I couldn’t let this go. I’m afraid I’m still struggling with the cold that’s been going round, and for several days this week simply haven’t felt well enough to blog. But the appearance of Theresa May on the news just now, blandly apologising for the state of the NHS, just annoyed me that little bit too much for me to want to let it go. Of course the NHS is in crisis, with cancelled operations, increased waiting times and extra strain put on doctors, nurses, surgeons and ambulance crews. That’s the way the Tories want it. And it’s happened every winter, ever since they were elected into power under Thatcher. Thatcher wanted to privatise the NHS, and although she was prevented by a backbench revolt, this is what they’re doing, piecemeal, by stealth. By opening it all up to private competition, handing over hospitals, clinics and other services to private healthcare providers like Virgin Health, Circle Health and others. Meanwhile starving the NHS of funds, in the hope that the crisis in care will cause more people to become disillusioned with this grandest of British institutions, so that there will be little outcry when they finally announce that state healthcare is gone, and we must all buy private medical insurance.
I caught the news about Jeremy Hunt apologising for the state of the NHS this morning. According to Mike over at Vox Political, Jezza was originally unable to be found, but someone decided that he had better put his face before the cameras and try and salvage something from the situation. And so he did a very carefully stage-managed interview.
Now I’ve seen Theresa May do more or less the same on the Beeb. She apologises for the state of the health service, and declared that she knows the situation is difficult.
I dare say she does. She knows, but in my view, doesn’t remotely care. She’ll still carry on with its privatisation, with starving it of resources, with manufacturing resentments among its staff, so that there’s a personnel drain. All to provide a pretext to get more private firms into the NHS. All done with the same glowing fanfare about ‘bringing the expertise of private industry to state the sector’. I’ve heard it so often I can practically write the nauseating script for it.
Enough’s enough. I’ve heard enough insincere apologies from our mendacious leaders, and had more than enough weasel words from Hunt and his vile mistress. Words are cheap. And I don’t trust the Tories to do anything to correct this. Oh, they might make an announcement that they are putting more money into the NHS if people become really angry, and declare that they’re putting more money into it than ever before, and certainly more than the last Labour government. But as has been shown, this is always a lie. The stats are chosen so that they look impressive, but when compared to what spending was like under Labour, they’re always shown to be well below. Meanwhile the Tories dig out once again the well-worn script about how we all must pay for ‘high-spending Labour’, even though it isn’t ‘high-spending Labour’ that’s created the economic crisis. It’s the Tories, pure and simply, and their determination to cut welfare services, privatise the NHS, and grind British working people down, all to give more power and tax money to their friends in big business.
No more insincere apologies. No protests about how awful this is all is, while secretly delighted with the chaos being inflicted on the health service. May is not sorry, as she and the Tories keep on doing this. They only want to appear sorry so that they don’t get voted out.
It’s far too late for that. If we want to save the NHS, then May, Hunt and the rest of this vile, murderous Tory government has to go. Now. And if May wants to show she cares about the NHS, the only thing she can do is resign. And take Jezza with her.
I’ve been avoiding talking too much about politics this week as I simply haven’t had the strength to tackle the issues in as much detail as they deserve. Quite apart from the fact that the issues that have been raised in the media this week – the continuing running down of the NHS, the growth of food banks, homelessness and grinding poverty, all to make the poor poorer and inflate the already bloated incomes of the Tory elite, all make me absolutely furious. I’ve been feeling so under the weather that, quite simply, I couldn’t face blogging about them and making myself feel worse mentally as well as physically.
But this is slightly different.
Slate has published a piece about the guidance notes Alt-Right Trumpist cheerleader Milo Yiannopolis has got from his publishers at Simon and Schuster. In this short video, scourge of anti-feminists, racists and general Nazis Kevin Logan goes through the notes, and it’s hilarious.
There are pages and pages of them. And the more you read, the funnier it gets.
