First section of this installment here.
… That any of the above came as much of a surprise to Mr and Mrs G. B. Public is testimony to the sheer scale of the propaganda effort being sold to British customers as ‘News’, as it is to the sheer audacity of the Infotainment outlets packaging deliberate misinformation as ‘News’, and to the delusional willingness of millions of my fellow countrypeeps to believe whatever convenient myths they’re offered rather than credit the evidence of their own eyes, just as long as those myths comfort their nagging sensation of itchy guilt and come wrapped up in the bright colours and familiar sounds of ‘News’. Everyone already knew this and yet people still voted for them, cry the talking-heads, so by virtue Rule 538.4a of the Mini-Machiavelli 4 Modern Maestros guidebook it’s obviously not important and going on about it is just losertalk.
Which would be a good and valuable point to make, if it wasn’t a pile of disingenuous nonsense and neither good, nor valuable, or even really a point at all. Everyone didn’t ‘know’ this. Some people had been saying things like it, yes, often loudly and frequently, with tons of real-time evidence to back up their claims, but without the enormous national megaphone accorded to the architects of pro-Tory misinformation their warnings have had all the bandwidth of a fart in a bath and had been routinely dismissed as either partisan sniping or unproven conspiracy theorising, or both, and in any case definitely not the kind of opinion the forelock-tugging flagstraddlers of Lesser Brexitannia would either want or need to be exposed to. Coming from such a senior figure within the Conservative Government, a man who only a year ago we were being told was so integral to everything the Government was trying to do that he was basically the Hand to Flobalob Johnson’s flatulent King, and to paraphrase the corporate motto of the World’s Greatest Soccerball Team, ‘This Means More’.
Now, let’s be very clear here. Dominic Cummings is a genuinely nasty bastard with a Ripper’s trail of carnage soaking his ledger and, should he one day be found hanging from a pedestrian footbridge with a bound and gagged Nigel Farage stuffed up his arse, the tracks of my tears would be drier than a Martian wadi. He’s a professional liar with clear links to the murky techno-anarchist fraternity of bomb-throwing dataminers financially fluffed into being by American billionaires, Russian kleptogarchs, Australian hatevendors and various Middle-Eastern ‘interests’ with cash to stash and boycotts to swerve, his stated aim of blowing up the entire British Civil Service so that it can be replaced with a eugenically-selected caste of creative/destructive megaminds wielding dictatorial powers in order to ‘get shit done’ sounds no different to me than any other misanthropic loser’s Statement of Aims and translates easily to “In this post-Apocalyptic dystopia of my creation all of my fiery dreams of intercourse will come true!” and according to the people who track such things it was his ‘family trip’ to Barnard Castle during the first Lockdown, combined with the obvious lies he told about it and the concerted Human Shield thrown up around him by Johnson and All Tories Everywhere (oh yes, a year ago it was an unpatriotic sin to doubt the ethereal honesty of St Dominic of Cummings) that more than anything else shattered the Public’s faith in Lockdown being a “We’re all in it together” national effort.
That said, and in full knowledge that his transparently obvious motivation on Wednesday was to present himself as the only sensible guy in all of the rooms where the deaths from Covid of tens of thousands of innocent people were being dismissed as the price of doing business, and that his cosy closeness to certain Tory aspirants to Flobalob Johnson’s shaky throne (Rishi Sunak, I’m looking right at you) means that a good portion of his invective has to be seen as brush-clearing for the next round of Tory Party reconstruction, at the end of the day he was in all of those rooms and he was there as Johnson’s eyes, ears and rending jaws. When the Prime Minister’s former chief political advisor goes in front of a pair of Parliamentary committees to answer questions about the Government’s response to Covid and basically calls it a complete failure that they should all fall on their swords for…. yeah, that’s the kind of thing that gets things moving.
Will it? Ha-ha-haaaaaaaa (wipes eyes) no, no it won’t.
First, a brief shuffle backwards across the kelp-streaked stones of yesterweek to lay out where we were before Cummings began his extended roast. It was a busy time, and as usual in Lesser Brexitannia, that’s not a good thing. Following the conclusion of local and regional elections in which they deliberately equated the successes of the NHS Vaccination program with voting Tory to ‘Get
BrexitCovid Done’, the Government had ‘suddenly’ noticed that the spread of the so-called ‘Indian Variant’ of Covid (Modi-Johnston Variant sounds more apt to me) in places like Bolton and Bedford might blow a huge, gaping hole in their plans to end all Lockdown restrictions on the 21st of June.
As usual the Media did a comprehensive job of dead-batting any suggestion that Johnson’s deliberate refusal to offend Modi and/or imperil a potential UK/India Trade Deal by red-listing arrivals from India back when it might have done some good had made the spread of the M-J variant pretty much inevitable, but again as usual, the virus and its mutations do not give a monkey’s chuff how they are given time and opportunity to do what they do, they just do it. Now scientists are warning that a Third Wave of infection is already here and the Government’s obsession with repeating the deadly mistakes of last Summer, with its vast transfer of wealth and infection under the label of “Eat Out to Help Out” (Credit – Rishi “I’m only light brown” Sunak) is looking more and more strained. Those with suspicious minds are, of course, of the opinion that Flobalob is hoping that vaccination will keep the numbers of dead low enough for him to keep on lifting restrictions and benefit politically from being The Man Who Saved Our Summer. That bilious twatwaffle simply cannot learn, because he’s never had to. A lifetime of selfish entitlement and consequence-free jollygagging behind a screen of elite protection has led him to the pinnacle of political life and all the grift he can imagine. What’s to learn?
