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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 2 years ago

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I’m listening to Andy Zaltzman’s interview on the WTF podcast, recorded in January 2021. I find Marc Maron incredibly annoying, for some reasons that are objectively justified and some that probably aren’t. I’ve sat through him twice before – once for John Oliver and once for Stewart Lee. Both times, Marc annoyed me hugely, but it was worth it to hear the guest.

He’s annoyed me in Andy Zaltzman’s podcast too. I’m a bit amazed at the number of new and inventive ways he finds to pronounce the word “Edinburgh”, managing to end it with the word “bro” a lot. “Edin-bro.” That’s one of my less objectively justified reasons to dislike him, probably, but it is pretty bad to not know how to say that properly if you’re such a significant comedian.

I’d say my least justified one is when he said to Andy, “So you grew up in London?” And I said, “No, come on, he grew up in Tumbridge Wells in Kent, a place he has described as ‘So conservative you were considered a bit of a leftie if you only voted Tory once in each election.’ Come on, Marc. How could you be so stupid as to think Andy Zaltzman grew up in London?” I then had to stop, take a step back, and remind myself that it is not at all reasonable to expect an American comedian to know where Andy Zaltzman grew up. Most British comedians do not know where Andy Zaltzman grew up. The vast majority of people in the world do not know where Andy Zaltzman grew up, it’s fine.

So I tried to check my anti-Marc Maron bias a bit, and once I did that, I realized… actually, you know what? Weirdly, Marc Maron might be the best person in the world to interview Andy Zaltzman. Andy Zaltzman tends to get evasive, to uncomfortably steer away from certain topics and it’s hard to tell when it’s genuine discomfort (which I don’t think an interviewer should press him on, I’m listening to this because I want to know where the most creative comedy I’ve ever heard comes from, but I don’t need to hear about anything he actively doesn’t want to talk about) versus just his social awkwardness making him sound vaguely uncomfortable about every topic. When I hear most people interact with Andy Zaltzman, they sort of know this, and if they get near most topics you can hear them expect to get the vaguely ironic or surreal reply. In this case, Marc Maron’s drawback as an interview who knows fuck all about his interviewee works in his favour. He asks Andy Zaltzman questions and expects to get an answer the way you would from a normal person, and when he doesn’t, he just repeats it. It’s kind of cool.

Marc Maron and Andy Zaltzman are wildly different comedians in just about every way, but they do have one weirdly specific thing in common, which is a… complicated relationship with The Daily Show. That highlights how different they are – Marc Maron spent years very publicly being a huge asshole about Jon Stewart, due to jealousy of Stewart’s success. And then sort of offered to apologize but only if he can do it for publicity on his podcast – seriously, fuck that guy (I’d say this is one of my more justified reasons to dislike Marc Maron). While Andy Zaltzman spent the first few years on The Bugle with a running joke where after John Oliver would tell one of his showbiz anecdotes about whatever celebrity he’d met through his Daily Show job that week, Andy would add that he had quite a good [insert different type of lunch meat each time] sandwich that week so they’ve all got stuff going on. He kept that up for so long that when I was relatively early in my Bugle listening, I made a bunch of posts on here saying I can’t figure out what’s going on with Andy Zaltzman, he seems to genuinely be totally unbothered by the commercial success discrepancy. When I got a hundred or so episodes into I declared that I’d figured out the answer, and it’s that Andy Zaltzman is just totally unimpressed by anything in the world that isn’t a bad pun or a cricket stat. He truly, deep down, does not want to meet Hugh Jackman. Episode 90 was the one in which he absolutely roasted John Oliver for committing the embarrassing transgression of winning an Emmy, and it didn’t sound like jealousy, it sounded like he understood awards ceremonies to be the stupidest thing in the world.

Cracks in that did start to show eventually, mainly when Johnny Showbiz’s Daily Show career became less about meeting Hugh Jackman and more about propelling him to get his own TV show and leave the rest of his career behind. But they were only ever the tiniest of cracks. He did his Comedian’s Comedian episode in 2014, just as this was starting to happen, and Stuart Goldsmith had to push him pretty hard, from a few different angles, to get the words “Yes, maybe at certain times and in some ways I have been a bit jealous” out of him, which felt like a massively out-of-character thing to say. And once he actually left, there may have been a short while of just the tiniest traces of bitterness in the way he used the once-purely-affectionate nickname Johnny Showbiz, and one time he took a moment out of one Bugle episode to say congratulations are owed to his former colleague on winning two Emmys in one night “Presumably for Most Elongated Departure From a Podcast and Least Enthusiasm For Physical Contact on a Football Pitch,” and he might have once shouted “Fuck you Percy Primetime, everyone in this room has heard of me!” upon finding three members of his stand-up audience who hadn’t heard of John Oliver. You know, little cracks. There was that one time when a reviewer called him a “left-behind sidekick" and he had what was, by his normally unflappable standards, a small breakdown, referencing that review with increasing frustration for several weeks’ worth of episodes, and recording an interview with himself about how he doesn’t want to be famous anyway and he loves writing in his shed.

So really, when you look at all that, Marc Maron might be the right guy to interview Andy Zaltzman. Both had reason to be bitter toward The Daily Show, one expressed this loudly and publicly for ages, while the other made like one slightly passive-aggressive comment on a podcast an average of every 1.5 years. One has built his comedy brand on relentlessly oversharing every single emotion he has for money, another does almost entirely political and sometimes vaguely surreal comedy, and sounds notably uncomfortable if he’d expected to get personal about anything. This is all relevant context for this exchange:

Andy Zaltzman: [John Oliver and I] met doing the live stand-up circuit, and he did little sketches in my first Edinburgh show, I did some stuff in his first Edinburgh show the following year, in 2002. We toured on the student union circuit – in my generation of British comedians there was quite a thriving student union circuit where you could go and experiment, and it didn’t matter so much if you…

Marc Maron: But that was better than clubs, right?

Andy Zaltzman: It was better than clubs, partly because, generally you were booked in to do a whole tour, so it wasn’t like you had to succeed at every gig to get called back. So we got to know each other pretty well then, we did some radio series together, then when John got the Daily Show job and left me doing an Edinburgh show alone instead of a two-hander in front of about twenty-five people a night as he went to the biggest comedy show in the world… um…

Marc Maron: And how did that go for you? How did you take that?

Andy Zaltzman: Well, I’ll be honest, it was a bit tricky at the time. [Marc Maron cackles in the background, like a man who was not expecting to be able to get a guest to talk shit about Jon Stewart-era Daily Show on this day, and is pleased it’s gone in this direction] It was about a month before Edinburgh started, and so… it would be an exaggeration to say I had to rewrite the show, because we hadn’t entirely got round to writing it at that point…

Marc Maron [audibly sensing blood in the water]: That must have been a horrible conversation.

Andy Zaltzman: Well, not really, because it was – you know – clearly a pretty big opportunity, so…

Marc Maron: No, yeah, I know. But still, you had to suck it up.

Andy Zaltzman: Uh, I guess so. And we’d also had two BBC radio series canceled round about the same time, and I found out my wife was pregnant, so it was a month of considerable upheaval… uh, for me.

Marc Maron sounded like he was having so much fun in that exchange. In John Oliver’s episode, he pushed John Oliver to talk shit about Jon Stewart and John Oliver refused to do it, straight-up shut down that line of questioning and said he knows how Marc feels about Jon but he doesn’t have a single bad word to say about Jon Stewart. Marc kept trying for a bit in a way that made things incredibly, painfully awkward, and he was clearly disappointed when he couldn’t get that, you could see he’d been looking forward to having on the Daily Show guy so he could find an outlet for his grudge against Jon Stewart. There’s such a contrast to how he sounds at this point in Andy Zaltzman’s interview, so excited to get the tiniest bit of commiseration about the shared experience of getting left behind by The Daily Show. To the point where weirdly, I may have started to sympathize with Marc Maron a tiny bit. And you can tell that Andy Zaltzman has no idea he’s been put in the middle of any of this, and is just trying to stumble through answers to the questions.

Although he may have had some idea, because he’s mentioned at other times that he had to rewrite stuff for their 2006 joint Edinburgh show once it became a solo show instead, which makes me think by saying they hadn’t written it before John left, he was downplaying how much effect that event had to avoid giving more bait to a shark that sensed blood in the water.

They then discuss whether Andy Zaltzman should do a show about having a baby, or a breakup show, the way some people win awards for doing these days, but the drawback is that he married young and it’s worked out ever since. I found that conversation hilarious, just because it’s funny to imagine Andy Zaltzman doing a show like that. It would be amusing if he did just one sometime, and didn’t explain it. An entire show about parenthood with absolutely nothing surreal, just true stories about the wacky adventures of raising teenagers, and then go right back to his usual stuff.

They also discuss Judaism, and I suppose that’s another thing they sort of have in common, both being Jewish. Again I find myself sympathizing with Marc Maron a bit, because you can hear that he’s so interested in learning what it’s like to be Jewish in Britain, and Andy Zaltzman keeps disappointing him. Marc Maron would have more luck getting John Oliver to talk shit about Jon Stewart than getting Andy Zaltzman to give a detailed an accurate account of Jewish communities in Britain. Andy Zaltzman, whose most personal stand-up material is probably the stuff about how much loves bacon and doesn’t even know when the Jewish holidays are despite the religion into which he was born.

Marc Maron then asks what the difference is between Oxford and Cambridge, after Andy mentions that he went to the former and John Oliver went to the latter. Which I thought was quite a funny question, even if unintentionally so. Weirdly, I am warming to Marc Maron more and more.

He asks Andy in about eight different ways for some basic biographical details about how Andy Zaltzman got into comedy during/just after his days at Oxford, and Andy Zaltzman is relentlessly more interested in explaining how ancient Greek plays can be applied to modern stand-up, and at this point the interview becomes a comedy of wildly mismatched personalities. He eventually gets the story out of Andy that he did one comedy gig that went very badly and then spent a year sub-editing articles, before getting back on the comedy circuit.

Marc Maron: And who was around? Who were the guys that you started with, that are still around?

Me: Oh! I can answer that one, actually, Marc. Have you ever heard of a drink called chocolate milk?

Andy Zaltzman: Well, John was starting round about the same time. Um, Russell Howard was starting ‘round then. Jimmy Carr, people who’d been very successful around then. Daniel Kitson was sort of the… the big… you know, the most successful comedian of my generation… creatively, him, he was, I think, you know, everyone of my generation, on the circuit, sort of looked up to. He was, you know, started doing stuff…

Marc Maron: Yeah, yeah, I heard about Kitson for years, and I think I saw, I saw one big show of his in London. I know he does – you know, he’s a, uh, unique person. Uh, doesn’t do the podcast, or talk, or, you know, function, necessarily, in a sociable way… but I’ve met him a few times, and I know that he’s revered.

Me: Aaaannnd there goes my sympathizing with Marc Maron. It was building up for a bit, gone now. Go fuck yourself, Maron.

I transcribed Andy’s answer word for word, including the stuttering and filler words, to try to get across just how much it sounds like having this conversation is akin to water torture for him. And how getting a straight answer out of him seems a bit like pulling teeth for Marc Maron. These two could have a sitocm together based on comically contrasting personalities, the oversharing American and the reserved Brit.

Anyway, that’s about halfway through the interview, at which point I decided to stop and write this down. They covered a bunch of other stuff too, about Andy Zaltzman’s familial, educational, and comedy backgrounds. Marc Maron got more out of him than most people do, just by not seeming bothered by the discomfort he created, which may be a good thing in some cases and a bad thing in other cases. Marc Maron talked a lot of shit about the Edinburgh Fringe Festvial, and Andy Zaltzman defended it.

This has gotten pretty long so I think I’ll post it now, even though there are forty-ish minutes left. I am quite enjoying this. Will get into the 2022 Bugle after this, and then presumably go back to having stuff to say about the actual comedy, I’ll admit that this entire post, and this entire interview, are pretty much only about comedian gossip. But it happens to be the exact side of comedian gossip I’m interested in. Marc Maron is clearly the man to go to if you want some gossip.

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thessalian · 2 years ago

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Thess vs Bad News

This country depresses the shit out of me.