You remember Milo Yiannopolis? He was one of the rising stars of the Alt-Right. He’s anti-feminist, anti-immigration and in many peoples’ eyes, racist, although he’s denied that he actually has any Nazi connections. All this despite the fact that he was filmed in a bar getting Hitler salutes from a party of Alt-Right fans.
He was the IT correspondent for Breitbart, many of whose founders, managers and leading staff are racists, and have been described as such by the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation and site Hope Not Hate. Yiannopolis has constantly denied that he’s racist or bigoted by playing the race and sexuality card. He’s half-Jewish, gay, and his partner is Black. And so he argues that he can’t possibly be prejudiced against people of different ethnicities and gays. Well, possibly. But he has said some extremely bigoted, racist and homophobic comments, quite apart from his anti-feminism.
He describes himself as ‘a virtuous troll’. Others just call him a troll. That’s all he is. He’s only good at writing deliberately offensive material, but is otherwise completely unremarkable. But he’s British public school elite, and so Americans, who should know much better, assume that somehow he’s more cultured, knowledgeable, better educated and insightful than he actually is. Sam Seder commented on Yiannopolis that if he wasn’t British, nobody would take any notice of him. I think it’s a fair comment. But it does show the snobbery that goes with class and accent. Incidentally, when I was a kid reading comics, my favourite characters were the Thing in the Fantastic Four, and Powerman, in Powerman and Iron Fist. And it was partly because of their accents. Stan Lee has a terrible memory, and to help him remember which character said what, he used to give them different voices, sometimes based on who was in the media at the time. He made the Thing talk like Jimmy Durante. He was a space pilot, but his speech was that of New York working class. I liked him because he was kind of a blue-collar joe, like my family.
The same with Powerman. He was a Black superhero, real name Luke Cage, who had been subjected to unethical medical experiments to create a superman by a corrupt prison governor after being wrongly convicted. I didn’t understand the racial politics around the strip, but liked the character because he was another lower class character with a working class voice. He also had the same direct approach as the Thing in dealing with supervillains. Whereas Mr. Fantastic, the leader of the Fantastic Four, and Cage’s martial artist partner in fighting crime, Iron Fist would debate philosophically how to deal with the latest threat to the world and the cosmos, according to the demands of reason and science in the case of Mr. Fantastic, and ancient Chinese mystical traditions, in Iron Fists’, the Thing and Powerman simply saw another megalomaniac, who needed to be hit hard until they cried for mercy and stopped trying to take over the world or the universe.
But I digress. Back to Milo. Milo was due to have a book published, but this fell through after he appeared on Joe Rogan’s show defending child abuse. Yiannopolis had been sexually abused himself by a paedophile Roman Catholic priest, but believed that he had been the predator in that situation. From what I understand, the victims of sexual abuse often unfairly blame themselves for their assault, so I’m quite prepared to believe that something like that happened to Yiannopolis. What was unusual – and revolting – was that Yiannopolis appeared to feel no guilt and regret at all about the incident.
Very, very many people were rightly disgust. He got sacked from Breitbart, along with a lot of other companies, his speaking tour had to be cancelled, and the book deal he had managed to finagle fell through.
Well, as Sergeant Major Shut Up used to say on It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot, Mum, ‘Oh, dear. How sad. Never mind.’ It couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, and Yiannopolis got a taste of the kind invective and vitriol he poured on the ‘SJWs’ and the Left.
He appeared later on to ‘clarify’ his statement – not an apology – saying that he now knew he was the victim of child abuse, and stating that he didn’t promote or approve of the sexual abuse of children. But the damage was done.
Now it seems Yiannopolis’ book deal is back on, though Simon and Schuster really aren’t happy with the manuscript.
Comments include recommendations that he remove the jokes about Black men’s willies, doesn’t call people ‘cucks’, and stop sneering at ugly people. One of these is particularly hilarious, as his editor writes that you can’t claim that ugly people are attracted to the Left. ‘Have you seen the crowd at a Trump rally?’ Quite. I saw the front row of the crowd at BBC coverage of the Tory party convention one year, and they were positively horrific. It seemed to be full of old school country squire types, as drawn by Gerald Scarfe at his most splenetic.
