In Which I Discuss #Yesallwomen

Women get a rough deal of it. It doesn’t matter if this is because it’s a little difficult to get used to the idea that thousands of years of male hegemony was stupid in the extreme. It doesn’t matter if it’s because men are predominantly in charge of government and business and wish to, for want of a better expression, maintain an old boy’s network. It doesn’t matter if it’s because men tend to be physically stronger than women. I say it doesn’t matter, I rather imagine it matters hugely, because if people agree on the cause/s of a problem, finding the solution makes it that much easier. That’s why this #YesAllWomen movement confuses me.

I am aware that women are raped more than men. I am aware that women are degraded in media more than men, that women are judged more superficially than men, that women are victims of physical violence more than men. I am aware that this shouldn’t be the case, and #YesAllWomen is trying to get across this message. There are some men out there who apparently don’t know all of this, and they're learning. Other than that, I am unsure of this movement’s aims. Is it merely enough that to know a problem exists, without doing anything about it?

A couple of years ago, there was an internet campaign called KONY 2012, the subject of which was a warlord in Uganda called Joseph Kony, who was abducting children and forcing them to serve in guerrilla armies. The aim of this campaign was to raise awareness of Kony, for as many people to start talking about him as much as possible and to share a video denouncing him. There was a problem, and people were discussing it and raising awareness. The main aim was to raise awareness, and that was achieved (apart from the fact that the Ugandan military had used child soldiers against Kony themselves, and that it was generally acknowleged that Kony was operating in a different country, but that’s by the by). People who shared the video felt good about themselves, people who clicked the like button felt proud, they felt a genuine sense of accomplishment. However, all of this was essentially a masturbation aid for the people clicking. They fantasised that their involvement, their sense of being in a group, would facilitate change, and doing this made them feel good about themselves . It’s two years later, and in the post-orgasm drowse when the fantasy has evaporated, nothing seems to have changed. Ask most of these people to name who that warlord in Uganda they were campaigning two years ago and most of them won’t remember. And so it will be for #YesAllWomen. In a couple of years, people won't remember what this campaign was called. They won't remember that the catalyst for it was a 22 year old mentally unbalanced man who killed six people and himself because he was emotionally frustrated at his lack of a relationship with women. I say people won't remember, perhaps they aren't even aware of it now. No matter- it's sad that it takes seven high profile deaths to get millions of people discussing misogyny, but at least there is some good come out of it.

The problem of sexism, and all of its unwanted connotations, will not disappear and people will not forget that it exists, but people will forget the #YesAllWomen campaign itself. Attempts to combat sexism will become less co-ordinated, less vociferous . The fact that there are so many things to support all of a sudden (there aren’t, it’s just easier to advertise them nowadays) gives us good cause fatigue. As a rule, we can't give our full concentration on something that someone says would be nice to sort out. With the advent of Facebook and the vast majority of activists having many friends to lobby support for their various causes, people feel pressured into acknowledging those causes, be it in the form of signing a petition, or actually donating money. If you don’t, then the spectre of “Oh, I see, so you’re only my Facebook friend, not my real friend” raises its ugly head. We are battered by causes and charities and the like, and the vast majority with an admirable ethos, #YesAllWomen amongst them. But It’s much easier to pay lip service to these charities and campaigns, click like and you’ve done your bit. The rules are different, though, for the cause that has snowballed and suddenly has all the media behind it. There is a tendency for people to adopt these (temporarily), whereas they didn’t really care so much about them before, or if they did, they took no action. The #YesAllWomen campaign will exponentially become more popular until it peaks (it may have already, I realise I am a little late on this one). I fear that this campaign will not make many people into feminists for a long period, or if it does, they will be silent. I am a hypocrite in this regard- I am, for the most part, not an active feminist. The supporters who profess to care about #YesAllWomen, and a great many do (for the moment) will drift away as it burns out. This is why people should actually propose action, rather than discussion, whilst the iron is hot, whilst there is more interest in the issue and more momentum for change.

Twitter is not the ideal place to promote cogent socio-political debate, simply for the reason that it’s incredibly difficult to get a meaningful point across and back it up with such character limitations, but it has gotten people talking. I want these talking people to start proposing action. Why not me? Well, I haven’t the imagination to help solve such a thing, but I imagine amongst the millions of people talking about it, there must be some people out there who want to try a few things to improve the imbalance . If they don't speak up, then some time down the line we'll be in the same position or worse. If they do have useful ideas, they should propose them whilst they have a large audience of fired up people, and perhaps if enough people actually do something about the issue, then in the future we'll be able to be part of the #YesShitStillHappensToWomenButItsGettingBetter movement.