A thing that’s been in the news lately was some lovely lady was growing vegetables in her allotment and giving them to the needy. Now, we probably wouldn’t have heard anything about this, except that someone else apparently took exception to this. Did they destroy the garden? Not quite in the way you’d think. They didn’t uproot plants that I know about; they salted the earth. I mean, I mostly grow herbs with the occasional strawberry and tomato; I tried some veg last year and it was only a partial success and I worked hard. I cannot imagine how that poor woman must have felt when she came to do some weeding and harvesting and found that. There’s no coming back from that. There’s no replanting until they can deal with the salination level of the soil. That’s just atrocious.

And then there’s Andrew Edwards, a councillor in Pembrokeshire. He has literally been recorded saying that “all white men should have a black man or a black woman as a slave” and “there’s nothing wrong with skin colour; it’s just that they’re lower class than us white people”. This is all still under investigation, because Edwards refuses to confirm or deny and threw it at an Ombudsman. I don’t really trust the Ombudsmen anymore, honestly, but ... oh, hell, I don’t even know anymore. I wouldn’t put it past any of them, honestly, either side of the political divide in this case.

Because there is no political divide anymore. Starmer’s throwing his entire party manifesto out the window to be in lockstep with Tory ideology, apparently trying to steal votes from them and ignoring the votes of people who don’t want any more of this shit. Recently backtracked on standing behind the Gender Recognition Act, instead saying he wants to “reach a consensus”. There is no ‘consensus’ to be reached here! Trans people just want to live as the gender with which they identify, and their allies want that for them; the other side wants them gone or dead! The only middle ground that exists there, if you want to call it that, is “They can exist but their lives have to be miserable and we have to be able to misgender them and force them into unsafe spaces all we want”, and that’s not existing! That’s not middle ground! That’s “Maybe if we make them unhappy enough, they’ll go away and / or die”, and that’s grotesque!

I cannot do anything about any of this. I live in what has been a fairly safe Labour seat (though I don’t know what’s going to happen in future given that Labour is just the Tories with a red tie now) but that means jack all when there’s an 80 seat Tory majority and a string of Prime Ministers we didn’t even get to vote for. We don’t get a vote for PM for another year at least anyway. I hate this country like you would not believe. I know it’s a vocal minority that’s being like this, but that vocal minority has the money and the power and the rest of us are stuck suffering for their comfort, all the way across the board.

So I may be ever so slightly depressed.

However, there are good things. My friends love me and I love them in return. My plants are thriving - my tomatoes sprouted already, and there’ll be pictures when the light’s a little less iffy (it’s been partly cloudy today, so the sunshine comes and goes). Somehow looking at my growing seedlings makes me feel better. And I still have a couple of days off and new House Flipper DLC, so there’s some Zen that should help. Though doing a farm DLC, and even looking at my plants, still gets me thinking of that poor woman with the allotment. At least her Gofundme to keep helping people is going well, but nothing will take away the sting of someone going that far to ruin so much hard work so completely. I hope they find that asshole and I hope they go to jail.

#Thess vs the Tories #Thess on politics #Thess on gardening

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j-a-c-k-j-a-c-k · 11 months ago

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Yeah this Reasonable Centrist Analysis is premised on the Labour party actually doing anything good once they get into power, which based on Starmer's track record as leader of the opposition will not be anything substantial. What these Reasonable Centrists don't seem to understand is that a reformist party like Labour can never appeal to right wing voters better than the Tories. Regardless of the depths of the crisis the party is in, this is not the end of the Tories, they will recovered at some point in the future, and a neoliberal Labour party will not pose a serious electoral challenge to the preferred party of the capitalist class (not that a reformist party will ever be able to seriously challenge a capitalist party but that's a different question).

Let's take the Australian example, just because it was mentioned previously and it's my ball park. After a crisis in the Coalition, the Labor party won last years election on one of the lowest first preference votes since federation. They did exactly what the Reasonable Centrists in this post suggested them to do: court right wing voters and play a small target game, let the Coalition lose the election rather than attempt to win it. 18 months later, we're left with a housing crisis, a failed referendum, and support for Israel, everything we would have had under a Coalition government, except the union bureaucracy is even less willing to organise struggle than before because it's their party in power.

Just in case I haven't made it clear, an electoral struggle against a capitalist class will never succeed, the only thing that could seriously pose a challenge to a party of the capitalist class is a struggle against capitalism. Any analysis that doesn't have a socialist revolution as its conclusion will be flawed.

what if we all killed ourselves

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monarchofrymden · 2 years ago

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I posted 26,167 times in 2022

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Blogs I reblogged the most:

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I tagged 398 of my posts in 2022

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Longest Tag: 134 characters

#found out that tiktok of the lass carding wool while talking about how she got her mum to beta read symbrock smut is in a server im in

My Top Posts in 2022:

The Magnus Archives AU where everything is the same except MAG 65 Binary is about Hatsune Miku

"The angles cut me when I try to sing."

24 notes - Posted August 22, 2022

Yes, I am glad the Parasite in Chief Queen Elizabeth II is dead. But at the same time, I know this spells disaster for the country.

This is the worst cost of living crisis the UK has ever seen already, and things will not be helped by the millions of pounds that are to be spent on a Royal Funeral and Coronation. This winter, hundreds of thousands of people will starve and go without heating, they will die because they can't afford to eat and pay the rent. Hundreds of thousands of children will go hungry because they can no longer get free school meals. The common people of this country are being pushed further down into poverty, while those with money and power steal what little money we have left for themselves.

We also have a new Prime Minister, yet another Tory profiteer that the people of this country did not vote for. Her leadership campaign was funded by the record high profits of an oil giant, while the genuine people of this country face insurmountable, unpayable and unmanageable high prices just to turn the lights on.

This is a dire time for the people of this country. The deliberate negligence at the hands of Crown and Government have already murdered thousands of people, and they plan to murder thousands more.

Fuck the Queen. Fuck the new King. Fuck the PM. God has forsaken our country.

27 notes - Posted September 9, 2022

The Media TM portraying DID: oh god theres evil voices in my head and they want to kill I can't control them

The Reality of DID: aight which one of you cunts read Homestuck while I wasn't looking

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THE QUEEN HAS COVID

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My #1 post of 2022

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Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys · 3 years ago

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Who is Damien green and what is the porn thing he got fired for?

Ah, now this was a few years back so I definitely won't get the details right, but in a nutshell:

Damian Green MP (he's in Kent somewhere) has been an odious little turd his entire life with an immeasurably punchable face and a demeanour so obnoxious even other Tories can barely stand him; while he was in uni as a young man (where he was, like, the president of the Young Tories in Oxford or what the fuck ever) one night a bunch of other Tories - including Dominic Grieve, former Shadow Home Secretary who later actually served with Damian - carried him out of town and threw him in the River Cherwell, breaking his wrist in the process. Don't feel bad - here's his voting record.

Here is his punchable face, if it helps:

I'd chuck him in a river, too.

He also got arrested once? While in office? For... fuck, I'm forgetting so much of this, but I think it was a misconduct thing that eventually collapsed through not enough evidence, or something like that. That's an aside to the real meat of what you've asked, though, but it is slightly relevant as you'll see in a sec.

Anyway, Theresa May made him Secretary of State, so he got to be a pretty big deal for a bit. But THAT meant - well, okay, let me take you back to the Westminster Sexual Scandals of 2017, which got kicked off because of the Harvey Weinstein thing and the Me Too movement, and loads of survivors came forward and what do you know, turns out most Tories (politicians in general, actually) are gross predators. So, Damian Green, naturally, came up in this. He had three accusers, but thanks to some gross intimidation tactics against the first one to go public, the other two never did. In the interests of fairness, I should specify that he was never accused of rape: she said he was a creepy lecherous toad who put his hand on her knee inappropriately and sent her gross text messages, that sort of thing. Skin-crawly unacceptable stuff, but not the monstrous big leagues of some.

So he had to be investigated, and as part of the investigation, it turned out that when the police had arrested him that time in 2008 they had found porn on his government office computer. He claimed it was a political smear. Then the police were like "Lol no it wasn't possible to have been anyone else u lil bitch", and then there was a REAL BIG investigation, and then there was a report that found that there wasn't enough evidence about the sexual harassment but he definitely lied to his colleagues about the porn so throw him in a river fuck him, and then suddenly, he was fired (or, uh, asked to resign by Tessie May, officially). And that investigation was apparently Sue Gray, now investigating Big Dog the Clown's lockdown parties.

To round up, he did apologise to his accuser but then led a "dirty tricks" campaign against her and got the Daily Mail to publish fake text messages painting her as a liar, but she eventually managed to get them to not only take down the articles (and admit most were fake) but also got them to give her £11,000. So there's that.

No word on what his specific flavour of porn was.

#politik

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howdon-aldi-death-queue · 3 years ago

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NEW SAM FENDER INTERVIEW FOR NME

THE BIG READ

Sam Fender: “This album is probably the best thing I’ve done in my life”

The hometown hero has distanced himself from the ‘Geordie Springsteen’ tag, but there’s no shortage of rites-of-passage yarns and colossal tunes on the upcoming ‘Seventeen Going Under’

“You can see the ghost of Thatcherism over there…” says Sam Fender, pointing across the water to a vacant shipyard, where once the shipbuilding industry was so healthy that vessels towered higher than the rows of houses on the shore. We’re on the waterfront in North Shields, just outside Newcastle, and our photographer is snapping away for Sam’s first NME cover shoot.

The singer-songwriter stares stonily into the lens as wafts of seaweed and fishing trawlers are carried by the northern coastal breeze. He’s already been stopped for a few pictures with fans, but remains eager to point out the impact that Tory leadership has had on his working-class town over the last few decades. “It’s been closed since the ’80s, from the ghost wasteland of the shipyards. You’ve got all the scars of Thatcherism from The Tyne all over to the pit villages in Durham.”

It’s as good an introduction as any to the outspoken musician, whose 2019 debut album ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ was a record for his sleepy hometown to be proud of – tackling themes that range from male suicide (the heartbreaking ‘Dead Boys’) to world tensions (and the “kids in Gaza” he eulogised on its soaring title track). He set weighty topics against blisteringly well-executed Americana with the fist-in-the-air euphoria of Bruce Springsteen’s colossal choruses and sax solos. Much like his hero, Sam smartly weaves his own political standpoint and personal circumstance into gripping anthems of a generation, which earned him the ‘Geordie Springsteen’ tag.

“I can’t exactly bat off those comparisons, can I?” he says back in his cosy recording studio nearby. “At the same time, I don’t feel worthy of that tag. The first time I heard it, I was like, ‘That’s fucking sick’, but you don’t want to be riding off the coattails of The Boss for the rest of your life. I can write my own songs, they’re different and my voice doesn’t sound anything like Springsteen’s. I don’t have his growl; I’m a little fairy when I sing.”

He may have toned down the Springsteen vibes slightly on his highly anticipated second album ‘Seventeen Going Under’, due later this year, but there are still plenty of chest-pounding anthems capable of making your hairs stand on end: “I much prefer Americana to the music we have in our country at the moment. I love the leftfield indie stuff like Fontaines D.C, Squid and Black Midi, but I love a chorus and melodic songs. I think the American alternative scene has that down with Pinegrove, Big Thief, The War On Drugs.”

‘Hypersonic Missiles’ thrummed with a small town frustration almost that every suburban teenager could surely relate to. This was most notable on ‘Leave Fast’, where he sang about the “boarded up windows on the promenade / The shells of old nightclubs” and “intoxicated people battling on the regular in a lazy Low Lights bar”, a reference to his beloved local. But album two sees him fully embrace North Shields, an ever-present backdrop to cherished memories and harrowing life events of his youth and surroundings.

It’s no coincidence that the 27-year-old has turned inwards and penned a record about his hometown while being stuck at home like the rest of the country: “I didn’t have anything to point at and I didn’t want to talk about the pandemic because nobody wants that – I never want to hear about it again. It was such a stagnant time that I had to go inwards and find something, because I was so uninspired by the lifetime we we’re living in.

“I’ve made my coming-of-age record and that was important for me – as I get older, these stories keep appearing; I’ve got so much to talk about. I wrote about growing up here. It’s about mental health and how things that happen as a child impact your self-esteem in later life. On the first record, I was pointing at stuff angrily, but the further I’ve gotten into my 20s, the more I’ve realised how little I know about anything. When you hit 25, you’re like: ‘I’m fucking clueless! I know nothing about the world.’ It was a humbling experience, growing up.”