Case in point, a few weeks ago the Tories released a report from its Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that met with pretty universal mockery and bitch-slap anger from everyone with a functioning soul. The question asked was about institutional racism and its effects on Black British society, the answer its collection of British Diamonds and Silks came up with was that the former didn’t exist and the latter should stop whining about it and just accept that being a cesspit of drug use and broken homes was entirely its own fault and nothing to do with… Whipeepl? Honkoids? Crackerwhackers? Whatever Ebonics jibber-jabber ‘Those People’ have to use because they can’t hack it in proper school. To back up their ‘findings’ they relied on misquoting experts, lying about the input of stakeholders and mangling the hell out of the findings the majority of the Commission’s members thought they’d reached. Did you know that slavery in Jamaica and other British colonies in the region wasn’t so bad because it introduced those savages to western ideas that allowed them (the opportunity, which they mostly failed to grasp, natch) to make something of themselves once, y’know, the Masters had gotten all snowflakey and outgrown the need for ‘staff with benefits’? Indeed, and I am not even joking here, ‘slavery’ is such a loaded word, better to call it the “Caribbean Experience”.
Caribbean fucking Experience? Please, insert your own WTF historical analogies here. I’ve already used up ‘Auschwitz Adventure’ and ‘Wounded Knee Wonderland’, but I’m sure there’s a wide range of disbelief you can mine along the same face-palming lines.
Thing is, that was a few weeks ago, but we don’t hear bugger all about it now.
You may also have heard that the BBC was entirely responsible for driving Saint Diana of the Tilted Shoulder Simper to her untimely death by pumping her full of some exotic truth-serum and recording her blathering on about relatively unimportant topics. What were they? Betrayed by her husband? Hounded by the Media? Ostracised by the Royal Family? Never mind all that, the thing to bear in mind in all this is the fact that BBC reporter Martin Bashir forged some paperwork in order to get a meeting with Britain’s Blonde Martyr and outpitch the BBC’s rivals to an interview with her, and that’s the only reason she died, and it didn’t happen 26 years ago (because that would be a silly thing to get riled up about now, what with a pandemic and Brexit and all that), it only happened yesterday, and so the Government has no choice but to seriously consider changes to the BBC’s charter to ensure that it can’t murder any more beloved royals.
The fact that the Director General and Chairman of the BBC are Tory placemen and the Corporation has been turned into a neutered spokesgimp for Number 10’s Communications whip-snappers should make it easier for these necessary changes to take place without any unsightly verbiage about “political interference” or “hang on, wasn’t it the pro-Tory Press that was calling her a vapid slut” polluting the national airwaves. Yes, there have been suggestions that all of this is just a transparently bullshit excuse to rip the BBC apart and sell it off to the likes of Murdoch, but those journalists will soon learn that there are narratives and there are Narratives, and there will always be a need for someone to cover the weather report in Scunthorpe, pour encourages les outres.
Thing is, that was a few weeks ago, but we don’t hear bugger all about it now.
There was just a report released about Islamophobia in the Tory Party. It should have been a full-on Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation like the one that was launched into claims of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, but the not-at-all Government-controlled leadership of the EHRC decided that, since the Tories had said they’d hold their own investigation, there wasn’t any need to embarrass the good, wholesome folks of the Conservative Party by making them bathe in the same water as that awful do-gooder Jeremy Corbyn (spit). After all, there was a convenient meme out there that the very fact that the EHRC was investigating the Labour Party was damning enough to require that horrible person’s immediate resignation, so it would just be rude to expose the Tory Party to that kind of inference, I mean, how would it effect the mood at future dinner parties if you were the person who had put a friend of Orban on the same level as a lifetime campaigner against any form of racism? Terribly, that’s how! Especially if the friend of Orban had brought the right kind of wine to go with the fish course and had children in the same fee-paying school as your brats go to. Again, priorities.
A cynical person would perhaps agree with the former head of the EHRC and say that, as an institution, it is far, far too obedient to the whims of the people that oversee it, but this is Britain, and interrogating the wrong people can get you put on the non-official naughty shelf quicker than you can say “I’d like a move to regional news, please. Behind the scenes if possible, thanks”.
What did the report conclude? Well, this may astonish you, but it didn’t find the Tory Party to be institutionally Islamophobic. It said (paraphrasing) that Johnson had said and written a ton of things that ‘seemed’ Islamophobic before he became PM, but that was no reason to think that he would or should continue to spout nasty things now that he had he was PM, even though ‘some people’ might suggest that he only won the Tory Party leadership race in 2019 because he had a reputation as a racist POS. It went on to conclude that, though the Tory Party triggered every theoretical land-mine in regards to complaints about Islamophobia, how it dealt with it, recorded it, and how its Muslim members felt about all of the above, the person filing the report felt that the Tory Party had just made a few mistakes that might lead someone to believe it might be totally Islamophobic, but it wasn’t, honest.
