Census: Dawn Of The Bottom Inspectors

The next UK Census may include questions about sexuality and gender identity for the first time, after the government said questions must be added...

Pink News.

Why?

What business is it of the state who anyone's shagging?

George Orwell must be spinning in his urn.

PS The only journalist to find this sheet-sniffing state snoopery sinister was Andrew Pierce at the Daily Mail.

Tim Cook: Bad Apple

Cycling home in Alabama one day on his new 10-speed bike, an adolescent Tim Cook saw a large cross in front of a house he knew belonged to a black family. Gathered around the cross were members of the Ku Klux Klan in conical hoods and white cloaks. Cook heard the sound of breaking glass — perhaps a stone hitting a window — and instinctively yelled: “Stop!” One of the Klansmen raised his hood and Cook recognised him as the deacon of a local church.

Startled, Cook rode off, but he says he has never forgotten that scene. The incident goes some way to explaining his obsession with “doing things right” and his distrust of authority figures. The Apple chief executive, now 55, is the first head of a Fortune 500 company to come out as gay and has bluntly told investors who fear the company’s environmental policy may adversely affect its profits to “get out of this stock”.

Now he is embroiled in a stand-off with the American government. A federal court has ordered Apple to help the FBI break into an iPhone used by one of the pair who launched an Isis-inspired gun attack in San Bernardino, California, in December, killing 14... 

Little was known about Cook’s private life, so it was a surprise when he outed himself in an essay for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014. He said if someone struggling to come to terms with their sexuality was helped by hearing the chief executive of Apple was gay, it would be a fair trade-off for his privacy.

“Part of social progress is understanding that a person is not defined only by one’s sexuality or race or gender,” he wrote. “I’m an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic and many other things.”

Apple, under his stewardship, was taking a lead on equality and human rights, he said. Tell that to the FBI: the fight over privacy isn’t finished yet. 

Sunday Times.

A positively glowing profile that elevates Mr Cook to near god-like status, glossing over any bad stuff Apple's done.

I love how the gay media will report on almost anything Apple does because CEO TIM COOK IS OPENLY GAY, even if it has nothing really to do with him, never mind with him being OPENLY GAY, but all their well-documented evil business practices are dropped down the memory hole.

Gilbert & George: God Save

From an excellent profile of the chuckle brothers in the Daily Telegraph.

PS I thought I'd made a BRILLIANT point before about G&G as Tory anarchists, by way of Edward Said, George Orwell and Jonathan Swift, but this seems to have been lost in the ether.

As you were.

Gay: So It Goes

Frank Kameny archive.

Reclaiming words, when done effectively, is all about power, Thorne [Tony, curator of the Slang And New Language Archive] tells me. “Reappropriation of ethnic and sexual slurs starts as an act of bravado by a few of the oppressed, then may become an empowering mechanism for a much wider community. It’s pleasingly ironic that those discriminated against have learned the Orwellian trick employed by the state and the establishment of hijacking everyday language (as in ‘doublespeak’) for their own nefarious purposes. Alternative discourse ousts and replaces the discourses of power.”

Paul Baker, professor of English Language at Lancaster University, agrees. “Control language and you control the society,” he says...

Reclaiming words is not a new phenomenon. Thorne points out: “Reversing pejoratives has a long history going back to cavalier, sans-culotte, Tory and Whig.” [Or Christian or communist - FB]. 

Modern reclaiming has had mixed success. He says: “Recently such terms as slut, gay and ginger (and to some extent nerd and geek) have been rebranded – perhaps with a tinge of irony.” As someone who has been all five of those things, I can safely say that some have been better reclaimed than others.

Paul Baker says; “Queer was reclaimed by academics and activists in the early 1990s. There was a shouty defiance about queer too – it wasn’t just pride, it was political activism and opposition to homophobic government policy like section 28. It was a disruptive and anarchic response to conservative forces at that time. But in reality very few people actually engaged with this wider ‘anything against the normal’ meaning of queer.
 
“That’s one of the problems with reclaiming concepts: not only do you have a set of people who don’t understand that the word has been reclaimed in the first place, so they continue to use it in the older negative way, but you can also have different understandings of what the reclaiming actually means. And even if you’re in on it, you still may not want to participate.” We are seeing a similar thing play out now with the word “gay”...