Early last year, before the pandemic hit, Sam was set to jet off to New York pre-pandemic to record in the city’s infamous Electric Lady studios founded by Jimi Hendrix. “Looking back, I’m thankful that it happened,” he says. “If I went off to New York and did my second album there… it wouldn’t have been the same record. I will go and do the third one in NYC, come hell or high water – I’m fucking out of here!

“The forced return home really informed the direction [of the record]. I was on the crest of this insane wave; we’d sold out 84,000 tickets for the [‘Hypersonic Missiles] arena tour that we still haven’t played yet. I’m still waiting to hear when it’s going to be rescheduled. It’s incredibly frustrating; I’ve got loads of frustrated fans. That was all cancelled on the day of the lockdown. I thought it was only going to be a couple of months and that it would be another swine flu thing, but fool me – I was stuck in the house like everybody else.”

It’s not the first setback that Sam has dealt with in his career. In the summer of 2019, he was ready to make his Glastonbury Festival debut with a Friday afternoon set on the legendary John Peel Stage, a rite of passage for any emerging artist, but had to pull out due to a serious health issue with his vocal chords. The mood in the room shifts dramatically at the mention of this devastating period: “I don’t want to focus on that, to be honest, because it’s just negative news and it’s in the past.”

“The further I’ve gotten into my 20s, the more I’ve realised how little I know”

Looking back now, he says, it was a tough decision, but ultimately the right thing to do: “We were doing so much at the time and I just burnt out. If you damage your vocal cords, you can’t take it lightly. If something happens like that and you keep going, you’ll fucking lose your career forever. I never want to end up behind the knife; I just refuse to put myself in that situation.”

The fact that his 2019 breakthrough ground to a halt again in COVID-decimated 2020 “was frustrating as fuck”, he says, “but I took solace in the fact that everyone was stopped in their tracks that time; it wasn’t just me.” This was in stark contrast to the singer’s experience of pulling the biggest moment of his music career in order to rest his vocal cords: “I didn’t talk for three weeks; I had to be silent and just watch Glastonbury on the TV, going, ‘This is completely dogshit’. But you can’t even say that out loud – you’re just saying it over in your head like a psycho. I’d take a pandemic over that any day.”

There was a brief flash of light when he headlined the opening night at the world’s first socially distanced arena, Newcastle’s Virgin Money Unity venue, to an audience of 2,500. Yet Sam’s not in the mood to wax lyrical about that, either. “It was amazing,” he says, “but it didn’t happen again.” A local lockdown in the North East brought the following shows – which would have featured Kaiser Chiefs and Declan McKenna – to a premature end in September: “It was another false start. We thought everything was going to get moving again but then we were just sat around [again].”

As for this reaction to the Government’s handling of the pandemic? It perhaps says it all that he’s selling face masks emblazoned with the words ‘2020 Shit Show’ and ‘Dystopian Nightmare Festival’ on his website. “I think everyone has said enough haven’t they?” Sam suggests. “I never want to see Boris Johnson’s or Matt Hancock’s face ever again. As soon as they come on the TV, I just turn it off.”

Political tension bubbles through ‘Seventeen Going Under’. Its second half boasts tracks such as ‘Long Way Off’, a brooding but colossal festival anthem brimming with angst and unease. “Standing on the side I never was the silent type,” Fender roars, “I heard a hundred million voices / sound the same both left and right / we’re still alone we are.” It’s gripping stuff; a Gallagher-level anthem ripe for pyro and pints held aloft.

Sam says the song is about feeling stranded amid political divisiveness here and in the US, epitomised when Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington back in January: “You’ve either got right-wing, racist idiots or you’ve got this elitist, upper-middle-class section of the left-wing, which completely alienates people like myself and people from my hometown.”

“The polarity between the left and the right has me feeling like I have no identity”

Closer to home, the last UK election, in 2019, saw the so-called ‘Red Wall’ crumble as working-class voters in the north defected from Labour to Tory. “The polarity between the left and the right has me feeling like I have no identity,” Sam says. “I’m obviously left-wing, but you lose hope don’t you? Left-wing politics has lost its main votership; it doesn’t look after working-class people the way that it used to. Blyth Valley voted Tory just north of here. Now, that is saying something! We’re in dire straits when a fucking shipbuilding town is voting for the Tories – it’s like foxes voting for the hunter.”

He’s even seen his own working-class friends peel to the blue side: “I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I understand it, though. I’d never vote for the bastards because I fucking hate them and I know what they’re up to, but I get why people don’t feel any alliegiance to left-wing politics when they’re working-class.”

As ever though, Sam isn’t masquerading as an expert: “I’m not fucking Noam Chomsky, you know what I mean? I’m not going to dissect the whole political agenda of the Tories and figure it all out because I can’t. All I see is a big fucking shit sandwich – every day through my news feed – and it’s just, ‘Well: that’s what your dealing with.”

The singer is fond of describing North Shields as “a drinking town with a fishing problem”. Today he adds: “That’s been the backdrop of my life: all of these displaced working-class people. It’s a town that’s resilient that still has a strong sense of community. In a lot of big cities that’s dead. In London everything changes from postcode to postcode, but everything is quite uniform up here.”

When NME was awaiting Sam’s arrival outside the studio before the interview, a passerby clocked our photographer’s gear and asked, “Oh aye – are you waiting for Sam? We all know Sam – a good lad; very accommodating with nae airs or graces about him.” Another pointed to The Low Lights Tavern down the road, where Fender used to pull pints on the weekends: “He was a terrible barman, and he’ll be the first to tell you that. I think he got sacked about six times during his time there.”

Sam (who confesses of his bartending know-how: “He’s totally right!”) hit the local to celebrate when ‘Hypersonic Missiles’ won him a Critics’ Choice gong at the BRIT Awards in 2019, placing the trophy on the bar. “I owed The Low Lights one for being such a shit barman,” he says. “I wanted them to be proud of us because they fucking certainly wasn’t proud of us when I was around working there!”

“Celebrity stuff freaks me out. I’d rather just live my life”

He’s clearly a key member of the local community, then. How did he see the pandemic impact on his family and friends – especially when the North East faced the toughest Tier Four lockdown restrictions last December? Sam pauses before bluntly saying: “I lost more mates; there was suicides again. Mental health was the biggest thing. We lost friends who had drunk too much.”

A track on the new record, ‘The Dying Light‘, is an epic sequel to ‘Dead Boys’, with the poignant last line of the album ringing out “for all the ones who didn’t make the night”. Sam, unable to truly distance himself from The Boss after all, explains: “It’s very Springsteen. It’s my ‘Jungleland’ or ‘Thunder Road’ – it’s got that ‘Born To Run’ feel; there’s strings and brass [and] it’s fucking massive. It’s a celebration. It’s a triumph over adversity.”

He stresses that it was vital for him to be in regular contact with his friendship circle through that traumatic time: “It becomes important when you lose friends to suicide… You realise it’s always the unlikely folks. We lost a friend to suicide at the beginning of last year and it was someone you’d never expect. It really hits home; it’s important to check in on your mates.”

Sam has alluded in previous interviews to a health condition that he’s not yet ready to fully disclose, and tells NME that he spent three months shielding at the beginning of the pandemic: “I was alone for three months and that was very tough… When you’re completely alone and isolated, it’s impossible. I spent a lot of time drinking and not really looking after myself and eating shit food, but I wrote a lot of good lyrics.”

There’s a certain resulting bleakness to some of his new songs, but Sam also wanted light to shine through. “It’s a darker record, but it’s a celebration of surviving and coming out the other end,” he explains. “It’s upbeat but the lyrics can be quite honest. It’s the most honest thing I’ve done.”

You might expect a young hometown hero to rail at having been denied the chance to capitalise on his burgeoning fame in the last year or so, but Sam insists, “I still have imposter syndrome,” adding: “I don’t feel like it’s happened… I’m walking around the street and people ask for photos and it just feels bizarre. I’m like, really? I feel like I haven’t come out of my shell yet.”

Sam has rarely been one to court celebrity, and revealed in 2019 that he’d turned down the chance to appear in an Ariana Grande video. “It was an honour but I would have just been known as that guy in the video,” he tells NME. “All of my mates would have been flipping their heads off, but I don’t think she would really want an out-of-shape, pale Geordie. I’d rather just live my life, because all of this celebrity stuff freaks [me] out, you know?”

He might have to get used to it: things can only get bigger with the arrival of the new album. “As a record I think this one is leagues ahead [of ‘Hypersonic Missiles’],” he says, “I’m more proud of this than anything I’ve ever done. It’s probably the best thing I’ve done in my life. I just hope people love it as much as I do. With the first album, a lot of those songs were written when I was 19, so I was over half of it [by the time it was released]. Whereas this one is where I’m at now.”

“This is a dark record, but it’s a celebration of surviving and coming out the other end”

Still, he adds: “At the same time, this record is probably going to piss a lot of people off.” He’s referring to a line in one of the more political tracks, ‘Aye’, where he returns to his most enduring bugbear, divisiveness, and claims that “the woke kids are just dickheads”. Sam’s no less forthcoming in person: “They fucking are, though! Some 22-year-old kid from Goldsmiths University sitting on his fucking high horse arguing with some working-class person on some comments section calling them an ‘idiot’ and a ‘bigot’? Nobody engages each other in a normal discussion [online] without calling each other a ‘thick cunt’.”

He’s eager to make this statement, though, come what may: “I don’t fucking care any more. I’m not really sure how the reaction is going to be. People used to say things online about me and I used to get quite hurt about it, but now I’m like, ‘Well, they’re not coming to my house’… [But] I get so angry. In Newcastle we say ‘pet’ and someone was trying to tell me that was fucking offensive towards women. You’re not going to delete my fucking colloquial identity. It’s not even gender-specific; we say it to men and women. My Grandma calls me ‘pet’! That brand of liberalism is fucking destroying the country. We could be getting Boris Johnson and all them pricks out of office if we stopped sweating over shit like that”.

Sam might be outspoken, but he’s self-aware, too. When we were talking politics earlier, he said: “I didn’t want to start on ‘cancel culture’ because I don’t want to sound like Piers Morgan [and] I fucking hate that cunt. But there is a degree of it which lacks redemption; people fuck up. Everyone is a flawed character. If you’re not admitting that you have flaws, then you’re a fucking psychopath. The left-wing seem to be that way and the right-wing are fucking worse than they’ve ever been. Politically I have just lost my shit.”

In all of this uncertainty, though, it seems a sure thing that Sam Fender will take his rightful crown – as soon as the world lets him – with the colossal ‘Seventeen Going Under’. “It’s going to be a hell of a return,” he insists. “I know the fans are still there, you know? So I’m not really worried – I’m ready to go out there and do my thing. Finally!”

#sam fender #majestic interview #some important points were raised #loved when he said that he hates the 'celebrity façade of things'#long post

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outlanderalien · 5 years ago

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@fullheartedlyprovocative

Very good point! Many people who aren’t from the UK are probably not aware of the impending disaster that is Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I keep describing him as a clown, incompetent and overall destructive to society as a whole, but i’ve failed to go into detail. And the reason is simple: There’s just far too much to cover in a concise and efficient way. It is very literally a massive rabbit hole that knows no end.

But i should probably collate some of his more memorable moments, so that everyone can get a rough idea about who he is exactly and why we’re all dead inside.

Bojo is often described as clownish, but don’t let that fool you into thinking he’s harmless. He’s as Machiavellian as a politician can get, and he weaponises his clownish behaviour in order to cover up his corruption. He has this down to an Art.

A recent example of his perception manipulation:

During the Brexit referendum, Boris was heavily campaigning for Leave, and he infamously commissioned a big red Bus with this message on it, claiming that the 350 million currently going to EU membership will be redirected to the UKs NHS (National Health Service), this was a massive deal and fueled the leave campaign.

This was also a massive lie, and he was (rightly) hated for it.

The Bus Lie hung over Boris long after the referendum. When you’d type up Boris Johnson on Google, it would suggest the Bus scandal as an auto-complete search, bringing up countless articles on the lie that had clearly tarnished Boris’ reputation.

However, during the leadership campaign, Boris did something extraordinary. While being interviewed about his leadership bid, he was asked what he does for fun. This was his response:

youtube

Hilarious. Ridiculous. Blustering. Making it up as he went along. It quickly became an interview widely mocked across social media and news outlets. Why did he make himself sound like such an idiot? Why buses? This is why:

He is not only immune to being mocked, he has weaponised it to cover up his biggest controversies. Typing up “Boris Johnson Bus” now yields funny clips of him struggling to get through an interview talking about painting little buses. His Bus Scandal has almost been entirely pushed out of the picture.