Comparisons with the EHRC report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party should not, we’re told, be seen as a mirror image of this piss-take of a report into virulent Islamophobia amongst Tories, because that’s a violation of the Narrative, and that’s just not allowed. The fact that the Tory Party’s senior Muslim figures say it’s a blatant whitewash that will only encourage Islamophobia would be something deserving of media coverage, but as Tories they should already understand that ‘those people’ are always whining about perceived slights and are best ignored for the good of social cohesion. After all, it’s not like they’re anonymous Labour staffers with long and sordid histories of working hand in glove with the Israeli Embassy’s propaganda arm to make false accusations of anti-Semitism. Now those people, they had credibility.
And how hard would it be to endlessly fap about the likelihood of Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak (who Cummings was extra protective of in his testimony) becoming Tory Party leader and the next PM if our News Media had to acknowledge that the Tory Party membership are about as likely to elect a brown to reign over them as the GQP are to select Liz Cheney as their 2024 candidate? Heaven forfend, that way lies reality, and reality don’t get you no promotion in today’s Infotainment business.
Anyway, that was a few days ago, but we don’t hear bugger all about it now.
You see where I’m going with this? Cummings’ testimony should, in an vaguely rational world, lead to a journalistic feeding frenzy as newspapers and 24 Hour News outlets scramble to dig out the truth and expose it for their viewers to goggle over. But this is Lesser Brexitannia, and that simply isn’t how we do things over here. There’s a decent article in, of all places, the Guardian by ‘brown issues correspondent’ Nesrine Malik which lays out the problem very clearly. To paraphrase, Johnson and the Tories are getting away with everything not because they’re political geniuses or because the Public agrees with them, but because the people whose job it is to oppose them and/or tell the Public what is really going on are either complicit, cowardly or just plain old lazy, and until that changes nothing else will change, except to get worse. Again, I’m sure none of this sounds exactly foreign to you. Britain is following along the same weighted arc of madness that gave America Trump and the GQP, we’re just doing it wrapped in a Union Jack and smelling of stale tea.
I could go on [Ed – Please don’t, we have lives] but won’t [Ed – Thank you, Jeebus!] I’ve barely even mentioned Brexit but that continues to be the radioactive gift that keeps on giving. The planned Trade Deal with Australia looks set to do to British farmers what it’s already done to British fishermen, truckers and Eurovision entrants. Kids showing support for the Palestinian cause are being labelled as ‘radicalised anti-Semites’ and punished by their schools. EU visitors to the UK are being treated like criminals and thrown into detention for talking funny. The scandal over Johnson refurbishing Downing Street to look like an explosion in a stereotype factory and lying about where the money came from has been resolved by the simple expedient of Johnson appointing an underling to ‘investigate’ the issue, with said underling returning a verdict that clears Johnson of any wrongdoing on the grounds that he just assumed that he’d somehow paid the £200,000 bill that a donor picked up and didn’t think to check, like, haven’t we all done that? The Labour Party are even more useless and incompetent than they were last week.
On the plus side….. uh, it’s sunny. So there’s that.
Nah. We’re fucked. Keep on working hard to fix your democracy, Americanoids, because if you don’t, you could be like us. Only with bigger servings.
Old School
Tony Jay is a treasure.
VeniceRiley
This is a gem amongst gems.
Sunny? Yeah no. My fiance reports she practically had to swim home from work. Stay dry, Tony!
That india variant is sounding scarier by the hour.
Fraud Guy
I was wondering what a hatevendors is. Hat-even-dors? Is that a Finnish accessory to a coat hook?
Then…oh, it struck me. Nevermind.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Correct me if I’m overstepping, but isn’t this all related to the continued corporeal existence of Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Rebekah Mercer and Robert Mercer?
Feed them to a bunch of pigs like written off “Deadwood” extras, and not only is a problem eliminated, but the other billionaires fall in line pretty quick.
smith
I’d be happy to see a semi-regular Tony Jay Letter from Brexitania here al a Alistair Cook’s Letter from America.
Tony Jay
@Old School:
I just hate the right people. They make it easy and I let them.
Omnes Omnibus
One wonders if the Tories have done away with editors.
VeniceRiley
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ve been wishing for this very thing.
Villago Delenda Est
“Modi-Johnston Variant”.
I like that!
You mentioned Bolton, Tony Jay. How about Notlob?
Villago Delenda Est
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: My only objection to this is the discarding of the tradition of having a large rally at the Place de la Concorde.
tokyokie
I thought the Caribbean Experience was a ride at DisneyWorld tied to that string of Johnny Depp pirate movies.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
II have no idea who Cummings is. but I do like the cut of Tony’s jibberish
How about “kidnapping, torture rape, wage theft and murder”? For those who don’t get the reference, the Caribbean Sugar plantations were much more deadly than the old South cotton plantations.
Tony Jay
@VeniceRiley:
It was sunny when I wrote it, honest. Well, I think it was sunny. I’d been drinking and the windows were closed and I couldn’t smell smoke, soooooo, best guess.
Oh, and we can’t call it the ‘India Variant’ anymore, because that might offend Modi and that will not do. So they’re going with Greek letters instead. We’re already up to Delta, which presents an obvious problem. To paraphrase the X-Men’s monocular leader, this assumes that there will only be 24 variants. Given this Government’s slackluster performance, that’s optimistic!
Tony Jay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I’m trying to think of a problem with this scenario and…. no, it’s solid.
Make it so, please.
Fair Economist
Did they actually call slavery the “Caribbean Experience”?
catclub
do Eurovisiion entrants really deserve fair trade agreements? Wouldn’t it be better to keep them out?