The guidance goes on with comments like ‘No, I will not tolerate you describing a whole class of people as mentally retarded’, and then factual corrections. Like ‘This never happened’. ‘This never happened too.’ ‘No, you’re repeating fake news. There was no Satanism, no blood and no semen’. At one point the editor demands that an entire chapter be excised because it’s just off-topic and offensive.
Here’s the video.
There probably isn’t anything unusual in the amount of editing that Simon and Schuster require. Mainstream publishing houses often request changes or alteration to the manuscript. It happens to the best writers and academics. Years ago I read an interview with the editors of some of the authors of the world’s most influential books. One of them was Germaine Greer’s. Greer had sent in a manuscript about cross-dressing in Shakespeare. A fair enough subject, as there’s a lot of female characters disguising themselves as boys in the Bard’s plays. But she had the insight that Greer was far more interested in gender roles, and suggested she write about that instead. And the result was The Female Eunuch.
At a much lower level of literature, Private Eye had a good chortle about one of ‘Master Storyteller’ Jeffrey Archer’s tawdry epics. Apparently the gossip was that it went through seven rewrites. Ian Fleming’s editor for the Bond books, according to one TV documentary, was a gay man with a keen interest in dressing well. Which is why some of the sex in Bond was less explicit than Fleming intended, but also why Bond became suave, stylish dresser fighting supervillains in impeccably cut dinner suits.
No shame in any of this, then. But what makes it funny is that it’s happened to Yiannopolis, who seems to have been too much of an egotist to think that anything like it could ever really happen to him. Looking through the comments, it’s also clear that the editor really doesn’t like his bigotry, and the invective he spews against racial minorities and the disadvantaged. I got the impression that he or she really didn’t want to have anything to do with book, but has presumably been told they had to work with Yiannopolis because the publishers were going to put it out anyway, no matter what anyone else in the company felt.
And the editor’s clear dislike of his bigotry is a problem for Yiannopolis, because he’s a troll, and that’s just about all he does: pour out sneers, scorn and abuse, like a male version of Anne Coulter, another right-winger, who’s far less intelligent than she thinks she is. And I know that grammatically standards are a bit looser now than they were a few years ago, but when you have the comment ‘This is not a sentence’, it’s clear that Yiannopolis is failing at one of the basic demands of any writer from the editors of small press magazines to the biggest publishing houses and newspapers and magazines. They all insist that you should write properly in grammatically correct sentences. But Yiannopolis has shown that he can’t do that either.
As for the kind of literary snobbery that used to look down very hard on comics and graphic novels, while promoting opinionated bigots like Yiannopolis as ‘serious’ writers, my recommendation is that if you’re given a choice between going to comics convention or seeing Milo, go to the comics convention. You’ll be with nicer people, the comics creators on the panels are very good speakers, and themselves often very literate and cultured. I can remember seeing Charles Vess at the UKCAC Convention in Reading in 1990. Vess is a comics artist, but he’s also produced cover art for SF novels. He gave a fascinating talk about the great artists that have influenced him with slides. And one of the highlights was listening to the publisher of DC, Roy Kanigher, who was very broad New York. Didn’t matter. He was genuinely funny, to the point where the interviewer lost control of the proceedings and Kanigher had the crowd behind him all the way.
Which shows what a lot of people really know already: just because someone’s got a British public school accent, does not make them a genius, or that they’re capable of producing anything worth reading. Comics at their best can be brilliant. They open up children’s and adults’ imaginations, the art can be frankly amazing and quite often the deal with difficult, complex issues in imaginative ways. Think of Neil Gaiman, who started off as one of the writers at 2000 AD before writing the Sandman strip for DC. Or Alan Moore.
Yiannopolis is the opposite. All he does is preach hate, trying to get us to hate our Black, Asian and Latin brothers and sisters, despise the poor, and tell women to know their place. He has no more right to be published, regardless of his notoriety, than anyone else. And the editor’s demand for amendments show it.
