May 2024 – Page 2 – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

RIP Doge

Kabosu has left the building. Much unhappy. Very sadness. Alas. But also so immortality.

Apparently the Tories are so angry at Rishi Sunak for calling this election July instead of October or something that they’re trying to have him fired so that it can be called off. Which should WORK BRILLIANTLY, cos even if it did they would still have to actually hold an election no later than January 2025, which would give any putative next PM (like that Rees-Mogg cunt) a bit over six months to completely turn the Tories around. And I don’t think that’s going to be anywhere near enough for such a thing to happen. I fear they’d just be delaying the inevitable, and I think that’s why Sunak’s calling the election now: he knows they’re going to get smashed and he wants it to be over and done with… or maybe:

Which, if the speculation up top is correct, may not work anyway. And there was this:

To be honest when I first read this I thought the bit about them not having enough time to get jobs in the corporate sector once they get trounced was meant a joke, but I am now realising it wasn’t. Sunak not caring about them? Why, that’s even worse than the rest of them not caring about the people of the country!

Of course, the image of Sunak getting drenched while delivering his speech in the pouring rain outside No. 10 because no one thought to offer him an umbrella is what everyone’s getting worked up about, and with good cause. Whatever Sunak’s weak attempt at justifying it—i.e., that it’s tradition for the PM to deliver this sort of news out front of No. 10—may be worth, I’m fairly sure there’s no tradition saying the PM can’t do it without protection from the weather…

…Especially not when THAT room evidently exists and no one needed to get wet at all.

And much as I do expect the Tories to get completely wiped out, I know we still shouldn’t rule out the alternative. I made that mistake in 2010—I know, because it comes back in Facebook Memories to bite me in the arse every year—when the Liberals adopted Tony Abbott and I thought they’d basically handed Labor the next election on a platter… cos his constituents might’ve been stupid enough to vote for him but the country as a whole would surely be smarter than that. Surely. I was not expecting Labor to shit the bed in the way that it then proceeded to do and actually make Abbott look like a viable alternative. Keir Starmer still has to catastrophically fuck up… which, to be honest, I don’t imagine he will, but even so.

Great, Britain

Britain’s off to the polls, in a sign that Rishi Sunak’s decided “fuck everything”:

Which I suspect is what’ll happen this time too… but Jesus fuck, how uninspiring is Labour right now? As far as I can see, the only thing they’ve really got in their favour is that they’re not the Tories. The latter are manifestly unfit to run a roadside newspaper stand, never mind a country, and I’d be surprised if a single member of the party as it stands is morally fit to be in politics at any level. But is Keir Starmer going to offer anything better? I feel Corbyn would’ve done, but I don’t get a similar feeling from him. Starmer vs Sunak. What a grim choice, almost as bad as Biden vs Trump…

That’s… optimistic

I kind of feel like if your film about Trump paints him as anything less than God, he’s not going to even watch it to decide whether he does in fact like it or not.

I am the Law?

As I’ve said more than once, I grew up on British comics more than American ones, most notably 2000AD, whose most iconic character, of course, is a certain officer of the law. Obviously, being only about eight years old when I started reading The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, I had no real conception that Dredd and the Judges were essentially operating a fascist, hyper-authoritarian system, not until the strip itself started addressing the whole issue of the absence of democracy in Mega City One… by which time I had aged into double figures and impending teenagehood, and frankly still didn’t understand the political issues or really care about them that much, really.

But Dredd was the hero, wasn’t he? Dredd was the living embodiment of THE LAW in Mega City One (and indeed outside it). The figure we were supposed to look up to. THE LAW was sacred to him, and, let’s face it, he was there to administer it to a bunch of unquestionably Bad People. He was opposed to Bad People. He was the Good Guy.

Wasn’t he?

Dredd co-creator John Wagner said of his creation many years later:

This was back in the days of Dirty Harry, and with [Margaret] Thatcher on the rise there was a right-wing current in British politics which helped inspire Judge Dredd. He seemed to capture the mood of the age – he was a hero and a villain.
That villainous aspect to Dredd’s character – and the Draconian laws of Mega-City One [the post-apocalyptic metropolis Dredd polices] – really caught the readers’ imagination.
Occasionally we’d get letters from children who seemed to be agreeing with his hard-right stance, so we made the strip more political to bring out the fact that we didn’t agree with Dredd. We introduced a democratic movement in Mega-City One as a counterpoint. So in a way the readers helped the character develop.

