What do you mean, he’s not Richard Petty?
I would totally vote for Richard Petty. I think this nominative confusion, perfectly understandable in all American Southerners, is going to be the cause of a lot of awkwardness between now and November 2012…
There is a crash of thunder. Enter Lord Piotr Manhandlebum.
Manhandlebum: Now is the winter of my discontent
Made quite frankly irksome by this glorious son of Marx.
But did I hear the clown say sooth
That Tony of Blair is here within the castle walls in truth?
I am not in his good books and my own book is not good.
The Turd Man has pricked New Labour’s rose, and pricks
Are all the rage at Arsinore. I should know.
I’ll to the chamber and position myself behind the arras.
No change there then.Exit pursued by a bare man.
I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s a treat.
…of laughter.
Meanwhile, apologies to all for the recent falta of worthwhile posts. I might have written something yesterday, but I went to the Derby instead. Not what I might call a profitable day overall, but tremendous fun and those £2 I put each way on At First Sight at 80-1 really paid off when he came second.
In other Derby news, I hope nobody placed any bets based on the tote tips. Of seven races, they got one right.
Favourite horse name from yesterday: Seeking the Buck (B g Seeking the Gold – Cuanto Es). Clever.
Also, I am thinking that it’s time for karma or whatever to change. The past year has felt like one tremendous uphill struggle, so surely the world and I are due a little plateau of contentment. To that end, I am humbly asking everyone who reads this post to leave lulz in the comments. Failbooking, Lolcats good; hectoring bombast will result in personalised poison-pen character assassinations from yours truly. These days, the bitch-blade goes snicker-snack almost of its own accord, so don’t even think about whiffling and burbling through this tulgey wood…
Al Jahom has a message for the morons who made my journey home from Wandsworth today such a misery by pressing the stop button 96,000,000 times:
click to embiggen
All right, all you readers out there. Time for a pollbomb.
At publicservice.co.uk (Public Sector & Government News), they’re running a weekly poll in which the question is:
Should public sector workers have to pay more to maintain the value of their pensions?
You won’t be surprised to hear that the ‘No’ votes are winning.
Can we round up enough ‘Yes’ votes to make them think pubic sector workers are all in favour of paying higher pension contributions? It would save the rest of us money, after all. And they deserve our spiteful little tricks.
Join me! Vote for higher pension payments for pubic sector workers. The poll is on the home page, in the right-hand sidebar.
‘We’re going to burn you in effigy! Slim down, or next time we’ll put you in there when we light it on fire. For the sacrifices of those caught in some offence are more pleasing to the gods, but if the supply of such people runs out, we will not hesitate to sacrifice innocents.’*
Can we expect to see Jamie Oliver officiating as Chief Druid?
Hat tip to Longrider, Leg-Iron, and Ambush Predator.
*Adapted from Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI.16 for maximum absurdity value.
Ah, the things people will Google – and the many and varied paths by which they arrive at this blog! Lately, we have these:
evan harris wanker
Fair enough.
is phil woolas pissed
If he were, that would explain a great deal. But I suspect he’s just a sinister, moronic little creep.
truly whipping extreme free
Delicious on pancakes and as a topping for ice cream.
And finally, this plaintive cry into the ether:
i want my internet turned back on virgin
Good luck, random Googler. I hope they came through in the end.
I gather that few others found this as funny as I did:
Fundamentally, the remit of any new localized ‘cell-based’ but centrally co-ordinated publication, whether electronic or hard copy, will be the creation of an effective interface between the existing ‘lifeworld’ and the development of an appropriate register of anti-hegemonic discourse.
By ‘lifeworld’, I refer to the post-Husserl Habermasian conception (‘Lebenswelt’) of a set of socially and culturally sedimented linguistic meanings, shared in their current form by the working class and its hegemonized identities (and sets of identities).