Tony Jay
@Villago Delenda Est:
Oh, everything’s great there! It’s about a year and a half until the virus retreats back up a sick bat’s rectum, people are looking forward to their friends and loved ones coming back to life, and eventually Yam Asareht will replace roly-poly gloomster Notsnhoj Peffefp Ed Sirob Aednasxela as Prime Minister and she’ll start rebuilding the NHS and dismantling the nasty Immigration barriers until handing over to Noremac Divad so he can put a bullet in the head of Brexit.
Love to be there.
Assuming that was a Red Dwarf reference. If not…. ohhhhhhhh, awkward.
Tony Jay
@Fair Economist:
That was the suggested descriptive term to stop people (you know, ‘those people’) obsessing too much about who enslaved who and whatnot so they can instead concentrate on climbing out of the gutter their whiny fixation on past contretemps has condemned them to.
It didn’t go over well.
Ruckus
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Those you listed certainly aren’t helping anyone but themselves, but it looks like they have more than a couple of supporters/helpers.
Baud
I see a lawsuit coming from Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
I do like your style…..
catclub
whom
omit an object pronoun and you are dead to me.
Tony Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Cummings is what you’d get if Sheldon Cooper was lured away from cool science, had his IQ pegged back without him knowing, and sent off to devise ways of advancing the causes of White Supremacy and oligarchic domination through the medium of data-manipulation.
And he looks like someone kicked his balls up into his skull and it left impact domes.
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
There are people in the UK who are as wealthy as Murdoch, and some worth more. And because of the insanity of the class system, some of them believe that their money is worth more because it is very, very old money.
Murdoch owns the very Establishment Times of London, but he still is not a true insider.
Old School
@Tony Jay:
I thought Python. “The palindrome of Bolton would be Notlob!”
Tony Jay
@catclub:
Patois! The common language of the International Juicing fraternity.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
Sorry I didn’t get around to replying to you and UU last night, but it was after 1am, I was tired, and I am soooooooo sick to the back teeth of talking about the Labour Party.
Let’s mock Conservatives instead. Inside they’re all creamy.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Isn’t it – who enslaved whom….?
In any event thanks for playing, and I’m sorry that you are living through that opportunity….
It sounds as though Britain is actually suffering more than the US from those lovely people that like cash better than breathing. Either that or it’s just the system and both are fairly well borked.
Tony Jay
@Old School:
I sit corrected. There’s a classic Red Dwarf episode where they think they’ve found Earth again but it’s actually an earth where everything is in reverse, including Time and the spelling of cities.
Pro-Tip – Do not make a trip to the toilet there.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Aw, old money. Much, much more valuable, it could be used to purchase humans. That new form seems to only work on purchasing stuff.
Ken
The preference is “Who offered marvelous opportunities to learn new trades, get daily healthy outdoor exercise, and pass on indentured status to their children to whom.”
Ken
@Tony Jay: I preferred the one where they ended up in the parallel universe where everyone was gender-swapped, and the female versions kept trying to seduce the males; if only for the line, “She’s gone to get some sexy videos. She seems to think seeing two men together might turn me on.”
Feathers
Tony, I got real pushback a while ago for saying Prince William is an odious person. Have my Meghan fan friends got it all wrong? There are just too many tabloid articles about how fantastic he is, without giving a bit of evidence, for me not to suspect the work shy rage-monster, who longs to leave his wife version might very well be true.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: You’re wrong, they are very concerned about their own breathing, the rest of us, not so much.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
See? Britain used to produce things of value for the world. We weren’t always crabby, racist knobheads.
Honestly, I’d take Rimmer as PM right now. At least he had a tiny core of human decency in him. Somewhere. Allegedly.
zhena gogolia
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
That first quotation is beautiful.
Tony Jay
@Feathers:
Putting his shoulder to the wheel to correct the impression that Klan Windsor would rather lose a Prince than gain a ‘touch’ more melanin was where the mask slipped for good.
That’s your brother, man. And if that’s not enough, you’re going to be a King in the 21st fucking century. Character-fail, foresight-fail, just tons of fail all around.
What else can you expect from a spermspray of entitled, racist snobs? America seems to have got the only worthwhile person out of that mess.
Ken
Historically, haven’t brothers been a major cause of death among British kings?
Mary G
I need a cigarette after that lovely rant, except that I’d be up to 3 packs of Marlboros a day within a week and dead in months. I think Russia got its hooks into you guys years ago; I remember reading about the insane increase in the prices of luxury flats and houses being bought for full asking by Russians with suitcases full of cash money back in the late 90s? early 10s?
It was a dress rehearsal for the USA where we worship money and vote for Republicans because we’re going to strike oil under our cubicle desk any day now. We don’t have the class thing as much, though, with “oh, has a posh accent, went to Eton and Oxbridge, and therefore knows more than us proles,” attitude. Ours are more likely to hate people with a lot of knowledge and money.
The press here isn’t as homogenous, and journalists who got laid off for being liberal are starting substacks and independent news outlets and raking muck to various degrees of success, so the brainwashing isn’t going as well as they’d like. Plus Boris is much more plausible to the low info voters than TFG. And Democrats, though still herds of cats, are refusing to go along with the march of fascism. Who knows if we can keep it up.
