This Christmas, spare a thought for those less fortunate than you.
I’m thinking, especially, of all those losing losers who have been driven to apoplexy by the Conservatives’ massive victory in the UK general election.
They wanted a Marxist Prime Minister. They believed they were going to get one in the form of crusty has-been Jeremy Corbyn. Instead what they got is their worst nightmare: the birth of Britain’s very own Trumpian revolution, in the form of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Yes, I know some of you have reservations about how genuinely conservative Boris is going to be. But since it’s Christmas, let’s banish all unpleasantness and think only of happy things: the tears, wailing and abject misery of the left as it tries — and fails utterly — to come to terms with the scale of the crushing defeat it has just experienced.
Saying this in Liverpool may now be a criminal offence.
The city’s mayor has promised to “work with police” to track down and “identify” those responsible for spreading this hateful, transphobic message.
I am not aware of the group, we will remove stickers and work with the Police to identify those responsible. Remember though,Liverpool takes #PRIDE in its diversity and history of fighting for equality for all, we love all our Trans residents and all our LGBT community😘😍🙏 https://t.co/YJdsA6uXXo
No. Scrub that. The question should actually be addressed to Twitter’s chief morality policeman Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey, as we know, claims to take a very dim view of ugly, bullying, malign trolling behaviour on Twitter.
So how come this person @mittendamour has suffered no consequences for her thoroughly nasty tweet – still up at the time of writing? How does wishing more cancer on a cancer victim not count as “hateful conduct”?
A tiny bunch of left-wing loons with no lives, shrivelled penises, and the collective IQ of a pickled herring is trying to ban a screening of the classic 60s movie Zulu at an armed forces fund-raising event in Kent.
Before I go on can I absolutely stress that while it has been widely reported – e.g. here and here – this is NOT a news story? The only reason I am writing about it is because it’s an excuse to say what a marvellous film Zulu is: one of those character-building experiences that every boy should have on his route to manhood.
It teaches the important virtue of keeping a stiff upper lip even as your small, thinly-manned outpost is surrounded by Zulus – farsands of ’em – and you are in grave danger of being disembowelled by one of their fearsome assegais. You learn that if you keep your head, suppress your urge to flee and stand with your comrades you may yet prevail, just like the 150 or so British and colonial troops did at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879 when they successfully held out against a vastly superior of perhaps 3,000 Zulus whose spears were still bloody from the 1,300 imperial troops they’d helped slaughter the day before at Isandlwana.
It’s also the film where Michael Caine really established himself as one of the greats, playing against type as an upper class English officer (Lt Gonville Bromhead). Plus Stanley Baker and sundry other fine actors are in it. It has a fine score by John Barry. And the Zulu king Cetshwayo is famously played by his great grandson chief Buthelezi.
If you want more on why Zulu is so wonderful, here’s a piece I wrote on the subject earlier this year.
One of Britain’s leading universities has gone into a blind panic after discovering that a quotation it had used to motivate students originally came from the mouth of an actual World War II German general, Erwin Rommel.
Here is Rommel’s aphorism:
“One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.”
The quotation was one of a series sent out by Exeter University’s career department in an email to students. Not unreasonably, you might think, given that the sentiment expressed is both motivational and wise.
But the moment someone pointed out that the quote came from Rommel, the university began frantically retracting.
A spokesperson said: “This was a genuine error and in no way intentional, however we apologise unreservedly for any offence it may have caused, and have put additional processes in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
They added that staff member who selected the quote did not know who Rommel was and the information was taken from a free to use website.
This is indeed an extremely shaming incident for Exeter University, though not for the reasons given in the article.
Most worrying, perhaps, is the sheer level of ignorance at an academic institution ranked among the world’s top 150 universities.
I am done with Oxford University. Possibly I have said this before but it can’t be said often enough.
Here is its latest outburst of progressive ridiculousness. It’s a letter, sent out by some pesky Social Justice Warriors at Queen’s College, protesting at a visit by Brendan O’Neill of Spiked.
Read it and weep.
Brendan O’Neill is speaking at Queen’s College, Oxford next week, and the college’s student organisation has sent out this bizarre warning. If you can’t have "contentious" discussion at a university, where can you have it? pic.twitter.com/7VEDDLWG0N
Jordan Peterson has called bull on the left’s claims that SJW media maven Cathy Newman has been a victim of “threats” and“alt-right” bullying.
In his first video appearance since totally owning Newman in a must-watch Channel 4 studio discussion on feminism, free speech and social justice, Peterson expressed regret at having given any credence to the threat claims.
“Define threats,” Peterson says, when asked whether he believes if these “threats” ever actually existed.
Because there is no evidence that these “threats” were credible, Peterson now wishes he had never tacitly endorsed their existence when he asked his Twitter followers to “back off” from being rude to Newman.
His critics just exploited this by using it as proof that threats had indeed been made.
