For Discrimination

Some time ago, in the context of removing all religious conscience from a pluralist society, a government minister wrote that you could "either be for discrimination or against it". Well now we know. They are for it. Group rights give no regard for any individual; they judge them wholly on their membership of a group. Accordingly, in the tiny, bigoted minds of Harriet Harman, etc, it is perfectly ok to deprive a white man of a job on the basis of his skin & bollocks: but it would be wholly wrong to apply the same logic to anyone else. Think about what this means: it doesn't matter who you are, what you have struggled through, how hard you have worked: if you are white, and male, in the name of social justice it can be right to deprive you of a job solely on the basis of the colour of your knackersack. Group rights don't care about you: they care about what they think you represent: and if you appear to represent something they don't much like, you can be fucked, fucked regally and legally up the arse without any consent at all. It matters nothing at all that you may have faced a life of hardship, because of what you are, you cannot have done, and you are privileged, and to strike a blow against your kind, you must suffer.

This is compassion. This is tolerance. This is liberalism.

Let's repeat that, for the hard of thinking: it is ok to discriminate against someone on the basis of skin colour and gender.

If they have the wrong skin colour and gender,that is.

Longest Day

Merry Fucking Christmas.

For Matt Out of An Insomniac

There are strong strains of Logopolis to tonight's Who.

The stars are going out.

The Cloister Bell (which, I am sure, is the *EXACT SAME* sound effect as used in 1981).

There is work with mirror sort of things (though the strongest resemblance here is to Kinda, obviously).

Though also this looks a bit like Planet of the Spiders.

Donna really isn't that different from Tegan.

References to telescopes.



um...alright, there's not that much. But it did strike me. And I guess they just sampled the original effect.

But it was the original effect from 1981. Did the sound effect travel in time I wonder?

But with all the Bad Wolf crap it means we won't see the Monitor resurrected, or Anthony Ainley given a posthumous role.

Never mind. Just the Daleks again then.


Fuck me if you'd've said this in 1990 I'd've bitten your hands off and possibly your arms as well.

In them days Doctor Who was a partial defence against the collapsing social and economic world around us.

Now...

Oh.

My Four Leafed Clover - Redux

Bloody hell I don't even know how to spell this: I thought I could do it on google hits: "four leafed" gives 49000 hits, "four leaved" 36000 so I thought I'd take the majority view, being a freedom loving democrat.

My reader will by now be accustomed to reading no updates of TTD at this stage of the week - too busy is the pathetic excuse. However today is an exception - for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment.

So I thought I'd post on one of my favourite subjects: the psychology of embarrassment. In particular how it can be desired as a pathway to annihilation and (maybe) therefore renewal.

I've made all this up, btw. This is more homespun than a jumper your nan made for you when you were two and were too embarrassed to wear it even at that age.

So. It is possible to desire, even actively plot, a situation wherein you are humiliated, with the full knowledge of this outcome, and still to desire it. The reason is this. Let us assume there is issue x, about which you are to embarrass yourself. Issue x needs to be plausible, even real, but not, on the face of it, desperately important. However, there is also issue y, which really is bugging you, and which is probably only tangentially related to issue x, such as occurring in the same place of work (to take a random example).

Issue x can be used to bring issue y to a head, by facilitating a total humiliation related only to issue x (on the face of it) - thus allowing issue y to be solved without its own humiliations, though admittedly using the humiliations of issue x. But it might just be that x allows you a more noble, or pure, solution than tackling the, say, political issues of y.

Choose your humiliations, is my advice, I suppose: choose them well and decide how you wish to be remembered.

Fucking Bloody Mess

Or is it Bloody Fucking Mess? I can't remember: either way it's supposed to be a quote from some Sex Pistols song or other.

Anyhoo.

