop (gosh, the internet is a marvellous thing). One enlivening film title was "hear her scream as grandad shoots his load".
Well, decent family blog, this. Vahl-ewes, and all that.
Actually, although, after the above, it might not sound that way, I'm all for mr mongoose's statement, with which I opened this rant, but I would like to add, "between consenting adult human beings".
Okay. Shut up now.
Sorry, me again. Didn't notice mr yardarm sneak in when I was busy ranting. Sound stuff, sir. All that he said and more. And if I start, I'd weep an ocean of tears.
Don't forget it's fun - heart starts pumpin' - blood banging in your veins - All that tipping statues into rivers, throwing stuff, letting fireworks off at the cops, chanting, solidarity - of course its fun - smell the adrenalin an' the testosterone in the mornin'....
One for the archives: rioter attacked by statue.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/activist-horribly-injured-when-confederate-statue-crushes-him-after-mob-rushes-pull-it
Exactly, mrs i, edit accepted, and just what poor JK said a few weeks ago that got her added to the "list of things to be torn down when the opportunity arises".
There is so much in your posts, and the comments, to think about, and so many welcome reminders of the life and work of Ruin’s most perceptive chronicler. I can almost never think of anything to add, mrs ishmael, but I always read everything here and look forward to more.
Thanks, mr mike - dangerous fun:
"the crowd begins to cheer the moment one of the statues on the monument crashes down, but horror ensues as soon as it's realized a man is underneath.
The shocking video shows a man - apparently unaware the large, likely many hundreds of pounds statue was going to be pulled down in that moment - get struck squarely on the head by the massive falling object. The chaos of the scene also makes it clear there was zero coordination or organization obviously given the mob frenzy, and highly dangerous setting."
Thanks, mr mongoose, my dear. Am I forgiven for ranting?
Oh, mrs narcolept, my dear, welcome back, welcome back, old friend of the family, so good to hear your voice; mr ishmael would be delighted to know that you are still here on cyber street. Gosh, it's nice to have a girl to hang out with. You don't have to think of anything to add, we're all just burbling away, pour yourself a chardonnay and join in the non-sense.
I noticed no ranting save my own, mrs i.
Rotten Tomatoes is front and centre on google so I am going to assume that, being a promoted site, they have to make their money by promoting their sponsors product.
That’s just my cynical take on it. Otherwise how would such a poorly written novel get past the publishers.
As far as I’m concerned anyone who can get published who does not have the talent is “connect” shall we say. Or the publishers, music industry included, can see some mileage in the product.
Reviews on the interweb are just a means of advertising.
Really? Goodreads is fixed? Nooooooo......
What about Rotten Tomatoes?
You are, of course, entirely correct, mr shoulders. It is all product - tin of baked beans/blockbuster novel/pair of jeans/latest film.
All are marketed in the same way - adverts/product placement/reviews.
Consumerisme totalares as mr ishmael might have said.
Thanks for buying our product. Would you take 2 minutes to rate your experience? Woud you give us a totally honest review in exchange for a free review copy of this fine product?
*****
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