That is only the tip of the Boris shaped iceberg.

His clowning has gotten him national and international mockery. Who can forget that time Boris (while Mayor of London) got stuck on a zip-line because he was too heavy?

Or that time that he got overly competitive in a game of rugby against kids and tackled a child.

Or that time during a recent Leadership debate where he pulled out a literal Kipper and waved it about, declaring that “we will get our Kippers BACK when we leave the EU!”

What a silly man. How completely harmless he must be.

Well while the nation struggles to get these images out of their heads, collectively we have forgotten many of his greatest sins.

One sin still hangs above him... An ongoing scandal that has endangered the life of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

In 2017 Nazanin had travelled to Iran from the UK to visit her parents, when she was detained by authorities under suspicion of coming to Iran in order to train journalists. In 2017 when Boris was Foreign Secretary and during Nazanins trial, Boris made this statement to the news:

“When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it,”

This was considered damning evidence that was used against Nazanin. She is still imprisoned today. Her husband in the UK has been tirelessly campaigning for her release, going on a joint hunger-strike with her. Boris refuses to take any responsibility for his comments or apologise for what he has caused.

This isn’t the first or last time Boris has been reckless with his words.

Very recently, Sir Kim Darroch (the UKs (now former) ambassador to the US) suffered a memo leak, in which unflattering remarks regarding Donald Trumps presidency surfaced. The leak was unfortunate, but the comments made were not unprofessional and entirely expected from a foreign diplomat. But Trump wasn’t happy and applied pressure to the UK government to fire Darroch for doing his job. The entire UK government united behind Darroch and supported him...... well... almost the entire government. During a live debate, the final two leadership candidates were asked about the Darroch situation, and whether Darroch would remain in his job if they become PM. Boris refused to comment and avoided the question as usual. However since Boris was the favourite to win, Darroch realised he had no hope, so he resigned. Boris was cited as the main reason and was widely criticised.

Before Boris was a politician, he was a journalist. And in recent years, a very unsavoury recording surfaced from his time as a Journalist in 1990...A phone recording between him and Darius Guppy, where the two conspired to have a reporter physically hurt. (Somehow this is the only youtube video available on this...)

youtube

Boris has also been known to have absolutely no filter and speaks before he thinks. Such comments are a result of this.

He had referred to black people as “Piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”

In 2018 he had referred to Muslim women wearing burkas as looking like “letter-boxes”

At a conference on Libya in 2017 he claimed that the country could become a thriving luxury resort once they “cleared the dead bodies away”

In 2013 he claimed that Malyasian women went to University because they “have to find men to marry”

In 2006 he claimed that Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender”

All of this... and we haven’t even covered his politics yet.

This is the big reason why he’s becoming PM and it’s simple. He’s lying to everyone.

He’s promising everything to everyone. He’s promised a soft brexit to some, a hard brexit to others. But he refuses to explain how he would achieve either. He’s only now clearly settling on the side of a hard-brexit, or what’s considered a No-Deal brexit (walking away from the EU without striking a trade deal), but he has no answers for any questions posed to him.

His debating strategy, and interview strategy is to make people laugh until they forget what they asked him.

When asked "Is austerity a dead duck at this point?” he ended up rambling about ducks for a solid minute and making the audience giggle before giving a very vague and nothing answer

When debating with leadership rival Jeremy Hunt, he won over the audiences heart by interrupting Hunt with immature jokes.

After declaring that he knows exactly what he’s doing in regards to a No-Deal brexit, he tells everyone that he will follow “Paragraph 5B” of a document that will supposedly solve the Brexit crisis. He repeats “Paragraph 5B” constantly, giving the impression that he’s a man of detail and knows the entire document like the back of his hand. When asked if he knew what was in Paragraph 5C, he simply states “no” and tries to play it off like it’s funny. Without a studio audience to laugh at him, he was simply left in the silence of an astounded interviewer. This is one of the many reasons why he had avoided as many interviews as possible during his leadership campaign.

The fact is, no one knows what he really stands for, no one knows what he’ll really do. He’s a wild-card, or more appropriately, the Joker card. He seems crazy enough and chaotic enough to go through with No-Deal that people are voting for him. But so many people are going to be disappointed. This is a man who says he’s always wanted to be Prime Minister ever since he was 15. He wants power for the sake of power. And for some reason, the Tory party are handing him that power.

There’s so much more to go into, but this is a good initial crash-course into Bojo, the literal clown.

#Boris Johnson #uk politics #brexit #uk #politics

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shmegmilton · 4 years ago

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Can you explain how Aaron and Alexander stopped being friends and started fighting?

They were never really ‘friends.’ I assume you got that idea from the play, but I have no idea why the play tried to push that narrative. Civil? Sure, but that was necessary. New York was less than 50,000 people at the time, and they were both accomplished lawyers & statesmen who had to work and interact with each other on a daily basis. Politics is politics, look at how people are acting right now during our election.

As for your question, it’s a long line of policy & personal disagreements, mostly. They were on opposite sides of the aisle on pretty much everything. Lots of small things, but a lot of big, BIG things.

Burr was (ironically) kind of a pacifist; he kept mostly to himself, didn’t really speak much publicly & didn’t necessarily go out of his way to confront people unless he’s been pushed long enough (everyone ‘snaps’ at some point, y’know?)

But that’s why the ‘Burr is an evil mastermind’ myth is so pervasive today. Burr just… didn’t bother defending himself, or correcting anything, because he (mistakingly) had faith in the inherent goodness of people that someday people would see him for his true character. So for that reason, we don’t really have a good timeline from Burr’s perspective as to how he felt about Hamilton—but BOY howdy did Hamilton never shut up about Burr.

----

Trespass & Confiscation Acts (1782ish)

During the Revolution, the British confiscated the property of patriots that fled the city. New York did the same thing, & for a while it was this game of: ‘Oh, you’re gonna take my stuff? **draws a line in the dirt** Well, everything behind this line is mine now.” It was all very bad, and after the way Tories & Loyalists faced a lot of honestly very fucked up discrimination & forfeiture of their rights. Hamilton (like most Federalists) was pro-British, so he represented a lot of these people in court. I’m sure it wasn’t purely out of the goodness of his heart--most of his clients were loaded--but the sentiment is there. On the other hand, there are multiple records of Burr buying up property around this time, most likely confiscated Tory property, which he would usually flip or give away to people that he knew, so he was taking full advantage of this. Burr also, most likely, went head-to-head with Hamilton on a few of these cases, because Burr tended to work with the ‘common folk.’

French Revolution (1789ish to 1799ish) & Proclamation of Neutrality (1793)

Burr (like most Democratic-Republicans) was pro-French, so much so that he took in French refugees fleeing the Revolution into his home. He was very sympathetic to the cause.Hamilton was not. He basically saw it the same way that right-wing Conservatives see the Black Lives Matter movement is the best way I can explain it. He also hated it for the amount of immigrants that were now fleeing to the U.S.

Burr Gets Chosen For NY Senate (1791)

Key word: chosen. As in, he didn’t actually run. That wasn’t how politics worked back then. The Hamilton musical just fucking lied outright about that, let’s be clear. He also never switched parties. Ever. Back then you were nominated by the people who were already in government--usually by one of the powerful families like the Clintons or the Livingstons, or yada yada. So Burr didn’t actually do anything. He didn’t even really want the position either, if I recall. But back then if you were ‘called to serve,’ you were obligated to do it. Hamilton was furious either way because it meant that Burr was replacing his father-in-law, Phillip Schuyler, meaning that he wouldn’t have that extra ear in government that he wanted. Burr also had a lot of views that were considered ‘extreme’ at the time, like getting extra rights for women, immigrants & black people, but I have no idea what Hamilton thought of those individual policies other than he just didn’t like women, immigrants or black people.

1792 & 1796 Presidential Election

Burr wasn’t really that serious about either of these elections, I don’t think (in ’92 he wasn’t that well-known & barely got any support, but it’s worth noting the fact he was nominated to run at all was really impressive. He’s tied with William Jennings Bryan as being one of the youngest people to ever receive an electoral vote, at 36 years old.) In ’96 he faired a little better—he got 30 votes, which is nearly half of what you need to get the ticket nomination, also very impressive.Hamilton was super staunchly opposed to both of these runs, though, and did his typical Hamilton thing of openly campaigning about how the people shouldn’t vote for Burr, yada yada.

Jay Treaty (1794)

I highly suggest looking up supplemental information on this because it’s a bit complicated, but it was basically a treaty between us and Great Britain to reaffirm that we were going to continue to not mess with France, as well as a couple of other weird hang-ups. It was not popular, at all, especially with the Demo-Republicans. There is a specific instance (that is actually kind of insane) where Hamilton gave a public speech in defense of it, and the Democratic-Republicans in the crowd started pelting him & the other Federalists with rocks. Hamilton got SO mad that immediately challenged a man to a duel, and threatened to fight each of the Democratic-Republicans one-by-one.

Reynolds Affair (1797)

Burr had a personal relationship with Maria Reynolds; he was her divorce attorney in 1793/1794, helped her out financially, & successfully petitioned (+paid for) her daughter Susan to attend a boarding school. I believe they also stayed in his him with him during the divorce proceedings, but don’t quote me on that. He never said anything publicly that I could find, but Burr probably had a personal investment in the Reynolds Pamphlet, since it painted Maria in a really damaging light.

Alien & Sedition Acts (1798)

These were some of the most worst laws ever passed in the history of the country. Like, these were AWFUL. It not only limited immigration, but it limited the freedom of the press and freedom of speech (ESPECIALLY immigrants, my god.)

Burr was right on the front lines helping defend people in court, he actively opposed it & is probably the thing that propelled him into Jefferson’s orbit as a potential Vice President.

John Barker Church Duel (1797)

John Barker Church had accused Burr of taking bribes (which was unfounded & untrue) and they ended up dueling. JBC was the husband of Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law.

Neither was injured (though, JBC apparently put a hole in Burr’s coat), but it supposed infuriated Hamilton & his associates so much that they would send out fake letters “from Burr” challenging people to duels.

The Manhattan Company (1799)

Burr was getting sick of the difficulty he was having getting loans from the Federalist-run banks and decided to do something about it. There had been several seasonal epidemics of yellow fever—caused by mosquitos but, at the time, it was thought to be caused by improperly treated water, miasma (‘bad air’) or (if you asked Hamilton) stinky evil immigrant refuges who were fleeing France and Haiti. Burr saw this and spearheaded a campaign to get a proper water treatment plant, even getting Hamilton to help him. Through some really weird loophole that I don’t quite understand, Burr was somehow allowed to use the ‘surplus capital’ for banking, which essentially turned it into a bank. The actual water treatment portion of the company was plagued with problems due to improper management and things like that. We’ll never know his exact thought process on this (people normally assume it was malicious trickery because people are biased to hate Burr anyway) & I highly doubt that Burr knew the extent of the issues (he was on the Board of Directors, but so were a dozen others--INCLUDING John Barker Church) so I don’t entirely think it’s his fault, but the fact of the matter is that it most likely exacerbated the existing problems & indirectly led to more people getting sick/dying until they finally fixed the problems.I would say that it’s completely justifiable for Hamilton to be mad at Burr, but, as we established, Hamilton hated both poor people & immigrants (two groups most likely affected by this) so he wasn’t actually mad at him for the reason a… y’know, a normal person would be mad at him. He was mad at him because Burr destroyed the monopoly that Federalists had on banks, making it easier for Democratic-Republicans & others to get loans. He was literally mad at him for making the economy fair.

1800 Election & 1804 NY Governor Election

These two are self-explanatory, I think, and I’ve already been writing way too long, lol. My hand hurts.

#Aaron Burr #Alexander Hamilton #Hamilton #AmRev #History #American Revolution #Long Post #Anecdotes #THIS TOOK SO LOOOOONG

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leam1983 · 3 years ago

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Watched the French debate on Radio-Canada...

Trudeau: poor clod started this election season on the assumption that COVID's boosted his rep in opinion polls. The exact opposite has happened, especially here in Quebec. The Libs have a decent platform, but too much of it amounts to "Hey, we did okay during the past year, and said year was shit! Also, don't think too hard about Mary Simon not speaking French, the WE Charity debacle or the fiasco with residential schools! Oh, and uh, we gave you CERB, so that has to count for something, right?"

