Month: December 2023

Ask a silly question, fear a silly answer?

Were the Middle Ages really like a popular fantasy book and TV series whose creator was, per his own acknowledgement, inspired by the Middle Ages and events of that time, particularly the Wars of the Roses and the Capetian dynasty in France leading up to the Hundred Years War? Who can tell? I post this mostly because I’m puzzled by one thing… the ABC turns off comments on the majority of its posts on Facebook, cos if they don’t the posts will often get hammered by complete shitheads who still think the ABC is a progressive shill. And I’ve seen how nasty the ABC’s commenters can be before whoever moderates their FB page steps in and shuts things down… and they closed off comments on this post before anyone had in fact commented at all. I just don’t understand why. Were they worried about dickheads like me swarming the comments section saying “well yeah it kind of WAS like that back then…”?

“News”

So Alex Jones has not only been invited back to Twitter, he’s been invited to do a show on there… which I find a bit odd given that he’s already got Infowars on which to do that sort of thing, but I subjected myself to a couple of minutes of Jones’ video and apparently it’s just going to be like a headlines & highlights reel of each day’s Infowars tirade. Either way, so much for what Oolong said about people profiting off the deaths of children… but I do think this might attract the interest of the lawyers for those people Jones infamously owes a billion dollars to that he’s been making a point of failing to pay up…

New Pat Finnerty!

Beato! To be perfectly honest, I’d feared Pat might have hung up the pedalmobile, but here he comes again just in time with a worthy opponent… and, to be honest again, I’d almost forgotten the fuss about Jason Aldean from a few months ago, but that seems to be the way the world in general works these days, there’s always something new happening that makes us forget what happened not that long ago… I mean, remember the Titan sub? Good times…

Anyway, when Aldean was having his 15 minutes, I noticed the controversy surrounding him but somehow I managed to avoid actually hearing the song or seeing the video… and I now know that it’s pretty fucking awful, and Pat goes into quite some detail about how and why it is, trying to understand the possible reasons for its appeal and finding none. There’s an amazing bit of live footage where Aldean just cannot hit the note he’s supposed to, and I’ve never been very good at actually telling when something’s off-key… but in Aldean’s case even I couldn’t miss the fact that he was missing the mark. Yikes. So good to see this today in my YT subscriptions, it was just the sort of thing I was needing.

RIP Q. Twerk

Well, there goes yet another bit of my childhood, with the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic announcing the passing of Ian Gibson. One of the defining artists at 2000AD, though he seems to have had a catastrophic falling-out with them later in life and… then THIS happened, which I don’t think I’d heard anything about before. Ian leaves a slightly more… complicated legacy than I realised…

That’ll work

Boy, 15, given official warning after saluting as neo-Nazis marched through Ballarat

A teenager accused of saluting as neo-Nazis marched through a regional Victorian city has been given an official warning by police.
Officers in Ballarat interviewed the 15-year-old boy, who has had no previous dealings with police, after the demonstration in the Victorian regional city on 3 December.
The officers issued him an official warning after determining his actions were not racially motivated.
“The decision was made to use the opportunity to educate the youth on the recent change in legislation regarding the Nazi salute, along with the potential harm that may be caused within the community,” Victoria police said in a statement.

So this comes after a march by a Nazi mob—the same one that rocked up to Posie Parker’s bullshit in Melbourne earlier this year, apparently—through Ballarat on the 3rd, which the Graun previously described thus:

Social media footage shows a group of men, dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, holding a banner reading “Australia for the white man” and chanting “hail victory” on Sunday.

So this kid saluting these cunts was also saluting a flag saying “Australia for the white man”… but somehow his actions weren’t racially motivated. I mean, these are Nazis we’re talking about; unless you’re being deeply sarcastic or ironic, saluting Nazis is an inherent racist act, especially when they’re packing white supremacist banners. I’d love to know how they decided this kid wasn’t being racist…