Into this existing set of shared understandings of how the world operates, it is necessary to ‘infuse’ the appropriate set of Marxian conceptions both around the essential nature of capital/labour relations and the consciousness of the working class as an objective entity in relation to capital. In turn such conscientization will lead to the development of a renewed ‘Lebenswelt’ in which class struggle becomes both more desirably and feasible through solidaristic local and then wider action.
Displaying a startling lack of self-awareness, one commenter blithely bypasses the main point and thus demonstrates a complete absence of appreciation for the author’s craft:
I think my approach here would have been a little simpler: sheerly ripping the piss out of these so-called libertarians. Several of them make comments which demonstrate that they didn’t read your article, particularly as regards where the funding comes from for your blogging endeavour.
Another misunderstands the definition of satire:
You can self-satirise Frankfurt school jargon, rampant bureaucracy and heavy-handed control-freakery all you like, but this is how the Left operates.
Ah, well.
One of the things that’s always puzzled me is that, in this current struggle between ‘right’ and ‘left’, each side is convinced that the other is the hegemonic group. This suggests that, in reality, neither is.
So who’s actually in charge, then?
UPDATE: Anna Raccoon has also picked this one up. I can only echo the remark of commenter Katabasis:
What makes the joke even funnier is that the satire is sufficiently subtle that not all of his fellow travelers will get it.
And the same person who, on the original post, misunderstood satire again levels accusations of FAIL at Anna’s place, because apparently, Lefties really are like that. Seriously.
*le sigh*
From Anna Raccoon, a timely parody of one of my all-time favourite poems:
“O Voters!,” said Old Cyclops,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be voting Me again?”
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd because
He’d pissed off everyone.
This is rather an old post, but everything about it is funny to me, including the title: Hands Off My Loaves and Fishes, Hippies.
26But Libertarian Jesus was great in wrath, and did goeth on at great length about negative liberty and natural law.
27And on.
28And on and on.
29And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the Pharisees begged Libertarian Jesus to holdeth his peace, but to no avail.
30And lo, presently the Legion came upon Libertarian Jesus, and gave him a bloody good crucifying.
31And there was much rejoicing and loud were the hosannas.
32And Libertarian Jesus looked down upon the Pharisees and said, Forgive them LORD, for they know not the principles of Minarchism.
Iowahawk strikes again:
But there’s a problem: as the worker researchers attempt to store each raw datum into the neat honeycomb hockey stick structure provided by the hive’s Alpha Grantwriter, they discover that few will fit. The infrared shows them growing cool with fear. This signals the climate researcher’s instinctive behavior to begin viciously beating, rolling and normalizing the data into submission. According to Dr. Nigel V.H. Oldham, professor emeritus at Oxford University’s Centre for Metascience, this violent data dance is what makes climate researchers unique among breeds of scientists.
Professor Nigel V.H. Oldham:
Like other species in the order homo scientifica, the climate researcher gathers and organizes data to lure grant money to the hive. In contrast to those other species, however, the climate researcher has evolved a set of complex violent behaviors to insure any data leaving the hive is perfectly adapted to nature’s most lucrative and sweetest grants. It really is a marvel of natural selection, and explains why the climate researcher continues to thrive in any kind of weather condition.
Truly, Iowahawk is a giant among satirists. Do go and read the whole thing.
From commenter D. Bum at the Devil’s Kitchen:
But when it comes to broken promises, explicit promises, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are two cheeks of the same Vichy arse and I would gladly cut off his cock and winch Gordon Brown’s intestines from his treacherous stomach and cook them for him in front of his remaining eye before cutting him in four and beating the rest of the cabinet to death with bits of him, the cunt.
D. Bum, I commend you.
What is that thing they say about a prophet in his own land?
H/T Bishop Hill.
Gangland Julius Caesar offers some advice to President Obama:
And believe me, nothing boosts an imperator’s public approval rating like turning the opposition into lion snausages. Your loyal plebes will love it, and after the games you can hand out free bread. And healthcare.