You know you are in real, serious, cultural trouble, when your most creative and subversive tv programme in a tv-saturated society (ie Doctor Who, in the UK), deliberately, and carefully, advocates rule by elite and slags off democracy as rule by ignorant bleached-blond, jewellery-wearing, heterosexual mob. Cleverly, one character even referred to the alien as an "immigrant". Oh how I bet they laughed in Hampstead, thinking of us racist cunts out here in the styx. Oh how we would of applauded her simplistic specisicissticisismthingy, how we would of loved to see all things we don't understand destroyed. After all, we routinely hound out anyone of different colour.*

Because that's how we are, see. Out here. In the country. We hate. That's all we do. You people in the city, oh how clever you are, how learned, how non-ignorant.

You can almost sense the fear in their breath: if those scumbags, the people, fuck me even Daily Mail readers...if they ever got to choose, if they were ever allowed a say....Jeeezus....



*It's true. We do.

An Assumption

Assuming that David Davis' extraordinary resignation and intention to fight a bye-election on the subject of 42 days is motivated solely by his stated disgust at the erosion of liberties in this country - he is a great man! Of course you can never be certain of anyone's motivations, especially in politics, and DD is somewhat to the right of Cameron: but the things he listed in his speech, surveillance, extreme powers given to local councils for minor offences, and the erosion of justice in this country will have found the support of many many people, left and right. He'll have lost some of the left with his mention of hate crime laws, but he keeps mine.

The question is: can he bounce the country into the debate on privacy and liberty that we so desperately need? Or will he just become part of another lot of cynical politics? Will the media -correctly, maybe - paint him as just attempting to undermine Cameron?

For the moment, I'm being naive about this because it's time I was naive about something.

Well done, sir. Good luck.


UPDATE: 1.25pm: Oh well, that didn't take long. It's not that much of a sacrifice if the Lib Dems aren't going to fight it is it? And I guess they'd already stitched up the deal. Hey ho. The debate is still essential.

The Government Is A Bunch of Cunts

I really don't think I can say any more than this.

Bad News Week Redux

God forgive the inventors and maintainers of work (see posts, passim). Still, they have little or no choice in what they do: they love it so much they can do no other than enslave everyone else.

Anyway.


I thought I would try to plagiarise a previous post by the awesome CBI. IN the original, CBI interviewed Jesus. I'm going to turn the tables somewhat. Here is the interview, keenly awaited, between God and TTD.

G: SO, TD, thanks for joining me here tonight.

TD: It's a pleasure o divine maker of all things.

G: How art thou, my son?

TD: Well, I've been better, to be honest. Firstly my love life is a shambles, very little love and no life to it: and as for work - well just go and read some of my posts.

G: I have, my son. Stella?

TD: That'd be lovely, thanks.

Stella appears on table, cold, bubbly and with a minimal head.

TD: Hey wow. This is...divine.

G: Au naturellement my son. Crisps?

TD: You read my mind.

An infinite packet of the most amazing cheese n onion appears.

G: [insouciantly waving infinitely powerful arm]. Now my son, onto more important matters. Why are you such a c***?

TD: Er...quoi?

G: You heard. My son. Can I dispense with this "my son" crap now? Tell it as it is, TD. After all, I know already.

TD: Er....I...well, you hardly need to hear it from me then do you you sadistic old bastard, er, o great one.

G: Au contraire you contemptible little shit, my son. I need more than ever to hear it from you, before you die and become a diseased part of my infinite arse.

TD: Why the ******* hell would that make any difference to you? Er...o infinite power of my power.

G: Well, look at it like this. You are a particularly unpleasant pile on the arse of the divine redeemer. If I accept you into my heaven I will be cursed with the agony of you in my eternal jacksie, for all of time and even beyond time.

TD: Oh. I always thought i was sort of special. Being a human and all that.

G: Don't make me laugh. I have wasps here with more intelligent - and humane - conversation than you.

TD: Oh.

G: So?

TD: So what?

G: Why are you such a ****?

TD: O great healer of sins, I am a **** as you so irrefutably and sinlessly put it, because I have never really been bothered to be anything else.

G: Meaning?

TD: Well, that it is easy to be an angry pisshead and a lazy old twat.

G: Good. Continue. My son.

Pint of infinite Stella appears, momentarily on the table.


TD: Well, er, I suppose that I look to be out of my head too much; I loathe and detest being...well, er...being.

G: So give me one reason not to kill you now.