Gary Nunn, in his monthly Guardian blog, Mind Your Language.

Note the irony of how quickly 'queer' became re-reclaimed; it's now usually used as an empty signifier of 'radicalism' by homosexualists who are about as radical as a wobbly pink blancmange.

Fagburn wonders if the word 'gay' - which has been reclaimed as a pejorative - will eventually go the same way as 'sod' and 'bugger', and become completely detatched from its homosexual meaning.

PS The UK release of the documentary Do I Sound Gay? 'inspired' a discussion on Woman's Hour today, Is there a gay dialect? (!), where Lucy Jones, an assistant professor of sociolinguistics, made the incredibly silly claim that polari was used as a code - no, it was just slang. If  'academic experts' just repeat nonsense they Googled and don't get picked up on it, no wonder we are doomed...

Daily Mail: Sorry

Daily Mail.

With the help of the BBC’s Panorama this week, the full evil lunacy of the child abuse and murder conspiracy allegations relating to Dolphin Square, Elm House, Leon Brittan, Ted Heath, Field Marshal Lord Bramall etc is now emerging. There is a long, long way to go, however, before the names are properly cleared and the police have apologised for their disgusting behaviour. There also needs to be a long list drawn up of those in public life and the media who gave credence to these cruel fantasies. The behaviour of Tom Watson MP puts him in the same class as Titus Oates, Noel Pemberton Billing and Senator Joe McCarthy. Many of us tut-tut that Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party, but it is far more shocking that its deputy leader is Mr Watson.

Charles Moore's Notes, The Spectator.

Post-Leveson score-settling from the Labour-bashing Mail and Moore?

Well duh, but this sorry, shitty episode shows the man is a power-crazed bully.

Oh. And erm Richard Littlejohn also hates the 'Nonce Finder General'...

I thought Orwell once wrote something along the lines of, 'Something is not necessarily false just because it's appeared in the Daily Mail', but I can't find it.

So can you just pretend he said it and nod sagely?

[Edit: And similarly, an accusation isn't necessarily true just because it's made against a public figure you despise].

Noam Chomsky: On Power And Ideology

Even Chomsky has bad hair days.

The role of concentrated power in shaping the ideological framework that dominates perception, interpretation, discussion, choice of action, all of that is too familiar to require much comment. Tonight I’d like to discuss a critically important example, but first a couple of words on one of the most perceptive analysts of this process, George Orwell. 

Orwell is famous for his searching and sardonic critique of the way thought is controlled by force under totalitarian dystopia. But much less known is his discussion of how similar outcomes are achieved in free societies. He’s speaking, of course, of England. And he wrote that although the country is quite free, nevertheless unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. Gave a couple of examples, provided a few words of explanation, which were to the point. 

One particularly pertinent comment was his observation on a quality education in the best schools, where it is instilled into you that there are certain things that it simply wouldn’t do to say - or, we may add, even to think...

Lecture given to the New School, New York, Saturday. Via Democracy Now!

And here's a Jacobin interview on Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Syriza and the prospects for radical change.

PS Now seems a good time to revisit Fagburn and Uncle Noam on US/Cuba.

Cliff Richard: Just A Brief Message

Sir Cliff's Facebook page.

Needless to say Fagburn is #TeamCliff.

'When I see an actual flesh-and-blood Cliff Richard in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.” George Orwell.

Owen Jones: The Establishment

The Guardian today publish an exclusive extract from our Owen's latest book, The Establishment, about how the political, social and business elites have a stranglehold on the country.

Sounds good, Jonesy. 

Thankfully, it seems Penguin are not going with the original front cover quote from that ridiculous berk Russell Brand, a man with the political acumen of the Chuckle Brothers, who dubbed OJ; 'Our generation's Orwell'!

This is about 

In his weekly Guardian column, Owen writes; 'The confines of acceptable political opinion are narrow and zealously guarded, and those presented as outsiders are actually the establishment in undiluted form.'

How true, Owen, how true...

PS Did 38% of Guardian journalists go to Oxbridge? Were half of leading newspaper journalists privately educated? Press Gazette.

Some people are so childish...

