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Post by CC on Dec 4, 2019 15:16:43 GMT
Godfrey Bloom tweeted thus on Monday as a response to Jack Merritt's father's request that political capital not be made out of his son's murder by a terrorist in London last week:
As I understand it your son died because he believed early release for jihadists was justified because they could be rehabilitated. Society is demanding these releases stop immediately. A very pragmatic view, nothing vile about it. Grieve silently is my advice.
This offensive message created some debate on another forum, which in turn led to a discussion about the Blame Game in general. We all agreed that although the victims, Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, were organisers of the event it would be absurd to suggest that, in some or any way, this meant that they contributed to their own deaths.
The person responsible for the murders was the murderer, although it would be fair to say that failings by certain people in certain areas of responsibility contributed to the attacks. He should have been better supervised. Better efforts should have been made to de-radicalise him. He should not have been allowed to travel to the conference or walk around the streets of London an his own.
We've actually had a lot of "blame" stories in the news recently. Blame has been apportioned to certain people, or not, and the results have left a lot of people dissatisfied.
An inquiry into the Clutha police helicopter accident of 2013, which killed all 3 in the helicopter and 6 people inside the Glasgow pub into which it crashed, officially laid the blame at the door of the pilot, David Traill. He was found to have run out of fuel as a result of switching off the supply to the tanks, even though he was an experienced pilot and there is no rational explanation for why he would have taken such foolish action. However, the whole point of the inquiry was to find out what caused the accident and, in so doing, to apportion blame. In the absence of any other explanation, blaming pilot error seems to be the only option, but it has left a very sour taste in the mouths of Mr Traill's friends, relatives and colleagues who simply don't believe that he could have made such a stupid error. There has been no suggestion that he was suicidal and so his taking action to actively cause the helicopter to crash for no reason whatever is, now officially, the cause of the 9 deaths.
David Duckenfield has been found not guilty of manslaughter in respect of the Hillsborough Disaster. There's no doubt that Mr Duckenfield didn't take action which could have helped mitigate the crushing on the terraces, or that he covered up his failings by claiming that Liverpool fans had battered a gate down, but it's hard not to come to the conclusion that he was scapegoated for the failings and carelessness for which others were responsible. The same teams, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, had met at Hillsborough the previous season without any problem, but the officer in charge in 1988 wasn't there in 1989 because he had been transferred to Leeds. The transfer followed an incident in which a new recruit was taken to an abandoned graveyard and had a gun pointed at his head by officers at Homerton Road station in a so-called initiation ceremony. Had that stupid act not taken place, the officer-in-charge would not have been transferred, Duckenfield would not have been given a job he was not up to performing and no-one would have died, so perhaps those coppers who scared the wits out of their rookie colleague are ultimately to blame. That, however, ignores other facts, such as Hillsborough not having the necessary safety certificate and Sheffield Council not insisting that they did so before the match took place.
It's the fire service that seem to be taking the bulk of the blame for the Grenfell Tower Disaster even though the local authority should never have allowed the block to be clad in inflammable material simply because it was cheaper than safe alternatives. The fire service's advice to residents to stay in their flats turned out to be catastrophic but it's certainly not their fault that the fire started or that it spread so quickly. Blame should, surely, lie with the government which imposed financial cuts on local councils, and Westminster & Kensington Council for not taking their health and safety responsibilities seriously. Perhaps the ultimate blame lies with the people who voted in the Tory/Liberal government; if spending hadn't been cut to the bone then maybe Grenfell would not have been neglected so catastrophically, but if we were to use that argument it would be equally fair to say that everyone who voted Labour when Tony Blair was candidate for PM shares the blame for the invasion if Iraq, thousands of deaths and the consequent destabilisation in the Middle East that helped to create ISIL.
If there is any conclusion to be drawn it's that blame for disastrous events should usually be shared around rather than one scapegoat being found. David Traill can never speak up for himself because he is dead, so it's actually very convenient to say that the crash was his fault. David Duckenfield isn't a very sympathetic character, and his behaviour after the tragedy at Hillsborough was dishonest, so the temptation to blame him for things that were someone else's responsibility became irresistible. The London Fire Service cops it for Grenfell even though their mistakes were made in their attempts to save people from what was obviously other people's fault in the first place.
