Xmas

So, it's that midwinter break again where we gather with family and friends to eat and drink too much in the name of the supposed birthday of an itinerant preacher from Palestine approximately 2,000 years ago. The date was appropriated from a logically placed pagan festival, where the days clearly started becoming longer again, by a growing horde of monotheists across the Roman empire, choosing monotheism over the even more batshit pantheism that preceded it, deciding on December the 25th as put forward by Hippolytus in the 3rd century CE. The exact date continued to be disputed for centuries by the various factions of the new religion, and still is by the Eastern and Western branches, never mind their smaller offshoots. In any case, what is celebrated by both at the more flexibly timed Easter is the crucifixion by the Roman occupiers and local Jewish theocracy of a bothersome man who made them feel threatened by saying some things about social equality and being nice to each other. This wasn't enough for Christians, who had to convert the pagans of the planetary natural cycle-based festival they'd taken over to join their ranks. So they retrospectively gave the victim superpowers and, just to be on the safe side, also asserted that he was the direct son of an invisible, inaudible entity that purportedly created the whole universe, and confusingly the the entity itself made flesh. The incarnation was also necessary so that the other tenet of their fairytale, the concept of the Christ figure taking the burden of the sins of the whole of mankind on his back and then 'saving' us all through getting killed about 30 years later, would carry more weight.

I do like the tunes of many carols (if I ignore the hatstand lyrics, which can be hard to do) the idea of having a period of peace, exchanging presents and having fir trees and candles in our houses. I just wish there weren't even more of the nutjobs around spreading the 'good word' than there are normally. And I'd also appreciate it if they stopped trying to tell people to worship 'little Lord Jesus' all the bloody time. Oh well, at least they left the summer solstice alone.

Merry Christmas.

A quick summary of Abrahamic religions for Easter

Judaism: a localised faith with a sadistic deity either demanding sacrifices or committing genocide, with the idea that you get punished for eating pork or mixing shellfish with dairy products, or not mutilating the genitals of male infants. And then get sent to hell.

Christianity: a slightly better version where the god character raped a married woman and the resulting child grew up to be an itinerant preacher with a humanistic moral philosophy, and then got executed by the authorities for being popular, but the adherents to his cult gave him superpowers too just to be able to compete with the deities of the time, and have killed each other, ever since the stories about the man were compiled, over slightly different interpretations of what he may have said.

Islam: a later offshoot of the two above, with a new preacher declaring that he is on a divinely mandated mission, which then involves a lot of murderous military conquest. Also the customary punishment of people for eating pork or not mutilating the genitals of male infants, with drinking alcohol and allowing women to dress as they like as added offences leading to being sent straight to hell.

Considering all of the above, Easter may not be that bad since it now largely just means some holiday time with your family and eating a lot of chocolate, but it is still celebrating the gruesome crucifixion of a character presumably based on a real historical person, as if that were a glorious thing and could grant you absolution for anything bad that you've done. In short, at heart quite mentally ill.

Why keep a blog going?

 After so many years of not touching it, it becomes like a spring clean for the mind. I expect no readership; that's not the point of it. So, to clear all the bees from my bonnet, here goes.

Putin: now falling back on a modern-day version of Mainila, because he has nothing else left. Trying for Stalin without any actual Nazi invaders to justify being an egocentric amoral dictator.  

Trump: lies always seemed like a dependable option, as well as calling the man in charge too old when he's hardly much younger and has never been competent at anything, including business, understanding communication or the human race.

BAME: yes, right-minded people care, but every single white person isn't responsible for American slavery, so drop that if you want to be seen as a rational human being. Read some history, please.

Woke: a horrible American term again, but apparently we're now stuck with it, and it seems to have led to this. Go on, start burning books in the name of not offending anyone at all. I wonder who else burnt books to delete history?

LGBT plus all the add-ons: all the gay people I've ever known haven't wanted to,or given a shit about being bracketed together with people who are feeling that their sense of misalignment is not recognised. 

Just got the wankiest job ad I've ever seen...

and the competition for that is stiff:

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Trump did not have Coronavirus, did he?