TD: I'm afraid to.

G: That's not a reason.

Stella disappears. TD gets deeply, profoundly, thirsty.


TD: OK...I guess...I could...sort of...

G: Yes?

TD: whispers Love some people.

G: Such as?

TD: Names obscured on legal advice.

G: And?

TD: Futher names obscured on legal advice.

G: Better. What else?

TD: I could stop treating people like fuel for my impotent rage. I could stop whining and moaning. I could stop being tempted to support an authoritarian and hate-driven government. I could truly strike out for what I believe in. I could work for everything that is good. But...I...

G: I sense a hesitation, my son.

TD: But...

G: Yes?

TD: What would I blog about then?


God disappears in a puff of blogospheric anguish.

D Day

Yes I know.


Yes I did teach it to my pupils.


Yes they did write some *really* good stuff.


And it's Henry Allingham's birthday, the Oldest Man in Europe: he is 112 and was in the RAF in WWI.


These are, and were, *great men*, whether they wanted to be or not.



Amen to you guys, and everything you did.

Some Hopefully Reasonable News

The Third Test starts today and England go into it 1-0 up after their brilliant win at Old Trafford last week. Rather less than brilliant is the fact that this still seems a very patchy, inconsistent England side, with few real talents capable of taking a game to a top side. They got away with it last week and Strauss did play a fine innings, though whether he'll ever recapture his 2004-5 best is doubtful. I seriously doubt whether we'll see Flintoff back, ever; and I am not sure I see the point of half of England's batsmen, who have, to be fair, regained that 90s skill of "one out all out", and who now follow each other off with the same regularity as British Leyland used to.

Still. Might be fun. And no penalty shoot out.

I See Only The Basic Materials I May Use

I love borrowing post titles from top 80s tracks*; I get to mould my whinging and moaning around someone else's intelligent thoughts.

So here I am, posting as Jim Callaghan, it seems a bit weird to then launch into full rant mode; so I won't. The toad work is once again rearing its ugly head (end of half term) and this particular toad is extremely ugly, especially in the way it disposes of rival toads. In fact toads are like that. Metaphorical toads I mean, Philip Larkin type toads. Toads don't tend to brook rivals, or challenges. Toads don't appreciate being left alone: they demand attention. Indeed you might argue that the whole concept of work, far from being a way we define ourselves (Gang of Four this time), is a way we have of defixating our egos. Let me explain. You start off with self-obsessional late capitalist man (I'm assuming it's late capitalism, it's beginning to seem like it anyway). He likes the mirror and reads the Guardian with the prim seriousness of the man who knows all opposing worldviews to be not merely incorrect, but also evil. Or he reads the Mail with the insouciance of someone for whom the major story of the day is Christiano Ronaldo's impending move to Real Madrid/new contract at Man Utd. It doesn't matter. The mirror in the bathroom does matter however. So does glass generally. He moves onto blame-everyone-else therapy when he doesn't turn out to be JFK or Einstein: he blames his parents, or the colour of the sky, whatever. The key thing is his victimhood. Then everything he thinks about is in some way internal; himself, sex, his favourite football team, genetic engineering.

What better way could there be to salve this poor man's conscience and bring him out of his morass of self-indulgence than work? OMG - looking outward and putting other people first! Maybe. Responsibility, at any rate. Work forces him into a state of mind where in fact he does not matter at all.

So his life becomes one of those ghastly trick of the mind pictures where he constantly has to switch focus because he simply does not know which is real: the self-absorption, or the responsibility.

The answer of course is that neither of them is real. One is an illusion, and the other a series of pathetic power games which exist, in the main, not to put food on the plate, but to give expression to someone else's self-absorption; because all work comes down in then end to this person. However, our poor confused late-capitalist still needs to put food on his table and so he goes along with it, joins in with it, eventually becomes that person for whom this supposedly outward activity is really just another way of biting the head off the toad.

Work is the devil in the flesh, but not the iron in the soul; more like the iron in the flesh as well.



* Well duh. I've finished with Change and I'm onto Red Guitar now.