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Post by CC on Dec 17, 2019 9:37:57 GMT
So who's to blame for the outcome of the General Election, which ended with the Labour Party many seats down? The consensus is that it's Jeremy Corbyn's fault. He was toxic on the doorsteps, an unelectable figure, a poor leader and so on, but wasn't this the same Jeremy Corbyn who led Labour to a surprisingly impressive result in 2017? His star was high that year; "Oh Jeremy Corbyn" they sang at Glastonbury, so how has he gone from charismatic Jeremy to hopeless Corbyn in 2 years?
The obvious answer is that he has been subjected to the most blatant and scurrilous media smear campaign since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Since he can't be everywhere at once he cannot reasonably be held to account every time a member of the Labour Party says something that might be construed as anti-Semitic, but it's not just the newspaper editors who have thrown this charge at him. Conspirators in his own Party have accused him of racism behind his back, to the press and also directly to his face, even though he is the only MP in the house to have been arrested for protesting against racism.
Certainly, Labour's position on Brexit was a definite vote-loser and JC's prevarication on the matter was a huge turn off for many voters on either side of the debate. Trying to appeal to Brexiteers in the English Midlands and to Remainers in London at the same time was an impossible task and it wasn't very wise to try to do so. In the end it was those Midland and Northern English working class anti-foreigner votes that cost the Party so badly, but no-one should be made to feel guilty about that because appealing to xenophobes is not what Labour should be about. It turns out that the ex-mining parts of Yorkshire and the East Midlands are home to a great many old-fashioned Little Englanders; that's not Jeremy Corbyn's fault and if he didn't do enough to appeal to their casual racism then that's a point in his favour rather than a stick with which to beat him.
Among other reasons, the Tories won the Election because the FPP system is unfair. They didn't come anywhere close to achieving 50% of the popular vote but have taken most of the seats. Still, when there was a referendum less than a decade ago on the question of introducing a different, more representative voting system, Labour campaigned against any such change, so they can't complain now the anti-Tory majority have suffered once again under FPP. The actual blame for the result should, surely, lie squarely, and solely, with the voters themselves. People don't have to believe the nonsense they are fed. Most, possibly all of us, filter what we see and hear in order to reject anything that doesn't square with our prejudices. You can't choose to believe something you read or see on television any more than you can choose to believe in God or in astrology. What millions of voters seem to have done is to deliberately choose to ignore the evidence that Boris Johnson is a transparent con man and that Brexit is likely to be detrimental to the livelihoods of the British people. It was national chauvinism that won the day for the Conservatives, and it's unreasonable to blame Jeremy Corbyn for that.
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Post by CC on Jan 6, 2020 12:50:22 GMT
Public shame could have been heaped on Donald Trump and his administration again this week but instead it's some lassie from Casualty who is getting mauled on the internet because she apparently didn't know who Greta Thunberg is, when presented with a question on Celebrity Mastermind. That she guessed "Sharon" as her answer made the whole thing more hilarious to people who like to find someone to whom they can feel superior. OK, she shouldn't have gone on to the show if she has so little knowledge of current affairs, but she's hardly alone in that. In an age where folk no longer read newspapers or watch news on the television, getting their entertainment from Netflix and their news from Facebook, it's depressing but not surprising that a young actor might not have heard of Greta. I wonder what % of the vultures mocking her on Twitter actually, themselves, knew who Ms Thunberg is or why she is famous.
Another person to face shame over the festive period was Jolyon Maugham QC, but in this case it served him right. Famous for his role in judicial attempts to prevent Brexit, Maugham threw his liberal reputation down the drain on Boxing Day by beating a fox to death with a baseball bat and then boasting about having done so, tweeting that he was wearing his wife's kimono when he clubbed the life out of the fox, who had been tangled up in chicken wire in his garden. He obviously expected his followers to be amused rather than appalled, and why not? Killing animals and bragging about it is far from unusual in the upper class circles in which QCs operate and from which most of them originate.
Maugham's argument that he is not a hypocrite because he eats meat would be thrown out of any decent court; he may not be a hypocrite but he is certainly a cruel bastard. How many carnivorous people would eat meat if they had to beat their dinner to death before they could eat it? Not many. The British people may have let themselves down a bit over Brexit but pointless cruelty to animals is something that goes down very badly in the average family home. Whatever their diet, I believe the normal response of a typical citizen, encountering a trapped animal and seeing the fear in its eyes, would be to help release it rather than to reach for a weapon in order to smash its face in. Our capacity to feel compassion is one of the things that sets us apart from wild beasts, after all.