Today's Tune 

In Which I Note That Moore Is Less

Sir Patrick Moore is no more. Many will mourn his passing, and will say such things as “he was the longest running presenter for any television show ever,” and “he helped map the moon for the Apollo landings” and so on and so on. He was notable for having a monocle and drumming up interest in astronomy by twatting about on a xylophone. I have already heard it said that he was one of a kind, and his like will not be seen again. Good. Sir Patrick Moore was one of those people who seemed to deliberately set out to prove the maxim that “only the good die young”. He was a product of a less enlightened time, and his antiquated views evidence this. Here is a man who was sexist, homophobic and racist. On a totally unrelated note, here is a picture of a baddie from the James Bond film "A View to a Kill" next to a picture of a racist astronomer:

Sir Patrick

Bond Villain

During the previous decade, the Radio Times interviewed Sir Patrick to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his magnum opus, The Sky at Night. He decided to discuss astronomy by taking this less than conventional approach:

“I would like to see two independent wavelengths- one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men.”

To be fair, the man's right. There is literally no way that a man and a woman could enjoy the same television programme. To the unenlightened interviewer's horror, he carried on talking.

“I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC- making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching.”

Again, he's right. The very idea that a woman could be in a position of authority is a shocking one, unless its being in charge of a television channel for women or being the leader of a knitting club. We shall assume that no-one told him that the longest serving Prime Minister started HER term back in 1979, a full 28 years before this interview was conducted. To be unaware of this, Sir Patrick would have to have his head far in the past, and far in the past is exactly where it was:

“The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days.”

Where to start? Yet again, the man is right. The BBC is run by women, although somewhat subtly as the BBC has yet to take the disgustingly liberal route of appointing a female Director General. Quiz shows are a bastion of the ladies- I can think of nothing more feminine than an episode of University Challenge presented by the physical embodiment of all things female Jeremy Paxman. The BBC showed its first cookery programme in 1936, so we shall assume that these golden days of which Sir Patrick Moore spoke of occurred before he was a teenager (he was born in 1923), and probably before the BBC started showing television programmes at all. It would also be fair to assume that the good old days he pined for included terrible working conditions, capital punishment and none of these johnny foreigner types coming over here. Fair to assume? Actually, there's evidence for it. He was noted for his opposition to the Race Relations Act (essentially a law saying let's not be racist because it's a bit of a dick move), and he openly discussed joining the BNP. It's interesting to note that every time I've typed that Sir Moore is right, the computer has offered to tack a hyphen and another word onto the end. Even a word processing program knows that he's right-wing.

“How dare you! How dare you speak ill of the dead! It's not like he can defend himself now, is it?” Ah, so I shouldn't say that Hitler was a nasty man on account of the fact that he's dead? “Well no, but that's different. You can't say that Sir Patrick Moore and Adolf Hitler were similar...” Actually, I can. And will. Unfortunately, Sir Patrick's wife was killed by a German bomb in 1943. This might explain, but not mitigate his attitude towards the Germans. First of all, he referred to the Germans as krauts, which isn't exactly the most PC of terms nowadays. Nowadays? Yes, he said this as recently as 2012:

“The only good kraut is a dead kraut.”

This seems a little extreme to me. I mean, the Germans have some strange ideas about which species are okay to have sex with, but saying that 80 million people are responsible for an event 69 years ago is a bit unfair. He might as well have said you and I are responsible for the massacre at Amritsar, or the invention of Marmite. I'm sure he didn't really mean it. After all, a man as learned as Sir Patrick would be able to see the irony of calling for the death of an entire people when that's exactly the sort of things the Nazis were known for...

Today's Tune

In Which I Point Out That Political Correctness Can Be Politically Incorrect

Right. Racism. In Britain, someone who is black and British would be classified as black British, and in the U.S, a black American would be classified as African-American. So far, so alliterative. But isn't this second term a bit... silly? Certainly if you trace the genealogy of a black American, you'll get to a point when their ancestors lived in Africa, but isn't that true of everyone? Conventional wisdom is that homo sapiens originated in Africa, and then some migrated. Now let's assume that you have an Arab who's from Egypt, and a white South African. If they become American citizens, and go to, say, Harlem, and start telling one and all that they are African-Americans, they'd get a bit of stick for it, to put it mildly. But aren't they just as much African-Americans as people whose roots are in Cameroon or Senegal? This Afro-American terminology just enforces the idea in American minds that all Africans are black. That's an ignorant and somewhat racist view. Why don't they call all the white people European-Americans? 

Today's Tune 

In Which I... Ugh.