I Do Not Think Most People Would Share the View That There is Mounting Chaos

In fact, I like Jim Callaghan so much, I've even changed my name - to Jim Callaghan!

I've not done this lark before so bear with me if it goes wrong. Also beware that future name changes might take in the other forgotten PMs, Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, and possibly even our old mate Baillie Vass.

Not Playing One's Red Guitar (Redux), Or Why Do I Fail Just When I'm Needed?

What a top track this is (tsk, Red Guitar by David Sylvian).

I love the flow and inconsistency of mood, and the tacit acknowledgement of being a failure, because one is more bothered about other stuff (ie red guitars). The inability to focus, to be determined, to give, frankly, a flying fuck about things everyone else loves. Even, the recognition of emotion and love but the simultaneous distancing from it.


If you ask me, I may tell you: it's been this way for years.

I Don't Know What to Say to This

Almost more depressing is the sight of black and Asian Britons following the wind blowing the Tories to victory. Boris has recruited Afro Caribbean "leaders" who believe in physical chastisement and smart young Asians who deny the existence of racism and want an end to political correctness. The more old-fashioned Uncle Toms and their female equivalents are now expediently making themselves known to the Tories and right-wing think tanks.

Truly I don't.

Luckily, Dale does. As do many of his commenters. And, more gratifyingly, do the commenters on the original article.

Excellent Effort

I think this is a marvellous defence.

In fact I can speak from some experience on this subject, for, when I was arrested at the weekend, drunk, swearing and shouting, throwing bottles and threatening people, it was entirely because I was doing it as a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the terrible plight of those suffering alcohol addiction.

My protest did in fact garner attention from local police, local media (though they sensationalised it somewhat) and fellow sufferers, who threw bottles and engaged in sympathetic obscene shouting and what is quaintly known as "threatening behaviour". We even had a "fight" to try to show the desperate physical strains of alcohol abuse on the human body.

It was so successful I intend to repeat it this weekend!

What the Hell

Oh well, no-one really gives a toss anymore, so, again, here is the PM who mattered, or rather who didn't, which is why no-one really talks of him these days.

Good old Jim. I care, Jim. I care.

Don't Waste Your Non Tax Payer Funded Money on This Book

--From Anger to Apathy by David Garnett.


This cost me twenty fucking quid for a piece of shit that even the author admits he more or less came up with in 1980, before he'd done any fucking research. Jeesus, why do these lefty twats keep giving us the same shit, year after year, why do they pass off the same bias, the same pseudo-intellectual "theorising" as impartial history, while slagging everyone else off for bias? Why don't they ever admit any blame on the part of the left? Why are there always these little mini-histories of evil rightwingers (let me guess - in the histories of 20 years' time there'll be just the same nasty little chapters on Nadine Dorries instead of Ross McWhirter)? Why do they insist on couching blatantly partisan points in neutral-sounding terms? Do they *really* think that the public was fed up in the late 1970s because they were blinded by greed instead of loving social justice (which is never, damnit, never properly defined)? Why do these histories always tell the same stories of good, honest Labour governments brought down by shadowy media-MI5-USA led conspiracies? Why was their only fault not to be lefty enough?

Why are good, non-socialist histories of Britain so damn hard to come by?

Listen Garnett, you twat, we're not socialists and we're not deluded. We're not passive drones led by the evil Murdoch empire or the dastardly Daily Mail, we just don't like socialism and we don't fucking want it. OK? It's fascinating how much the "stupid" or "passive" public features in the narratives of the academic left. Constantly betrayed by cynical Conservatives, or self interest media, the public either act in bad faith or through ignorance. You see the problem is they've never gone for socialism. Hence they've made a massive error.

Being consumers makes us active, not passive, we LIKE having choice, it's made life a lot easier since milk had to be sold by the Milk Marketing Board; it's made people in charge of their own damn lives, whereas all you wanted was sex and abortion on demand; that was supposed to be enough to shut everyone the fuck up, wasn't it? You want us to accept the loss of electricity whenever some union or other deems it necessary, and you call that social justice?? Jesus you are either really fucking stupid or just damn dishonest.