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Post by CC on Jan 30, 2020 16:35:42 GMT
I don't know what Alastair Stewart said so am not in a position to comment about his sacking by ITN. It sounds a lot like the Danny Baker rammy last year, when he tweeted a picture of a monkey as a comment on Harry & Meghan's baby leaving hospital. I actually doubt that Danny Baker meant to be racist because (a) I doubt that he is that stupid and (b) he may not have known that Meghan is mixed-race. I didn't know she was till Baker was sacked, because I'd never read any of the stories about her. What he posted wasn't funny or clever and he should have had more sense but if he says he didn't mean it as a racist insult I think we can believe him because unlike Boris Johnson, for example, he doesn't have a history of making such remarks about minorities.
I was once babysitting a wee girl for her mum, a friend of mine who is black. I took her to the dole office with me, where she held my hand. She was a smashing wee lassie, full of fun, and I was proud that people might see her with me and think she might be my daughter, but when it was time for us to leave I said "Right, monkey." This is an old-fashioned term used in Northern England to mean, among other things, "OK, let's go" and is nothing to do with monkeys at all, but the very instant that I finished saying it I knew that it could have been considered, and not unreasonably, as a racist insult. It was an accident, but it would have been hard for me to prove it if the wee girl had taken offence (she didn't, thankfully) or if anyone had heard me say it and made an issue out of it.
On another occasion, when I was in the same office, I heard a security man say to a clerk who had just come from a holiday and was tanned, that she looked like a nigger. She was flustered and embarrassed, and I complained to the manager, who told me she took my allegation very seriously and that the man in question had been warned previously. I got the impression that she intended to sack him, and I was pleased to hear it because that man was a racist and his intention was to be provocative. He was looking for trouble, and found it.
So, blaming Alastair Stewart for what he said might be fair and it might not, but if black people who are well acquainted with him say he isn't a racist then they should know. If they say he is, then the same rule applies. Only the person making a comment knows whether it's meant to be insulting, but the person on the receiving end is likely to have a pretty good idea as well, especially if it should keep happening. Who was the TV "personality" who famously said he had tried really hard not to use the N word but did so anyway? You know who he is; he is a professional loudmouth who thinks racism is funny.
But, that words can dribble from your mouth innocently before you've thought them through is exemplified by another faux pas I made when talking to a man with no legs about whether the DWP might withdraw his award of Disability Living Allowance. I told him that if they considered doing so they would not have a leg to stand on. I had barely finished the word "on" before apologising, but the guy didn't mind because he knew I hadn't meant to be offensive. In fact, he laughed, but if he hadn't done so and I'd had to justify myself it wouldn't have been easy at all.
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Post by CC on Feb 12, 2020 16:49:07 GMT
This is a true story. I once knew 2 women who shared a house, and both of them told me, when her housemate left the room, that the other was an alcoholic. They used to hide bottles and cans around the house and then, if disturbed when they "found" them again, accused the other of having left them there.
I thought of this story a lot the last time I looked at Twitter. Whatever our side does is OK but if they do likewise then they should apologise, immediately and profusely, and make sure it never happens again. If someone on our side goes rogue then it's nothing to do with us or with the validity of our cause, but if one of them goes off the rails they should all take responsibility and, at the very least, resign. At its most ludicrous this phenomenon means that our bombs and bullets are entirely justifiable but they are a bunch of terrorists and murderers. At a time when Sinn Fein are in the news for their success at the ballot box rather than via the bomb its another reminder of the rule that says our friends are freedom fighters and never cold-blooded gangsters and killers.
The BBC has managed to be held to be biased against both left and right at the same time. If they were to include every item that someone somewhere considers to be important every bulletin would last all day and all night, but they are, like all news outlets, perpetually touting for business and will concentrate on the sensational rather than the mundane. Man Bites Dog is news, whether the man represents Extinction Rebellion or the Brexit Party. Sinn Fein are no longer linked to the IRA as they were but it didn't help their cause when celebrating candidates were caught singing Come Out You Black & Tans. Sure, it's a great rebel song but it was inevitable that the part they were shown to be singing was the bit that goes
Tell her how the IRA made you run like Hell away
From the green & lovely lanes of Killeshandra.
