When George Osborne lost his job because of Theresa May and he started saying he wanted to chop her up and keep the parts in bags in a freezer, we all thought he was a bad loser. But maybe he knew her well enough to know that this was the best solution. Keep the body parts separated and frozen until medical science can work out how to kill her for good.
The head has already started to decompose. Note the Michael Jackson-style nose, which will soon fall off.
Sajid Javid is often said to be the frontrunner to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. This is the latest headline about him:
Ageism could be classed as a hate crime, Sajid Javid poised to announce
With the Brexit deceit and this sort of rubbish the Conservative Party is disintegrating before our eyes. So is the country. It’s like the teachers all went out to investigate a loud noise, and they left the spods in charge.
Younger versions of the people currently ruling your life. Do you think they’re going to stop soon, and say, “That’s enough control”?
The teachers haven’t come back, and they never will, because they’ve all been killed by Muslim terrorists, and the spods remain in charge. The rest of the class is still sort of doing what the spods say because they’re expecting the teachers back any moment, but some of the class is starting to get very restless. But the teachers are never coming back, and we need to dump the spods and start getting things back to normal.
Where the Tories think they’re headed…
Where the Tories actually are…
2000-01
Semester 2
Week 7
Wednesday (cont.)
It’s dark outside the staff club, and there’s no sign of any bearded old philosophers running around going berserk. Ren takes a guess at which way Tyson went, and runs. Ten minutes later, after he’s covered a lot of territory but seen no sign of the crazy old bastard, he hears some screams and commotion coming from the direction of the student bar. He hesitates. This won’t be good. Maybe he should just leave Tyson to his fate. He’s probably already been trussed up by security. Except that the Uni bar doesn’t have security guards, and the general campus security is good for nothing but discovering broken-into buildings six hours after they’ve been broken into. In the end, it’s curiosity more than anything else that drives him to investigate. What kind of story to tell will it be if just ends in ‘And then I went home to watch TV’?
Outside the bar he finds outraged students milling about. He can see some guys scouting around the area, searching.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks a random group of students. There’s something in the corner of his visual field that is disturbing him, but he doesn’t want to look just now.
‘A flasher,’ says one of the students. ‘That’s what we heard.’
‘An old flasher with a stiffy,’ says another. ‘Must be a Professor.’
‘I didn’t know Professors of that age could get stiffies,’ says a third student.
‘Jase told me he heard the guy had no trousers on,’ says the first student, over the others.
Ren knows what the thing in the corner of his eye is without having to look at it now, but he briefly glances anyway. A pair of trousers lie discarded near a bush. Did Tyson take them off there, or did someone, discovering them somewhere else, drop them there?
The students are bursting to fill him in further.
‘He was wanking while watching those ladies there, and they saw him, and then he ran away.’ The student points. Ren groans inwardly. The two women are Millicent Bartonella and Lenora Helminth, who are directing the search parties, looking grimly satisfied.
Everyone is too excited and flustered and giddy to look properly, so they don’t see what Ren now sees, which is Tyson sneaking back behind a nearby bush. The dark night means that visibility is poor, but Ren definitely gets a brief glimpse of nothing but white flesh and black hair below Tyson’s belt line as he moves into position.
Ren is now faced with a moral dilemma as daunting as anything to be found in a moral philosophy class. Forget abstract intellectual exercises where you are forced to choose between diverting a runaway trolley to kill one person rather than the five it’s heading for. Forget the issue of whether you should dynamite the pregnant woman. This is an urgent, real-life moral dilemma, with real consequences. Should he shout, ‘There he is, burn the witch,’ and watch as the pack goes for Tyson? Or should he shut up, and let Tyson enjoy his few last moments of freedom twanging the wire before he’s locked up for good? And maybe slink off home? Or go inside the bar for a quick beer while the crowd at the bar has thinned, as most of the customers have come outside for a look?
It’s not really much of an ethical dilemma, though. Clearly Tyson needs to be apprehended for his own, and everybody else’s, sake. Ren sidles away from the students and walks causally over to Tyson’s bush, trying not to draw too much attention to himself. As he gets closer he can see Tyson’s face peeking through the bush, looking at the students. Some slight rustling at groin level gives him an idea of what Tyson is up to, which puts him off going any closer.
‘Tyson,’ he says quietly.
Tyson either doesn’t hear him, or ignores him.
‘Professor Kipnis,’ he says, a little more loudly. Tyson still doesn’t respond to him.
‘Is that the Dalkeith medallist Professor Tyson Kipnis, who has run departments, chaired prestigious committees, edited the best journals in the world, testified to the White House, and advised three US Presidents?’
Ren thought that was sure to work, but Tyson’s gaze remains fixed on the females present, a group that includes Millicent and Lenora, which you’d think would give anyone an instant soft-on, but then Tyson has gone doolally.
‘Is that the Randolph keyhole wanker?’ Ren says a little bit louder still.
That gets Tyson’s attention. And everybody else’s – they all swivel around to look around at Ren. Lenora, faster than the rest at seeing what is going on, strides towards the bush. But quick as a flash, Tyson has grabbed something off the ground. A pre-prepared weapon. He comes around the side of the bush to screams and gasps from the crowd, not only because he is naked and erect below the waist, which isn’t a good look for a man his age, and not only because his face is twisted grotesquely, but because he is waving something white around his head. As something brown flies out of it Ren realises that the white thing is Tyson’s underpants.