Another sign of healing – my neighbor MAGAt to the east, who attends some kind of superstore church, maybe Scott Warren’s, I dunno and don’t want to know, has restarted her “Bible Group” today for the first time in 15 months. Twenty or thirty women get dressed up like Real Housewives, show up, there is a short prayer that sounds like it was written by cheerleaders, then the Lord’s Prayer, and finally two or three hours of eating and drinking. They chat loudly about things having nothing to do with religion after the first ten minutes. Plus screeching and laughing. It’s very loud today. I am pretty sure they are all vaccinated, though.
New Deal democrat
With deepest apologies to our British correspondents, I have to say that one of the few joys of the past 4 1/2 years has been reading about how absolutely f**k*d the UK is, under the rubric of “at least we aren’t the only country that is going directly to hell, and quickly!”
And you’ve accidentally transitioned to a sort-of Presidential system (bad move!) under the Something Something Terms Act.
May G*d help us all!
VeniceRiley
@Mary G: OC meetup? Karl Strauss for brews sometime? We can schedule it so you’ll be away from home during Bible Block Party.
jl
Thanks for another very informative post from Tony Jay.
As long as the issue of journalistic laziness or inattention came up, I’ll mention a very important item in AL’s coronavirus update posted earlier today. Look for the link to the Virology Today podcast. It contains interesting information showing that more an more evidence coming out supporting a natural evolutionary origin of the covid bug.
My favorite is that by the time of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, the two main strains, A and B, of the virus were in circulation. So, for the thing to be engineered, they would have had to have been able to engineer not only the virus, but two strains of it, and also make it look like the two strains came out through evolution. Or that gain of function experiments just happened to have produced the two strains.
I guess the most likely lab leak theory isn’t shot down so thoroughly, but then three people cleaning up that sinister mine would have had to have been infected by both strains.
Anyway, the podcast contains a lot of interesting info that a layperson can easily understand. Including why the location of the lab near an outbreak isn’t such a strange coincidence at all.
Edit: the connection to media laziness is that a lot of this the information is in the maligned WHO report, and it is stuff that, as noted above, any reasonably informed layperson can understand, and can easily figure out the significance. Is it possible that multiple media organizations never even read the report and are just playing telephone with a lot of suspicious characters and the GOP sources that they always fall for? I can’t imagine that would be true. /s
?BillinGlendaleCA
OT: Madame took Mabel, the cat who adopted her, to the groomer. She discovered that Mabel is not a female, but a male cat. Mabel, got a lion cut.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
I appreciate all your comments, and I hope it is clear that I think that the Conservatives are thoroughly despicable, and that I hope Labour finds a way to succeed.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
One Heir, One Spare, and the dagger goes there. the King is dead, God bless the King!
@Mary G:
Really, truly, I think the whole shitstorm boils down to that point you make about the homogeneity of the UK Press and the sheer, relentless horribleness of its worldview. Lowest common denominator, bullying, racist, dumbed-down, lying fuckery coming from all sides every single day really and truly does have an effect.
One thing, though. If it wasn’t for our truly awful electoral system we wouldn’t have a Tory Government. Way over 50% of the UK electorate don’t want those shits in power, they just get spread across more than one Party. But we do, so we do, and yes, we’re fucked.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
Perfectly clear, I value your opinion. I just felt bad that I left you hanging.
VeniceRiley
@jl: Also of note this here thread
https://twitter.com/wokeglobaltimes/status/1399187095764279303?s=21
Ken
The traditional test is to use a trebuchet to toss a plague-ridden animal corpse over their wall.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Thanks again, Mr. Jay. Do you follow Chicago-based Twitter polemicist Ragnarok Lobster? He generally does not comment on British affairs, but he could not resist when plutocrat Alan Lord Sugar weighed in on the Harry/Meghan controversy with a pompous tweet supporting Piers Morgan’s take on the matter:
“That Lord Sugar’s a salty bitch I’m tellin’ ya!”
I think you might appreciate Mr. Lobster’s sense of humor.
Roger Moore
@Tony Jay:
Yeah. I’ve been a Harry fan since it came out just how hard he pushed to get the opportunity to risk his life in Afghanistan. The man takes his duty seriously, and it must have taken something really horrendous for him to give up his duty to Queen and Country. That and taking seriously his duty to his wife and child. The Firm really screwed up to put them in conflict.
jl
@VeniceRiley: Wow. Some problems there. I’m not expert enough to know how bad all of those authors’ qualifications are, but not promising.
We need all three lines of evidence to shoot down nonsense: lack or credible expertise from sources and promoters and authors, evidence of of authors’ previous lack or credibility, and also need to address the subject matter itself.
Edit: and then there is common sense and basic reasoning we use to get through everyday life. Not sure whether that is evidence or a summation. And I understand that sort of thing it is in bad repute in certain quarters, but need to do it anyway.
Ruckus
@Ken:
Preferably a rather large plague ridden carcass…….
To make sure you get them all.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ken: Fetchez la vache!
sdhays
@Roger Moore: I don’t follow the Royals all that much, but from what I’ve picked up, Harry has actually treated the family still play-acting important people much better than they deserve. I really couldn’t understand the supposed difference with the Queen not willing to protect her grandchildren and “the Firm” or whatever nonsense they call it not willing to do so.