You could criticise the BBC for showing that bit rather than the first verse but then again the SF candidates could have sung something else, or nothing, and then there would have been nothing for anyone to complain about. Likewise it's a bit rum to moan that they didn't name SF as the "winner" of the Irish General Election when they only got 24.5% of the national vote and will have to go into coalition with a more right wing party in order to form a government. No news outlet can please all the people all the time, especially when we are all so resistant to accepting any evidence or suggestion that does not support our own opinions and mores. Among the things we've been told during our adult years by representatives of organisations that just could not face the truth are that there was no ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, no bombs that fell on Serbia killed innocent people, Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction, Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist, Tommy Sheridan never attended swingers' clubs but was the victim of a conspiracy, women can't be raped unless they want to be, the world is flat/only 6000 years old and the Birmingham 6 were guilty all along. I knew a retired policeman who seemed to be a perfectly normal and reasonable person except for his refusal to accept that any innocent person had ever been sent to prison for a crime s/he had not committed. As far as he was concerned the Birmingham 6 and Guildford 4, the Maguire family, Stefan Kiszko and the Carl Bridgewater 3 must have been guilty because the Police simply do not arrest or fit up innocent people.
The SO unashamedly supports Scottish independence but, should Alex Salmond be found guilty of sexual offences against women next month, I shan't argue that they must all have made it up as part of a Unionist conspiracy. I can add here that expressing this opinion has led to my being called an English spy by some or my more impressionable comrades. I am also a vegetarian, and I accept that Hitler was one as well because evidence suggests that it's the truth and it does not follow that all vegetarians are Nazis any more than that the whole notion is a lie perpetrated by the meat-processing industry. It really isn't, you know.
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Post by CC on Feb 21, 2020 16:57:13 GMT
The UK media are in trouble again. Yesterday a man in Germany perpetrated a terrible crime against members of the country's minority Turkish population; a crime for which, on the face of it, the killer himself was, overwhelmingly, to blame. Whoever supplied him with his weapon should also take a measure of responsibility, of course, and if he was radicalised by the racist opinions and arguments of others then they should shoulder some blame, too. It's not easy to understand why the media should have taken a bashing, though. When something is their fault they deserve a good trouncing but they don't seem to have done much wrong in this instance.
Some people have argued that "this is entirely about racism and not about mental health" but the two are not mutually exclusive. It's quite possible to be a neo-Nazi and to be mentally ill as well, and evidence suggests that the killer had severe paranoid tendencies. To mention his mental illness does not equate to condoning his actions; it's simply part of providing the public with a full and accurate background to the crimes. I've also seen and heard that if the murderer had been a Muslim the massacre would have been given more publicity, which is just daft; there has been a great deal of publicity in the media including the vigils and one-minute silences that took place throughout Germany in response. The killings are still being discussed in the papers and on TV today, and treated with appropriate seriousness. It would be entirely reasonable to say that if the events had taken place in the USA and the killer had been a Muslim Donald Trump and his supporters would have used it as an excuse for yet more racist legislation but that's a different matter.
It's also been tweeted and re-tweeted that women suffer from mental illness too but 98% of spree killings are carried out by men. Both of these statements may well be true but it would be a fallacy to conclude that 98% of men carry out spree killings which is what the tweet seems to be trying to suggest, and is the way some have chosen to interpret it. The vast majority of men do not massacre people. What seems like a fair point actually just amounts to bringing a spurious argument into a tragedy and trying to make capital out of it. It would be just as valid, and equally pointless, to say that both men and women get flu and go to bed but women are more likely to read Take a Break and Chat. It doesn't follow that all, or most women read rubbishy magazines any more than it would be fair to conclude that no men read them.