Only his years of playing cricket save Ren – he instinctively sways his head backwards as the loose packet of sludge hurtles towards him like a thunderbolt from a vastly earlier, and more primal, cricketing era. He gets his face underneath the trajectory of the semi-solid tracer bullet just in time, courtesy of all the years he has spent evading bouncers in the nets. His cricket career never went anywhere, but he is now immensely grateful for those wasted hours spent after school when he and his friends would bounce balls of string-covered cork at each others’ heads at tremendous pace.
Like any good batsmen Ren keeps his eye on the ball, or streak, as it passes by a centimetre or two above his nose, which enables him to get a good, if upside-down, view of it hitting Lenora smack in the chest as she rushes towards Tyson. He also notices some other small smidgeons of poo spraying around the area at the same time, some perhaps coming off the main body in flight, some perhaps coming from the generous smear on the underpants, but none of them hit him. He will later swear that he saw a small fleck hit Lenora on the cheek microseconds before the main motherload struck her. The central poo, as is all too evident, was not the firmest stool, which has made the resulting splat on Lenora’s white blouse – and neck – all the more ruinous.
As a hit on an immediate enemy, from Tyson’s point of view, it’s an effective blow. The hunting party’s leader has been stopped in her tracks, and is standing there, huge breaths gasping in and out, her arms pulled up away from her body, wrestler-style, far away from the damage, her day of fighting over and done with. And the others are too stunned to move.
In terms of Tyson’s wider strategy, though, it wasn’t perhaps the wisest move. But Tyson is now in a primeval mood, wanking, shitting, mis-perceiving, over-reacting, running and fighting like a gorilla… would never dream of doing. He looks more like an escapee from the opening scenes of 2001, and his scraggly beard hits just the right note.
Ren decides that his swaying back motion can be continued for another fraction of a second, just enough to cause him to topple over onto the ground on his back. That allows others to rush past him to do the dirty work – possibly very dirty work – of tackling Tyson. He sees Tyson’s hairy white bum disappear into the distance as he runs off at a surprising pace, a once-canny fox gone senile, pursued by a baying crowd of drunken student hounds, hungry for his blood.
‘Tally ho,’ murmurs Ren. Tyson is going to be ripped to shreds.
A couple of weeks ago I expressed some doubt about Thomas Wictor’s claim that the Republicans knew what they were doing when they asked the FBI to do further investigations on Brett Kavanaugh. I’m still not entirely convinced by his argument, but I have to give him credit, he was right that it did turn out well for the Republicans.
It’s a terrible shame that he’s been banned from Twitter, and his blog no longer seems to work, but he is on Gab:
He has something interesting to say, and always tries to back up what he says with argument. Gab’s not the greatest place for detailed discussion, but at least he’s still going strong somewhere.
Journalists, that is, Are there any real ones left? Almost everyone who draws a salary as a journalist these days is, despite what it says on their contract, a columnist. An opinion-monger, like me. Or, to put it more bluntly, a propagandist. A political operative. Or else, if they’re lower down the food chain, they’re a reproducer of press releases. Or a Twitter-trawler.
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if you had columnists who knew something about how the world really works. Or even how a field or two works. But very few of them know anything about anything. Owen Jones isn’t passing on his hard-earned wisdom through ink or pixels, because he has none. He doesn’t even have any easily-won wisdom.
I’m not saying that journalists ever used to be that knowledgable, but at least they used to do some investigating. Mind you, they also used to make stuff up back in the old days, so I’m not going to get too nostalgic.
The situation we have now is that most columnists are dead boring (with a few exceptions, eg. Rod Liddle). Actually, they usually were, for the most part. But when blogging started we all thought the newspapers would soon become filled with these wonderfully entertaining and knowledgable writers from the internet. But most of these bloggers never made it onto a bigger stage. Glenn Reynolds did in the US. And Brendan O’Neill (though arguably never really a blogger) is one who did in the UK, but as good as he is, he just writes the same column over and over. I still like bloggers like Tim Newman, but no newspaper is going to pick him up. So the blogger takeover never happened.
And then the blogs started dying, and most of the good old bloggers gave up (as I did for years) or turned to Twitter, which in effect meant that they gave up column-length writing. And things aren’t going to change, because few young people now dream of getting into journalism to investigate anything. They dream of getting into ‘journalism’ so they can denounce their political enemies. I can’t complain too much about that seeing as I’m an opinionated blogger, but at least I took the trouble to learn a few things first before I first decided (in the early 2000s, under a different name) to start mouthing off
Anyway, I think we can all agree that if you work for the Telegraph’s Women’s section, you’re not a journalist.
Update: Almost on cue, this Tim Blair blog post appears where he reveals that the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough — who you may remember making a dick of himself in the old Iraq War days — has been asked to do “more reporting and less columnising”. That hasn’t gone down well with MgGeough, and the result is that he is in discussions with the SMH over a voluntary redundancy package.
I’ve decided to revive my Gab page, which has been lying dormant for many months. It’s here:
And my Twitter page is still going strong:
https://twitter.com/hector_drummond
There are three problems with Gab, though. The first is that the layout and typography don’t work as well as Twitter. I was kind of hoping they’d have improved it by now, especially as they’ve been boasting about all the money they’ve been getting recently, but they haven’t. But maybe I’ll eventually get more used to it.