I mean, it all seems like we’re supposed to believe “the Family” (which I translate to “The Queen”) is powerless when it comes to controlling how the royal bureaucracy works, which is simply not credible. Or if it is, it’s such an embarrassing joke that that admission right there should end the monarchy once and for all.
sdhays
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ve long felt that if antifa (the Faux News version) was a real thing, the Murdochs would be literally afraid to leave their houses.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
To be fair, I get the impression that the Queen has been around long enough and has seen enough that she doesn’t need to be racist. I also get the impression that she loves William and Harry. She also appeared to have genuine affection for the Obamas, something that pissed off both Trump and Boris Johnson.
But I also think that there is a clique of courtiers, including the press, who believe that they not only must protect the “integrity” of the aristocracy, but that they know better than the monarch herself what she needs.
I also think that these fools saw that Meghan made a lot of people, nonwhite and lower classes of all colors, feel as though they actually belonged. And they decided that they had to shut this shit down fast.
As an aside, I noticed that a lot of anti-Meghan comments in the online version of the Daily Mail came from Americans. Some Brits noticed this and pushed back, but after a while they just got tired of wading through the vile bigotry that the Daily Mail clearly encouraged.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
I’m one of those sad-sacks who refuses to engage with social media, but when someone has quoted him here he’s been well worth reading. And for someone who doesn’t follow British Affairs he’s nailed Sugar something fierce.
@Roger Moore:
Yeah. For someone raised in that viper’s nest he seems to have come out with a normal person’s compliment of embarrassing misdemeanours and the good taste to pick a partner who hasn’t got 10% horse DNA.
Probably helps that he’s Spencer + ? and not a Windsor.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
Not really; cousins have been far more dangerous than brothers. This actually makes some sense. A fair number of younger brothers have succeeded to the crown when their older brother died without children, while cousins really need to make something happen to have a shot at the crown.
jl
@Brachiator: I don’t have enough interest in the monarchy to figure it out. Don’t have time to research it. I just go with my opinion that the British monarchy should be downgraded to a lesser gig, force the royals to earn at least a little honest money, like a few other European countries do.
But, you might be right. Certainly there is royal family PR and media gravy train, and a lot of people get easy work out of it in the media, the government, and various allied cottage industries.
I read that one royal commenter who gets a lot of regular media work on that nonsense does regular practice to keep proper body language and just the right posh pommie accent in good order to the go-to guy on royal gossip. Edit: since I guess no sane person who travels in the real world would act in such an bizarre way outside of the palace bigshot royal servantry.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: Sons have also been problematic on occasion.
debbie
Who’s Johnston?
zhena gogolia
@Tony Jay:
So you don’t think Charles is his father?
Raoul Paste
“Slaves“ is a loaded word
Try “prisoners with jobs”
Geoduck
@Tony Jay: They’re still making new Red Dwarf episodes on occasion. Maybe not as good as the Backwards era, but still pretty funny.
debbie
@Brachiator:
The anti-Meghan comments on the Royal Family’s FB page have been appalling and haven’t changed even though she left England. Did you know the only reason she got pregnant was to take attention away from Kate? Did you know she wore a coat for some occasion to show off her preggers belly and take attention away from Kate? They go on and on and on.
It’s a real surprise no one in that household is moderating comments.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
Did you see that story about how the entire Royal Household has been kept Schwarzerfrei (other than the lowest cleaning staff) for decades? That didn’t happen accidentally. Threatening to withhold Queen’s Consent from racial quality legislation unless the royal household gets secretly exempt from it doesn’t happen without the Queen herself being in on it.
Nah, she and her mob might well be willing to spend time with ‘those people’ if they inhabit a certain station, might even be fond of some of them, but when it comes to their own world, racist as fuck.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
He’s the spitting image of the guy his mother was having an affair with.
trollhattan
@Mary G:
Huh, my wife calls that a “book club.” Is she a closet warehouse ministry fundy only I don’t know it?
VeniceRiley
@debbie: I noticed in FB groups that have a lot of UK members … Well, they sound just like their tabloids brainwashed them to sound. They predicted H&M would fail. They wanted them to pay for their own security immediately and pay back the Frogmore money. I predicted that they’d be able to do that in short order, as they would be getting Oprah sized money as soon as they were settled. They could not believe it. I was right.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: In that all gingers look alike, sure. But then again, he also looks like his Diana’s brother, his uncle.
Brachiator
@jl:
The royal family and the aristocracy helps generate tons of tourism bucks. Visiting a royal palace for some is as big as going to Disneyland.
But here is a great, short video that demonstrates what a bunch of frauds most “royal watchers” are. Here, these dopes whose jobs are all about explaining and defending the royal family comment on a Meghan interview that they could not possibly have seen.
Video here …
Tony Jay
@zhena gogolia:
I’m willing to entertain the theory that his mother gave her cheating bastard of a husband the required heir and decided that the next time she went through the broodmare circus she’d allow the possibility that Daddy wasn’t getting the spare he required.
People rebel in the ways they can.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sons have been problems on numerous occasions, though they usually recognize they just have to survive and they’ll succeed eventually. Nephews have been a problem, as have uncles. But brothers seem to have done a surprisingly good job of sticking by each other. As I said, I think a huge chunk of it is that younger brothers have had a decent shot at succeeding without any foul play, and the older brother has usually managed to combine that and some flattery and bribery to keep the peace.