It was not a man but a woman who outraged Question Time viewers last night with an ignorant racist rant from the audience, which indicates that gender is not a particularly important factor in whether or not an individual is an ignorant racist. On this occasion, however, the BBC does deserve criticism, not only for allowing the said racist to continue her diatribe unchallenged for a minute and a half but then to tweet a film of the rant and invite comments, as if the contributor's appalling xenophobia were in some way as valid as arguing about tax thresholds or the price of beer. To give so much publicity to someone whose opinions represent the lunatic fringe of political ideology, on the very day of the Hanau killings, was stupid and the BBC should stop trying to justify what seems to be a continual policy of treating all opinions expressed on QT as equally valid whether they are backed up by evidence or not, and regardless of the possible consequences. It could have been the mainstreaming of such bilge that helped turn the German racist into a killer. I can think of at least one couple of my acquaintance who would have been nodding along to the audience member's words and thinking "Quite right, love. It's about time someone had the guts to say it."
Nothing happens any more without it being somebody's fault, so someone has to be blamed for the suicide of a TV personality last weekend. Social media users are blaming the tabloids, who are in turn blaming social media, and meanwhile no lessons have been learned. The scramble to show us "the last photograph of Caroline Flack" tells us that the intrusion into her life which probably pushed Ms Flack into her final desperate act is going to continue, after her death, till every drop of publicity has been squeezed out. As well as blaming each other, the press and the Twitterati also have it in for the Crown Prosecution Service, because while, normally, domestic violence should always be taken seriously and prosecuted in order to deliver a strong message to alleged perpetrators, these principles don't apply to TV celebrities.
"It's not our fault" say the Sun, who splashed photos of the interior of Ms Flack's house and pointed cameras at her every time she put her head out of the front door, and "it's not our fault either" say the readers who only bought the paper so they could enjoy looking at those very pictures. "We are not to blame" cry the ghouls who lapped up every little detail, whether true or false, about Ms Flack's relationship with her boyfriend and shared mean-spirited, ill-informed comments on Twitter, Facebook and all the rest. There's nothing sells papers and magazines like schadenfreude, and the sheer joy that Ms Flack gave to so many by being arrested and sacked from Love Island is now being repaid with a torrent of insincerity. This week everyone loved her, and everyone is deeply concerned about mental ill health, or at least everybody was so before a neo-Nazi with a psychiatric illness ran amok with a gun in Hanau.
EDIT
So, it transpires that the ranter on last night's QT was pictured last year, holding a placard and shouting at a "Free Tommy" demonstration. Either the producer doesn't bother vetting its audience, or, which is worse still, deliberately chooses hate-filled ignoramuses and then makes sure they get to have their say. Should there be an increase in hate crime in the UK this weekend someone connected with the programme should be held to account. Firstly, the racist should not have been invited; secondly, she should not have been chosen to speak; thirdly she should have been stopped after a few seconds when it became clear she was spouting offensive rubbish and fourthly she should not have had her diatribe put on Twitter. Finally, an apology rather than a pathetic excuse would have been appropriate.
In this instance, playing the Blame Game seems fair and reasonable. That's our licence money they are spending on a show that happily broadcasts racism, folks!
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Post by CC on Feb 29, 2020 17:35:07 GMT
Shamed film director Roman Polanski won the César award - the French equivalent of the Oscar - yesterday for his latest film, An Officer and a Spy. He was named Best Director, causing many women in the audience to walk out in protest because Polanski has never returned to the USA since 1978, when he pled guilty to having sex with a 13 year old girl and fled to Europe. Polanski didn't turn up for the ceremony because he knew he would be subjected to an angry demonstration. He is now 87 years old.
Polanski has directed many films and won several awards since his disgrace and exile. For 40 years there was little or no protest against him and he was welcome at award ceremonies but in the age of #MeToo he is now persona non grata. There's no doubt that the crime he committed was a serious one, that the girl involved suffered, and probably still suffers mental trauma and that he deserved to go to prison, and yet a good defence counsel would no doubt point to extenuating circumstances. The young Polanski saw his father arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw, his mother died in Auschwitz and then, in 1969, when he was famous and living in Hollywood, his wife and unborn child were hideously murdered by followers of Charles Manson. None of this gave Polanski the right to rape young girls but it might explain why some of his moral standards were different to the norm.