PS Is Ed Miliband protecting and courting Owen Jones? Dan Hodges' Telegraph blog.

Dan - Glenda Jackson's son, incidentally - once famously called Owen 'The Justin Bieber Of The British Left'.

Update: Statistics should provoke Britain's media into prolonged period of self-reflection. They probably won't, since 54% of top 100 media professionals went to private schools, Owen writes in Thursday's Guardian.

Owen neglects to mention that the new Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission's report also says that 47% of newspaper columnists went to Oxbridge.

Sex Crimes: The Week In Stupid

Schoolgirl given police caution after sexting topless selfie to her boyfriend - Daily Mirror.

Teacher banned for life after having sex with 17 year-old girl he met in a nightclub when he was 23 - Daily Mail.

87% of new internet users reject Cameron's porn filters - The Independent.

Journalist guest on BBC Breakfast says John Barrowman's gay kiss was 'inappropriate for children' - Pink News.

Police warn skinny dippers they could be put on the sex offenders' register - BBC News.

Ladies and gentlemen, this country is now officially FUCT!

Football: The Beautiful Game

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. 

At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face”.

There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.

George Orwell, The Sporting Spirit, 1945.

When I see a gay bar saying that they are showing World Cup matches a part of me dies.

Satan made us queer for a reason, you know.

A gay football fan should be an oxymoron.

Such men are traitors, quislings.

Come the revolution they will be taken out and shot.

I hope England lose, terribly.

#TeamIran for the win!



From Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the media.

Marriage: You (Still) Need Hands

The poll of 1,007 (presumably straight) people showed one in five British adults would not go to a gay wedding if invited – out of protest. The survey by BBC Radio 5 live also found men were nearly twice as likely to stay away as women.

Well, bully for them. There are probably millions of reasons why some Britons won't go to a gay wedding if invited: they could feel out of their comfort zone; they wouldn't know what to expect; they may cite religious reasons – and the most childish of all, straight men may worry that being surrounded by a bunch of gay men, drinking and having fun, could end up with lots of unsolicited 'offers' coming their way.

Or it may just be plain homophobia and bigotry.

Telegraph.

A much-loved classic from the gaymarriage stock photo library, here.

Strange, the Torygraph's vehement opposition to the Same-sex Marriage Bill seems to have fallen down an Orwellian memory hole.

Graeme Archer: Boring

Comment to a story by the Telegraph's incredibly boring token gay, Graeme Archer.

Graeme won an Orwell Prize for his blogging on ConservativeHome.

Yes, you read that right.

An Orwell Prize for writing for ConservativeHome!

If you think about it, that's quite Orwellian.

Russia: A Lost Chapter From Orwell

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

George Orwell, 1984.

Can't happen here!

Fagburn: 46

Just bringing out my inner flowery Dave Spart.

Camus died at 46.
Gramsci died at 46.
TE Lawrence died at 46.
George Orwell died at 46.
Oscar Wilde died again at 46.

But I intend to carry on for a bit.
(If that's okay with the rest of you, that is).
x

Russia: Another Country

Today gay America is mightily pissed over this video.
RUSSIA BOO HISS!!! etc etc.
Can you believe it!?
Nobody knows who made it - or if it was actually made by Russians, anyone could have thrown this old cobblers together on a laptop in half-an-hour. 
Although only an idiot would see one crappy little homemade video as being representative of an entire nation, it is offered up as further evidence that Russia today is exactly like Nazi Germany/Apartheid South Africa (delete as hysterical) - comparisons that are as morally obscene as they are ludicrous - and uniquely evil in how it treats gay people.
But its "arguments" - that homosexuals are carriers of disease, die early, want to rape your kids (that's why they want to adopt them), and are taking over the nation etc etc - are exactly the same sort of nonsense that American rightwing and/or Christians regularly come up with (eg the charming booklet below).
Indeed, many of its "facts" are lifted straight from this American Christian tract.
And it acknowledges a laughable "study" by anti-gay Catholic loonbag, Mark Regnerus, who claimed one in three kids adopted by gay men were sexually abused - again an American.
Perhaps then the video tells us as much about the sickness in the American body politic?
Just as how the new "gay propaganda" law so closely echoing Britain's Section 28 says much about our own moral low ground.
Can't happen here...

The video was "newly discovered" - and posted on YouTube (purely coincidentally!) - by the rightwing self-styled "liberal" gay blogger, John Aravosis, who runs AMERICAblog. - their touching patriotic slogan: 'A Great Nation Deserves Equality'.
Aravosis - "I got involved in gay politics 20 years ago in order to win the right to serve in the military, have a job, and get married..." - is the source for many of the scare stories about Russia's anti-gay "pogrom", along with Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, and Voice Of America - all are rightwing propaganda media funded by the American state.
They are usually obediently repeated, unquestioned, unchecked - for in the current climate anyone can get away with writing any old bollocks about Russia.
The credulity of so many people to these media reports is thoroughly depressing, but sadly - as a cursory look through this blog shows - this is endemic to our culture.
I wouldn't be surprised to read in the gay media soon that; 'PUTIN EATS GAY BABIES!', with the usual caveats; "allegedley", "reportedly" etc.
Aravosis is so angry about what's happening right now he's started a subsite, Gay Russia.- a veritable mine of disinformation.
(The only other hot topic he thinks deserves its own subsite is "Putin's puppet" Syria).
Note how the two other loudest voices shouting about the plight of LGBT Russians are the far-right Zionist porn mogul, Michael Lucas, and the equally politically dodgy HomoCon/NeoCon, Jamie Kirchick, who famously hijacked a live TV debate about Chelsea Manning to rant about Russia while wearing rainbow "suspenders".
(Dan Savage who instigated the Boycott Sochi campaign - against a vodka that's not actually Russian - is seen as a "progressive" - but his last major foray into international politics was the "lefty" and liberal-bashing, 'Say YES To War On Iraq').
Seems the gay right are still living out their Cold War wet dreams.

Anti-gay propaganda from America the beautiful

The latter act - or rather self-publicity stunt - by James Kirchick is surely the neo-imperial mindset defined - where someone literally ignores the great crimes being committed by their own country, and fumes about those of its power rivals.
As is the tendency by westerners to think they know best about what to do, while ignoring what LGBT Russians are saying.
(Note also how often neo-colonialist Orientalist rhetoric appears that Russians are "backward", "uncivilised" etc - ah, the thankless western gay white man's burden). 
Witness what happens whenever someone on a messageboard points out LGBT Russian groups have asked people NOT to boycott.
Simply stating this obvious and important fact can get you compared to a holocaust denier.
An oft repeated post is some variation on "This is exactly how Hitler started!" - as preposterous and offensive as saying any discriminatory legislation is the first step on the road to Auschwitz, and as silly as saying drinking Earl Grey tea will inevitably lead to heroin addiction.
[Edit: It's just as common to be accused of supporting Putin or being a homophobe, if you challenge or correct an untruth here].
The debate has become so debased - and so many commentators are so indoctrinated, so oblivious to facts - it often seems pointless to enter into any discussion.

Yesterday, John McCain, the Republican party presidential candidate, slammed the Russian bogeyman in a widely-circulated op-ed.
He - but of course - highlighted how; "They write laws to codify bigotry against people whose sexual orientation they condemn."
This is somewhat odd, to say the least, as a senator McCain has always opposed any gay equality initiatives.
Ever get the feeling you're being used?
Perhaps it was a joke, and he was being ironic?
For he also wrote; "[Putin] is not enhancing Russia's global reputation. He is destroying it. He has made her a friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed, and untrusted by nations that seek to build a safer, more peaceful and prosperous world."
Could any rational, intelligent, informed person hear an American politician saying any of that without risking dieing laughing?

Manufacturing Discontent

Sophisticated political satire.

It is heartening and moving that so many people in the west are angry about the oppression of gay people in Russia, and are expressing solidarity.
Though it often seems like an outbreak of whipped-up mass hysteria, akin to 1984's Hate Week, usually expressed in "passive activism"; actions that are pointless (clicktivism), and/or counterproductive (boycotts).
Or like a little outburst of over-emotional collective insanity much as that we witnessed when Princess Diana died.
All too often this does not look like some queer political re-awakening, but further proof of the depoliticisation of our culture.
But people can not be blamed for reaching for their pink pitchforks and torches when they've been subject to the sort of avalanche of media misinformation we normally only witness in wartime.
It is foolish and politically blind not to question why this has now become such an issue - warranting endless, blanket coverage, to the virtual exclusion of other countries' often far worse gay rights abuses - at a time when tensions between the US and Russia are at their most heightened since the Cold War.  
And it is obvious that the increasingly hysterical, hyperbolic and hypocritical "debate" has been hijacked, and is being used - meaning our struggle for gay rights is being used - as rightwing propaganda, by demonising a declared enemy in service to American hegemony.
USA! USA! USA!

Russia: Today

Gay hysterics in America protest Russian homophobia vs gay men in Russia who think it's all a bit dumb.

Hate Week (n.) week in which Oceanian citizens all attend rallies and parades to inflame hatred of Party enemies and heighten their efforts on behalf of Oceania. George Orwell, 1984.

Yes, I know Russia Today is part state-funded, so don't write in, but if you want to see propaganda at work ask yourself why American gay men are going mental over Russia, the big bogeyman, and Officially Declared Enemy of Uncle Sam, and not, say, one of the 70 countries where homosexuality is illegal.
Or protesting about their own country's 'special relationship' with so many other oppressive regimes that are down on queers?
Or demonstrating when the US keeps bombing, invading and occupying other countries?
Or why aren't we "Brits" boycotting American goods?
The most spectacular achievement of propaganda, of course, is when people can't see they live under a propaganda system.

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

Edward W Said.

PS First reader comment after Towleroad posted this video; "Tell that to the gay people that are tortured you stupid propaganda witch. AND most Americans feel that the USSR should have been bombed while we had the chance."
Not sure you've really thought this one through, dude.

Thanks to @Spitzenproudukte for the message from the guys at Grindr! This is madness.

Update: An Open Letter From Stephen Fry; "An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential. Stage them elsewhere in Utah, Lillyhammer, anywhere you like. At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world." Emphasis added.
He also compares Putin to Hitler.
Though comparing the introduction of a law similar to our own not-so-distant Section 28 to the Holocaust seems something of an exaggeration.
And does it mean the Nazis could have been stopped by a boycott of Schnapps and the Berlin Olympics, and an e-petition?

Rylan Clark: Camp X Factor Loser Wins - Cries Like A Girl

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

PS Don't get me wrong, I've watched and enjoyed some Big Brother and CBB in the past, and think it's wrong to condemn other people's pleasures; getting angry about a tellybox show like these is a sure sign of clueless apolitical twattery and cultural snobbery.
I just hate Rylan and his terrifyingly bad dye-job.
You do realise this is exactly how Hitler started?

Orwell Day: The Party

Today is the first Orwell Day.
There's a season of programmes starting on Radio 4.
Not sure what we're supposed to do beyond that.
George Orwell was a hero when I was a kid - partly because his were just about the only left-wing books I could find in Chalfont St Peter.
Not sure what I make of him now; Eton-educated, homophobic, state snitch, "a Trotskyist with big feet".
I think I kind of wanted to be him.
Though I knew I'd more likely end up like Winston Smith; alone, poor, embittered, alienated, writing angry streams of rubbish to no-one, crying gin-scented tears while the tobacco falls out of my Victory Cigarettes.
Funny how things turn out.

PS Think I'll read Homage To Catalonia, his only great work that hasn't been hijacked by the right. The fool. I'm not sure many people really listened to Orwell - we all think power-worship and propaganda are things that only other people fall for. While Animal Farm and 1984 are used to psych us up for Hate Week.

Update: Apropos of nothing much The Observer published this essay by Orwell on Oscar Wilde's The Soul Of man Under Socialism. It doesn't mention his disgusting personal life...

Remember: Kylie Minogue 11. 11. 11

Remember - Kylie Minogue.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day.
Remember.
Remember - You are a Womble.
And do not think in anyway.
Destroy all rational thought.
Think what they tell you
Is true.
Feel how we're told to.
Cause your actual Two Minute Grief is the the same as a Two Minute Hate.
We must be stupid, lest we die.
War is peace.

Riots: People Getting Angry = Good

"When I see an actual flesh and blood worker in conflict with a policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I’m on.”

George Orwell.
Carry on, as you were...