I do like the BBC news website. It's a good source of news, not too up its own arse, not too “The country's gone to the dogs ever since Diana died.” It's about as unbiased as it could be expected to be, and it gives fair attention to events happening outside the country. One of the most startling news stories I've found is this:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20523950


For those of you who are so interminably lazy as to not click on a hyperlink, the gist is this- the current German government is calling for beastiality to be made illegal. That means sticking it in and wiggling about a bit, or having it stuck in you and have it wiggled about a bit, with and by animals. “Hurrah!” the more pleasant of you think, then “Jesus CHRIST, beastiality is currently legal in Germany?!?” I was astonished when I read this. Apparently, West Germany legalised it back in 1969, I do not know why. I'm going to have to assume there was a strong political group lobbying for it, and many people marching until they were given the right to fuck a sheep/cow/slow loris. I can't look into this because I fear I will lose all faith in humanity- I'll certainly never look at bratwurst the same way again. “This meat has been individually tenderised by-” “AHLALALALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA!” One crumb of comfort is that for ze Germans, the sex with animals is over if they cause them significant harm. Ron Jeremy wouldn't be allowed to go to Hamburg for a spot of zoophilia, then. Wiki answers says that man possesses a 9.8 inch long sausage stick (and that's only the circumference lololol). I wouldn't normally trust wiki answers as a source of information, but again, I am unwilling to research this further. So yes, people in Germany are permitted to have sex with animals unless it causes the animals “significant harm”. The trouble is, you can't really give an animal therapy lessons. How d'you tell if an animal is suffering flashbacks? Also, its ability to provide testimony in court would be suspect at best- “So, Rover, can you point to where the man touched you on this Scooby Doo doll?”


Did I mention that this story is deeply unsettling? I mean, hurrah for cultural identity and vive la différence and all that, but you're fucking animals for God's sake! This is almost like a German discovering that the British had just started to make rape illegal, and rape only being a bit of a no-no previously if the victim was caused “significant harm”. Worse still, it would be like the Germans discovering that we were considering the punishment for rape to be a hefty fine. They're only going to fine people that fuck animals! No, that's not right, they're only CONSIDERING fining people for fucking animals. Fining people for committing this “misdemeanour” would mean that the German people would equate buggering a badger to be in the same area as fly tipping! Ugh. It's going to take a lot of mind floss for me to be able to get over this one...

Today's Tune

In Which I Enjoy Sinking to New Depths

One of the things that you might not know about me, but would square with everything that you DO, is that I like participating in flame wars. That's not to say participating in a war where the Americans try and burn down Canada, and instead have the White House and the Capitol Building and the treasury torched by the British. I mean getting involved when someone says something on the internet and then someone violently disagrees with it. The traditional forum for this discourse is Youtube comments, and my somewhat unique style is engaging people in cogent debate whilst being backed up by facts. There are a few scientific laws which the internet adheres to, and on of them is Godwin's Law:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

For those of you who are not familiar with this sort of thing, it might take this sort of form: “even tho he isnt doing it th best he cud, Obama is tryng to save the counrty.” “Thats bs obama is hitler.” These are the heights of Elysium of which we can expect discussion to rise. So, I was watching a video of Paul Merton presenting Room 101, a show about celebrities' pet hates that they get to “banish” to the eponymous chamber of hell. Alexei Sayle was the guest for this episode, and one of the things he chose to get rid of was the Cirque Du Soleil, a sort of weird post modern Canadian circus where not a single custard pie is thrown. Please bear in mind that I didn't check back daily to see if someone had replied to my comments, Youtube e-mails me when that happens. With that in mind, I include a transcript of the conversation below:

Anything out of Canada is shit.
Topite 8 months ago

do you like telephones? insulin? electric ovens? or hey if you're a girl the wonderbra is Canadian. Yeh...everything out of Canada is really shit...thank god we have the US eh!
88adamjohn in reply to topite (Show the comment) 5 months ago

Alexander Graham Bell had U.S citizenship as well as Canadian (Scottish too, he was born in Scotland. Most people think of the phone as a Scottish invention, and that even that was stolen off of Elisha Gray, an American) and Canada didn't invent insulin, it's what the body produces and the Wonderbra was trademarked in the States. Come on you Canuck, you can do better than that?
chenkton 4 months ago

You are an illiterate and incorrect in your findings.

Please correct my spelling you pompous jack of nothing because im sure your a troll with no actuall knowledge...
That you can find the time to be so ummm...lets say, "notoriously pathetic pilgrim"- defetes the purpose of any comment you have being held apon this vid...