The next question is whether someone's bad behaviour means we should deny their place in artistic history, and there are serious double standards around this particular issue. Gary Glitter wasn't blessed with great talent, which didn't help when he was convicted of paedophile offences. His records have been deleted from playlists, as have those of the Lostprophets on account of the crimes committed by their lead singer Ian Watkins. This is unfortunate for the Glitter Band and for the other, innocent, members of Lostprophets who have lost out on the royalties which would have been theirs but for their front men's offences. Michael Barrymore has never retrieved the career he lost when a man drowned during a party in his swimming pool, Chris Langham has more or less disappeared since being found guilty of child pornography offences and the very mention of Jimmy Savile's name has people spitting in anger. Kevin Spacey might as well retire because no-one wants to act with him anymore. And yet...
...Joe Orton's plays are still popular even though he used and abused Arab rent boys and went on holidays with Kenneth Halliwell for that very purpose. Wagner's music has survived his anti-Semitism and Eric Gill's sculptures the revelation that he had sex with his daughters and his dog. Michael Jackson, Jimmy Page and Bill Wyman all had sex, illegally, with teenagers and a woman has revealed that she had sexual intercourse with beloved late DJ John Peel when she was 15. Leslie Grantham was sacked from EastEnders for lewd behaviour even though the fact that he was a convicted murderer had not prevented him getting the role of Dirty Den in the first place. Phil Spector is in prison for shooting and killing Lana Clarkson but his Wall of Sound records can still be heard on the wireless. Boy George was convicted in 2008 of abducting a man, handcuffing him to a wall and beating him with a metal chain and yet is now considered a National Treasure. John Lennon and Ringo Starr both admitted beating up their first wives. Frankie Boyle is back on the BBC in spite of never having apologised for the misogynistic remarks and shameful comments about disabled people on which he built his career.
So, whether or not someone's work is or is not deleted from history seems to be arbitrary.
None of that detracts from the validity of #MeToo. Obviously, post-Harvey Weinstein women have said Enough! That's entirely fair and reasonable, especially in a world where the casting couch has obviously been dominant for so long and far too many women have had to do things they hated in order not to be rejected from roles or denied a career altogether. Polanski's case is different from Weinstein's in that his offence was against an ordinary girl rather than a list of aspiring film stars, and perhaps given the unfortunate events in his life he should be cut a wee bit slack, but I'm well aware that many people won't and don't agree. When it emerged that Jo Cox's widower Brendan had been considered a sex pest by women when working at Oxfam, feminist writer Julie Bindel had no qualms about publicly calling him a bastard regardless of his having been a nuisance rather than a criminal.
But not everyone involved with #MeToo would show such a lack of sympathy for someone who became a single parent in the most appalling way imaginable when his wife was murdered in the street by a neo-Nazi. Like every other movement, #MeToo will have its own problems with fundamentalists, fascists and unrepentant zealots. Let's not kid ourselves by denying that, whatever our most dearly-held opinions and principles might be, some of the people we share them with are pretty unpleasant. I point to Stuart Campbell, otherwise known as Wings Over Scotland, as a good example. Just because someone is right about something once it doesn't follow that we have to forgive them all their trespasses any more than a single immoral act should necessarily be held against someone for ever.
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Post by CC on Mar 2, 2020 19:17:26 GMT
On the subject of whether someone's personality and behaviour should or should not prevent us from enjoying their work, I've just finished reading Women, by Charles Bukowski, who would have been 100 this year but died in 1992. Bukowski was a talented writer and remains a cult figure, by many accounts the best ever chronicler of American low life, but he was also an unreconstructed bastard, as Women demonstrates. What begins as an interesting tale of a doomed love affair turns into a sordid catalogue of sexual encounters with groupies and numerous drunken misadventures. By his own account he seems to have twice raped one of the young women who were so enthralled by his celebrity that they pursued him for sex even though he was a generation older than they were as well as being smelly, physically unattractive and obnoxious.
I've never understood the mania for celebrity sex that would lead someone to dump his/her boy/girlfriend in order to spend a night with someone who stinks of vomit, especially when that someone is almost certain to write an account of said night in his next autobiographical novel. Right at the very end of the book Bukowski appears to have fallen in love with someone, and for the first time in the whole account turns down an offer of a fuck with someone who phones him up to offer herself. He appeared to believe that this small piece of self-denial should make us like him again. It doesn't.
The thing is, though, that the book is actually all about his surprise that in spite of his appalling looks and personality so many women wanted to go to bed with him. That he accepts his own character defects doesn't alter the fact, though, that he was a lousy human being or, another fact, that I plan to take his books off the shelf and hide them whenever any of our women friends come to visit.