Shit, I dunno, maybe I’m being to hard on Obamacus. The big problem is that the punk don’t know how to pick a posse. Look at his Senators. Jupiter H. Cripes, I thought that crazyass Caligula was straightup psycho for appointing his horse to the Senate, but that thing had more brains than half these muthafuckers. Combined.
…
I know you be thinkin’ you’re some kind of stone cold Claudius, layin’ down some phat oratory at the Forum and plowing your enemies’ fields under with salt. But you still a teleprompter punk, and you gotta know what you don’t know…Lesson one: rule first, deification later.
Iowahawk has breathed new life into my Friday afternoon. Go read the whole thing; everybody knows regular blogging on a Friday snuffs out around 2 pm.
I’m so doing this. My favourite:
Drink Three Fingers If:
Nick Griffin moans about how television isn’t as good as it used to be. What happened to ‘The Black & White Minstrel Show’ and ‘Love Thy Neighbour’?
He breaks into a version of ‘I Will Survive’
Down All Drinks If:
He attempts a comedy foreign accent.
It seems I’m not the only one who understands Peter Hain’s reluctance to appear on Question Time with Nick Griffin. As I said moons ago, the only thing that differentiates the BNP from the ‘social justice’ platforms of the three main parties is its racism.
Interviewing the shifty and unsavoury Griffin was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. We went through his ‘manifesto’ point by point.
There was little in it which couldn’t have been espoused by any of the main parties.
His law and order policies, for instance, were straight out of the David Blunkett song book.
He was against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, just like the Liberals. The Tories and UKIP were both promising to repatriate powers from Brussels.
I put it to Griffin that what set the BNP apart was the large elephant not in the manifesto, namely that it is the ‘Wogs Out’ party.
Even when I confronted him with the incontrovertible evidence in chapter and verse, he shrugged and shuffled, mouthed a few platitudes and that was about it. I may have pressed him again on the overtly racist appeal of the BNP, but it didn’t achieve anything.
Needless to say, I shall be watching Question Time tomorrow night with great amusement. I’ve even stuck a reminder to myself on the television set so that I don’t forget.
H/T Obo the Clown.
Meanwhile, in crazy-land, the Saudis want oil-consuming nations to compensate them for all the oil we won’t be buying in our efforts to reduce climate change.
It’s like that bit in Catch-22 wherein Major Major’s father is paid generously by the US government for not growing alfalfa. Throughout Major Major’s childhood, his father buys up more and more land so as to get more and more money from the US government for the increasing amount of alfalfa he’s not growing.
And as Megan McArdle points out, crazy-land is not so far away from home:
Commenter Mike in DC adds “The sad thing is that if it were Midwestern farmers making this argument rather than Saudis, it would be taken seriously.”
The men of the country have not come off well in a poll rating the quality of the world’s male lovemakers. With #1, the worst, being Germany:
2. England (too lazy)
…
7. Wales (too selfish)
…
8. Scotland (too loud)
Still, better to be too lazy, selfish, or loud, than have the problem Germans have, which is apparently that they are ‘too smelly.’
But hey, Irishmen are the fifth best lovers in the world, behind Spain, Brazil, Italy, and France. Too bad the article doesn’t tell us what, exactly, makes them so good…
Occasionally, a confluence of events in pop culture seems so elegant, so mathematically perfect, that my heart cannot help but swell in gleeful appreciation.
The appeal was easy to see: If you can’t whittle a toy horse, knit a blanket, write a poem or play an instrument, at least you might be able to destroy some amount of the free time possessed by the people that can. If the productive members of society who are usually out there creating something–no matter how small or trivial–instead used their time yelling at you for slights that you put absolutely no effort into, then they were also not producing. And if they were not producing, and you were not producing, then voila! You’re suddenly just as valuable to society as they are! Instead of simply being “lesser than” the average person, now you’re finally “lesser than or equal to“! You’re no better, but at least they’re a little worse! And thus trolling was born. It was easy, it provided a largely illusory benefit (but a benefit nonetheless) and best of all – you’re ruining something! They always say, “It’s easier to destroy than it is to create,” and while most people saying that intend it to be a bad thing, you, the troll, see it as a benefit.