Go find something informative to spew nonsense at while the rest of us have a laugh.
 Or better yet something simple for you, shut up please you rude under educated wanker.
technicolournaruto in reply to chenkton (Show the comment) 6 hours ago

Deary me. There's you calling me an illiterate, despite being unable to spell defeats, actual, and upon. These are rather basic words that are taught to people who are quite young... Is English your second language? Your punctuation and grammar's a wee bit off too. That I can find the time to write fifty or so words is rather shocking, I must admit, but surely it's even more distressing that you take time out of your busy schedule to do the same? So in conclusion, less hypocrisy please.
chenkton in reply to technicolournaruto (Show the comment)

After this little exchange, technicolournaruto deleted his comments, and most likely felt very bad about himself. Being petty's fun..

Today's Tune

In Which I Hope That's Chocolate Ice-Cream They're Eating!

Today, I went to my local optician instead of going to one of those big chains. It had been seven years since I'd been to that particular one, but it took me rather less time to remember why there had been such a hiatus. Back in the day, they used to have this lens plastic swing on a bracket jobbies that I'm not very good at describing. Apparently they're called refractorheads. The point is, they'd done away with these and got some much cheaper metal glass rim jobbies (ha!) which were somewhat unpleasant, to say the least. They'd actually managed to downgrade this piece of equipment to such a level that it was like an instrument of torture from the past. Or the future:

They didn't go quite as far as to show me two girls and one cup. “Do the women who are doing unmentionable things look clearer with the first?... Or second?...” Still, it made a bad feeling in the guttywuts right horrorshow. Ha! Microsoft spelling and grammar utterly spazzed out with that last sentence- perhaps it's not a fan of A Clockwork Orange. The point remains though that the facilities at this place were more than a little rudimentary. Still, that's all fine. Costs have to be cut somewhere, and I was helping the little guy.

I had gone there because of a persistent ache in my left eye, feels like it's strained or bruised. The optometrist took note of my symptoms and got this suspiciously evil looking contraption out... “Okay, I'm going to use this magic squirty thing to gauge the pressure in your eye... Don't worry if your eye hurts when this shoots into it and takes a reading, that'll just be the asbestos.” “Wha- ARGGHHHH!!!” “The pressure seems normal.” “Why on earth would you put asbestos in there?!?” “You don't want your eye to catch fire, do you?” “Erm... No?” “Well then.” Eventually, he told me that I'd got a little bit blinder but that there's nothing visibly wrong with my eye apart from a tiny allergic reaction to asbestos. “Come back in a couple of weeks if your eye's still feeling dodgy, and we can at least squirt some asbestos in the other one so they look as shit as each other... But now I want you to talk to a woman who might well get commission, which would certainly explain her sneering and unhelpful attitude if you decide to not purchase her wares.” So off I trotted to someone who we shall call Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch. Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch seemed very proud of the 10 glasses that she stocked, and unaware of their astronomical prices. I tried on one or two, and noted with mild surprise that they didn't make me look any more of a twat than usual. Still, I could do better, and cheaper. I said to her that I would go further afield to Colchester to get my spectacles. Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch was not exactly enamoured with that idea. “You fucking what? You're a fucking idiot!” “Eh?” “My fragile little mind simply cannot cope with the idea of someone getting an eyetest at one opticians and then getting glasses from another! That's like cheating, you adulterous little shit! Would you ever go to a different pharmacy or go and see another hairdresser behind your regular one's back?!?” “...Erm...” “You would as well, you little bastard! What if the other opticians have a problem?!? You'd be caught between here and there in some sort of purgatorial netherworld!” “What sort of problem with my eyes could possibly cause a schism between two optician firms?” You know, a problem!" “Well, I'm going to give them my prescription from here and they'll recognise that the optometrist has been to optician's school and trust his judgement. If there is a problem, I'm sure their vast wealth would be able to purchase something or someone to sort it out, or provide me with ample compensation.” I'd just like to say, the above may have been paraphrased an eensy bit, but the following is a direct quote of Mutton-Dressed-as-Lamb-Bitch: “We'd rather you didn't do that in future. It would be better if you don't come here again.” I'm inclined to agree with her.