He was a fine writer, though, when he wasn't bragging about drinking, fighting and treating women badly, and at least he owned up to being horrible unlike, say, Jack Kerouac, another selfish drunk who exploited people, especially women, as a matter of course. Kerouac's alcoholism eventually destroyed his ability to write; maybe he lacked Bukowski's awareness of his own shortcomings. Maybe not, Who cares, anyway? They were a pair of shits who would, undoubtedly, have seriously disliked each other and probably had an alcohol-fuelled fist fight had they ever met.
I still have their books on my shelf, though. I have performers on my I-Tunes playlist who are or were unpleasant characters, too. There must be a line somewhere; maybe I'd be boycotting Morrissey on account of his support for Britain First only I can't do that because I never thought he was much cop anyway. I can't dig out his records and throw them away because I've never owned any. I suppose in the end most of us do have that line that nobody is allowed to cross, even if they are dead; I just haven't discovered where mine is yet, although should Stranraer FC sign a new centre forward who is a member of the Ku Klux Klan I can definitely say I shan't be going to watch them play at Stair Park again.
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Post by CC on Mar 22, 2020 9:53:18 GMT
CV-19 is sorting out the baddies from the goodies. People who buy up supplies and hoard food and bog roll in their houses are universally condemned even though many of the complainers must themselves be doing the same thing, or the shelves wouldnae be bare of stuff. There was a survey carried out not so long ago; I can't remember the details but the strong finding was that most drivers of vehicles in the UK believe that their own driving is better than the average. We might be seeing the same phenomenon here, in which people believe their behaviour is better than average simply because they were too late getting out of bed and other panic buyers had stripped the supermarket shelves before they had a chance to do likewise for themselves.
Someone who buys 2 packs of 24 bog rolls will see someone else buying 3 packs and feel loftily superior, but that's still 5 packs gone, in a few seconds, that won't be there when NHS workers come off their shift.
Another set of baddies are people heading for their holiday caravans because they feel less likely to bump into people in the country and by the seaside than they would be in their cities. I find it hard to blame them too much for behaving the way refugees always do; taking to the road to escape something that might kill them. Aye, it's putting the local population at increased risk but there's nae need to take to social media saying things like this:
To anyone coming from London or Manchester, or Glasgow or Edinburgh, to isolate themselves in remote areas or communities in the Highlands and Islands... please fuck right off back to London or Manchester, Glasgow or Edinburgh. You are fucking self-centred bastards. Fuck off now.
That delightful message was posted on Twitter by Paul Martin. He comes from Leith, which was a heavily-populated township in Edinburgh last time I visited it and difficult to confuse with Ullapool or Dornoch. Replace "Highland and Islands" with UK in the message, and "London, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh" with "Syria, Libya, Egypt and Iran" and you have a tweet that Katie Hopkins would be proud of.
Political jibes have been aimed at the UK and Scottish Governments but they seem to be doing a decent job to me. That the NHS has been underfunded for years is true, and has led to a lack of beds and intensive care units, but in an emergency the advice has been sound and the measures taken by the UK chancellor seem appropriate to me. I'm a socialist who approves of Government intervention rather than relying on markets so I would be a hypocrite if I were to criticise the Tory Government for behaving like socialists. Both governments are doing their best to take sensible measures while not imposing totalitarian restrictions. Those restrictions are slowly coming about, but have been introduced sympathetically and as a measure of last resort.
Britannia Hotels, considered the worst hotel chain in the UK by Which? for the last 7 years, are a legitimate target after (a) sacking their already-underpaid staff at their hotel near Aviemore (b) ordering them out of their lodgings and into the cold of a Highlands March (c) sending out a teenager to deal with the media and (d) lying about it the following day by claiming it was all an administrative error. Well done, though, to Macdonald Hotel in Aviemore for inviting the sacked workers to stay there, and well done to everyone who has opened their premises to NHS workers up and down the UK.
Congratulations also to everyone helping out their neighbours and/or spreading love and good wishes via the internet or phone. Just as we'll remember who let the side down we'll also remember who shone during the emergency. In the latter category I'd like to include the people working in shops who are carrying a mad workload and somehow retaining their good humour through it all. I'd like to give them all a hug but I doubt that they would welcome one just now.
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