Brachiator
@zhena gogolia:
He probably is. But it doesn’t matter. Through Diana, Harry is connected to more British kings than the Germanic Windsors.
jl
@Brachiator: I forget the name of the royal watcher media guy. I think his regular gig is reporting on the travel industry and tourism. But, read that he has a very strict workout routine on his body language and accent. And same amusing article said other’s whose brand is British Expert do the same.
Hilarious and maybe or maybe not sad. Maybe sad that there is such a media market for that stuff.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
Except that his mother didn’t meet the guy who he was supposedly the spitting image of until after he was born.
Ken
@Brachiator: Ah, yes, the classic Blackadder Goes Forth exchange:
PRISONER: I’m as British as Queen Victoria!
BLACKADDER: So your father’s German, you’re half German, and you married a German
(To which might be added, your grandchild is the Kaiser.)
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t believe Hewitt was a ginger.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
Yep. Saw it. Doesn’t really affect my conclusions. Early on there was a battle over Harry and Meghan. The Queen shut down that lesser aristocratic fool who thought it might be funny to wear a racist piece of jewelry to some event that Meghan was also attending. And early on there were clearly some messages passed to the press to be kind to Meghan. But the overt racists looked for an opportunity to strike back and did so with a vengeance.
BTW, I think that Boris Johnson’s first wife is not a standard issue white person, even if his kids from that marriage are blond.
Racism in America and the UK is complicated and sometimes contradictory.
Reading history I recall that some Brits lost their minds when a Duke of Devonshire married John Kennedy’s sister. Just could not abide that she was Irish Catholic. And American.
Brachiator
@debbie:
These people are such a bunch of racist dopes.
I am also reminded of a great story that easily demonstrated how the right wing British press orchestrated anti-Meghan furor. The article quoted snippets of Kate and Meghan doing exactly the same thing at various public appearances. And in every instance Kate was praised for her behavior while Meghan was slammed for doing or saying the same damn thing.
VeniceRiley
@Brachiator: Reminds me of Fiona Hill and her story of how poorly she was mistreated and how grateful she was for the opportunities America gave her. If you don’t matter to them, you don’t matter. They will actively sabotage you, going so far as to physically trip you, because they deserve all the things. Color isn’t the only factor. You can just be a coal miner’s daughter with a northern accent.
Spanky
Serious question, if you can find it in my phrasing. America’s version of Upper Class Twits all seem to come from the Ivy League schools. Were they twits going in, and were weaponized at school? Or do Ivy League schools turn relatively normal freshman into Twits?
And when will we finally take a sledgehammer to the notion that the Ivy League graduates are something special?
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
I’m well aware that not all racists feel the need to wear pointy hoods, but that doesn’t make them any less racist than the braying scions of slightly less elevated families, they just feel less of a need to be performative about it. That revelation about the deliberate decision to avoid racial equality laws nailed it for me. Just because there are exceptions made and the occasional act of paternal kindness shown, that doesn’t mean a thing.
Again, when the decision was made to demand immunity from prosecution or scandal for banning non-whites from positions of influence in the royal household that was a deliberate choice. It wasn’t a whim or a passing fad, they didn’t want ‘those people’ around them, and at no point did the woman who could have stopped it with a word do anything of the sort.
What’s that quote? “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” That’s what I’m doing.
And it doesn’t detract one iota from the righteousness of your distain for the courtier class and the media circus that surrounds the Royals. They deserve each other.
TomatoQueen
Dear me. Royalwatcher/Anglophile hat on. Harry looks more and more like a combination of his father and the late Prince Philip as he gets older. William didn’t start looking like Charles until after he joined the rescue squad. Not too long ago VF or People or some reasonable variation published a substantial number of Prince Philip’s baby pictures, and there’s Harry all over again, for those with eyes to look for more than ten seconds. As for that cad Hewitt, no. The timing is wrong and the face shape is wrong. For close observers, the real tell is Charles’ hands compared to William’s and Harry’s–same weird shape and structure, oval fingertips. Charles’ hands are extremely puffy and I think he needs to be on Lasix, but that’s by the by.
“….Reading history I recall that some Brits lost their minds when a Duke of Devonshire married John Kennedy’s sister. Just could not abide that she was Irish Catholic. And American…” That’s backward. The problem was Kick’s mother, who would not countenance the marriage because the Duke of Devonshire was not Catholic.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Spanky:
Yes.
No.
Tony Jay
It’s stupid o’clock again on this side of the Atlantic. Please stack your seats neatly when you leave and don’t forget to turn out the lights.
Emma from Miami
@debbie: He’s actually the spitting image of a young Prince Phillip. There’s no need to do the “his mother was a slut” variation.
Roger Moore
@Spanky:
My impression is that most of the Ivies are really two schools that exist in parallel. One school is a great institution of higher education that takes the best and brightest high school students, puts them in classes with brilliant professors, and gets the predictable results. The other school is a place where the scions of the rich go to make connections and get a diploma that supposedly supposedly proves how bright they are.
The idea is that these two parts of the institution synergize. The rich people fund the school’s endowment, subsidizing the education of the less well off. The best and brightest give the school its academic credibility, making the rich people’s diplomas more valuable. At the same time, the two sides of the school make connections that power the next generation of businesses. The best and the brightest get access to capital to fund their new ideas, and the rich get advance access to new investment opportunities. Of course the school benefits when they make it big and remember their alma mater with their philanthropic donations.