Today's Tune

In Which I Give Another Brief History Lesson

Right, I said I was going to write this DAYS ago. It's a little known story about military co-operation between the U.K and France. Back in the day, there was this bloody enormous U.S.S.R armed force ready to come steamrolling through western Europe from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary... The western powers weren't entirely happy about that. They'd just had a nasty little spat with the Nazis, and another dictatorship invading sovereign European territories just wasn't on. The idea that the western powers should form a super happy fun club with which to buck a potential Soviet attack was hit upon- everyone foots the bill, an armed force to which all the members would contribute. This was a new era of co-operation, and though it came out of something negative, it's quite nice there was a group of foreigners working together. Well. Apart from the French of course. They realised they were not super, happy or fun, and as such started to get the hump with everyone else. When everyone else in NATO was trying to pull together, the French insisted on calling it Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord, which spells OTAN, which is, if you haven't spotted it, the palindrome of NATO. I'm not sure that the French could come up with a better demonstration that they are, quite literally, backward people.

In 1958 France's premier was a bloke called Charles de Gaulle, perhaps the most self-interested ungrateful bastard to have an airport named after him. I cannot fully explain what was wrong with him without going into pages of detail, so let's work with the idea he was a tosspot. So. De Gaulle was galled by how involved the Americans were with NATO. How dare they commit loads of men and billions of dollars to defending people who most likely don't speak their language on a continent thousands of miles away. How DARE they?!? I suspect that the real issue de Gaulle may have had is that the Americans speak the same language as the British. De Gaulle never forgave the other Allies for taking the credit for liberating France. The 83,115 British and Canadian troops and the 73,000 U.S troops that landed on D-Day were just faffing about, it was clearly the mammoth 177 French soldiers that turned the tide of the battle.

Another thing of note in World War 2 is that after France surrendered to the Nazis, not all of France was occupied. The Nazis said “Basically, you can run half the country without involvement from us, as long as you round up Jews and send them to death camps.” Some French asked “Is it alright if we fight for the Nazis too? It's just that they're fighting the English, and we hate those beef eating victory monkeys.” “Oh, go on then,” said the Nazis, “as long as your capital city is Vichy.” As you may know, the war didn't end that well for the Vichy French, so when France became France again, she reluctantly put Marshal Pétain on trial. He was the leader who had collaborated with the Nazis. The judges at this trial said something along the lines of “Ah, let him off, we know it's an open and shut case but he didn't REALLY mean it”, yet the jury decided (by only one vote!) to put him to death. De Gaulle decided that this was a little bit too much- after all, Pétain had ensured the deaths of thousands of French Jews, it's not like he did anything really nasty. Pétain's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. At the time of sentence, he was 89.
Sorry, got sidetracked there. What I was meaning to say is that de Gaulle got all nostalgic for the days when France could bend over backwards for dictatorships, and if the USSR invaded, then the other members of NATO might frown a bit on a fellow member trying to negotiate a separate peace with the Soviets or surrender to them. France dropped out of NATO, but sadly the Russians never invaded so France didn't get the chance to surrender to them. The Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, but all the NATO countries thought that they were all mates now and it would be a shame to break up the party, so NATO carried on. In 2009, the French asked “Are you sure the USSR has been defeated? Really? No?” After being told that they most certainly had, the French finally put their head above the parapet and rejoined NATO, on the grounds that they could be snotty about it and not really get into the spirit of things.

So here's the little known story about the French working with the U.K. The British have an agreement with the Americans that their submarines shouldn't really be in the same place at the same time, because things might get a bit crashy. They have a system called deconfliction, which is a tad like air traffic control- the subs know roughly where each other are (if not exactly) so that they can't be dangerously close to each other. I think this approach is prudent, partially because the damage caused to submarines from being crashy doesn't just buff out like when you ding your Nissan Micra. The reason I most think it's a sensible idea, though, is because it's a teeny bit dangerous to have submarines carrying nuclear warheads not knowing where other submarines carrying nuclear warheads are.

The French disagreed. My command of French is not great, but I shall attempt to translate what I overheard from a drunk French admiral in a London whorehouse:
“I'm sure that we'll be able to see any other submarines coming even though we don't have any windows and our periscope doesn't work underwater, and that a submarine's main point is to be as undetectable as possible simply is not relevant. There is literally no way we can possibly crash into another submarine.”

Sure enough, in the same year that France rejoined NATO, she crashed one of her submarines into HMS Vanguard, and both were carrying nuclear warheads. This could have been a catastrophic encounter- both subs might have sunk and the missile casings could have broken and caused the irradiation of the Atlantic. The French submarine shrugged its shoulders, brushed herself down and said “Well, you should have been lookeeng where you were go-eeng, English.” The British sub had to put back into her home port to try and rid her of the garlicy smell she had inexplicably picked up. Hmm. If it's one thing I've learned from all of this, it would be that the French think that risking poisoning a great big chunk of the food chain is an acceptable price for not having to work with the Royal Navy. Still, they DID make Asterix in Britain, and that's a great film.

Today's Tune