Sarah Palin, laughing as a radio shock-jock calls her cancer-surviving colleague a bitch and a cancer:
I know this is more or less irrelevant to most readers, but if you’re USA-an or a blogger then it’s probably worth forwarding to wavering Hillary-ites or putting the video up to increase the chance of someone forwarding it to wavering Hillary-ites…
THOU SHALT NOT PICK FIGHTS THOU CAN NOT POSSIBLY WIN is a fundamental precept one needs to appreciate before any thrilling arguments about how things ought to be, because if your wrong about those noble thing you’re just wrong! wrong! wrong!; but if you’re wrong on the fundamentals you are (right! / wrong!) (x3) AND you have a huge boot jammed up your ass, which is arguably more significant, especially for your ass.
Also, can all the gibbering “oh noes! new Evil Empire” lunatics (notably this lot, unsurprisingly enough [*]) note that Russia is pulling its troops out of the border bits of Georgia that they briefly occupied, and that the temporary occupation of proper Georgian territory was driven by the fact that it was a tactical necessity rather than Evil Sinister Machinations.
[*] see, I completely appreciate that the EU is full of corrupt idiots and wastes large amounts of money. I suspect that its existence and our membership are nonetheless positive in aggregate – but even if they weren’t, the fact that the people who oppose it subscribe to more or less every other cretinous political conspiracy theory going (for fuck’s sake, how double-standards-tastic do you have to be to actively support Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and still think that Russia’s actions this week are unspeakably evil?)…
Since Decent-ists like to demand that everybody condemns everything, I thorougly condemn Georgia’s occupation of Ossetia, and Russia’s invasion thereof.
If either of said acts were being done in the name of the UK, using UK soldiers, directly or tacitly approved by our leaders, then I’d be equally disapproving but spend more time condemning them because then they’d be our fucking fault.
(note: this also applies to pretty much every fucking ‘why do you condemn X and not Y’ thing: it’s because either it’s us, or the Yanks who’re basically us; or the Israelis who’re basically the Yanks. Of course we’re going to condemn them more than the latest doings of some random maniacs wherever – even before we get onto the question of who armed whom in the first place. And yes, I know we armed the Georgians…)
An absurdly whiny and precious post from Kubatana on the sale of Zimbabwe dollars as a novelty item on eBay:
I wish I knew the dockworkers instrumental in stopping the Chinese weapons from being unloaded in South Africa. If I did, they might have some advice as to how to shut down the sale of Zimbabwean Dollars on eBay. Perhaps it’s not neatly parallel or fair to compare the sale of weapons to a dictatorship with a few people making money on eBay. However, there are similarities in the underlying end results. In both cases, a set of people are operating (consciously or unconsciously) with seemingly no concern around the difficult and unjust realities for a much larger set of people.
Do you understand how fucking ridiculous you’re being? Selling Z$, unlike selling guns to Robert Mugabe, has no positive impact on the Zimbabwe government – the only impact it could possibly have beyond the private transaction is to raise awareness among anyone who’s been asleep for a fortnight of how badly the dictator has fucked the country.
Oh, but it hurts our feelings to have ourselves mocked – it’s “hyper-insensitive”… Well, fuck off. I’m fully in favour of anything that could possibly help Zimbabwe, but that isn’t going to stop completely mocking the end results of Dr Mugabe’s insane policies – and the people who continued to vote for him in democratic elections up until last year hardly lack complicity in that…
America is the most unjustifiably arrogant shithole on the planet (I mean, for fuck’s sake – US immigration is hilarious. “No, of course I’m not fucking coming here to work without a visa – what, d’you think I couldn’t get one if I wanted? Do you think I’d choose your poxy country if I was going to fucking emigrate? Cuntards.”)
But it’s always worth remembering that – much as we love to hate the current President – that actually the whole country is based on barbaric, shitheaded arsery. See the latest fiasco: the International Court of Justice suggests that murdering Mexicans based on comedy fake trials would be wrong; the Texas Supreme Court tells the UN to fuck right off; the President suggests that actually, the UN might have a point; the US Supreme Court tells the President to fuck right off; the International Court of Justice says “err, guys, are you like Iran and Saudi, or are you some kind of approximation towards a civilised country?”; and we await the outcome.
(clue: in Iran and Saudi, they top people for fun; in civilised countries they don’t.)
a) George Bush is a fucking tool
b) George Bush is coming to the UK
c) This is a Bad Thing
d) Manticore!!
Whining lying thieving pikey cunts; gas the lot of them:
“We are the last group of people in this country who you can openly mock and make racist jokes about – who else is there?”
Fuck off and tarmac my driveway. You’re not a race, you’re just a bunch of navvies who couldn’t be arsed to settle down and get jobs when they stopped building railways…
I’m sent a link to this story, on the grounds that it will really piss me off. And it sort-of does, but not as much as the sender might have expected.
[it's about a woman in the US who got locked up for 10-20 years aged 19 for some half-arsed drug offences, who escaped from jail after a year, spent 32 years as a fugitive living a respectable suburban life, and who's now been thrown back into jail after some unspeakable bastard grassed her up].
And indeed, there are elements that piss me off. Anyone who grasses up a non-violent offender to the police should be beaten about the head with an iron bar until they no longer have a head. Also, obviously, the original sentence was gibberingly crazily insane. As we all know, drugs don’t take themselves; while many of the people who sell drugs, as a result of the trade being illegal, are nasty bastards who also shoot and steal, there is nothing any more immoral about the act of selling drugs in itself than the act of selling pie or skydiving lessons [*].
But the actual ‘someone who escaped from jail being sent back there’ thing doesn’t actually upset me all that much. If we’re going to impose deranged sentences on people for non-harmful non-crimes, then the ones who break out of prison shouldn’t be punished any less severaly than the ones who actually stay there, follow the system, endure the torture of jail and try and get paroled…
[*] to pick two activities that, like drug use, are enjoyable but raise one’s chances of untimely death
The headline is hardly news; it’s a well-known fact that joking with Yanks about subjects such as Vietnam, the KKK, 9/11 and Iraq is something that generally doesn’t go down well. As highlighted by the previous post.
[special PDF competition: £100 plus medical bills for the remainder of their life will be paid to the first person to go up to a New York fireman and go with "what's the odd one out of Vietnam, the KKK, 9/11 and Iraq? 9/11, cos none of the other victims deserved it"]
So my sympathy for pissed-up Northern Irish idiot Aidan Mackle is somewhat limited. Nonetheless, holding a drunken Irishman on terrorist charges for slurring “I’m Bin Laden’s mate and he’ll hijack your plane if you don’t give me more booze” is obviously crazy: if anyone, even for one second, thought the chap was a serious threat then they’re the one who should be locked up forever in a non-reality-based institution…
Update: I forgot to add that American airlines (small final A) are the worst in the world, that all of their crew thoroughly deserve murdered, and that for anyone who flies with them, being murdered by terrorists – or, indeed, being abused by an Irish drunk – would be a merciful release. Genuinely, I would rather fly fucking Aeroflot or Turkish Airlines than subject myself to another transatlantic flight on Delta, NWA, Continental or United. I haven’t yet flown AA, and would sooner grind broken glass into my eyes than do so, so there’s a small possibility I’m being unfair to them and them alone…
As any fule kno, publishing controversial material in England, especially if it concerns evil litigious rich bastards, is unwise.
Many bloggers, me included, host their sites [*] in the US, on the grounds that Yank courts are generally a little bit saner about That Sort Of Thing (yes, I know it doesn’t legally protect me from a libel action in England, but any sue-er would need to demonstrate to an English court that the person they’d dragged into the dock was Mr PDF, which would be difficult without records from my US hosting company).
However, the experience of WikiLeaks suggests that American courts are almost as fucking rubbish as ours. It’s a (truly excellent – as with all freedom-of-information stuff, anyone who opposes it should be crucified and resurrected on an infinite torture cycle forever) site that allows whistleblowers to post for the perusal of the unwashed masses.
Some such documents concerned Nazi-gold-laundering Swiss cunts [**] Julius Baer. The crooks’ bank first issued a writ to WikiLeaks directly for ‘violation of trade secrets’ (oh noes! our sekrits is violateds!). But worse, while that case awaits trial, Julius Baer have served a writ on the doman registrar that manages the wikileaks.org domain banning them from, err, doing their job: instead, the domain points to nowhere.
…which is a bit depressing. On the plus side, there are an awful lot of mirrors where Wikileaks can be activated (also, awesomely, BBC News has a story that links directly to one of the mirrored sites – hooray for misplaced legal actions that massively increase the bad publicity for the fuckwits who bring them). Still, it’s just a shame that the one country that claims to be totally free-speeched up has let the world down on this one.
Relatedly, if you’ve not seen the Northern Rock information memorandum from last autumn, then Wikileaks still has a copy. In some ways, it was daft of NR and the government to try and restrict this one, given that it confirms the fact that the bank really does have a high-quality loans book that’s putting the taxpayer at more or less naff-all risk…
[*] or “site their hosts”, if you prefer
[**] ‘Nazi-gold-laundering Swiss cunts’ is used here as a general synonym for ‘Swiss’ – I have no knowledge of or interest in the question of whether Julius Baer itself laundered Nazi gold, but since Switzerland’s prosperity is based on taking a cut from every thief, fraudster and genocidaire going, it’s certainly profited indirectly from horrible suffering.