So, basically, kids not getting the point of the strip was what caused Wagner to be more overt, cos he was a bit alarmed by what he had wrought. But it took me rather longer to appreciate that point myself, and indeed I’d argue that I only finally did so tonight, when someone posted the meme at the top of this post on the PIAT FB group. Cos on more recent reading about 2000AD and its history, I’ve been kind of struck by the often-expressed notion that TGGC was related to the punk movement of the same period, which I could see in a lot of instances, yes, but not with Dredd, who was the flagship character of the comic, he was specifically mentioned in the cover logo for years. He was… not punk particularly.

But yeah, thinking about it now from the perspective offered at the top of the post, the idea that the Judges were just another gang in Mega City One… that makes a certain sense. The gang with the best resources, evidently, and the power to declare themselves THE LAW. The gang that, to some extent, took over the territory of the erstwhile United States from someone even worse than them, the gang that just destroyed democracy rather than most of the rest of the world like Bad Bob Booth… the gang that, per that particular Dredd story, was supposed to restore democracy eventually but just became dictators, the gang keeping on top of and wiping out its competitors for decades… some of whom are still even worse than them. The devil you know, indeed. I don’t know who made that meme, but after 40 years I think I understand Dredd much better now…

Oh not again

ANOTHER fucking Rapture? How did I miss that this one was coming? Still, at least I know to expect the bearded fellow’s assumption of the throne in July; I’m sure that’ll be a BIG and PUBLIC event that will be EVIDENT to EVERYONE, so that it’ll be OBVIOUS when it happens and not an EMBARRASSMENT if it were to, you know, not happen…

Thoughts and prayers

Talking of obnoxious phrases, Steven Moffat recently skewered it in this interview when the interviewer mentions it in the context of his new Who episode, “Boom”:

I always think, how about, “I’m sending thoughts and prayers”… how about cash? You could send cash! Or, help! What the hell is that? I’m against it. It’s like saying, “I’m very, very saddened about these needless deaths.” I’m glad you gave me that useful piece of information! I thought I might have cheered you up.
I think it is vacuity. How can people come out with this crap in the face of genuine tragedy? You come out with thoughts and prayers? Say something useful or do something useful. Be respectful. Don’t reach up for a line off a shelf and throw it in the grieving faces of the massively traumatized.
Yes. My hope was, if we can get “thoughts and prayers” going as a villainous catchphrase, like “Exterminate!”, people might stop saying it.

Which is kind of how he deploys it in the episode, and in a particularly vicious way, too… Indeed, in its way, despite ending happily, “Boom” is one of the harshest episodes of the show (and the “caskets” may be the most quease-making story detail since the “soup” from “Time Heist”):

And that’s not even the nastiest thing the Doctor has to say on that subject. The story itself has the Doctor stuck on a landmine, which is not the first time he’s been in that position:

But this mine is a rather more complicated proposition than that one on Skaro; there’s no easy way for the Doctor to get off it and if he doesn’t it’ll eventually explode anyway and wipe out a substantial chunk of the planet they’re on. Ncuti Gatwa is, accordingly, stuck in one place for almost the entire episode, meaning all he really has to work with is his face and his voice, and godDAMN he puts those things to amazing use. The people whining about the first two episodes being too heavy on the fantasy and absurdism shouldn’t have much to complain about in this one. Though not everyone’s agreeing on its merits, obviously:

Ungood

Spotted this on Tumblr recently:

I have developed a sort of love/hate relationship with it, or perhaps not so much the picture itself as what it represents… cos on the face of it, it really is piss funny and fills me with delight, but good Christ I hate the word “unalive”. I see it used quite often on Youtube and on Tumblr, and I know there are reasons—particularly related to The Algorithm—why people use it, but I still hate it. I know there’s a school of thought that the modern west is a lot less comfortable with the concept of death than it used to be, and that might well be the case, though I think society at large can only go so goth before it just gets silly; I mean, I tend to think about death (particularly mine) fairly often but that’s because, you know, disability, health, a life-changing illness that will probably shorten my existence in this vale of tears. all that gives me a certain perspective. Most people don’t need to think about death; it might come for us all but not all of us really need to worry about that.