Oh, and as regarding publishing fake news, he’d have had far less sympathy from Mike, if by some misfortune Mike had found himself as Yiannopolis’ editor. Proper journalists are expected to check their facts, which Mike was always very keen on. It was he was respected by the people he actually dealt when he was working as a journalist. The problem often comes higher up, at the level of the newspaper editors and publishers. In the case of Rupert Murdoch, I’ve read account of his behaviour at meetings with his legal staff that shows that Murdoch actually doesn’t care about publishing libellous material, if the amount of the fine will be lower than the number of extra copies of the paper the fake news will sale. Fortunately it appears that Simon and Schusters’ editors don’t quite have that attitude. But who knows for how long this will last under Trump. The man is determined to single-handedly destroy everything genuinely great and noble in American culture.
‘Share and enjoy’ is the company motto of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, a massive robotics conglomerate best known for its incompetence and shoddy workmanship in Douglas Adams’ Science Fiction classic, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The company and its products are so substandard, that its complaints division now occupies the major landmasses of three whole planets.
And while, according to Adams, the great Encyclopedia Galactica defined a robot as a machine designed to do the work of a man, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as ‘your plastic pal who’s fun to be with’.
And we’re coming closer to that reality every day. Yesterday and today, BBC 2 have been running a short documentary series, Six Robots and Us, in which six families and other groups of people take care of six robots designed to help them with their particular problems. One of these is Fitbot, a robotic fitness instructor, which was given to a group of people trying to get fit. In tonight’s episode, the people of a shop take custody of Shopbot, are robotic store worker, to see how they get on. And there are two children with learning difficulties, one of whom is autistic, who are given Tutorbot, to see if it can help them overcome their difficulties at school.
Douglas Adams predicted something very similar in the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy way back in the ’70s-80s. In the second series of the radio version of Hitch-Hiker, there’s a device called an autoteach, a kind of computer teacher. It gives the student facts, and then starts asking questions to get the student to think through the issues. If the student gets an answer right, they get to press a button on the autoteach, which stimulates their pleasure centres. And at the end of the lesson, after the students has laughed and screamed with pleasure when they get the answers right, the autoteach asks them to press the other button. This give the autoteach itself a dose of pure pleasure, so that part of the story ends with the autoteach laughing like a maniac.
Ok, so Tutorbot, with its humanoid shape isn’t quite like that, and it doesn’t electronically stimulate the pleasure centres, mercifully. But the idea’s more or less the same: an intelligent machine to teach children.
As for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, the Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy defined them as ‘a bunch of mindless jerks, who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.’
I didn’t see all of yesterday’s edition, because I went to bed early due to this cold. The next programme is on tonight, 28th December 2017, at 8.30. Aside from the cold, what went through my mind while watching the programme was all the jokes in Hitch-Hiker about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Here’s a clip from YouTube from the 80s TV version of Hitch-Hiker, where the Book talks about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and robots.
My apologies to everyone coming here these past few days, who’s been disappointed by my not putting up any posts. I’m afraid Sunday night I started coming down with a stinking cold that literally left me unable to do very much except lie around feeling ill and miserable. I’m still not over it, but I shall put one or two things up over the next few days.
And needless to say, I hope you’ve all managed to avoid it or similar germs, as well as the soul-crushing malignity of the current Tory government.
Okay, I’m afraid I haven’t done much blogging this week. That’s partly due to my having picked up some kind of germ that was going round. It left you feeling completely drained of energy, and feeling that you were almost going to come down with a bout of diarrhoea and sickness. Mercifully, I didn’t. A lot of people in our area have had it, and all except one or two have managed to have avoid getting diarrhoea. It’s nasty, but it also seems to be over in a couple of days.
This is about something else that’s nasty, but unfortunately hasn’t been over in a couple of days. I’ve been blogging a lot about the resurgence of Fascism in eastern Europe, including Ukraine. One of the pieces I put up was about the Pravy Sektor – the infamous ‘Right Sector’ group of Ukrainian extreme Right-wing groups, including ‘Svoboda’, whose name means ‘Freedom’, but are probably more accurately described by their old monicker, the Social Nationalist Movement. Yep, they’re a bunch of Nazis. And the current Ukrainian regime includes them as one of its coalition partners, and seems very happy indeed with the extreme violence, intimidation and brutality it metes out, especially to ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
This is another video presenting the case that the regime change, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Maidan Square in 2013, which overthrew President Yanukovych, wasn’t entirely a popular revolution, but a carefully orchestrated piece of geopolitics by the US and EU to install a client regime as the Ukrainian government. Yanukovych had committed the cardinal sin of signing a treaty providing for closer relations, both political and commercial, with Putin’s Russia. This could not be tolerated by the governments in Washington and Brussels, and so Yanukovych was toppled, fleeing to Russia with Putin.
This is at times a very hard video to watch. It’s not short, at about 1 hour 25 minutes long, and shows scenes of very graphic violence. Many of these will be familiar from some of the other videos I’ve posted up, such as the masked, uniformed figures of Svoboda and their Nazi regalia – the Wolfsangel SS Rune on their sleeves for example – marching amongst the crowd. It shows them holding torchlight marches – almost exactly like those staged in the Third Reich by the Nazis – chanting the names of Stepan Bandera and another Nationalist hero, along with cries of ‘Death to the Communists’ and ‘Death to the Russians’. At one point the marchers are shown chanting a slogan about sticking Russian heads on spikes.
There’s also footage of the snipers from Svoboda shooting and killing unarmed demonstrators in Maidan Square, in an atrocity that was falsely ascribed by Obama and the Western media to Yanukovych. It also shows the attack on the trade union headquarters by Svoboda thugs, in which something like 45 people were burned alive, while others were beaten, and thrown out of the building’s windows. As they fell, their attackers joked about how ‘Negroes are falling!’ The documentary also includes an interview from Russian television, RT, with a young woman, who was one of the survivors of the attack. She was part of a peace camp, and she and the others were chased into the building by the storm troopers. Other victims included people in unarmed demonstrations, shot and killed by retreating state security forces.
Some of the victims were dissenting journalists and politicians. There’s a clip of one of the senior journos in one of the Ukrainian papers being roughed up by the minister for looking after the country’s ethnic minorities, at the head of another mob of thugs. He was angry as the newsman had published photos of the stormtroopers beating up civilians. One opposition politician was pelted with eggs, and savagely beaten. His attackers even attacked the ambulance crew that came to help him. There are also scenes from inside the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. An opposition politico takes the chair to voice extremely trenchant criticism of the government and its policies. Immediately, other politicos and officials start running to the lectern to force him.
In many of these attacks, the police either do nothing, or are actively involved. There are scenes showing senior police officers in very chummy conversation with the masked and uniformed Nazis surrounding them about beating and murdering protestors.
This is also a regime, which doesn’t even bother to hide its Nazi sympathies. Another piece of footage shows members of the government at one of the national monuments making speeches praising Bandera, the Nazis and Hitler himself. They’re greeted in their turn by angry shouts and chants from a pro-Soviet crowd just behind the barrier. There’s also a leaked phone conversation from the Ukrainian politicians and Oligarch’s wife, Yulia Timoshenko, to another government official describing what she’d like to do ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians: nuke them, and then kill them all.
So what’s the US and EU’s response to the beatings, mass murder and repression? Active collusion with the regime, and smooth denials to the international press and Congress that there is any kind of ethnic cleansing being done by the regime. Or that if there is, is all the fault of the Russkies under Putin. There’s that notorious phone call between Victoria Nuland and another state department official, effectively fixing who she wants in the Ukrainian cabinet. One of the members she explicitly mentions, Oleh Tiahnybok, is the head of Svoboda. There’s also the phone call between the Estonian minister, Urmas Paet to Baroness Ashcroft about the shooting of unarmed civilians by Svoboda snipers, in which Ashcroft sounds distinctly uncomfortable. This is not stuff she really wanted to hear. And the lies go all the way to the top. It’s not just Nuland in the state department, nor Psaki, a Whitehouse spokeswoman, but also John Kerry and Obama. All of whom tell the press, and some critical US congressmen, that Ukraine is a free, democratic country that’s not oppressing anyone.
