spEak You're bRanes

Perhaps realising that there’s more fun to be had in bitter flame wars, the Guardian and the Mail have apparently been running some kind of exchange scheme. While many of the comments on the former’s website have got progressively dafter and more batshit rightwing, the Mail’s very own Marie Antoinette figure, pensioner-mugging professional train-wreck Liz Jones can’t even lecture the poor on the benefits of a 13-day working week without being lectured in turn by a load of bloody hand-wringing lefty types.

But Lindsay still managed to find this tucked in amongst all that reasonable drivel:

We should bring back domestic service.
Full employment and self-worth and self-esteem for the servants (rather than relying on benefits), and their employers would have more free time to spend on worth-while occupations which require more intellectual creativity, such as politics, finance, etc, so benefiting the country as a whole.
alibongo, Dorset, UK

It is problematic, isn’t it, when the lower orders find themselves with rather too much leisure time, whilst the wealthy have so much on their plates they’re unable to focus on those areas of intellectual creativity – such as politics, finance, etc – to which they’re naturally more suited, having instead to think about dressing themselves and loading their own dishwashers and what have you.

Goodness, I’ve been pestered, I can think of no better word for it, I have been quite simply pestered by Mervyn King, asking – nay! begging – for a solution to all this economic crisis business.

“Dear Mervyn,” I tell him: “dearest, dearest Mervyn. I am sure that your task is every bit as bothersome as you say. However, I am quite unable to help as my mental resources are, at this moment, entirely focused on the hoovering.

“If only that grotty little man Gordon Brown had not rashly forbidden domestic service. The poor knew their place in the days before that ban. They were chirpy and good-natured, occasionally cheeky, but above all, pliant, and always grateful for a chance to address their social betters. ‘Cor blimey, half a crown!’ they would cry. ‘Fanks, guv’nor!’

“Now they belch and scowl and say things like: ‘GIVE ME YER FUCKIN WATCH NOW YOU POSH TWAT OR I’LL FUCKIN CUNT YER DICK UP YER ARSE!’

“I should wager a good twelve hours scrubbing the various congealed fluids from my breeches would soon bring them back to earth.”

It’s war.

Against a backdrop of global economic instability, the Tories have seized, with crushing, dreary inevitability, upon a once-in-a-lifetime chance to absolve themselves of almost all responsibility for anything that doesn’t immediately and directly generate profit. Bravely hiding behind hyperbole, public ignorance and weak opposition, they’re cutting the state down to its free-market skeleton, and we have to put up and stop moaning because apparently we have no choice and anyway We’re All In It Together.

The humanities provide the easiest target of all. For a start, no-one likes intellectuals at the best of times. And voters are hardly going to miss something when they don’t even understand what it’s actually for, are they? Get rid.

Nevertheless, the likes of Iain Pears are still meekly paddling against the changing tide, defending such fluffy abstractions as ‘ideas’, ‘understanding’ and ‘education’.

Good luck with that. Here’s what they’re up against (thanks to Tony)…

All the humanities train people’s minds in is in reading people’s unverifiable opinions about other people’s unverifiable opinions. Billions have been wasted in educating people in non-subjects like philosophy whilst our economy is crying out for people with the real knowledge and skills that you can only get from studying the sciences.

No matter how far the cutbacks to humanities go there will never be a point at which people start complain about shortage of philosophy or media studies graduates.
AManCalledJayne

And there we go. If you can’t eat it, milk it, rub it, build with it, kill things with it or masturbate over it, then it’s essentially useless, isn’t it? I get it now, and I give in. You win. You have at last defeated me with your dull wits and depressing lack of imagination. I bow my head in deference and submit the remaining few, miserable years of my life to the dull, prosaic, colourless world in which you and your straightforward ilk will have us all live: a world unencumbered by fripperies like education for its own sake; a world without art; a world without ethics; a world bereft of empathy, passion and joy.

Cunts.

Crikey found this story on the Daily Record website, concerning one “tragic businesswoman” who’d jumped to her death from the fourth floor of an Edinburgh hotel. That this tragic businesswoman chose to take her own life at rush-hour, the Record considers to be a very important detail. So let’s not forget that. Ever. On her headstone should be engraved:

Tragic Businesswoman, b. 1980 ~ d. rush-hour 2010

People often wonder what’s a decent length of time before it’s acceptable to start being honest about the dead. With suicide, you can safely bypass all that. It’s the point at which a life may be reduced to an inconvenience, and the usual rules are suspended. Your ignorant squawks of disapproval will generally be tolerated, sometimes applauded, even before rigor mortis has set in. And if anyone doesn’t like it you can lean on the mantlepiece, wagging finger aloft, and go: “blah blah selfish waffle waffle cowardly blah blah 3-mile tailback.” Others will sit around in plush armchairs, nodding sagely and occasionally harrumphing. An ornate Georgian clock will tick in the background.

None of this will make you any less of a cunt, but at least you’ll believe that you’ve claimed the moral high ground and eventually die with a clear conscience. And on that score at least, you’ll have won.