But the very word “unalive” certainly serves as evidence for that theory about how uncomfortable we are with the idea of death; so much so that some of us can’t even bear the idea of the mere word and we have to make do with this bullshit that Orwell would’ve shake his head at sadly. It’s not even “political correctness gone mad”, it’s just… silly. And so, however hilarious the meme is (and it is, obviously), I still find myself kind of galled a bit by it… cos that’s me and what I’m like, I suppose.

Cumberland blue

Nice to be able to report that Cumberland City Council undid a bit of stupidity it enacted last week:

A controversial ban on same-sex parenting books at libraries in part of western Sydney has been overturned at a marathon late-night meeting after large crowds of protesters clashed outside the council chambers.
Cumberland city councillors voted 13-2 in front of a crowded public gallery on Wednesday night to revoke the ban, two weeks after it was introduced.
The council’s u-turn followed a widespread backlash and a warning from the NSW government that Cumberland risked losing its library funding.
Councillors narrowly voted on 1 May to “take immediate action to rid same-sex parents books/materials in council’s library service”. During the meeting, the councillor who put forward the motion, former mayor Steve Christou, brandished a book he alleged had received “really disturbing” constituent complaints, saying parents were “distraught” to see the book, A Focus On: Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig, displayed on a shelf in the children’s section of the library.
At a fiery meeting on Wednesday, Christou attempted to have same-sex parenting books restricted to the adults’ section of the library.
When that failed, his Our Local Community party colleague Paul Garrard tried to have the same restriction placed just on Duhig’s book.
Ultimately, all but two councillors supported a motion put forward by Labor’s Kun Huang to reverse the ban and ensure all books were catalogued according to national library guidelines, including having Duhig’s book in the junior non-fiction section.
Eddy Sarkis was the only councillor who supported Christou.
Labor councillor Mohamad Hussein, who had voted for the ban originally, changed his vote at the last minute. Hussein declined to comment when asked by journalists why he had changed his mind.

Notably, the 15 council members who voted tonight were more numerous than those who voted for the ban, cos there were only 11 councillors there that time. Almost like Christou, a far-right shit of several years’ standing, was exploiting the other four’s absence to make it easier to push his ban through or something. Anyway, the grand plan came undone and a bit of sense prevailed for once; Christou succeeded in getting drag queen story time events banned at Cumberland libraries despite the fact that none were planned and none had indeed ever happened in the first place, so I quite like seeing him be told to go fuck himself in this fashion.

Shannon Molloy at News, on the other hand, had an interesting take on the affair; after describing a couple of books full of horrors, he makes this “shocking” revelation:

I’m talking about the Bible and the Quran, of course.
If we’re applying Cumberland City councillor Steve Christou’s same logic about what’s appropriate in a library, then surely those holy books have to go too.
Mr Christou’s opposition to a book about kids with two mums or two dads was to prevent the “sexualisation” of children.
The book in question isn’t remotely sexual. It’s about families.
If Mr Christou is really, truly concerned about the welfare of children and saving them from content that’s inappropriate, he mustn’t waste any time.
He should immediately call a vote of the council and push for the removal of the Bible and Quran from Cumberland’s libraries.
To not do so would expose shocking double standards, which I’m sure he doesn’t hold.
Of course, I’m being facetious.
I’m gay, but I’m also a Christian with a deep fondness for the teachings of Christ. I’m in favour of the freedom of religious practice, no matter the brand of one’s faith.
But the metaphor I’ve used here shows how absurd and hypocritical Mr Christou and the council’s book ban is.
It also demonstrates that censorship – which flies in the face of an open and free society and the democratic values we hold dear – is a very slippery slope.

I don’t know why, but I feel like brother Shannon wouldn’t actually be that bothered if the Qur’an did get pulled from libraries…

Anyway, according to Leo Puglisi on Twitter (yes, I KNOW what I said in the last post; I saw this bit earlier before it went to shit), the book in question has apparently been borrowed ONCE in the five or so years that it’s been in the Cumberland library system. It’s so dangerous that hardly anyone’s read it… and, funnily enough, Steve Christou himself had to admit to being among its millions of non-readers. Because OBVIOUSLY. The only thing I worry about in all this is that the silly cunt might look at all this bullshit and decide he needs to up his homophobia game. Or maybe he’ll just go back to racism. I don’t want to say anything more in case I give him ideas.

Month: May 2024