Of course it's a massive insult to hundreds of thousands who have died. But you expect nothing less from the largest turd imaginable dominating the international media. The polls are looking bad for him, even the twisted constitution of the US may not allow him to annul a losing result in the election through outright dictatorship, and so he grabs on to the only thing he believes will perpetuate his self-created myth of invincibility, when it's just long enough before he has to finally face the music that he can make out that not only is he physically fit enough again to lead the country but that God is on his side. That and pity votes, as if flouting all medical advice to supposedly catch the virus somehow makes him closer to the average Joe. 
I no longer want Trump assassinated. Castration live on air without anaesthetic would certainly be an acceptable option, and every American who voted for him should be barred from ever leaving their shores again...if only either were achievable. This has all had the unfortunate side effect that when you see Johnson on TV, for all his self-involved bluster and hopelessness, you just think "Oh, bless. At least we've just got an utter twat in charge."

All paedophiles are white

This has gone too far. I just watched a new version of Alan Bennett's 1998 Talking Heads episode Playing Sandwiches, with Lucian Msamati (black) taking the role played in the original version by David Haig (white), of a paedophile living under a false identity. The role is utterly independent of, and without reference to, race. Yet because it's now a black actor playing a paedo, the BBC has seen it necessary because of the Black Lives Matter movement to add the disclaimer: “This film is set in the 1990s and reflects the language and social attitudes of its time.” Why stop at sex offenders? From now on, will we have this disclaimer before every piece of fiction or entertainment if it contains black characters who aren't saints? Jesus wept.

Po-faced over blackface

So, two and a half years after last posting, during which period we've seen Brexit, the unbelievably and exponentially growing odiousness of Trump and the concomitant collapse of any remaining global good will towards the United States, the blusterings of blimp Boris and, of course, a global pandemic on a scale not seen for a century and somehow seeming worse than the Spanish flu outbreak back then just because of modern media saturation and the constant babble of analysis and reproaches, what finally gets me to rise from my torpor?
The fact that they've now pulled Little Britain, The Mighty Boosh and The League of Gentlemen from Netflix, and in some cases even from the BBC's iPlayer, that's what. Why? Because absurdist white comedians who have no compunctions about offending all and sundry had the gall to don blackface for some of their comic characters. Therefore, this equates directly to Al Jolson, The Black and White Minstrel Show and dear old 'some of my best friends are black'-style Nazi Jim Davidson doing Chalky back in the dark ages, when TV was still rife with his ilk.
Of course, nope. It has been widely stated that we now have two competing viruses, one medical and the other social, but the latter is not racism. It's the insidious and uncontrolled spread of a belief that the virulently systemic racism of the American police force, and to an extent U.S. society as a whole, is something that people in this country have thus far failed to spot here, but it must be there because racial prejudice does exist here too, and therefore the situation must be rectified. This is still fine when a statue of a slavery profiteer, which should really have been taken discreetly away for 'renovation' a long time ago and then forgotten about somewhere deep and dusty to avoid any anti-PC nationalist backlash either, is thrown into the harbour. Mind you, my choice, and thankfully paralleled by that of some other longer-sighted individuals, would have been to simply stick a big plaque in front of the thing explaining the man's noxious misdeeds in full, and likewise with any of the other statues now being targeted, all the way to Churchill. Attempting to erase all historically significant figures who had shitty character traits is akin to erasing the history that led us to where we are, and that isn't far off burning books.
But locking away the aforementioned comedy shows is indicative of something quite different and alarming: it's simply anti-intellectualism from those unable to differentiate between laughing at people different from us and laughing at ridiculous racist stereotypes, which is all the shows in question do. It's a ban on satirising certain groups in society, for fear of causing offence, and therefore an attack on free satire itself. Chucking the real, unquestioning racism of Gone with the Wind in the same basket speaks volumes about the depth of analysis that is behind these decisions. Presumably, everything by Sacha Baron-Cohen is up next, starting with Ali G. To his credit for once, one-time cheeky chappie turned all-round misanthrope Harry Enfield refused to bow down and apologise for his past blackface characters. If comedians have any political duty at all, it's to mock that which is worthy of mockery, not to preach or educate. 
I don't do protest marches as a rule, as I'm truly lazy and also because I find they easily turn tribal and simplistic, but if we go any further down this path, I'm off on an essential shopping trip to get what I need to make crappy placards.

EDIT: Today, they also pulled the episode of Fawlty Towers where the gin-sozzled Major spouts some racist epithets. So even laughing at racist characters is verboten now. As all his abovementioned comic successors can be argued to have done, John Cleese may have wanted to have his cake and eat it by cleverly lampooning racism while allowing bigots who didn't get that they were the target to believe that they were being represented too, but the point still stands.