Month: November 2024

The Queen is… undead?

On a lighter (?) note…

This news from the other day caused quite some confusion and merriment; as the chap on Threads who posted this screenshot said, isn’t she… you know, dead? I think a surprising number of us needed a surprising amount of time to realise the Queen in question was actually Camilla, not Liz… which kind of says a lot about how people will never think of Camilla as “The Queen” in the way that Liz was “The Queen”; you hold a position long enough, you become “the” thing, and 70 years is an awfully long time to stay in one job. (In a similar way, John Paul II was the Pope of my lifetime—even though he was really the third but baby me had no awareness of Paul VI or JP1 before him—because he was Pope for so long, and neither Joe Ratzinger nor Jorge from Buenos Aires has ever been “the Pope” for me in the way old Karol was.) Plus I saw someone else saying something similar about “the Prince of Wales” and how they thought it was a reference to Charles, not William, and I knew exactly what they meant. Awfully hard to think of him as King somehow…

Also…

You know how I’ve been dithering about deleting Twitter for ages now?

I finally snapped a few hours ago. I was, as I think I’ve said more than once on here, only really there for a handful of friends who haven’t left for whatever reason (and I’m not going to blame them for that), I don’t post much any more, but tonight I was on the “for you” page to see something other than the usual follows and frankly it just kept throwing up so much Trumpeter triumphalism that it pushed me over the edge at last, and I realised it would be easier to just delete the cunt of a thing than to block all of them individually.

15 years’ worth gone in an instant. Most of that time before Oolong was nice, too. But no more. I hate that. I hate Oolong. I wish him a lifetime of nothing but pain and agony and suffering.

The United States of Dunning-Krueger

Post title borrowed from a friend’s comment on FB about what just happened in America.

Fuck.

I’m not actually SURPRISED that this happened, not at all, it’s hardly the first time Americans have voted against their own interests and I daresay it won’t be the last, but I’m disappointed at them for doing so. The myth of freedom-loving rugged individual America is now dead if it wasn’t already; America wants a Big Strongman Leader as much as anyone else and seventy million voters wanted one enough that they chose this thing to fill that position. How many people didn’t vote at all, though? Cos frankly I’m blaming THEM as much as the seventy million Drumpf voters. The latter cared enough about TrumpCorp’s brand of fascism to want to impose it on the whole country. The non-voters didn’t care enough either way. And they’ll probably be fine under the new regime anyway, so they won’t care then either.

Oh, and all you fucking “I can’t vote for genocide” people who opposed Kamala over the Democrats’ support for Israel? Well done, you’re very moral and your purity is admirable and all that, but as far as the Gaza situation goes there were only going to be two outcomes: one, Kamala wins and might turn on Netanyahu once she was in the hot seat and things might get better; two, Trump wins and the situation will get worse. Congratulations, Kamala lost, you got what you wanted… and Netanyahu got what HE wanted. Frankly, the idea that anyone in his government was acting as a “brake” on him strikes me as ludicrous, but apparently people did see this Yoav Gallant person as holding back the worst elements of the far-right… but not any more, and I suspect Bibi picked this day deliberately to pull this stunt.

You let Jimmy Carter down, you cunts.

I am out of words.

Ofsplaining

This has been one of the top sources of Internet mirth to circulate in the last few days, and with good cause. What makes it really funny, though, is that not only is dickhead here mansplaining Atwood’s own book at her, he’s doing it WRONG. Atwood did say that the Islamic Revolution was a partial inspiration, but her observations of the American religious right and the state of Canadian politics by the end of the 70s were the bigger one… and that Gilead was specifically inspired by her study of the early Puritan period. of America, a country whose history has never contained an Islamic era. Faces out of context? Facts out of arse, more like it…

RIP Quincy Jones

As I noted when he celebrated his 90th birthday last year, Quincy Jones did well for a man who was supposedly dying of not one but two brain aneurysms in 1974, beating them and living another 50 years… his passing the other day has obviously generated a lot of comment on social media, amidst which I saw someone saying about how they were discovering just how much music he was behind, and, well, I made my own discovery:

I have known this piece of music for years (I gather it was the Austin Powers movies that brought it back), but have never known what it was, never knew its name, and consequently had even less idea who might’ve written it; indeed, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was actually a recent composition like a bit of stock music or something pastiching 60s lounge music or some such. But then last night Youtube suggested this somewhat randomly, so I clicked on the video… and OH! It’s THAT music! It’s ACTUAL 60s music! And Quincy Jones wrote it? I will indeed be damned. So if other people are amazed to discover some of the things “Q” was responsible for, so am I…

Well THIS was unexpected

One of the more interesting aspects of the US election is how many Republican figures have come out in support of Kamala Harris…

…but I don’t think I would ever have imagined THIS guy slinging his hook with Kamala. Richard Spencer? The fucking NAZI? The Nazi who… voted Democrat last time round too?

Spencer supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Following Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor, Spencer said Bannon would be in “the best possible position” to influence policy.
By 2018, however, Spencer had distanced himself from Trump, saying on Twitter that “the Trump moment is over, and it’s time for us to move on.” The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that, around the same time, the white nationalist movement as a whole was dissatisfied with Trump’s presidency, particularly because they believed Trump had failed to put a stop to non-white immigration into the US.
In a July 2019 interview on CNN, he called Trump’s tweet about four congresswomen (telling them to “go back” to where they came from) “meaningless”, as he believed Trump was practicing a “con game” in not clearly developing a white nationalist agenda. He stated that Trump was merely providing “tweets that are meaningless and cheap and express the kind of sentiments you might hear from your drunk uncle while he’s watching [Sean] Hannity.”
In 2020, following the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Spencer said that he regretted voting for Trump. In August of that year, Spencer said he would be voting for Joe Biden and the straight Democratic ticket in the 2020 election. “The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over. I made mistakes; Trump is an obvious disaster; but mainly the paradigm contained flaws that we now are able to perceive. And it needs to end,” Spencer wrote. “So be patient. We’ll have another day in the sun. We need to recover and return in a new form.” The Biden campaign renounced his support.

So, if I’m reading that Wiki excerpt correctly, Spencer’s main issue with Trump is that he hasn’t been racist enough (and he’s too opposed to our “Aryan” cousins in Iran), so he thinks he can get the white ethnostate back on track by… voting for the BLACK woman? I mean, I can understand him voting Biden, at least he’s white, but Kamala is… kind of not. This really doesn’t make sense… but then again a couple of years ago he was also claiming he no longer identified as a white nationalist despite still running a white nationalist publishing company that publishes professional racists like Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Kerry Bolton, Jared Taylor, scum like that. Make it make sense, Richard, I’m getting tired of all this bullshit…

The feeling is no doubt mutual

Someone posted this on Threads the other day:

This is, arguably, an unfortunate opinion for Tristan to express, given that his better-known brother Andrew has a sideline career as a rapper called “Mr Plenty”. Mind you, the bits of his alleged “music” that I’ve heard (as featured in that video) would put me off music too… Anyway, seeing that tweet made me realise I never seem to see the Tates or their ghastly ilk ever talking about music or anything like that, what movies they enjoy and so forth… don’t know why it’s taken me so long to consciously note this, but I think I know why this is the case, and it’s because ART WON’T FUCK YOU. Music will not give you a blowjob. A film won’t give you a wristy. Books don’t really work as an allegedly sex-trafficked camgirl network. It’s not currency with which you can buy sex.

Somewhere deep down I think I’ve always recognised the essential crassness of soul that the Tates and other hustlers like them and their varied cultists evince; it’s all about the grind, being on the grind, making money from the grind, never not grinding, never stopping to enjoy whatever the benefits of the grind may be… it’s materialism of a kind I find particularly repulsive (which I say as someone who likes his material things, let’s be honest), it’s a mindset that’s not just uncreative but almost anti-creative. And young Tristan’s drivel above just crystallised all that for me when I saw it… I don’t know, fuck all these people, I hate them.