The other parties are long-toothed, as expected, and spent the last several weeks tearing those assertions to shreds.

Blanchet: by far the best debater of the four. His points were well-presented, his retorts well-researched; but that's all he effectively served as. The Bloc Québécois is, as ever, a lucid critique of whoever happens to be in power, but not a force to honestly be reckoned with. As ever, their main rigamarole is giving us more executive powers within our own boundaries, but I'd say Christ has more chances of rising up and inverting Newton's Laws of Physics out of pure spite than the BQ has of being an effective executive party for the whole of the country.

Singh: I really, really, really, really want to vote for the guy. He means well, his perspective is fresher than anyone else's and most of his suggestions are reasonably lucid (taxing the American tech bigwigs further, financing more daycare centers and subsidizing nursing and teaching programs at least in part in order to shore up the shortage in both sectors). Unfortunately, he really didn't defend himself all that well. He didn't develop his platform and stuck to generalities. However, of the three English-speaking candidates, he was second-best in French. The NDP doesn't quite have the all-or-nothing Environmental focus of the Green Party, but what's there is a heck of a lot more commendable than the Libs' focus on carbon emissions - and especially more than the Conservatives' basic shrugging-off of the last several heat waves.

O'Toole: "I have a plan" *record-skipping noise* "I have a plan" *record-skipping noise* "I have a plan." *record-skipping noise* "We passed a contract with the population of this province, you can read it on our website." *record-skipping-noise* "We passed a contract with the population of this province, you can read it on our website." *record-skipping noise* "Until I entered the race, there hasn't been a more qualified Conservative candidate since Brian Mulroney." *record-skipping noise* "I'm the best hope this province has had since Stephen Harper."

*the needle skips past a groove, mangles the recording as the arm is guided back towards the centre. A grim mantra is revealed*

"TAX REVISIONS AND TAX CUTS. TAX REVISIONS AND TAX CUTS. TAX REVISIONS AND TAX CUTS. TAX REVISIONS AND TAX CUTS..."

Fuck off, Erin. I'm sure even the most Irish of all Irish-Canadians would tell you to start writing your refund checks for your usual crusty financiers and then find the time to go suck on Harper's dick.

Of course, I say that and I know patently well that The Pattern will not be broken. The Pattern, for my non-Canadian readers, is eight years of Liberal rule, followed by eight years of Conservative rule. The Libs try and spend eight years funding programs and implementing measures, while the Tories basically grunt and squeal about the Sacrosanct Budget and spend the next eight years cutting.

No social platform. No ambitions, no social or moral drives - just being fiscally in the black for a few years. Oh, at the absolute most, you'll spot candidates from the Prairies yeehawing it up in Jesus' name once or twice, just so our own Diet Trumpers feel a vague sense of approval.

Now, to wait for the English debate on CBC... It'll be nice to see if Singh has more meat on his bones in Shakespeare's idiom, and if O'Toole's heart comes up a little more if he goes back to his native tongue.

#canadian elections #the best sitcom beaverlandia's ever known

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anarchist-soupkitchen · 3 years ago

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ooop its a really long essay

A brief list of why the Tories is pretty rubbish

Before we start, I have a few things to say. As this is intended for UK audiences it might be a little difficult for people outside of the UK to understand the wording of certain topics, I will include somethings that need more explanation up here but if I do not include it here, please feel free to ask down in the comments.

Tory: someone who is a part of the conservative right

Anglicanism: the English church’s version of Christianity

This essay is a PERSUASIVE ESSAY this means its BIASED I hope you could tell from the title. This essay is from the view of someone who is white I am not trying to speak over people of colour on issue like race and I encourage you to look at non-white creators within the UK to get views on this matter.

I am pretty armature when it comes to my writing so do not expect something ground-breaking. And with that out of the way, let us begin.

1. The tory party we know today was founded in 1834, you would think that would be plenty of time for its members to grow and shape the party into the best organization it can be. But with the tory party still stuck on the same ideas that Anglicanism is the only true religion, and that queer people should not have rights you would think that the party is straight out of the early 20th century, or still stuck on the same ideas the party was founded upon. It does not matter what side you are on and how your choice to view the tory party, people can agree on the prominent figures inside the tory party from old to recent. An example of a prominent tory of old was Winston Churchill a well know racist who also, coincidentally got us through WW2 when he was appointed by Chamberlin. He fostered such views that white people should govern over the “primitive” black and indigenous people of Africa and that Indian people “bred like rabbits”. To anyone who knows their UK history, 1983 was a very eventually year for politics and the UK as a whole. You now have to wear seatbelts in the front seats of cars, the dismembered victims of serial killer Dennis Nielsen are found in his London flat, unemployment was on a record heigh since the 1930’s and a general election found that Margaret Thacher was to be the next prime minister after a landslide win in the polls. Over the course of her 11-year reign of terror she periodised free-market capitalism and privatised public sectors including transport, railways and mines. Then because she did not like the Scottish government, she through a hissy fit and closed all mines in Scotland. Just like that she fucked up the economy, where in the big mining areas of the past are still experiencing the aftershocks today. I remember my granny telling me how she made up food packages for the miners around town and how it was so devastating to the town’s economy. Everyone was unemployed and starving, even my grandad. These examples really show that the Tories will support people who are the worst in British society if they have the parties’ interests at heart. You would think the tory party cannot get any worse but with modern polices such as pledging to get 50,000 nurses for the NHS while only giving them a 1% pay rise, which is only £7.78 for a low band nurse, by 2023. Or being “tough on crime” even though 96.4 crime were recorded by every 1000 people in 2019. You can see how tough they are about carrying out their polices. Let me tell you my favourite of the lot, Boris Johnston, our current PM, wants to limit immigration by 100,000 people. They want to only let in “the brightest and the best,” what a load of shite. Our immigrants are the backbone of our society doing everything people like the Tories would not even dream of doing. Imagen seeing Boris working in a McDonalds or in your local call centre. That fucker probably has not worked a day in his life. According to the migration observatory, migrants make up 50% of the low pay workforce. Either way you look at it, its abysmal. The government should do more for these people that letting them rot in a McDonalds or in a low paying job. If you have taken time to be a model citizen, train and get your qualifications, possibly learn a new langue to mover over to a shitty wet rock I do not see any problem with the government providing necessities to get you started in your new life. We have got the money.

2. Can I ask you, what side do you think Boris Johnson is on? I will let you think for a moment. The Working class makes up more than half of our population according to the BBC’s class calculator. They say that a government is reflective of the people’s views and I think that is bullshit. Out of the working-class eligible to vote, who do vote, only three in ten vote conservatives. Do you want to know why people in the working class do not vote tory? Because under tory leadership since 2010, 6000,000 more children and their families were forced into poverty. The need for foodbanks skyrocketed 12.3% in the last five years and that is no even accounting for the pandemic. It is clear by now; I have given you enough time to think. “we know whose side Boris Johnson is on- the billionaires, the bankers and the big business.”- labour shadow chancellor, John McDonell. We know the conservatives are very busy committing acts of voter suppression and giving money to their friends instead of caring about you. They are buzzy introducing laws that make it mandatory to have voter ID in order to vote. If you do not make it free people will stop coming. The electoral commissions think 3.5 million voters just will not come back. this is all a part of, “takle[ing] every aspect of electoral fraud”- tory manifesto. It is well known that many rich people have been investing in the party for quite a while. Here is just a few: Anthony Bamford head of machinery in JCB, he gave £12.1 million since 2005. Charles Cayzer owns a shipping tycoon, he gave £480,00. Did you also know, Boris is known to be very generous when it comes to giving back. You’ve probably herd in the news about the conservatives handing out £3mil in contracts to tory owned covid PPE companies over the course of the pandemic. Some of that went to a MP, Nadim Zahawi who is a shareholder in SThree. SThree was given £1mil in contracts over the course of the pandemic. With all the evidence I have given above you’d think the government its rolling in it, I suspect they are but I doesn’t look like it from the outside. They have cut funding to courses drastically, as well as benefit schemes. Like cutting access for eighteen- to twenty-year-olds to the housing benefits. Yet with all the money they been cutting away from services and councils who desperately need it they still have enough money to cough up a commission for a royal yacht named after the duke of Edinburgh, costing over £200 million. Seems sweet does it, name a yacht after the ghoul of Edinburgh, right? You probably know the just of it now, your wrong. Not only is the yacht being paid for by taxpayers, but they are also naming it in honour after a racist. Or how the BBC would phrase his words as “memorable one-liners”. Here is a selection I find quite fitting: “The Philippines must be half empty if you’re all here running the NHS”- while meeting with a Filipino nurse. “If you stay here much longer, you’ll be all slitty-eyed”- he said to a group of British students while on a royal visit to China. My favourite must be “It looks like it was put in by an Indian.”- referring to and old-fashioned fuse box in Edinburgh. He is supposed to be the duke of the bloody place! I really like how one article what I read put it “[Prince Philip] screams out loud what other racists like him have learned how to conceal and camouflage in what they think and project as civilised demeanour.”- Hamid Dabashi.

3. What I find absolutely astounding, is the Tories inability to show compassion to the people who have nothing. If you did not know the vagrancy act among other things crimeless the homeless and rough sleepers, which is by far a very bad mixture with the recent homelessness statistics, homelessness has risen 28% since labour was last in office and if the Tories continue down the path they are now, it is only going to keep rising. What you would find is most shocking is that there’s solutions for the homeless crisis right in front of us, what the Tories must to not be able to see. Layla Moran of the liberal democrats thinks they “must take a more compassionate and holistic approach, starting by scrapping the vagrancy act”. I think that would be a step forward and away from the old ways of prosecuting people for not being as fortunate as the rest of us, but there is something even more simple than that. Repossessing the 200,000 buildings that have been vacant in the UK for more than six months. Not only would that put a sizeable dent in the houses we need, but it also saves space. The UK is small collection of islands and I do not think the Tories can see that. We do not have the land available to just start building everywhere while leaving all those homes empty and unfilled. Its not a way to solve the housing crisis and its certainly not a way to save the money we supposedly need. Even the homes the Tories are building are left dormant because they are too expensive for the area, they are located in. With the way things are going the Tories will have to build more houses than they ever built before, because by 2041 homelessness is expected to doble. That is 400,000 more households if things do not change -a study by heriot-wat university. The evidence suggests that whatever the Tories are doing to end homelessness it is not working. Everything is not as bleak as I just told you though, the conservative has ended homelessness before. In the hight of the pandemic the conservatives got 90% of all rough sleepers off the streets and put them in hotels or hostels. This helped people apply for benefits, find jobs and get some more permanent assistance. People was helped during the pandemic, but when the funding ran out last July, homeless and the rough sleepers in the hotels and hostels where back out in the streets again. Alone and forgotten by the government that promised to end the very crisis they are apart of years ago. Theis shows that the Tories have the money to help the unfortune but they would rather sit on their arses chatting about what colour they should paint the walls of their house. More recently the Torie introduced a law what will fine people for sleeping in doorways. It really shows what the Tories care about, getting linings for their pockets. The Tories have the money to stop homelessness and when it was a danger to them, they stopped the issue what has been so recuing in our politics for decades. They helped the people who so desperately needed it only to chuck them back into the cold when covid-19 was no longer a danger to them.