Of course this only happens in the best case. In a lot of cases, the rich just party it up, safe in the knowledge the school will be afraid to fail them. If they make connections, it’s with the smart up-and-comers who have decided they can skip the hard work and get rich by sucking up to people who already have more money than they know what to do with. The people on that side of things wind up being the Ivy League douchebros we’ve all seen too many of.
debbie
@Emma from Miami:
Not at all what I was doing, but you be you.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
The “men in grey suits” wield inordinate power.
RepubAnon
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The real problem , as always, is Ronald Reagan and deregulation. Once media ownership was concentrated in the hands of the Republican donor class, doom was inescapable.
Emma from Miami
@debbie: Sorry, I didn’t mean it as it came out but the thing is that the Hewitt story was really promoted by the Tory press in those days where Diana was public enemy no.1before she died and became a saint.
Apologies.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Tony Jay:
Whenever given an opportunity to make the lives of regular people better, Her Nibs chooses to punt. She got a shitload of mileage out of running a couple of jeeps a couple of years. After that, she’s done fuck all for anybody but herself.
Hand-waving and prepared speeches from a nonogenarian aren’t doing shit for the people of the UK.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: The Ivies have always attracted their share of conservative kids, many of them from middle class backgrounds. They are nurtured by conservative political clubs and contrarian conservative student newspapers. Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza practiced their conservative polemics writing for Dartmouth’s conservative rag. There are many like them.
I would guess that there are more liberal Ivie grads than conservative. I think the reason the conservatives stand out is that liberals like to think that politics is a matter of intelligence: smart people are liberal, conservatives are dumb. The expectation is that Ivy grads should be liberal- and most are- so the conservatives are seen as freaks.This analysis leaves out the qualities of empathy and good sense. These, I think, are distributed among us independently of IQ, and contribute more to a liberal mindset than simple intelligence.
The wealth associated with Ivies probably does play a factor, though. These schools were founded on wealth and power, and many students see their schooling as a pathway to wealth and power. For some with raw ambition, conservative politics may seem the surest route.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
I don’t know about this. I always got the sense that liberal minded students thought that even though we might be a slight majority, we existed within a largely conservative tradition. And the conservative students I knew believed that they inherently were the masters of the universe by divine right.
debbie
@Emma from Miami:
No worries. In my corner of NYC, we were cheering her on for standing up for herself.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
I think the Ivies are kind of a weird holdover of the Oxbridge model of universities as a place to send the younger sons of the aristocracy. Most of the rest of the American university system was either part of or heavily influenced by the land grant colleges, which were intended to train the masses in the practical arts. The land grant model has been a smashing success, to the point that even the old-school universities for the elite felt they needed to copy it, but they definitely maintain a substantial role as finishing schools for the aristocrats even as they copy the land grant model for their non-elite students.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Pretty much, remember the President and the Vice President were the first winning ticket since 1976 to not have an Ivy grad on the ticket.
sdhays
@Brachiator: This comment reminds me of the recently highlighted letter from Eton to BoJo’s daddy back in 1982. He was appalled that he was expected to…do work.
sdhays
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I had forgotten that neither Joe or Kamala had been to an Ivy League school.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@sdhays: Yup, first since Grits and Fritz.
Haydnseek
@Fair Economist: Reminds me of when Stephen Colbert was talking about Texas banning the word ‘slavery’ from high school textbooks. Instead it was referred to as “The triangle trade.” When he mentioned that henceforth in Texas that they would be called ‘Isosceles Americans.
Needless to say, hilarity ensued.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Harvard, Yale, etc originally existed to train ministers (and yeah, younger sons of aristocrats), but by the 19th century were schools for the upper class elite. Law and the sciences (natural philosophy) became attached as elite pursuits.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
took me a minute… I had to work back from “Fritz”. I never heard that.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That’s what some in the press called the Carter/Mondale ticket.
ETA: It looks like it was actually from the 1976 Carter/Mondale campaign.
Subsole
@Tony Jay: Patois?!
No need to spit, good sir!
Geminid
@Brachiator: You may be right. But many Ivy grads are not really political, or else they tend to look at politics less as ideologues and more as technocrats. For these, choosing a political party within which to satisfy and ambition for political office might have been conditioned by circumstance. I don’t think that would be true today, given the lurch to the right the Republican party has taken. Nowadays, for a young person with political ambition to throw in with the Republicans, they’d have to have to be very conservative or very cynical, or both.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
It’s no Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Even in places where there weren’t aristocrats per se, the ministers were the elite. Education has always been the province of the elite; even the land grant schools weren’t completely successful in democratizing it.
Subsole
@Raoul Paste:
“Conditionally Manumitted Long Contract Laborers”
gwangung
@Brachiator: There’s a reason the Ivies and the quasi Ivies jokingly (not really) refer to themselves as the future ruling class of America.
Tehanu
Tony, your skills in mockery and disdain make these posts a joy to read!
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: and every intellectual property lawyer knows that you.do.not.fuck.with.the.Nazgul…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Feathers: I would imagine the thought of ending up a debauched pervert like his uncle Prince Andrew would be enough to freak out any dude and just being some guy who is a spokesman for charitable in Canada would vastly more attractive to anyone with any sense of self worth. Not to mention his mother was hounded to death by stalker media. But hey, you’re the one with a window into all men’s souls.