The second problem is this. The attraction of Twitter is not just being able to easily post stuff (which is no great attraction for me as I know how to make and run my own website), but all the interaction with a wide variety of interesting people that can happen. There’s much less of that on Gab, because there’s nowhere near as many people, and because most of the best people are still on Twitter.
The third issue is that with Twitter you have the potential to tap into a large mainstream readership if you start to get known (although that’s still a long way off for me). That doesn’t really exist on Gab. Maybe it will one day, but it doesn’t for now.
But on the other hand I feel that Gab deserves support for providing a real free-speech platform, which is why I’ve gone back to it.
So one of the more sensible women at the Telegraph, Allison Pearson, says, quite rightly, that female rage is getting out of control, and it won’t end well. So far, all agreed. But then she says:
Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who made allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh dating back to high school, gave moving and plausible testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee at great risk to her reputation and safety.
In what way was it ‘plausible’? Her story fell apart. None of her witnesses have a clue what she’s talking about. Do you mean it was plausible because she put on a good performance? Is that your measure of plausibility? Nothing to do with evidence then?
And as far as her reputation goes, she’s now going to be a star on the left, in the same way that Anita Hill is still regarded as a brave, courageous heroine.
Nor was it a good look to have the allegation made public just as the Republican-supporting judge was about to change the balance of America’s highest court. Her action could too easily be mistaken for political convenience, rather than civic duty.
Easily mistaken, yes, easily mistaken, in the way that Arabs who run towards the Houses of Parliament waving what looks like a gun and shouting ‘Alluh Akbar’ are easily mistaken for real terrorists.
But Pearson was just getting warmed up:
The opposing side was even worse.
Yes, she really said that.
Kavanaugh himself gave an unpleasant, pink-faced performance, alternately petulant and angry.
It doesn’t seem to occur to Pearson that he may be innocent. How would she behave if she was accused on worldwide TV of being a rapist? Cry? Scream? Admit she was guilty when she wasn’t?
If he was a woman, they’d have called him hysterical.
No, if he was a woman they’d have called him brave and feisty, and he’d be on the cover of magazines all the time with puffball pieces written about him, which is what happens, for example, with Rose McGowan, despite her berserk rages.
And now for the most ridiculous paragraph in the whole ridiculous piece:
Most sinister of all was the calendar he had kept from his teenage years.
I swear I’m not making this up. Look at the link if you don’t believe me.
Who on earth knows exactly what they were doing on a Friday in 1982, and for what reason might they have kept that evidence?
Allison Pearson apparently thinks that a teenage, 80s Brett Kavanaugh thought that to cover up a sexual assault he’d keep his calendar for that year for decades in case it ever came up in, say 2037. Because then he’d be able to sway a jury by producing a calendar which doesn’t list the dates he raped people.
Personally, I have all sorts of stuff from my teenage years that I’ve kept. I’ve had to throw some of it out over the years as space has become an issue, a scenario which is less likely to be a problem for a well-paid lawyer living in America. I’ve never been a diary or calendar person, but I’ve kept some of the silliest things. It wasn’t because I was covering up for a string of bank robberies I committed. It was because of the fondness I have for those days.
Nor did I much like the anxious, sidelong glances Kavanaugh’s wife gave him
If I’m ever arrested for a crime I didn’t commit I really hope that Allison Pearson is not on the jury.
Still, any moderately sensible person would see there were holes in both arguments. Except moderate and sensible are no longer on offer.
Pearson is under the mistaken impression that she’s moderate and sensible, rather than gullible and neglectful of the principles that underlie civilization.
Mind you, compared to the unhinged harpies that work in the Women’s section of the Telegraph, she is completely moderate.
Historically, witch-hunts were evidence of moral panic. Man-hunts are just as ugly. Women are better than that.
Why do feminists, or columnists in their feminist mode, always talk in such generalities, making claims that are not even remotely true even if we replace the ‘all’ with ‘most? They do it with men: ‘All men are rapists’, for example. This is no different. Women aren’t a block group in this respect.
I’m not saying we can’t make some true generalisations about women. But this is not one of them. When it comes to tyranny, women aren’t any different to men. Some men are drawn to power so that can abuse it, some aren’t. Same with women. Some men join in witch-hunts, some don’t. Same with women.
So yes, some women are ‘better than that’, but there’s no reason to believe that the claim applies to all, or even most, women. A lot of women not only are not better than that, but they’re at front of the pack, handing out pitchforks, and egging everyone on.
If Allison Pearson wants a good look at that sort of woman, she only has to look at some of her colleagues in the Telegraph Women’s section. As I’m sure she has. I expect this article was her little dig at them. So I’ll end on a positive note — at least she’s having a go, however feeble, at her pitchfork-wielding colleagues:
What we have instead is boiling female rage, which justifies thinking that any man who stands accused is guilty, because, you know, they got away with it for so long so, hey, string him up!
So, to continue my fisking of Claire Cohen’s abhorrent article from yesterday:
According to President Trump, this is “a very scary time for young men in America”. I’d say it was a scary time for both women and men – one being discouraged from speaking out about sexual assault
Yet a women has been praised as a hero for talking about a sexual assault, despite the fact that her story didn’t add up.
the other being fed lies that any woman, anywhere, could ruin their life with a false allegation.
It’s unbelievable that someone who works for a British newspaper could write this in 2018 after several recent cases took place where clearly innocent young men had their lives ruined by false allegations. Claire Cohen is a disgrace.
But let’s be clear on two things.
One: there is no evidence at all that there are more false allegations in rape cases than in any other crime.
Joan Smith was also spouting this very unlikely claim the other day in an even more appalling Telegraph Women’s article that I fisked. I suspect some BS has recently been concocted, along the lines of the old ‘1 in 4 women have been raped’ lie.
Two: if you haven’t sexually assaulted anyone, you have nothing to be scared about.
Tell that to Karin Cheshire, the mother of Jay Cheshire who hanged himself after being falsely accused of rape a couple of years ago. Oh… you can’t, because she also took her own life due to the agony of it all.
and know full well that others have come forward to make allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
You mean the ones that not even the Democrats are taking seriouisly any more? The ones that have as much credibility as saying that Kavanaugh had aliens help him rape women?
It has read the FBI’s hastily compiled report – one that Democrat senators maintain was incomplete.
You mean the report that the FBI had to do in addition to the other six in-depth reports it had already done?
And he insisted that his close female friends have been messaging to tell him that he is a “good man” – one a feminist, no less.
Not a single person who has worked with him, man or women, has anything but good things to say about him. That’s not something you hear much of in the newspaper world.
When I – and no doubt many of the other women who watched, spellbound, as Christine Blasey Ford bared her soul – think back on the past few days, there are two things that will stick in my memory, and throat.
Hearing her voice crack, as she described how Kavanaugh and his friend allegedly laughed as they assaulted her
You should hear how convincing the people who swear that aliens raped them sound.
As a section editor this is the sort of uninformed ‘feelz’ article that Claire Cohen should be tossding into the bin, not penning herself.
What worries me is that the fact that the Telegraph has regularly run this sort of article for years indicates that there’s a market now for this sort of hard-done-by, throw-a-tantrum-at-everything feminism even amongst middle-class professionals. This won’t end well.
I said the other day that the Telegraph’s Women’s section is an ‘odious cesspit’, and the Kavanaugh hearings have revealed this quite starkly. Here’s another disgraceful article, called “Brett Kavanaugh: Women are angry and here’s why“. This time it’s by Claire Cohen, who is one of the editors of the Women’s section.
In many ways she was the perfect witness: articulate, an academic; middle-class, married. She delivered her testimony in soft, low tones – clearly doing everything in her power to master her emotions.
Yes, being a middle-class academic she was the perfect witness in the eyes of the Democrat establishment. As the numerous lower-class women who accused Bill Clinton of rape discovered, unless you’re the right sort of person you can just be breezily dismissed (‘Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find’, as James Carville said). Whereas intellectuals never lie for political reasons, do they?
Blasey Ford had first come forward with her claim before Kavanaugh became President Trump’s nominee.
In actual fact she first started accusing Kavanaugh after she had found out that he was on a list of possible Supreme Court replacements for Kennedy.
Now, her worst fears have been realised. Brett Kavanaugh has been appointed to the top court in the US – a job for life, voting on issues that go to the heart of the American people; abortion, gun control.
Hang on a minute. What do his political views have to do with the sexual assault allegation? Aren’t her worst fears that her assailant got away with it, not that a judge with political views opposed to hers got appointed to the Supreme Court? This seems more like an admission that the real aim was to stop someone with the wrong politics getting power.
Instead, it is Blasey Ford’s life that has been blown apart.
How? Has she lost her job? She’s now a hero to the left, and the feminists.
Just as the accused are innocent until proven guilty, so must we be wide open to the possibility that the accuser is telling the truth.
Sure. But we must also be wide open to the possibility that this was a totally predictable takedown attempt.
This has been a personal tragedy for Christine Blasey Ford, but it has also been a very public one. Because if even she hasn’t been believed, millions of survivors the world over must be thinking, what chance do the rest of us stand? If she isn’t considered credible, who will be?
This is very revealing. Why does Cohen say ‘even she’ and ‘the rest of us’, as though this case, above any others, should have resulted in the accuser being believed? Because she’s an academic? Because she’s backed by the Democrats, and numerous powerful feminists? Is that what Cohen thinks should matter? But what about the stunning lack of verification of any element of her story, the gaping holes, the extreme vagueness, and the fact that none of the supposed witnesses backs her up? Lecturer or not, as rape stories go, this story is at the bottom end of credibility, not the top end, and Cohen gives us not the slightest whiff of being aware of that, or admitting to it.
If anything, women who really have been raped should be fuming that Ford, and the other women who made even more ridiculous allegations against Kavanaugh, have made it more difficult for real rape victims to get justice. But at least they will have the advantage of more credible stories, and a functioning memory.
That is one reason why so many women are angry. Why they have taken to the streets in protest
Ordinary women aren’t the angry at Kavanaugh — ordinary women, that is, as opposed to neurotic feminist columnists. And professional protesters. Yes, professional. The women who ambushed Jeff Flake in the lift are professional agitators, from the Centre for Popular Democracy, who are funded by George Soros. (The left-wing media are trying to cast doubt on this, saying that Soros didn’t instruct them to protest this particular case, but the fact us that these are the sort of antics he funds them to do.)
Part 2 of this fisking is here.
2000-01
Semester 2
Week 7
Wednesday (cont.)
When Ren arrives at the staff club he is appalled to see that Tyson is drinking a glass of wine, and has a wine bottle in front of him. Who the fuck bought him that?
‘Tyson? Are you allowed to drink on your medication?’
‘What medication?’ says Tyson. ‘I’m not on any meds.’
‘I heard your wife mentioning earlier that she was going to the pharmacy, so I just assumed…’
‘She’s the one on meds.’
‘Any idea where she is? She’s been gone a long time.’
‘She’s probably gone crazy by now,’ says Tyson, knocking back his wine and pouring himself another, as though, with his wife gone, this is the last ever chance he’ll have in life to get loaded. ‘She gets like that if she doesn’t have her meds.’
Am I really supposed to babysit this mad fucker, wonders Ren. And his possibly, or possibly not, mad wife, if she ever turns up again? Can I, a junior squirt, tell a venerable and distinguished professor that he’s not allowed to drink? Ren notices that the Continentals have come to the staff club and are keeping their beady eyes on Tyson, just waiting for him to create some more juicy gossip.
‘Perhaps you should go easy on that,’ tries Ren. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Listen sonny, I’ve run departments, chaired prestigious committees, edited the best journals in the world, testified to the White House, advised three US Presidents, and won the Dalkeith medal for outstanding intellectual achievement. You’re not going to tell me that I can’t have a goddam drink after giving a talk. How many Dalkeiths have you won?’
‘None, but how many times have you had to be committed?’ is what Ren is tempted to say, but he just goes off to get a beer instead. When he comes back he is unsure of which conversation to join – the after-seminar party is a big one tonight, with plenty of people from outside the department in attendance.
‘Did you hear Tiddles is off to East Anglia?’
‘Poor chap. Is he taking something for it?’
‘Tyson, you can’t surely be serious about dropping the law of lesser consequences?’
‘No law is safe from me. I’m a law unto myself.’
‘If the Dean’s wife won’t put up with him anymore I don’t see why we should either.’
‘I heard she clocked him one. Giving you any ideas?’
‘Well, if I hit him in the same spot there’ll be no evidence.’
‘I swear it was the same food they serve the students. Pigswill’s too good a word for it.’
‘Did you see the Continentals taking notes at the talk?’
‘Notes? I bet they had a secret camera recording the whole thing.’
‘No-one told me Frank was going to give a talk to the grad students. How do they feel about it?’
‘Not happy, because now they’ll have to waste time reading his stupid book in advance to have a clue what he’s on about.’
‘Would you say Tyson is more mad or less mad than last time you saw him give a talk?’
‘I would say the talk was slightly less mad, but the eyes look slightly more mad.’
‘He did rather put Alan’s nose out of joint, so he’s done one thing right.’
‘If we’ve got rid of Alan on top on of getting rid of Sadler then that’s a result.’
‘Never heard of him, but I hear there’s a famous guy in Chemistry who’s just as mad as this guy. Wasn’t your supervisor a bit loopy too?’
‘Only on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons.’
‘Have you heard Raven’s lunatic plans about taking over a Scottish University and connecting them up with a solar-powered rail link?’
‘The guy’s insane. If I had a wife that looks like his I’d be spending all my time in bed instead of dreaming up megalomaniac ideas.’
Ren sits down, uneasily, on the edge of the group. He can see at a glance that Derek is in a malevolent mood after his treatment by Tyson, and that George is shitting himself over what Tyson might do when provoked by Derek.
‘What was that fat guy on about, huh?’ Tyson is saying. ‘Calling me a degenerate medievalist. I’d like to get medieval on his fat ass.’
‘What fat guy would that be?’ asks George.
‘The fat guy who was fat. And a guy,’ says Tyson.
‘I don’t remember a fat guy, Tyson,’ says George. ‘And no-one called you a degenerate medievalist. Or a degenerate modern. Or a degenerate anything.’
‘The hell. The fat guy at the back with the dirty T-shirt. Where’s the organiser?’
Tyson looks around and finally spots Ren. ‘You. You must have seen him. The fat guy at the back. Greasy hair. Nasal German voice.’
‘Right’, says Ren. ‘Fat guy. Don’t remember him.’
‘Course you do.’
‘Perhaps his comments were so worthless that my memory of him was immediately erased by my brain,’ Ren says in a lame attempt to lighten the mood.
‘Fuckin smartass. You can remember. You’re just being a prick.’
‘Maybe, ah, maybe you’re remembering another talk you did recently?’
At this Tyson looks furiously at Ren, but says nothing. He pours himself another drink, and takes a big swig. After a few moment’s uncomfortable silence, Derek, in full-on mischief-making mode, says, ‘I’m surprised you’re not still at Randolph University, Tyson. That’s where you made your name. I thought they loved you?’
‘Fuckin Randolph,’ says Tyson. ‘I’d like to take the dirty slug-sucking cockroaches and strangle them with a horse’s cock.’
Talking of horses’ cocks is clearly thirsty work because Tyson pours himself another glass from someone else’s bottle (his is now empty). George kicks Derek under the table, but to no avail.
‘Didn’t they offer you enough money, Tyson, is that why you left?’ Derek says, before getting up to go to the bar, well away from any fallout that might occur now.
‘Keyholes,’ says Tyson enigmatically. ‘That’s what it all came down to. Keyholes. I’ll say no more. You get a good perspective on things by looking through keyholes. They’re like looking into other Universes. Philosophical kaleidoscopes. Most of my best work has been powered by the keyhole. Meditative. Enlightening. I want to go back there to keyhole space.’
While Tyson is expounding on the metaphysical poetry of keyholes, behind him Derek is miming the actions of someone who has crouched down to peer through a keyhole, while simulating, in exaggerated fashion, the having of a furious wank. Suppressed titters can be heard, which confuses Tyson.
‘Coburn and those other cunts couldn’t understand it,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘A fucking chemist in charge of the place. Saw everything in the basest way.’
‘Well, that was predictable,’ whispers Ren to Compton, as Niall Raven, the Vice Chancellor comes into the room. ‘You never see him when you need him…’
‘What do you mean? He’s never needed,’ whispers Compton.
An angry, bespectacled forty-something man in an immaculate suit walks over to Derek, who is still bent over and carrying out his impression of Tyson, with his back to the VC. The sight of the VC’s determined strides causes the mood in the group to abruptly change, which confuses Tyson even further.
Raven puts his hand firmly on Derek’s shoulder.
‘I’m not sure that’s setting the best example to any guests who may be in the club tonight, Dr Lucas,’ says Niall, in a severe tone of voice, a tone which Fourier analysis would reveal to contain the coded message ‘You’re getting sacked in the morning, wanker’.
‘Argh,’ shouts Derek, who in his shock falls from his crouched position onto the floor.
Tyson turns around to see what was happened, and sees Niall standing over Derek.
‘What have you done to him, you greasy goose fucker?’ he shouts.
‘It’s all right, Tyson,’ says a panicked George. ‘He’s the Vice Chancellor.’
Tyson grabs George by the shirt and shakes him. ‘They’re all the fucking same, these chemists,’ he shouts. ‘Don’t you see? Give them a bit of power and they start fucking us over.’
‘Really, it’s all right,’ whimpers George, who is getting more crumpled by the second.
Tyson lets go of George, who sags and shrivels, and turns to Raven. ‘Leave him alone, you maggotty slimeballing shitscreen.’
‘I don’t know who you are,’ says Raven, ‘but that language is not acceptable. You’ll have to leave.’
‘Not this time, chemistry man,’ Tyson shouts. Then he screams, ‘It’s payback time.’ He picks up his empty wine bottle and hurls it at Raven. It misses him, but hits the wall behind, making a tremendous smash, and glass splinters everywhere.
Then Tyson tips his table over, taking George with it, and screams, ‘Open the cages! Free the animals! Everyone out! RUN!’
Tyson runs at Niall, and mimes throwing a punch at him. Niall cringes and shields himself from the blow that doesn’t come, which gives Tyson the opportunity to kick Niall’s legs out from under him.
‘No more bars,’ shouts Tyson. ‘Ever.’ He runs to the door. ‘I’m never coming back to your little world. Free yourselves or die like gooses.’
Niall, Derek and George are all lying on the floor amongst the debris. George is clutching his chest. Before anyone can say anything, Tyson puts his head back through the door.
‘Sorry, geese,’ he says.
With a heavy heart Ren decides that as seminar organiser, and as the youngest and fittest departmental member, he’d better be the one to chase after Tyson. Someone else will have to look after George.
I swear the Telegraph women’s section is even worse than the Guardian. They’re currently going loony over the Kavanaugh nomination. Here’s a disgraceful one picked at random in which the stupidity burns white hot:
It’s something most women know instinctively. The smearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers shows how many men automatically assume that all women are liars
‘Most women’? It’s normally only Guardianista women who assume that every woman in the world think like their little group does, but the Telegraph Women’s section is giving them a run for their money.
‘All women are liars’. For a start, let’s unpick the glaring ambiguity here that the author, Joan Smith, and her sub-editors (not the Telegraph really has sub-editors any more) have failed to notice, or have pretended not to notice.
Does ‘All women are liars’ mean ‘All women lie all the time?’ Obviously no-one believes that.
Or does it mean that ‘All women lie some of the time?’ That’s obviously true, because everyone, men and women, lie sometimes.
Or does it mean, ‘All women lie enough times that the word of a woman, any woman, cannot be trusted on important matters?’ No-one believes that either. Obviously there are many women whose word can be trusted. Maybe there are some incel chatrooms where you can find men who says that no women’s word can ever be trusted, but it’s not something many men believe.
So once we do a little undergraduate work in picking apart the ambiguity here, the absurdity of it becomes apparent.
The rest of the article is no better:
On Wednesday, Republican members of the committee released a statement accusing Julie Swetnick – who has claimed that she witnessed Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge drugging and gang-raping girls at parties in the early Eighties, and is herself a rape victim – of lying about Kavanaugh’s behaviour towards women when he was a young man.
Well, let’s see. Swetnick made absurd allegations that at age fiteen to sixteen, and in his school uniform, Kavanaugh and his buddies drugged and then gang-raped numerous women, including herself, at parties. Not just one party, but at over ten parties that Swetnick went to Kavanaugh was part of a drink-spiking mid-teens mass-rape gang.
Now, you might be wondering (but Joan Smith certainly isn’t) how come this Julie Swetnick kept going to these parties where there would be a massive gang rape happening every time? Why didn’t she bolt for the door as soon as she walked in and saw these criminal masterminds? Because, it turns out, she didn’t realise at the time that the gang-rape was happening. You see, she never actually saw Brett Kavanaugh, or anyone else, spiking any drinks (let alone raping anyone). But get this: she saw him around the punchbowl, handing out drinks. She also saw other boys near the punchbowl who were laughing. Damning evidence indeed.
And, she says, she did later tell people about the rapes, once she realised what had been going on under her nose the whole time. She told her mother… who is now dead. And a policeman, who is now dead. She may have told others, but cannot remember their names.
Nobody has backed up any of what Swetnick alleges, despite the fact that she says that everyone in the county knew about the parties. In fact, not a single person has been found who even remembers her attending any party that Brett Kavanaugh attended. And NBC tried hard – very hard – to find some. What’s more, sixty men and women who knew Kavanaugh at that time have said (under penalty of felony) “that he was only ever respectful towards them and others”.
So here we have a woman telling obvious lies for explosive political purposes, and all Joan Smith has the wit to do is to complain that Swetnick’s ex-boyfriend said disrespectful things about her. And Smith actually has the nerve to say that say that Swetnick is the one who has been ‘smeared’.
Note that the media organ that is doing the actual investigating here is Breitbart, whereas the media organ that is going with vague, ignorant ‘feelz’ is the Telegraph. (I can only remind people not to pay for this garbage. I subscribe, but only so I can fisk it.)
I’ve never understood the notion that women habitually lie about sex, randomly accusing men of rape, while men tell the truth at all times
This is actually written after numerous rape trials have fallen apart in the UK because it became clear that the woman making the accusations were lying. Of course, no-one is saying that ‘women habitually lie about sex’, which is a ridiculous straw man. Nor is anyone saying that men tell the truth at all times. It’s hard to believe that even the Telegraph’s Women’s section can publish such rubbish. That some women lie about rape for personal reasons is just well-established, as attested to by the women who are currently in jail for doing this. And we know only too well that leftists will gladly tell lies to advance the leftist cause. So the idea that leftist women will come forward to make false accusations – accusations that are damning, but suitably vague enough to protect them against perjury – for an important political cause is all too predictable.
In the Trump era, the assumption that all women are liars is being openly expressed at the highest levels of government.
Where? Examples? (And not just examples where doubt is expressed about Ford and Swetnick’s stories.)
Rape complainants don’t lie any more than victims of other serious crimes
Really? How many people are in jail because they falsely accused someone else of bank robbery? It’s an irrelevant point anyway. The fact is that, as Smith is now admitting, women do lie about rape. And leftists lie for the cause. Something Smith doesn’t mention, possibly because she is simply unaware of almost all the facts in these cases and is concerned only with how they feed her neuroses, is that:
The lawyer for Christine Blasey Ford’s “beach friend”– the one who worked for the FBI in the office of former Schumer staffer Preet Bharara–just so happens to be the FBI official who oversaw the Clinton e-mail and Trump Russia probes.
There are many, many holes in Ford’s story, but I’m going to presume you already know about them.
it’s the men who promote such baseless smears who should be ashamed of themselves.
In the few days since this article was published, I wonder whether Smith has started to realise that she’s been had. (A lot of Democrats have now become angry with Swetnick and her lawyer because they think her clearly ridiculous stories undermined Ford’s allegations, which they regarded as more credible.) I think: probably not. The Telegraph’s Women’s section doesn’t have much truck with old-fashioned feminist ideas, like that women should acquaint themselves with facts and reality rather than trusting their emotions for everything.
Update: I note without comment that Joan Smith has written twenty articles for the Telegraph, everyone of them about rape, and all with titles like “The police have a duty to believe all rape victims – have we learnt nothing?” I also note that one of them says that she is ‘Co-chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls panel’. This is what the Telegraph has become.
Update 2: Turns out she’s also a Guardianista. No great surprise there. And a Humanist.
Update 3: Some more relevant articles by me about the Telegraph Women’s section and the Kavanaugh debacle:
Claire Cohen: Ordinary people are angry, and here’s why
Claire Cohen: Ordinary people are angry, and here’s why. Part 2
I blogged about issue this last year, and to my mind the question has not been resolved. Is being a member of the EU like being a member of a club, or like being in a partnership? If the former, then once you leave you are not obligated to pay for anything that the club has committed to pay for after you leave. If I leave a snooker club, for example, I have no obligation to contribute to the cost of a bunch of new snooker tables. That applies even if the club made the committment to pay for the snooker tables before I left. On the other hand, I can claim no share in the club’s property and assets.
However, if membership of the EU should be conceived of as more like a partnership, then I do have an obligation for to pay for anything that the partnership committed to before I left. But in that case I do have a claim on the partnership’s property and assets – -I’m entitled to my share of them.
When do we get our snooker tables back?
The EU, it seems, treats the UK’s membership of the EU as like a partnership when it comes to discussions about the UK’s financial obligations, but like a club when it comes to discussing what the UK has a claim on (like the Galileo satellite system). The hopeless May government seems to be incapable of dealing with this duplicitous treatment.
According to Guido Fawkes, Sadiq Khan lied about the approval process for the Trump baby blimp:
Despite his long-running feud with Trump, Sadiq Khan was insistent at the time that the decision was solely that of the Greater London Authority (GLA) as a “corporate body” and that he had not personally approved the blimp. In fact, emails obtained by Guido reveal that the GLA initially rejected the proposal outright, only reversing their decision after a concerted campaign from Sadiq’s closest advisers including his Director of Communications Patrick Hennessey.
A story about the London mayor caught in a bare-faced lie to the public generates zero press interest. But that’s hardly surprising, is it? Because Theresa May engaged in one of the most outrageous and shameful episodes in British politics in recent decades, where she had Cabinet ministers preparing what they thought was the UK’s Brexit package, only to have a secret civil service unit work behind their backs coming up with the real UK Brexit package,and she has completely got away with that scot-free, so far as the press is concerned. It’s gone down the memory hole.
The fact that she screwed over the official Brexit team, and the rest of her party, and her country, was swept under the carpet once the media realised that her Chequers proposal was the closest they were going to get to Remain. And now the Daily Mail editorship has been taken over by a Remainer in Geordie Greig, they’re on-board too, and May will be feted as long as she stays that way:
The fact that May is now loathed by the vast majority of Tory members and conservative voters is not an issue, because they don’t matter. The fact that she has made a shambles of Brexit and plunged her party into an unprecented crisis doesn’t matter, because she’s ‘dancing her back to authority’. What matters is whether the bubble currently approves of your behaviour.
So some guy on Twitter got a lot of amused attention recently for tweeting this:
The problem is that the @guardian has now swung so far to the right that I don’t even bother to collect my free one from @waitrose any more! Sad to see a once great paper die but that is what’s happening. #BoycottTheGuardian
It’s not just him either, a lot of people on the hard left have been saying this recently, all because the Guardian doesn’t always toe the latest party line. Anyway, I asked him who had changed, the Guardian or him? To which he replied:
Genuinely a good question. I was always “centrist” Labour (although back then we called it “traditional working-class”) but I DID give Blair a chance until he blew it. Thing truth is probably the Grauniad and myself “diverged
So I thought, let’s have a look at today’s Guardian headlines and bylines to see how right-wing it has become.
First we have:
I kept telling the cat to stop being gross, but he just looked at me with contempt
Brigid Delaney
Mad cat ladies. Par for the course at the Guardian since time began.
A moment that changed me: when deep sadness drove me to counselling
Sachin Nakrani
The usual saddos. Also par for the course.
Kellyanne Conway proves patriarchy has no gender
Suzanne Moore
The usual left-wing buzzwords.
Hysterical, alcoholic and cut-throat: party conferences should be banned
Simon Jenkins
Ban this. Ban that. It’s Guardian world.
If the Czech economy is thriving, why are we so poor?
Saša Uhlová
Everyone’s always been poor in Guardian world.
Forget profit. It’s love and fun that drive innovations like Parkrun
Aditya Chakrabortty
‘Forget profit’, typical Guardian phrase.
The Trump administration knows the planet is going to boil. It doesn’t care
Bill McKibben
Loony Bill McKibben still wibbling on about global warming.
Public bathrooms are gender identity battlefields. What if we just do it right?
Simona Castricum
Everything will be fine if you just do what we say.
Fascist Spain meets British punk: the subversive genius of Judge Dredd
Ian Dunt
It’s Ian Dunt. And the phrase ‘fascist Spain’. And ‘subversive’.
Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade
George Monbiot
The cult of personality that the Guardian feeds with its mad obsessions with the individuals they endlessly demonise, like Trump, Bush, Thatcher, Reagan? That cult of personality? Also, I really don’t think George Monbiot has become right-wing.
Trump mocking Christine Blasey Ford shows how women are silenced
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
What was that about the ‘cult of personality again’?
Here’s how to beat the populists: stop talking about immigration
Natalie Nougayrède
Not exactly what I’d call right-wing.
Philip Johnston in the Telegraph:
Boris Johnson is a ‘man of the moment’, but his moment may, tragically, have passed …
Yet while his fringe event was packed out, unlike the main conference hall which was often half empty, there is a distinct sense that Boris’s time might have passed.
Theresa May … is still there and shows no sign of going or of being forced out …
Well, yes. I’ve been saying for a long time now that May needed to be dumped quickly, and that if she’s still in place by the time of the Conservative conference it would too late. It’s now too late.
The blows she has endured since then would have flattened Anthony Joshua; and yet I can only report from seeing her here in Birmingham that she looks in remarkably fine fettle, both determined and optimistic that she will get through in the end.
The reason is the Tory MPs. It’s tempting to blame the Brexiteers and the Tory right for losing their nerve, but they would have forced a confidence vote in a flash if they thought they could win it. But they know they can’t. Actually, maybe now they can if the mood reported in this article is correct. But it’s clear that the majority of MPs haven’t wanted to get rid of May when it mattered. The members haven’t wanted her, nor have the associations, so you can’t blame them. It’s the squishy MPs who are to blame.
This means that May will deliver a soft Brexit. There won’t be a no-deal Brexit. It’s too late for that. For that to take place you’d need a lot of time to sort out the details, because a no-deal Brexit would in fact be a lots-of-little-deals Brexit, to sort out logistics of flights and border arrangements, etc. There isn’t the time for that now.
And May hasn’t got the stomach to push through a no-deal Brexit anyway. Forget all the theatre the other day in her pretend patriotic speech, which as I said at the time was balls. She’s going to roll over for the the EU, who have known all along that she will, as long as they hung tough. As Johnston says:
For all the hoo-ha over the type of post-Brexit trading arrangements the UK is to have with the EU, most ministers and senior Tories I have spoken to think so, too …
One veteran Brexiteer put the chances of Mrs May landing a deal and getting it through Parliament at 90 per cent. While an argument may rage now over Chequers minus or Canada plus or Norway squared, once a deal has been reached (and there is too much at stake on all sides for there not to be one), the dynamics will change.
The strategy all along was play for time, and then before you know it will be too late to change, or to have a no-deal Brexit. That has worked. May is simply going to ride it all out. She may bring down her party as well as the country in doing so, but she doesn’t care, as all she knows is that she knows best.