They’re totally right! It is easier, isn’t it? Aren’t easier things better?
It’s like you practically have no choice but to type “meh” or “fag” or better yet (and I’m only giving this to you because I love you) you could combine the two.
You could type “mehfag.”
From Terry Eagleton’s review of The God Delusion in the LRB:
Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.
The mental picture… ahahaha. Ha.
His take on the Waxman-Bullshit Cap and Trade Attainder is absolute class.
A pack of dogs, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls…
And now, via Samizdata: a stupidity of voters.
From a comment on Tim Worstall’s piece in the Guardian:
…Prof. Guillebaud, emeritus professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College, London is arguing that sex is the primary cause of increasing populations…
No! Surely not…?
Whether you think the results of Iran’s presidential elections were valid or not, you have to laugh at this:
Among the countries congratulating Mr Ahmadinejad on his victory were Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and North Korea.
Don’t you? ‘Cause I did.
Via a Commonplace Book, the word is full of funny stuff today.
Who knew sex was only appropriate on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays?
…and yet somehow so amusing:
“The only way Gordon Brown can win the general election is if Madeleine McCann’s body is found in David Cameron’s garage.”
Flatmate had a right good laugh at that. So did I.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wVrq6K9LpI&hl=en&fs=1&]
From memory:
Jacqui Smith.
Hazel Blears.
Beverley Hughes.
Tom Watson.
James Purnell.
John Hutton.
Geoff Hoon.
Margaret Beckett.
Tony McNulty.
Caroline Flint.
And why, when I google ‘uk minister resignation,’ is Al-Jazeera the top result? Suspicious, no?
Anyway, dare I say it: this meltdown is vastly more exciting than any other political event I’m old enough to remember, including Obama’s this-that-and-the-other. Although I was a child when the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Germany was reunified, these things meant nothing to me, living as I did with no understanding of twentieth-century Europe.
But I know a good farce when I see one, and I concur heartily with Obo: break out the popcorn. This truly is turning out to be The Best Show On Earth. Big, toothy, gleefully sadistic smiles all round.
The scene – bella and flatmate are discussing full-serve toilets, as featured in today’s Guardian.
Me: Those toilets don’t sound so bad, the way you describe them.
Flatmate: And you know what – the Japanese-style ones, they’re like Continental toilets in that there’s a little shelf for inspecting your output. It’s weird; there’s like this little Viking longship poo sitting there, and then you press the button, and whoosh, it sails out. I feel like I should salute as it goes past.
Me: [dies laughing]
In all fun and affection, m’dear, via my flatmate:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fbrUjjivw&hl=en&fs=1]
The pithy Tim Worstall makes my heart happy. Of John Harris, ignorant twat, he says:
For just as using a plough rather than a stick to scrape the earth for our food frees up labour to do other things, like wipe babies’ bottoms, treat cancer or go on Celebrity Big Brother, so reducing the number of jobs in retail frees up people to go and write fatuous columns for the national newspapers about how they misunderstand the basic concepts and tenets of the real world.
A new version of the Hail Mary, over at Lambeth Palace. I liked it so much, I’ve put it into Latin:
Ave, Gordon, gratia carens,
Dominus non tecum.
Vituperatus tu in hominibus
et vituperatus fructus laborum tuorum, recessio.
Nefas Gordon, pater incompetentiae,
interveni usque non adeo pro nobis civibus
nunc et in hora mortis perduellionis.
Amen.
UPDATE: I should point out that I am well familiar with LPUK and what they mean by ‘liberal.’ I was even at their AGM in November.
On communism, terrorism, and totalitarianism. Over at the Landed Underclass.
No. 265:
No. 90:
