I’m not for the KKK or Antifa, I think our craven dependence on Chinese nuclear technology is corrosive, and our media ownership issues are coming to a head. Every discussion these days turns into factual denialism by the Believers. Bad news becomes mad news, and parody is indistinguishable from Truth. I don’t see an end to it, but I do see tears.
To the footage released last week of Antifa kicking the hell out of both statues and people has now been added a genuine LA press ad offering “crowd work” to any Occupiers fancying a trip to Charlottesville, and the spectacle of a US Senator expressing the sincere hope that the President would be assassinated.
Meanwhile, it was revealed last week that Beijing had asked the Cambridge University Press to censor some 200 mentions of unpleasantness in modern Chinese history. These were minor incidents like the Cultural Revolution, Tianeman Square, using Chinese soldiers in Vietnam and so forth. The CUP bowed obediently to the demand, and by so doing no doubt secured Britain’s nuclear power capability for the next generation.
This being real rather than fake news, George Soros and his Twitter allies ignored all of it, as did the New York Times and the Washington Post. So the truly true news that all those media billionaires represent the vanguard of Fake Newsfinding has left me confused and disappointed; I mean, surely the point of a witch hunt is that you come back with some witches, right?
For those of you educated after 1979, witch hunting involves finding people you don’t like, and then throwing them into a suitably deep lake with a millstone for buoyancy. If the person sinks, then it wasn’t a witch after all, and nobody talks about the incident. If it floats, it’s a witch and no mistake: thus, you take it out, dry it off, and burn it. Witches don’t like fire, so the system is both objective and foolproof.
As China swooped undetected upon the deviants of Cambridge, the Socialist Worker stumbled upon the case of a white rat that bit a black woman as she was trying to escape over the Obama Wall into Mexico. The woman fell off the wall with fatal results, but the Clinton Foundation has traced the rat and discovered via its microchip that it had escaped from a Lab owned by the second cousin of Trump’s son in law’s half sister’s uncle’s great Aunt by marriage.
Drawing the obvious conclusion that the killer rodent had been deliberately released by the White House, The New York Times has called for more pressure to be put on Congress to speed up the 137 moves already in motion to impeach the President, and candlelit vigils will be held in all major US cities to the memory of the unfortunate woman so callously done away with by the forces of regression, repression, suppression, compression and unlawful possession.
Outside the lab, animal rights activists clashed violently with themselves over whether to get the rats out first, or simply torch the whole den of evil before any rats were able to mate with progressive rats elsewhere and thus infect the entire planet with Nazis.
Editor’s note: given that (in the best traditions of Fakefinder General Alastair Campbell) I made this entire rat story up, I’m surprised that the correct media have all passed it as A1 and fit for duty.
And lo, The Great Healer Jeremiah from the Shibboleth tribe came among a great multitude of the Cymru brethren, saying “I will turn your water into wine and make enough jam tomorrow to feed you all today”
“Bah humbug,” said Mr Blair unto the Children of Labour
“Baaaaaaa” said the Cymru
And the Lord looked down upon this and said, “Fuck me, they’re falling for another false prophet”
And He saw that it was bad, but went for his tea break anyway.
So Allah fired him, and gave unto The Great Healer a commandment to part the Red Sea and give entry to Al Jihadisis and his purveyors of the Peace of the Blade.
Don’t miss next week’s thrilling episode.
If you missed the radio debut of New relaunched multimedia Slog last Thursday, this is the recording of it. It kicks in on almost exactly 50 mins:
It’s not a bad slot, as the subject was blind acceptance of ideology, and the inevitable war, death, famine and torture that always goes with it.
The growth of ideology unfit for purpose continues to gather strength, and as always the vitamin supply comes largely from the two media sides involved. Talking with some fairly to very intelligent people over the last few days, it’s clear that the blinkers are now well and truly on as far as the “interpretation of events” thing goes.
What I find almost universally now is that any simple interpretation of the course of events on a timeline is greeted with, “Well that’s all very well but” – usually before one has finished the sentence. It really matters very little whether the subject is Putin, household debt, the MH17 shootdown, Charlottesville, stock markets, Brexit, Greece, Hungary or North Korea: the Left reads one version of the facts, the Right another, and the at most 20% of us who don’t believe anything that’s agendered can choose to either argue (and thus raise the bp level dangerously) or just smile benignly and then wait a polite few minutes before retreating into another room, topic, location or problem.
We are none of us in a good place. It’s whether we realise that or not that often makes the difference between a calm discussion and a surfeit of yelling and flouncing.
Have a good week.
The Slog 