4. The conservatives fail to keep minorities safe in the society that they created. It is not surprise that the Tories are the most incompetent as ever. A study by BBC radio 5 found that hate crimes have doubled since 2013. An optimist would assume that is great, that there must mean that people have been reporting it more, right? Partly so. Although we have seen a rise in reports of hate crimes, the rate of prosecution has dropped down from 20% to just 8%. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, in a survey of faith-based organizations; the home office found that seven in ten of the employees surveyed has never reported a hate crime to the police where one happened. For a country where we are supposed to be the most tolerable it is no surprise that a big portion of the hate crimes committed are ones where the religion the victim followed played a big part. Our population, like many others, is influenced by our politicians. After Boris described Muslim women in burkas as “letterboxes” in an interview; citizen UK found that there where a surge in hate crime directed to Muslim women where the word “letterbox” was used. Again, continuing with the theme of hate crime against religions, Muslims made up half of the statistics in 2018 – 2019. The biggest spike we have seen in the last few years has been to Jewish people, where hate crimes against them have more since doubled. It is not a surprise since people seem to relate being a ‘good’ Jew to being a Zionist. Other minorities like trans youth under sixteen in England and whales now must go through everything that goes with puberty on top of not wanting to have the body you cuntly have all because TERF’s and conservatives do not think puberty blockers should be available to them. At this point I genuinely think they want trans kids dead, how could you not see that the benefits of puberty blockers far out way the potential consequences. If puberty blockers really where the target they would have taken them of the shelfs completely, but they did not do that did they? They just restricted the rights of an already marginalised group more. Its not just trans kids but the fight for a third gender to finally get recognised is still waging on despite it being a battle since 2018. The government petition has been signed 136,000 times demanding non-binary finally be recognised as a valid gender in the eyes of the law. I hope I can get recognised as well as everyone else. It may not seem a big deal to some of you reading this but it is to thousands. Especially the people who want to go on hormones and medically transition. Because right now I and many other people are restricted and not allowed to get that service. If you are in the UK and you are of age, I urge you to signs the government petition. In other news the conservatives are just now getting to outlawing conversion therapy three years after they announced they would do so. It just shows how the party is not on target. On the topic of not on target let us talk about the increasing number of racial minorities becoming homeless because of lack of funding to their communities. Since the conservatives got into power in the 2010 racial minorities now make up 40% of all homeless despite being only 15% of the current population. It really shows how much they care about anyone who is not white. Yet people like my gran will continue to say they are doing enough for these underfunded communities.

the tory party really has nothing going for them, they are certainly not for the working class, they cannot solve homelessness and they do not give two fucks about minorities. To think anyone would vote form them is just amazing. Its fucking stupid to believe that they are anything but a bunch of rich shites dawdling around and thinking up ways to get more money into their pockets. To end this really all over the place essay, if you vote tory you are a massive twat.

Sources in comments:

#essay #uk #uk politics #uk politics essay #persuasive essay #tory government #tory #left wing politics #conservatism #conservtive #if any reads this well done #im sorry #its long #heehee hastags go burrr

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Trudeau promises massive covid stimulus

Canadian Prime Ministers have a fun gambit: when things start to go really badly for them, they "prorogue" (suspend) Parliament, which dissolves all committees, inquiries, etc, until such time as they are ready to reconvene, with a tabula rasa.

Most egregiously, the far-right asshole and climate criminal Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament in the middle of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis in order to avoid a no-confidence vote that would have triggered new elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_parliamentary_dispute

While this DID save Harper's bacon, it also left Canada without a legislature during a global crisis that threatened the nation's entire future. It was a crazed, reckless thing to do.

Canada has a safeguard to prevent this kind of gambit: as a constitutional monarchy, Canadian parliamentary manoeuvres have to receive the Crown's blessing, in the form of assent from the Governor General, the Queen's rep to Canada.

This is the sober, apolitical adult supervision that fans of constitutional monarchies are always banging on about, and then-Governor General Michaëlle Jean completely failed to do her fucking job, leaving Canada without a Parliament during the GFC. She literally had one job.

Proroguing Parliament didn't just save Harper from a no-confidence vote: it also dissolved all the Parliamentary inquiries underway at the time, including the "Afghan detainee transfer" affair, which was investigating Canadian forces' complicity in the torture-murder of POWs.

In many ways, Trudeau is the anti-Harper: a charismatic Liberal who tells refugees they're welcome in Canada, marches with Greta Thunberg, and appoints the first-ever First Nations person to serve as Attorney General .

Truly, there is no policy so progressive that Trudeau won't endorse it...provided he doesn't actually have to make it into policy. Because many of his policies are indistinguishable from Harperism, albeit with a better haircut.

This started before he won the election, when Trudeau (whose father once declared martial law!) whipped his MPs to vote for a human-rights-denying mass surveillance bill, C-51.

Trudeau did so while insisting that the bill was a massive overreach and totally unacceptable, but claiming that the "loyal opposition" should still back it so as not to be accused of being soft on terrorism in the coming election. He promised to repeal it after.

Of course, he didn't.

Trudeau is often compared to Obama, a young and charismatic fellow who makes compromises, sure, but comes through in the clutch.

Tell that to pipeline protesters.

After the Obama administration killed the Transmountain Pipeline - the continent-spanning tube that would make filthy, planet-destroying tar sands profitable enough to bring to market - Trudeau bailed it out, spending billions of federal dollars to keep it alive.

Then, Trudeau - who campaigned on nation-to-nation truth and reconciliation with First Nations - announced that he would shove this toxic tar-sand tube through unceded treaty lands across the breadth of the naiton.

And then he had the AUDACITY to march with Greta Thunberg at the head of a climate march, demanding a change to policies that would see billions dead in the coming century.

HIS OWN policies.

I mean, Trudeau's boosters have a point - Harper NEVER could have pulled that off.

The Harper years were a Trumpian orgy of blatant self-dealing and cronyism.

The Trudeau years, on the other hand...

One of Trudeau's major donors is SNC Lavalin, a crime syndicate masquerading as a global engineering firm (think Halliburton with less morals).

SNC Lavalin had done so much crime that it was on its final notice with the Canadian legal sysem, a probation that it must not violate on penalty of real, big boy federal criminal prosecutions.

Then it did more crimes.

Remember Trudeau's historic appointment of a First Nations woman to the Attorney General's seat? Now was AG Jody Wilson-Raybould's moment to shine.

As Wilson-Raybould began aggressively pursuing these corporate criminals, she started getting calls from Trudeau's office.

For avoidance of doubt, these were not calls of support. They were demands to drop the case and let the SNC Lavalin crime syndicate get off scot-free. Eventually the PM himself called her and demanded that she give his cronies a pass on their repeated criminal actions.

Wilson-Raybould went public, decrying political meddling in the justice system. Trudeau denied everything and began to smear her (Harper had tons of scandals like this, BTW, only the counterpart was usually a rich old white guy, not a First Nations woman).

But Wilson-Raybould had recorded the conversations, and she released the recordings, and proved that Trudeau had lied about the whole thing. Trudeau fired her and kicked her out of the party.

But at least he's not Trump, right? He's the anti-Trump! (Well, except for the pipeline and that time he announced "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there").

Remember the Muslim Ban? As Trump was tormenting refugees at the US border, Trudeau tweeted "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada."

Yes, that was awesome. There is no policy so progressive that Trudeau won't endorse it...provided that he never has to do anything to make it happen.

Canada and the US have a "Safe Third Country Agreement" that says that asylum-seekers turned away from the US border can't try again in Canada. To make #WelcomeToCanada more than a hashtag, Trudeau's government would have to suspend that agreement.

Instead, Trudeau's government insisted that under Trump, "the conditions of the Safe Third Country Agreement continued to be met" and thus they would not suspend the agreement and give hearings to those turned away by Trump's border guards.

But at least Trudeau handled the pandemic better than Harper handled the Great Financial Crisis.

No, really, he did!

Mostly.

I mean, unless you were in a nursing home or on a First Nations reservation.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/an-emergency-season-pandemic/

But still, Trudeau's government did a MUCH better job than the Trump government, or Boris Johnson's Tories. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives will really fight cronyism, climate change or authoritarianism, but there are still substantive differences between them.

But in some ways, they are depressingly similar.

Take corruption.

Long before the plague struck, Canadaland was publishing damning reports on We Charity, a massive, beloved Canadian charitable institution nominally devoted to ending child slavery.

Canadaland's initial reporting on the charity focused on its partnerships with companies that were using child slaves to make their products, but the investigations mushroomed after the charity sent dire legal threats to the news organisation over its coverage.

And then Canadaland founder Jesse Brown found himself smeared by a US dirty-tricks organization that got its start working for GOP politicians, who got a contract to plant editorials criticizing Canadaland's We coverage in small-town US newspapers.

Private eyes started following Brown around, even keeping tabs on his small children. Rather than being intimidated, Brown kept up the pressure on We, which prompted whistleblowers to leak him even more details about the charity's activities.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#we-charity

These included massive, mysterious real-estate holdings, hard-to-excuse criminal investigations of its Kenyan activities, and (here's where I've been going with this all along) GIANT CASH PAYMENTS to Trudeau's family, as well as valuable gifts to his Finance Minister.

And, as with the Wilson-Reybould affair, Trudeau's initial response to this was to simply deny it, calling his accusers liars. But then the scandal kept unspooling, his Finance Minister quit in disgrace, the charity (sort of) folded up and shut down, and Trudeau...

Well, Trudeau prorogued Parliament, shutting down Canada's government in the midst of a crisis that was - unimaginably - even worse than the 2008 crisis that Harper had left the nation rudderless through to avoid his own scandal.

(Again, for constitutional monarchy fans, that's two entirely political proroguings in the midsts of global crises, signed off on by the Queen's supposedly apolitical and sober check on reckless activity)

Shutting down Parliament seems to have rescued Trudeau's government from snap elections, which may well have been won by the Tories, who have resolved their longstanding racist and plutocratic tensions with a new ghoulish nightmare leader:

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/canada-erin-otoole-conservative-party-cpc/

And, as Trudeau has reconvened Parliament, he's promised something genuinely amazing: a massive, national stimulus package meant to keep families, workers and small businesses afloat through the looming second pandemic wave.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-canada-economy/canada-bets-the-farm-on-big-spending-as-second-wave-threatens-economic-recovery-idUSKCN26F1NF

This is something Canada - and the US, for that matter - desperately needs. Canada is monetarily sovereign: it issues its own currency and its debt is in the same currency, meaning it can never run out of money (no more than Apple could ever run out of Itunes gift cards).

The Canadian DOES face constraints on its spending, but they're just not MONETARY constraints - they're RESOURCE constraints. If the Canadian government creates money to buy the same things the private sector is shopping for, there'll be a bidding war, AKA inflation.

But as a new wave of lockdowns and mass illness looms over the country, there's going to be a hell of a lot of things the private sector isn't trying to buy - notably, the labour of the Canadian workforce, millions of whom will be locked indoors through the winter.

An analyst warns that Trudeau's proposal is likely to add CAD30B to the deficit, which is a completely irrelevant fact unless that new money is going to be chasing the same goods that Canadian business and citizens are seeking to buy.

Trudeau has promised to create a national prescription drug plan (a longstanding hole in Canada's national health care system), as well as universal childcare, and he's denounced austerity as a response to the crisis.

There's a part of me that is very glad to see this. My family and friends are in Canada, after all, and if Trudeau lives up to his promise, he will shield them from the collapse we're seeing in the USA.

But that is a BIG if. Trudeau isn't Harper. He's more charismatic, he's got better hair, and he says much, much better things than Harper.

However, when the chips are down, Trudeau out-Harpers Harper.

Mass surveillance legislation. Corruption scandals. Lying about corruption scandals. Bailing out the pipeline. "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there." Abandoning asylum-seekers to Trump's lawless regime.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." It would be pretty naive to assume that merely because Trudeau has promised to do the right thing, that he will do the right thing.

Indeed, if history is any indicator, the best way to predict what Trudeau will do is to assume that it will be the OPPOSITE of whatever he promises.

I won't lie. I felt a spark of hope when I read Trudeau's words.

But hope is all I've got - and it's a far cry from confidence.

Or relief.

#pluralistic

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tory-ben-hi-shelton · 4 years ago

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my favourite quotes from virals

The back-ass of Charleston. It's not so bad, if you aren't prone to loneliness. Which I am, but whatever. I've come to appreciate the legroom.

Kit's still not over the shock. I see it on his face every now and then. He'll wake up from a nap, or come up for air after a long stretch of work and literally jump when he notices me. That's my daughter. I have a daughter who is fourteen and lives with me. I am her father. Same shock for me, Pops. I'm working through it, too.

Kit and I attended service once. Took me ten seconds to see he'd never been there before. We made no second appearance. I hear the Big Guy's pretty understanding. I hope so.

I saw through his macho act. He was afraid I'd hurt him, but couldn't let on. Good. Be nervous, wuss.

"Well done, genius squad," I said. "I'm impressed."

Parallel tough guy nods. Man fix boat! Man be strong!

"What now?" I asked, hoping to divert the two from actually beating their chests.

"Monkeys are always funny. You pretty much can't go wrong with a monkey, right? Well, unless that monkey wants you dead or does needle drugs or something. Then it's a wrong, and a bad monkey."

"You did break that ATV." Ben, deadpanned.

"Right." Shelton's eyes rolled. "Shelton broke it. Not Ben and Shelton, because Ben is better at hiding in the woods. So only Shelton." He cuffed Ben's shoulder. "By the way, you're welcome, Blue." "I said I owe you one."

Head ass, if you ask me. That's where he kept his, most of the time.

Hi was busy explaining to Ben how many punches he'd absorbed before body-slamming the primate gang leader. His audience looked dubious.

"Good idea, finding a proper gown." Typical Hi sarcasm. "The Prom Queen has to look sharp. Vera Wang, perhaps? Or maybe something in Lauren Conrad?"

"Thanks," I responded dryly. "You'll still be my date right? Or will you have a playoff game that night? I'll understand; we need our star quarterback on the field."

"I'll let you know." Hi replied breezily. "I may be dining with Kristin Stewart. Or Bill Compton. Some vampire, I'm not sure which."

Then Ben and Shelton said they'd think about it. Following an impressive string of profanities, Hi consented to sleep on it.

"You're beginning to attract some real whack-jobs," Hi said when the two were out of earshot...

"Bro?" I teased.

"He caught me off guard." A touch defensive.

"Then we do it old school." Shelton flexed one twig arm. "Manpower!"

Hi raised a hand.

"Yes?"

"This sucks."

"Got it. Dig."

Shelton's response was less manly. Spotting the gruesome discovery, he yelled, "Grave, grave!" and scrambled from the pit. Hiram took one look and promptly upchucked.

"Don't be babies," I said. "Sometimes you have to touch the bones."

Ben sat beside me. Kit has remained on Loggerhead and Tom was driving the boat, so we were alone. For now. A bit of luck on the a day having none.

Embarrassed, I smoothed down corkscrew curls gone wild.

"Stop primping, Miss America." "Maybe you should start," joked Shelton.

Hi was top left, wearing Chuck Norris PJ's buttoned to his chin.

Simple. To the point. Ben Blue in a nutshell.

No bells, alarms, or whistles. Big break for the felon squad.

"Oh man, we're the worst burglars ever!" Shelton laid on the floor, defeated by the roller coaster ride of the last few days. "Forget it. I give up!" Ben popped Shelton on the head, conveying his opinion of surrender.

We pumped on. A shame no one recorded our record sprint times. Personal bests were undoubtedly set.

"Hiram, wake up man!" Shelton slapped Hi's cheeks, then rubbed his arms. Not exactly Web MD stuff. I gently eased Shelton back.

"That's Ben," Jason said. "He's the best. Bit of a talker, though." Ben glowered. I jumped in to diffuse. "This is my good friend Ben Blue."

I told Ben about my fainting spell and Hi's discomfort. He stepped back and covered his mouth with one hand. "I'll keep my distance. I've got enough problems."

"Thanks. Your sympathy is underwhelming."

"She's (Whitney) not that bad, right?"

"She's not trying to train you like a dancing bear."

"Ha!" Kit snorted. "Shows how much you know."

"Did you guys like the chicken?" I asked. "Mine was a bit dry." Dead silence. Then nervous laughter rose around me. It was music to my bruised ears.

"No biggie. Just breaking into Karsten's office and searching his files."

"Pfff." Ben pooched air through his lips. "I thought you meant something dangerous."

"If the old goat's still here, we're toast." Ben, always the optimist.

"Holy buckets," Shelton whispered. "Haul ass!"

"Meaning?" Ben asked.

"Neuro-anatomy is very complicated." Dismissive.

"So am I."

Recognizing the menace in Ben's voice, Karsten paused to organize his thoughts.

I was about to speak when I heard movement, a bark, then, "Oof."

"Coop votes to go right, too," Hi said. "At least, I think that's why he knocked me over."

And spotted Hi, jacket inside out, sneaking back up the steps. Frick.

"Hold it!"

Hi straightened, slowly turned, and trudged down to my bench.

"Oh, hey." Feigned nonchalance. "Didn't see you there."

"We're going to hell for this," I hissed. "What if Great-Auntie Syl blows our cover?"

"She's got dementia," Hi whispered. "She won't know the difference."

"That's horrible."

"People in these places love to have visitors. Even from fake relatives."

"Like I said. To hell"

"When did they build this monster?"

"1876." Shelton had a book on Carolina lighthouses. Of course.

Ben glanced at my scum covered arms. "Does it have a sink? A hose?"

Ha ha

"Perfect," I said. "Lead the way."

"Not a chance," said Shelton.

"Clean up," said Hi.

"Now," said Ben. "We'll wait." I stuck out my tongue but hurried home to scrub up.

My dirt-free attire got a round of applause. Ben whistled.

"Much better," Shelton proclaimed.

"I don't know." Hi pooched out just lips. "The avian excrement added a certain je ne sais quoi."

"Very funny," I said.

"Why would I not like that?" I asked.

"I wasn't finished." Shelton said. "I paused for dramatic effect."

"Let me think this through."

The boys rolled their eyes, but clammed up. They'd seen my concentration trick before...

"Ben may be right."

He raised the roof. I ignored him.

"If Chance catches you act love struck." Hi winked. "That'll work."

"Love struck?" Ben's brow furrowed. "What's he talking about?"

"Nothing. Wish me luck." Stupid Hi.

"What are you doing here?" I babbled.

"What am I doing here? I live here."

"She's going to say 'tonight', isn't she?" Shelton's chin dropped to his chest. "Every time I think I'm done for the night, Tory says we have to raid some fortress."

"Hiram!" Shelton ran to Hi's side. "Aren't you bleeding? I thought she shot you!"

"Tory can order me around inside my head." Ben said. "If that doesn't make us close, I don't know what does."

#hey sorry this post is so fucking long #i just re-re-read them and am in love (yet again) with these books #these are all from the first book btw #i kinda hate that the series and the first book have the first name #i'm gonna be making one of these for every book tho so deepest apologies #long post #virals #virals series #the morris island pack

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eliotquillon · 4 years ago

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mark walden and politics in h.i.v.e

as you probably all know by now (thanks to the j.k rowling fiasco), art and politics are inherently linked; whether it’s intentional or not, it’s difficult to extricate an author’s beliefs from the way they manifist in literature. and with that in mind, let’s talk about politics in h.i.v.e.

h.i.v.e is a series that has never exactly shied away from criticising the politics of the year each book was published in, and you can probably see this best in the character of matt ronson, who is the most obvious stand in for mitt romney that i’ve ever seen in my entire life. romney was running against obama in the 2012 election, and, coincidentally enough, matt ronson appears in deadlock, which was published in 2013 (and almost certainly written during 2012). in case you’ve repressed the events of deadlock (which i wouldn’t blame you for lmao), ronson’s a senior member of the disciples - he’s actually head of an entire cell - and is running for president in order to secure the disciples’ control over the united states. it’s not exactly subtle imagery. it’s definitely the boldest walden gets in terms of critiquing the state of late 00s-early 2010s politics, and is also the example that i think is easiest to pick up on, because of how similar ronson and romney’s names are, and how in-your-face the whole scene is. i mean, otto leaves ronson to die in a plane pre-programmed to crash in the middle of the ocean because when raven tells him that a bullet would’ve been quicker, his response is, quote, “too quick.” for further proof, if you check walden’s twitter, he’s pretty positive towards obama on the whole, which i imagine is why he decided to kill off obama’s presidential challenger.

but that’s not the first time politics gets infused in h.i.v.e. the first time - the one that actually serves as the catalyst for, well, everything - is otto deposing the prime minister by making him moon the nation on live television. book 1 was published in 2006; this was when tony blair was prime minister in the uk. if you’re unfamiliar with uk politics, blair is pretty harshly criticised on both sides of the political spectrum for his role in the iraq war/the 2008 financial crash (although he resigned and appointed gordon brown as his successor in 2007), and the fact that he created ‘new labour’, a movement which pushed the predominantly working class, leftist labour party further towards the ‘moderate centre’ in an attempt to capture more of the middle class vote as opposed to labour’s traditional post-industrial ‘northern heartlands’. the prime minister that otto deposes is blair, or at least a stand in for him; i’ll give proof below.

the important thing is that otto decides to get rid of the prime minister because st. sebastian’s is closing down, and st. sebastian’s is closing down because of the prime minister’s childcare reforms that result in, quote, “the restructuring of local childcare provision.” whether or not st. sebastian being closed would’ve been an overal net positive or not is debatable (otto mentions that the building was starting to become “genuinely unsafe”), but if you don’t know much about blair, he was BIG on restructuring, especially in london, where st sebastian’s is located, and something in particular that blair was fond of was giving more powers to local councils (essentially, shifting the uk to more of a federal system than a centralised one). you’ve probably already guessed, but yep, the letter that announces st. sebastian’s is closing comes from the local council. it’s also mentioned that the childcare reforms have “the prime minister’s personal backing”, and, yep, childcare budgets and early years spending increased exponentially under blair (he even renamed the department of education to the department of children, schools, and families, which was promptly renamed AGAIN once labour left office, but that’s a rant for another day). there’s also the fact that otto goes to brighton for the prime minister’s party conference - this is where the labour party conference is held, whereas the conservative party conference alternates between birmingham and manchester. finally, in zero hour (published in 2010) it’s mentioned that the prime minister resigned and that his party lost in the next general election - this is exactly what happened to blair and new labour after the financial crash. of course, this evidence is very circumstantial, but i don’t think that this is a coincidence, and, anyway, i struggle to see how walden could’ve been more explicit in implying that this is blair without facing parental backlash.

now onto the political commentary; i’ve already mentioned how everyone hates blair, and walden is no exception. the statement that otto makes the prime minister is absolutely damning. it’s too long for me to copy and paste the entire thing (i say, when this post is going to be ridiculously long anyway), but here are some highlights: “we hold you and your families in nothing but the deepest contempt”, “i don’t think that we get enough credit for having to put up with your constant whining”, “half of you can barely read or write, and the way the education system’s going, that’s not going to change any time soon”, “we don’t care” “all we care about is power and money”, “shut your mouths and cut the moaning, because we don’t give a monkey’s.” i think it’s pretty safe to say that this is not exactly positive. personally, i think that the “moaning” and “whining” walden refers to here is a reference to the anti-war protests about the us/uk invasion of iraq, and there were complaints about the scrapping of grammar schools/“dumbing down” of the GCSE qualifications (regardless of whether or not that was intentional) across the board for years both before and after blair got into power. but whichever way you look at it, this is not a glowing representation of blair. and if you look on walden’s twitter (again), he tends to retweet a lot from michael rosen and owen jones, both prominent labour members who are very staunchly anti blair and anti ‘new labour’.

also, while searching walden’s twitter for blair references, i also came across this 2019 tweet:

where, as you can see, he shares an anecdote about how his old house used to be next to an army range and that his neighbour told him that military helicopters were often “flown by a 21 year old with a hangover”. and, like, i’m not saying that that’s the inspiration for 13 year old laura being able to hack a military base so she could spy on her classmates, but i’m totally saying that.

anyway, there’s one more political figure i want to cover here, and that’s duncan cavendish, aka the prime minister in zero hour. anyway: duncan cavendish is former conservative prime minister david cameron (notice the identical initials). i did actually ask walden about this on twitter, and he said he ‘couldn’t possibly comment’, which imo most likely means that he’s unable to confirm because of contractual reasons. but anyway: zero hour was published in 2010, the year of the election which put the conservatives (for clarity’s sake, i’m going to be referring to them as tories for the rest of this post) back into power for the first time in 13 years (albeit in a coalition with the centrist libdem party), meaning that it was written in 2009 when cameron was party leader, and after the 2008 crash. i don’t think walden knew for sure that cameron would come to power (after all, in zero hour it’s stated that cavendish’s party won by a landslide, whereas the actual 2010 election resulted in ‘hung parliament’), but it wasn’t exactly a hard guess to make that labour would lose after the events of 2007/8 and their record in iraq.

something that particularly sticks out to me is cavendish thanking nero for switching him from the polfi stream to the alpha stream - in real life, cameron has an a level in economics, and studied philosophy, politics, and economics at oxford and his father is also a stockbroker, all aspects which certainly scream polfi to me. personally, i think this was a dig at cameron’s fairly elitist background, and the fact that he’s historically been seen as an opportunist rather than a real leader. also, cameron was once approached in the former soviet union by two men he suspected were KGB agents trying to recruit him, and i’m not saying that walden used this connection when linking cavendish to pietor furan and the disciples, but....yeah. there’s also the fact that nero references cavendish’s academic record of going to an elite boys’ school being fudged, and, yeah, cameron attended eton (he also got suspended for smoking cannabis, which is just. a lot to think about for a man who helped push through legislation that further penalised cannabis users). again, on twitter walden has been extremely outspoken against the tories in general, specifically about brexit, the referendum for which occurred under cameron’s government. also walden kind of predicted the future: in zero hour, cavendish is blackmailed by nero into resigning. in real life, cameron resigned the whip (left both his post and the tory party as an MP) in 2016 after the uk voted to leave the eu. obviously that’s not proof of anything but it just makes me laugh.

those are the specific figures - now let’s talk more about walden’s general ideologies. he’s very anti-gun on twitter, and this obviously links to wing and his refusal to wield guns/shoot people; wing’s arguably the most staunchly moral character in the series, which i don’t think is a coincidence. walden bashed mass surveillance by having otto abhor (and later destroy) echelon; echelon is actually a real international government project that was originally designed for military surveillance but later branched out into greater mass surveillance (also, fun fact! i only live about an hour’s drive from an echelon radome base, so i hope my mi5 agent is enjoying this post). we see walden criticise mass surveillance again with the existence of the artemis project (and also the disciples’ use of facial recognition software), and while i have no idea whether or not that’s real, i think everyone knows that there are multiple international coalitions devoted to gathering and sharing data on world citizens (google the nine eyes partnership if you want to give yourself a bit of a crisis). walden has reposted a picture that says ‘make orwell fiction again’ on twitter, so it’s pretty clear where he stands on that. in general, walden is left wing, and that shows in his books - while i’ve corroborated all of my assumptions here with evidence i found on walden’s twitter, i came to most of these conclusions on my own just from reading the source material.

and this is why i’m only 90% joking when i talk about walden lagging behind on book 9 because there’s so many different things he needs to satirize. the global stage has changed dramatically since deadlock’s publication, and if walden’s passionate about critiquing those in power, he’s got a lot of content to choose from - trump, obviously, but also boris johnson and theresa may over on this side of the pond (and he really, really hates johnson). h.i.v.e as a story is inherently political, and not just because of the more obvious “morally grey villains” trope. walden uses his fictional world to critique the real-life authority figures in control, and does so while keeping it subtle enough so as to not tip off most casual readers. overall, it’s pretty impressive.

#h.i.v.e #mark walden #meta #long post

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29 January 2021

Tragedy and statistics

The UK marked a grim milestone this week, recording more than 100,000 Covid deaths by every measure.

Various versions of the famous quote have it that one death is a tragedy, many merely a statistic. Newspapers tried to avoid that and humanise the sombre statistic in different ways. The front pages of The Times and the i focused on the individual tragedies, photographs highlighting the human beings behind the numbers.

Beyond their front pages, both tried to visualise the impact. The i used its paper form to give a double page spread to 100,000 dots, each representing a death. Online, The Times combined the human stories with a different use of dots and a 'narrative scroll', the act of having to move down the page helping illustrate the extent of the tragedy. It put me in mind of Ampp3d's story from 2014 (no longer online, analysis here and here) visualising migrant worker deaths in Qatar. The New York Times took a different approach to scrolling , using the density of dots to show how the pandemic unfolded in the US.

The FT, meanwhile, kept things simple, using a line chart to show the different measures of deaths all exceeding 100,000, and a simple bar chart to compare the UK's mortality rate to others.

Different approaches, but all important attempts to communicate the human cost of Covid and examples of how data visualisation can help make sense of tragedy on such a large scale, when words might fail us.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In other news:

It's Data Bites this Wednesday at 6pm. Come!

Congratulations to my erstwhile IfG colleagues on the latest (terrific) edition of Whitehall Monitor. Read it here (some more links below), sign up for next week's launch event here.

I had a great time at this year's (virtual) UKGovCamp last week - thanks to the campmakers for making it work so well online. I made it to sessions on public trust; the state of (open) data; every move you make, every word you type...; data in regulation; silos beyond government; data service design; and digital exclusion. I ran a session on whether some sort of annual report on the state of government data could work and if so, what it should include - the notes are here, Jamboard here, and rest assured it's a subject I'll be returning to... Full grid of events and notes here.

The Atlantic had a rather good piece on narratives about the pandemic this week, and how a successful vaccination programme could dispel memories of 'a catastrophic failure of governance': 'The pandemic disaster that might not happen'. I wonder if focusing on how politicians can drive their own narrative overshadows the role of society's storytellers - the media - in shaping and questioning narratives, and absolves them of agency to hold the government to account. Not dissimilar to some narratives around data and technology that seem to forget the decisions around them are made by humans.

Have views on vaccine passports? Tony does. A reminder that the project I'm working with the Ada Lovelace Institute on is taking evidence until 19 February.

And I forgot to post this last week... President Biden's inaugural address grappled with some of the same tensions between unity and dissent in a democracy that some of the founding fathers did in The Federalist. I'm a particular fan of Alexander Hamilton's fourth and fifth paragraphs here, the fourth eloquent on the need to respect our opponents, and the fifth eloquent on the exact opposite ('no, not these opponents').

Have a good weekend

Gavin

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Graphic content

Macabre milestones

Boris Johnson ‘deeply sorry’ as UK’s Covid death toll passes 100,000* (FT)

How the UK reached 100,000 Covid deaths* (The Times)

100,162 lives (The i, via Matt Butler)

UK official Covid death toll has always undercounted fatalities, analysis shows (The Guardian)

How the world reached 100 million coronavirus cases* (New Statesman)

Covid-19 cases pass 100m* (The Economist)

How 425,000 Coronavirus Deaths Added Up* (New York Times)

Vax populi

Covid-19 vaccine tracker: the global race to vaccinate* (FT)

Vaccine nationalism means that poor countries will be left behind* (The Economist)

Vaccination rates in England are lower for older non-white people, study shows* (FT)

Viral content

UK Covid lockdown starting to work, say scientists* (FT)

Home page for an experimental website displaying COVID-19 statistics

New UK and South Africa Covid variants may spread more easily, so what does this mean for the fight against coronavirus? (The Guardian)

The Amazonian city that hatched the Brazil variant has been crushed by it* (Washington Post)

The march of the coronavirus across America* (The Economist)

See Covid-19 Risk in Your County and a Guide for Daily Life Near You* (New York Times)

We are now sharing previously hidden weekly COVID-19 state profile reports with the public (Cyrus Shahpar, White House COVID-19 Data Director)

Covid-19 Pandemic Could Be Source of Global Crises for Years: WEF* (Bloomberg)

Putting Kamala Harris as VP into perspective (Melissa Shusterman)

How popular is Joe Biden? (FiveThirtyEight)

Joe Biden is taking executive action at a record pace* (The Economist)

Full List: Where Every Senator Stands on Convicting Trump* (New York Times)

How The Frost Belt And Sun Belt Illustrate The Complexity Of America’s Urban-Rural Divide (FiveThirtyEight)

Our Radicalized Republic (FiveThirtyEight)

This is one of the most harrowing pictures I have seen about how we lost an entire generation (@marcusjdl)

Whitehall Monitor 2021 (IfG)

Launch event next week (IfG)

Three ways that the coronavirus crisis has changed government (Alice for IfG)

Ministers overrode official advice more than ever in last year’s crisis* (Tim for Times Red Box)

We’ve calculated ward level EU Referendum estimates in England/Wales (James Kanagasooriam)

In data: the benefits squeeze* (Prospect)

Who's furloughed? (Resolution Foundation)

Cities Outlook 2021 (Centre for Cities)

Global

The uncounted: How many women die at the hands of their partners? We simply don’t know – and that needs to change* (Tortoise)

La Niña Roars, Unleashing Fire, Drought and Floods Worldwide* (Bloomberg)

How the Arab spring engulfed the Middle East – and changed the world (The Guardian)

Pessimism and Distrust Could Sway Elections Around the World* (Bloomberg)

Poland’s coal-fired home heating creates widespread pollution* (The Economist)

#dataviz

How to work with Facebook population density data (Alasdair Rae)

Check out this interesting cartography decision! (Gretchen Peterson)

Sport

How green are Premier League clubs? Tottenham top sustainability table (not entirely convinced by this graphic, BBC Sport - and not just because Spurs are top)

When GOATs meet: Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers, by the numbers* (Washington Post)

Everything else

The frenzied rise of GameStop* (The Economist)

Data Archeogram: mapping the datafication of work (Autonomy)

VIEW THE ARMADA MAPS (National Museum of the Royal Navy)

Spanish Armada maps 'saved for the nation' (BBC News)

Meta data

ICO baby

Our session with Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee)

Tory party illegally collected data on ethnicity of 10m voters, MPs told (The Guardian)

Covid contracts: Extend FoI act to cover private companies making millions says Information Commissioner (Evening Standard)

Adtech investigation resumes (ICO)

Information commissioner’s term extended to allow successor recruitment (Public Technology)

Shaking that pass

Exclusive: Tony Blair calls on Boris Johnson to lead drive for global vaccine passport* (Telegraph)

Vaccine passports and ID Cards (Phil Booth)

Tech companies are racing to build smart vaccine passports. But technology isn't the only problem (ZDNet)

Viral content

What Covid revealed about government’s legacy IT, and what to do next (Civil Service World)

What can wastewater tell us about COVID-19? (COG-UK)

Digital government

Our Syllabus: Here to help you teach Digital Era Government (Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age)

Respecting users’ privacy on GOV.UK accounts (Inside GOV.UK)

Two GDS projects to watch : GOV.UK Accounts and “Forms discovery” (David Durant)

Government Gateway at 20 – looking back at the UK’s most successful digital identity system (Computer Weekly)

No digital postal vote application service before May elections (Public Technology)

"Find your NHS number" (Tom Read and others)

Open government

The Path to the Future (Audrey Tang for CommonWealth)

We are thrilled to announce that #OpenGovWeek will take place May 17-21, 2021! (Open Government Partnership)

RECOMMENDATIONS TO STRENGTHEN CANADA’S RESPONSE TO NEW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND REDUCE THE HARM CAUSED BY THEIR MISUSE (Public Policy Forum)

FOI* (Peter Geoghegan for the LRB)

AI got 'rithm

Government by Algorithm: The Myths, Challenges and Opportunities (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change)

What's your go-to document or paper that defines different types of algorithmic bias? (Rumman Chowdhury)

AI review: Transforming our world with AI (UKRI)

New – Amazon SageMaker Clarify Detects Bias and Increases the Transparency of Machine Learning Models (AWS)

Who Is Winning the AI Race: China, the EU, or the United States? — 2021 Update (Center for Data Innovation)

The City of New York has released an inventory of algorithms in use (Rumman Chowdhury)

A New AI Lexicon: Responses and Challenges to the Critical AI discourse- Call for Contributors (AI Now Institute)

Independent auditors are struggling to hold AI companies accountable (Fast Company)

Media

Fix information failures or risk lives: the Full Fact Report 2021 (Full Fact)

Facebook News feature launches in UK (BBC News)

How Participatory Media Promote Coverage of Social Movements (Nieman Reports)

‘It’s a reality’: Google threatens to stop search in Australia due to media code (Sydney Morning Herald)

Privacy

Exploring Design and Governance Challenges in the Development of Privacy-Preserving Computation (Nitin Agrawal, Reuben Binns, Max Van Kleek, Kim Laine, Nigel Shadbolt)

How Europe’s privacy laws are failing victims of sexual abuse (Politico)

Inside India’s booming dark data economy (Rest of World)

We're exploring the role of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) in enabling secure and trustworthy use of data (CDEI)

#DataProtectionDay

#DataPrivacyDay

Everything else

Microsoft is one of the largest contributors to the members of Congress who tried to subvert the Democratic process (Judd Legum)

Why does Big Tech want us to feel nostalgic?* (New Statesman)

Census 2021 will be taking place March 21 (ONS)

Opportunities

EVENT: Data Bites #16 (IfG)

JOB: Chair of Geospatial Commission (Cabinet Office)

JOB: Head of Open and Innovative Government Division (OECD)

JOB: Head of the Evaluation Task Force (Cabinet Office)

JOB: Product Manager (360Giving)

And finally...

Lady Gaga as diagrams about AI systems (thread). (Miles Brundage)

Infosec sea shanties (Rachel Tobac)

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