No. The public was not fooled in the late 1970s. It was betrayed by a weak, incompetent government too close to selfish and anti-democratic unions to be able to make a difference. Historians like Garnett just don't give a toss about the majority of the population who were not members of the powerful unions and who just had to damn well do what those bastards told them...and they call it "social justice".

Fuck me. Vote Thatcher. Vote Thatcher now.

Nope. Sorry.

I was unable to work it into anything sensible so here it is:


-People hate my generation precisely because we *don't* get around; because we sit and shit ourselves around postmodern articles in the Guardian which no-one else gives a fuck about because it reminds them of when they really had to pay the bills against the shilling of lefty cunts who still say that strikes were always about social justice and anyone who didn't agree was selfish, even now, thirty years later; because we salivate and ejaculate over non-existant images that we love enough to spill our seed over while we persuade everyone else that it means nothing that we dash home from a day's being fucked at work to wank out the day over some bullshit people screaming above their tattoos how much they love (being) butt-fuck(ed) or (ing). People hate my generation because our science, our literature, our music, is obsessed with an inward movement, into our own self, our origins, the beginnings of the next lot of poor fuckers, our bodies, we love our -great, fake, gymned up - bodies and we really don't love the bodies of people who aren't right: they should never of existed and we will damn well make sure they never happen again. People hate my generation because it is shit. Because we are still 14, now, in 2008, when the youngest of us is 25; because we love to be transgressive and rebellious even though it was our parents who really did it and it was really safe for us whose parents really didn't know what the fuck to do; because we were the first to come off the pill at 14; the first to throw hissy fits when someone told us we weren't Einstein or Bobby Charlton; the first to slash each other to pieces by the hundred; the first to take toddlers by the arm and kill them; the first to tell everyone else they were utterly irrelevant; the first to wave our wallets (which had no money in them after all) in front of a starving world; the first to beat the shit out of anyone who told us we were parked wrongly or had dropped a bit of litter or could have let someone sit in our seat; the first to tell anyone, anyone at all, who crossed us for any reason, to fuck off.

People hate us because we are cunts.

And we are 1971-1984: before and after are different generations: the one that comes after is worse, a lot worse,but then, we made it: the one that comes before is a bunch of shits, to be sure; but restrained by something: a sense of purpose or permanence: a belief in...something. It really isn't a joke, those of us born in the collapse of the consensus. We really do exist; and we are still here, shadowing out the rest of our lives behind keyboards, at the bottom of a glass, beating the shit out of our children or of anyone else we don't like. Shrilly denouncing everything from ourselves to anyone who has the audacity to disagree.

Our music: it stole riffs and tunes for E-ed up nights in other people's fields: now they steal our stealings for their own ironic dance music, now they prefer the stuff we stole from to the stuff we made. And how they laugh. They laugh because they know we are dead. We had nothing to give in the first place. "Oh, I just know that something good is gonna happen" - oho, we thought that was ironic enough in 1991, when postmodern life was fucked; and we thought the xpbm version by Utah Saints would last forever, now it has itself been ironized by another version laid on top: and so we are buried, we are buried because all we did was steal. We were stupid enough to believe that grave robbing made a civilisation.

Fuck me, when we danced to all that shit, did we really know how dead all that smiley-faced crap really was? What did it have that was real, what did it do that was original? They take the piss out of us, you know - they see NO DIFFERENCE between hippies and the twats at the end of the 80s: in fact, they've more respect for hippies. They are bright kids, and they elide 20 years in a heartbeat - it really doesn't matter to them.

Many of my pupils think I was a hippy. They have no idea, nor do they care. The powercuts, the breeze blocks from motorway bridges, Challenger, the beatings, the riots, the fear of a 4 minute death: they really do not care. Nor should they.
We really are shits.

Good old Sunny Jim. You lost, uncle Jimmy, you lost. And the world changed. And it wasn't, really, Mrs Thatcher's fault. She only surfed the wave.






Actually, you know what? Fuck it, I like Jim Callaghan and I'd vote for him tomorrow. But not in 1979.


And they wonder why my hair is falling out.