on Nick Griffin's Question Time appearance:
23/10/2009
Let's keep Griffin and the BNP where we can watch them
Well, well, well. Didn't Nick Griffin do well on Question Time last night? Of course, when I say "do well," I mean he did well for us rather than for him and his disgraceful little band of bigots - he revealed himself as the poisonous idiot that he is.
BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.
For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."
Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.
Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.
There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.
The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.
Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.
BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."
Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.
Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.
There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.
The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.
Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.
22/10/2009
Scottish fatties' kids taken into care
Scotland, a country known for the unhealthy ways and diets of many of its inhabitants, is once again in the news following reports that social workers removed seven children from the home of morbidly obese parents Jim and Nicola McFryup. Concerns were raised about the children after the owners of neighbouring houses experienced subsidence problems in their properties - structural engineers called in to trace the roots of the problem were unable to discover traces of typical causes, such as abandoned mine shafts in the area, and later realised that the McFryup family's combined weight was causing fissures to open up in Dundee's granite bedrock.
Mum Nicola McFryup agreed t speak to Acid Rabbi after we promised to buy her breakfast in local restaurant Cholesterol Joe's.
An offical working for Dundee City Council, who cannot be named, confirmed that the children had been removed. "Myself and other officials, accompanied by police officers, visited a home in Dundee last night and removed seven children who are now being housed at a secret location,'' she told Acid Rabbi.
Unusually, the parents are happy to discuss their situation with reporters. "The fact that these Guardian-reading, lentil-munching loonie lefty do-gooders can tell me what to feed my own bloody kids in my own bloody house beggars belief," says father Jim, who weighs in at 798lb (362kg), "It's political correctness gone made and just goes to show what this country's coming to. Why the hell should I have to feed my kids on salad - whatever the fuck that is - when my wife can go down to the supermarket and get a packet of 20 beefburgers for 99p? Anyway, we already give 'em vegetables - they always have tomato ketchup on their chips at breakfast time."
Mum Nicola (nee McChipbutty), who at a mere 560lb (254kg) looks diminutively svelte next to her husband, agrees. "How can we feed them vegetables and stuff with the pittance we get in unemployment benefit payments? For the price of a few carrots I can get 3kg frozen chips and a bag of sausage rolls. We have to get our fags and booze out of that money too, you know. That's if vegetables and all that other green shit really is good for you, which I doubt. My Uncle Bob ate nothing but fried haggis every day of his life and he lived to be 43 which is a bloody good age if you ask me."
It is understood that the seven children range in age from a 13-year-old boy believed to weigh 252lb (114kg) to a newly-born baby girl of unknown weight. However, neighbour Ethel Ramsay, aged 57, has seen the baby and informed our reporter that it is "fucking massive." The other five children are also said to be morbidly obese, as confirmed by local schoolboy Hamish Banks who asked if Acid Rabbi was in Dundee "to report on those wee fat fuckers the McFryup bairns?"
Our source at Dundee Council is quick to point out that decisions to remove children from the family home are not taken lightly. "We don't want to take children away from their parents," she says, "especially not in cases like this. We have a tight budget as it is - can you even begin to imagine what it'll cost the department to feed these kids? The decision to remove them came after in-depth studies into and discussions of the case and which course of action would be the best to take."
"We decided eventually that their safety was at risk," she continues. "Not so much due to their obesity, because they're young enough that once we've got them to do a bit of exercise and educate them on the importance of a healthy diet they'll be fine for a few years until they start getting into heroin; but due to physical risk from their parents. People who don't have to regularly go into the homes of families like the McFryups won't be aware of what goes on in these places - they have industrial size deep fat fryers like you see in fairground fast food stalls in their kitchens and, well, all I'm saying is that when Mum or Dad wake up at 3 in the morning wanting a snack or ten, a young kiddie fits easily into a fryer. You get a fatty needing a food fix and they'll stop at nothing - even a three-year-old with a nappy bulging with the results of the irritable bowel syndrome it suffers from because of all the battered sausages and pork pies it gets fed on.'' The children will be kept in care until their parents are able to demonstrate that they have made alterations to their lifestyles likely to improve the health of their children, such as only feeding them three meals a day and weaning the baby off her 40-a-day smoking habit.
Meanwhile, Nicola says she spoke to her children by telephone this morning. "My two lassies were crying their eyes out," she says, "complaining that they'd been given cornflakes for their breakfast. "We fucking hate cornflakes, Mum, they taste of shite," they were saying, "when can we come home and have sugared lard for breakfast again?"
"It's not all bad, though," says Jim, suddenly turning optimistic. "When we go to McDonald's for lunch today we don't have to buy them anything so we can spend all today's food money on Big Macs for us."
"That's a good point," says Nicola. "To be honest, I was getting bored of the little bastards anyway. Social services can keep 'em."
Mum Nicola McFryup agreed t speak to Acid Rabbi after we promised to buy her breakfast in local restaurant Cholesterol Joe's.An offical working for Dundee City Council, who cannot be named, confirmed that the children had been removed. "Myself and other officials, accompanied by police officers, visited a home in Dundee last night and removed seven children who are now being housed at a secret location,'' she told Acid Rabbi.
Unusually, the parents are happy to discuss their situation with reporters. "The fact that these Guardian-reading, lentil-munching loonie lefty do-gooders can tell me what to feed my own bloody kids in my own bloody house beggars belief," says father Jim, who weighs in at 798lb (362kg), "It's political correctness gone made and just goes to show what this country's coming to. Why the hell should I have to feed my kids on salad - whatever the fuck that is - when my wife can go down to the supermarket and get a packet of 20 beefburgers for 99p? Anyway, we already give 'em vegetables - they always have tomato ketchup on their chips at breakfast time."
Mum Nicola (nee McChipbutty), who at a mere 560lb (254kg) looks diminutively svelte next to her husband, agrees. "How can we feed them vegetables and stuff with the pittance we get in unemployment benefit payments? For the price of a few carrots I can get 3kg frozen chips and a bag of sausage rolls. We have to get our fags and booze out of that money too, you know. That's if vegetables and all that other green shit really is good for you, which I doubt. My Uncle Bob ate nothing but fried haggis every day of his life and he lived to be 43 which is a bloody good age if you ask me."
It is understood that the seven children range in age from a 13-year-old boy believed to weigh 252lb (114kg) to a newly-born baby girl of unknown weight. However, neighbour Ethel Ramsay, aged 57, has seen the baby and informed our reporter that it is "fucking massive." The other five children are also said to be morbidly obese, as confirmed by local schoolboy Hamish Banks who asked if Acid Rabbi was in Dundee "to report on those wee fat fuckers the McFryup bairns?"
Our source at Dundee Council is quick to point out that decisions to remove children from the family home are not taken lightly. "We don't want to take children away from their parents," she says, "especially not in cases like this. We have a tight budget as it is - can you even begin to imagine what it'll cost the department to feed these kids? The decision to remove them came after in-depth studies into and discussions of the case and which course of action would be the best to take."
"We decided eventually that their safety was at risk," she continues. "Not so much due to their obesity, because they're young enough that once we've got them to do a bit of exercise and educate them on the importance of a healthy diet they'll be fine for a few years until they start getting into heroin; but due to physical risk from their parents. People who don't have to regularly go into the homes of families like the McFryups won't be aware of what goes on in these places - they have industrial size deep fat fryers like you see in fairground fast food stalls in their kitchens and, well, all I'm saying is that when Mum or Dad wake up at 3 in the morning wanting a snack or ten, a young kiddie fits easily into a fryer. You get a fatty needing a food fix and they'll stop at nothing - even a three-year-old with a nappy bulging with the results of the irritable bowel syndrome it suffers from because of all the battered sausages and pork pies it gets fed on.'' The children will be kept in care until their parents are able to demonstrate that they have made alterations to their lifestyles likely to improve the health of their children, such as only feeding them three meals a day and weaning the baby off her 40-a-day smoking habit.
Meanwhile, Nicola says she spoke to her children by telephone this morning. "My two lassies were crying their eyes out," she says, "complaining that they'd been given cornflakes for their breakfast. "We fucking hate cornflakes, Mum, they taste of shite," they were saying, "when can we come home and have sugared lard for breakfast again?"
"It's not all bad, though," says Jim, suddenly turning optimistic. "When we go to McDonald's for lunch today we don't have to buy them anything so we can spend all today's food money on Big Macs for us."
"That's a good point," says Nicola. "To be honest, I was getting bored of the little bastards anyway. Social services can keep 'em."
01/10/2009
Harman appeals to Arnie to shut down prostitute-ratings website
Punternet is a website which allows users to rate prostitutes - including some from London - which has got Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman all hot under the collar.
OK, so it's a bit on the tasteless side, but hasn't Harriet realised yet that however much she dislikes the concept of prostitution it's been around for a lot longer than she has and isn't going to go away? Has she been talking to Jacqui Smith, whose Policing and Crime Bill sought to transfer blame from prostitutes onto clients and as such was widely attacked by feminists, women's rights groups and prostitutes (the latter surely being the experts in these matters) who believed it would lead to an increase in violence towards prostitutes as punters took more aggressive and violent steps to hide their activities, while at the same time making it harder to establish and run lapdancing clubs so that women with no alternative way of making a living would be forced to turn to prostitution instead?
Harriet Harman - has appealed to the Terminator for help in getting rid of website Punternet.
Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 licence.
Harriet, who in also being able to call herself Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Labour Leader, Party Chair of the Labour Party and MP for Camberwell and Peckham has almost as many titles as Count Mandelson of Transylvania, told the Labour Conference that the website is "degrading." Of course, it's not really any different to a site which allows people with faulty cars to look at user ratings for various repair firms - somebody supplies a service for a price, people want to know they're going to get a good deal. It's seedy, but not especially degrading - certainly far less so than being forced to sell yourself, putting yourself at high risk of contracting any number of diseases, risking violence and murder every day just to be able to support yourself and feed your children or your drug habit. Perhaps it might be better to have a long, hard look at society and see if there are any ways that we can help the women and men who are forced to live like this? Like, maybe, free childcare so women with young children can get jobs, benefits that pay enough money to actually live on or drugs made freely available on the NHS for users who agree to attend programmes designed to help them kick the habit?
Oh, maybe not - that'd be expensive, wouldn't it? Plus we'd run the risk of being forced to stop pretending that our society has opportunities for all, or perhaps we'd discover some very big and costly-to-repair holes in the welfare net, holes that allow thousands of people to fall through, vanishing from society forever in some cases? Or maybe there'd be no choice but to increase the rights that immigrants - such as those thousands of illegal immigrants who have to sell sex because they're nor permitted to get proper jobs and enjoy the sort of protection that mere, simple humanity seems to suggest we ought to offer them; and that's going to really stir up the Daily Nazi/Scum-reading hordes that Harriet's failing, falling government so desperately needs if they're to survive the coming General Election intact (which appears to be all they can hope for - they've long lost all hope of winning it). There's even a chance that the population might cotton on to the belief that our current system of Government and partisan politics has made a bit of a hash of things and dear old Blighty is looking a bit, well, shit as a result - and we can't have that, can we? We might have to change. Perhaps it's best to just throw a blanket over the whole sordid thing instead and pretend something has been done about it - that's a far cheaper way to try to scrape back a few votes.
Punternet is registered in California, which is a bit of a problem for Harriet because the United Kingdom Government has no say in what goes on in the USA (unlike the other way round - the US Government can demand all sorts of things, such as the extradition of naive UFO buffs suffering from acute learning difficulties). So she can't do a lot about it.
But she knows a man who can, or might at the very least - Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and has contacted him asking for the site to be shut down. "It won't be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate Punternet," says Harman. "If he doesn't, I'll be back."
You what? Harriet, please - just shut up and fuck off.
Note: We're not back yet. We just couldn't resist an opportunity to tell Harriet Harman to shut up and fuck off.
OK, so it's a bit on the tasteless side, but hasn't Harriet realised yet that however much she dislikes the concept of prostitution it's been around for a lot longer than she has and isn't going to go away? Has she been talking to Jacqui Smith, whose Policing and Crime Bill sought to transfer blame from prostitutes onto clients and as such was widely attacked by feminists, women's rights groups and prostitutes (the latter surely being the experts in these matters) who believed it would lead to an increase in violence towards prostitutes as punters took more aggressive and violent steps to hide their activities, while at the same time making it harder to establish and run lapdancing clubs so that women with no alternative way of making a living would be forced to turn to prostitution instead?
Harriet Harman - has appealed to the Terminator for help in getting rid of website Punternet.Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 licence.
Harriet, who in also being able to call herself Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House of Commons, Deputy Labour Leader, Party Chair of the Labour Party and MP for Camberwell and Peckham has almost as many titles as Count Mandelson of Transylvania, told the Labour Conference that the website is "degrading." Of course, it's not really any different to a site which allows people with faulty cars to look at user ratings for various repair firms - somebody supplies a service for a price, people want to know they're going to get a good deal. It's seedy, but not especially degrading - certainly far less so than being forced to sell yourself, putting yourself at high risk of contracting any number of diseases, risking violence and murder every day just to be able to support yourself and feed your children or your drug habit. Perhaps it might be better to have a long, hard look at society and see if there are any ways that we can help the women and men who are forced to live like this? Like, maybe, free childcare so women with young children can get jobs, benefits that pay enough money to actually live on or drugs made freely available on the NHS for users who agree to attend programmes designed to help them kick the habit?
Oh, maybe not - that'd be expensive, wouldn't it? Plus we'd run the risk of being forced to stop pretending that our society has opportunities for all, or perhaps we'd discover some very big and costly-to-repair holes in the welfare net, holes that allow thousands of people to fall through, vanishing from society forever in some cases? Or maybe there'd be no choice but to increase the rights that immigrants - such as those thousands of illegal immigrants who have to sell sex because they're nor permitted to get proper jobs and enjoy the sort of protection that mere, simple humanity seems to suggest we ought to offer them; and that's going to really stir up the Daily Nazi/Scum-reading hordes that Harriet's failing, falling government so desperately needs if they're to survive the coming General Election intact (which appears to be all they can hope for - they've long lost all hope of winning it). There's even a chance that the population might cotton on to the belief that our current system of Government and partisan politics has made a bit of a hash of things and dear old Blighty is looking a bit, well, shit as a result - and we can't have that, can we? We might have to change. Perhaps it's best to just throw a blanket over the whole sordid thing instead and pretend something has been done about it - that's a far cheaper way to try to scrape back a few votes.
Punternet is registered in California, which is a bit of a problem for Harriet because the United Kingdom Government has no say in what goes on in the USA (unlike the other way round - the US Government can demand all sorts of things, such as the extradition of naive UFO buffs suffering from acute learning difficulties). So she can't do a lot about it.
But she knows a man who can, or might at the very least - Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and has contacted him asking for the site to be shut down. "It won't be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate Punternet," says Harman. "If he doesn't, I'll be back."
You what? Harriet, please - just shut up and fuck off.
Note: We're not back yet. We just couldn't resist an opportunity to tell Harriet Harman to shut up and fuck off.
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