This is demonstrably untrue. The video also shows footage of Ukrainian troops entering Russian-speaking towns in the east of the country, firing on and killing unarmed civilians. There are also shown occupying a polling station to prevent the local people voting for independence. Again, when the local people march to claim their right to vote, they open fire. One young lad is horribly shot in the leg. This scene is cut with Kerry telling the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate that no-one was being prevented from voting, the elections were completely fair, and that the reason why turn-out was so low is that nobody turned out to vote. Again, that’s another lie, as the video shows a massive turn out of Russian-Ukrainians of all ages, taking the opportunity to vote for a federal Ukrainian. This is something else that’s anathema to the Ukrainian puppet regime and its masters in Washington. Obama and Kerry stand in front of the microphones and cameras claiming that the polls by the people in the eastern part of the country demanding their own separatist, autonomous enclave, lack democratic support. Of course, the video argues that the opposite is the case. It is the American-installed regime that lacks the democratic mandate.
The Fascist regime and Obama also try to claim that the demands for a separate Russian-speaking enclave in the Donbas region is due to the machinations of Putin. It isn’t. They claim that these were only made after the Ukrainian government sent the troops into the Russian-speaking areas to intimidate them. Obama, Kerry and Nuland also claim that the reason Crimea voted to join with Russia was due to the intimidation of the Russian forces there. In fact, the voting in the Crimea was much fairer and far less rigged, due to the presence of the Russians as observers.
One of the other tactics the Ukrainian regime has also tried to use to smear its enemies is accusations of anti-Semitism. The Donbas separatists were supposed to be going to pass a law demanding Jews register with the authorities. There is, horrifically, much anti-Semitism in Russia, just as there is in the rest of the former eastern bloc. But this was a lie, and soon had to be dropped as too many people knew it was.
As for the Russians, Putin is, it seems, this time the maligned one. Rather than seeking to overthrow a democratic regime or dismember a rival, and disobedient nation, the opposite is true. He’s been forced to act because a democratically elected regime was overthrown at the behest of an outside power – Washington, and the oppression of his own ethnic group by the resulting Fascist regime. And Putin has every right to do so under international law. Putin’s a nasty piece of work himself, but this time, he’s the victim, not the aggressor.
And it’s not just Russians, who are the victims. some of the groups beaten and shot at by the goose-steppers are, it is claimed, just severely normal Ukrainians. And one fact both Washington and Kiev want to cover up is that many of the original Maidan protestors don’t want the ruling president. They wanted to throw out Yanukovych, but they are very definitely not supporters of his successors.
The video lastly claims the reason Washington has set up this puppet regime, and is attempting to demonise Putin, is because Putin has defied America’s attempts to become the only world super-power, and is successfully competing with the Land of the Free in what it sees as a ‘multi-polar’ world – one in which there are various competing powers, not all subject to American domination. And so here there are shots of Putin with other world leaders, including those of Iran.
Here’s the video:
The video is by a group calling itself Global Research, based in Quebec, Canada. It’s an interesting video which presents a compelling case. I think some scepticism is necessary in the way it presents Putin. He’s not ‘whiter-than-white’ innocent. His regime itself is extremely authoritarian, and it has also responded to critics and dissenting journalists with violence and murder. The same for many of the regimes with whom he is shown doing business. But this time, it really does seem that he is not responsible for the current outbreak of ethnic violence and repression. It’s the fault of the governing elites in Washington and Brussels, safe and comfortable thousands of miles away from the horror they’ve unleashed further east.
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