This is the story of Magicgate. Yes, another scandal, but one that for a change doesn’t involve any actual rape or sexual harassment… only game players who like pretending to be witches and wizards.
Like Gamergate, it concerns ordinary people who just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobby.
Ranged against these ingenus is an orcish horde of bullying, preening, self-righteous Social Justice Warriors who believe that everything — even an innocent collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering — should be played and policed according to their viciously intolerant politically correct rulebook.
Even if, like me, you’re not among the 20 million people who play Magic: The Gathering, what I hope you’ll appreciate is that this is a story that should concern us all.
By the end, I hope, you’ll feel as angered as I am by this ugly, scary power grab by the regressive left. And I hope you’ll want to join me in making your voice heard by hitting the people responsible where it hurts most: in their bank balance.
That means the companies which own and profit by Magic: the Gathering. That means you, Hasbro toys. And you, Wizards of the Coast.
I want you to realize that playing games is not a left-wing thing or a right-wing thing but an everybody thing.
I want you to realize that it is not the business of games manufacturers to discriminate against or punish players for their political opinions.
I want you to realize that your miserable sordid scheme to bully everyone who plays your games into sharing your SJW values is not remotely liberal but authoritarian and fascistic.
I also want you to realize that we have got your number: you try to claim the moral high ground, yet your entire business model is based on the kind of predator capitalism I’m sure you’d be the first to condemn if you weren’t getting so rich off of it.
You have a captive market of often vulnerable, socially maladjusted young men for whom your game is their social life, their passion, almost their entire world. And you exploit their addiction mercilessly with regular releases of new card sets, sold in packages costing around $100, which they can’t afford not to buy and trade because it will limit their gameplay. OK, fair enough, that’s how capitalism works, more or less. Except you’re a monopoly provider, so you’re abusing your monopolistic power — which for most leftists, and indeed most conservatives is a big no-no. Plus, I understand from Magic: The Gathering players that your product quality is getting worse and worse, with poorly printed artwork, damaged cards inside new packs, or ones that warp shortly after opening. So it really does show some chutzpah, I must say, to rip off your customers and treat them like shit — then to insist that, “Oh, by the way, we reserve the right to tell you scumbags how you must think as well…”
Like Gamergate, Magicgate is a classic example of what Andrew Breitbart meant when he used to say that “politics is downstream from culture.” Sure Trump is doing great work, fighting the good fight in the White House. But ultimately whether our civilization thrives or withers depends not so much on what happens in DC or Westminster or Brussels or the United Nations as it does on what happens in the broader culture of our ordinary, daily existence.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak,” Sun Tzu, The Art Of War.
One of the big mistakes Trump’s critics make is to assume he is very stupid. Hence the liberal media’s delight in his Pershing tweet in the aftermath of the Barcelona massacre.
They think it shows the president to be an historically illiterate and gullible fool because – or so they claim – he is repeating a debunked myth that General Pershing used bullets dipped in pig blood when fighting Muslim terrorists in the Philippines.
Former England footballer Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne has just pleaded guilty in court to a “racially aggravated public order offence.”
If you didn’t know the details, you might imagine he’d done something serious.
Nope. Here’s what happened:
Gascoigne was speaking at a venue in Wolverhampton, as part of his An Evening With Gazza tour, where audiences around Britain are paying upwards of £30 a head to hear anecdotes about Gazza’s days as a footballing legend.
At some point in the evening, Gazza made an ill-advised quip at the expense of a black bouncer standing in a darkened part of the auditorium. Gazza joked that he couldn’t see whether or not the security guard was enjoying himself because the venue was poorly lit.
Yes, you probably had to be there. It’s not the funniest joke ever told. But nor is it the kind of remark you’d ever imagine getting anyone hauled up before the courts. It’s just laddish banter of the kind you’ll often find when boozed up blokes are gathered together. There’s certainly no malice in it and in the old days – before the era of licensed victimhood and professional offence-taking – that security guard would perfectly well have understood this, in much the same way any white person would have done in the Seventies or Eighties had they been singled out as the butt of a joke by, say, Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy.
I originally reported that the bouncer had complained to the police – but it turns out I maligned the poor fellow. It wasn’t the black bouncer who complained but one of those grisly SJWs – often known as Offendotrons, usually white – whose speciality is to patronise ethnic minorities by taking offence on their behalf. This Offendotron reported to the police and the police, in accordance with the wishes of the rampantly politically correct Crown Prosecution Service, decide to make an example of Gazza.
Well I’m not so sure about that. My fear is that this kind of case, far from healing racial divisions in Britain is likely to exacerbate them by fostering a climate of mutual resentment and bitterness and a sense that “Britain is no longer a free country any more.” Which indeed it isn’t. In Britain – taking our cue from the identity politics victimhood culture of the US – our minority grievance industry has now become so powerful that you cannot even make a mildly tasteless joke without being dragged before the courts and treated like a criminal.
And it won’t be long – you can be sure – before jokes perceived as offensive to women result in similar court cases.