You’ll have fucking won.

i don’t get it why do people take their own lives

no matter how bad or dire your life is you need to say to yourself its going to get better

my heart goes out to the family
3inarowithinkno

Just remember that, when you’re standing on the edge of existence, deafened by the screams of a tormented world, nothing but bleak plains of sorrow sprawling endlessly before you, and behind you, the cracked shell of your own soul. Remember: it’s going to get better.

Goodness, what came over me? Sorry about that, vicar. Another slice of parkin?

im sorry, i have been severely depressed and considered suicide myself, but i would never have dreamed of doing so in a way that others are involved. i cant bring myself to feel sorry for the woman, who would put people in that situation to have to witness that??? what about the poor kids that would have been subjected to that??? or the poor people she may have took out with her??? sorry to her family, but im terribly sorry, she not getting my simpathy vote
amber78

There’s a certain breed of human being whose first instinct, when faced with a tragedy of some kind, is to start snuffling round for reasons not to give a shit. amber78 is a fine example. Even with the supposed ability to view the event through the prism of shared experience, she’s more than happy to toss that prism aside and say, “nope, I refuse to let this ruin one second of my day! And here’s why: blah blah selfish, etc.”

Perhaps they fear the weight of empathy will overwhelm them, and are trying to convince themselves more than they are the rest of us. Perhaps they’re too unimaginative to see such complex and emotive issues in anything other than purely binary terms. Perhaps they’re just arseholes. Whatever. They fill me with equal parts boredom and despair, and I wish they’d keep their opinions to themselves.

Is Britain now a more equal society, asks Have Your Say. Which seems like a pretty straightforward question to me.

You have Tony to thank for this.

I don’t live there yet I can tell you my observations and I can tell you my experiences from way over here in the USA. It is a shame that even though you look into the mirror and see yourself you can make less of others. There are things I wouldn’t do to my possessions or to myself. Possessions although they are not living things according to my expenses I would not harm them. No matter the loss of my knowledge about them, if they did not behave as I would want them to I would not destroy them.

BBC I do not agree with any cultivated society that draws from it’s self the substance of others to be less than themselves because they have been taught to by their society although it was not merited, but because the individual was taught such sanction abuse.

I do not succumb to such exploitation nor do I respect any such creatures belligerent abuses. Spoiled brats it would be best to be said nice but to be honest it is a limited subspecies response’.
KingLeeRoySandersJr

I never got no degree or nothing, and I certainly never received any formal instruction in the study of philosophy. So you can imagine my near-constant bafflement whilst reading Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals a couple of years back. Each time I thought I had some slender grasp on what the dead motherfucker was trying to tell me, I’d soon find myself having to twist round yet another convoluted network of logic pipes, only to re-emerge once more lost and empty-handed.

Trying to decipher KingLeeRoySandersJr’s jagged mentalogue is a similar experience. After several minutes of intense concentration, I think I spot a thin vein of coherence weaving in and out of the swirls and pointy bits, but then he starts talking about commanding inanimate objects to do his bidding.

Suddenly I’m back in the dark place with a sweaty, trouserless Kant. And the look in his eye suggests he’s about to act very much not according to that maxim whereby he can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Women. They’re everywhere, and they have been for a very long time. Many English people are women. And a lot of them are even white. How much bile, then, could Have Your Say possibly dredge up on them?

God, what a naive question. I hate you.

Because, as we all know, there is a common thread of animosity that unites everyone misguided or ill enough to actually use – rather than laugh at or weep over – HYS, regardless of their own peculiarities. And the object of that single unifying hatred is anyone or anything which doesn’t share the subject’s own peculiarities. A virtual nation united in its divisions. It’s beautiful, really, when you think about it. Almost as beautiful as the little sick I just done on my keyboard while I was thinking about it. Almost, but not quite.

So this thread on women in politics is nothing less than a masterstroke. It truly has something to offer everyone. After all, any man can hate women, whatever his nationality, colour or creed. And for the ladies? Just pick one from the opposite end of the political spectrum and bathe in her blood.

No women Plumbers, mechanics, technicians, engineers. Where is the quota? Women don’t want to do these jobs or do they? How can women expect to lead with confidence when they are missing from a huge part of Industry
Adrian O sullivan Belgium

Big in student politics, eh? Got a bit of pull within the union, have you? Tireless activist, are we? Well, you’re not impressing Adrian. Your energy, ambition, revolutionary social policies and macroeconomic strategy won’t wash with him, not until you’ve fixed that boiler.

It depends on whether we want quality or quantity, and whether we are willing to accept a possibly larger percentage of delinquent children if mothers in general are too involved in social or political activities outside the home.
Max

This is a classic response to the feminist threat: when a member of the weaker sex displays those first ominous signs of independent thought, simply appeal to the womb-brained bint’s irrepressible nature. But who’ll look after the children? Think of the little babies!

It’s a tactic with a proud tradition. It failed in 1918, it failed in 1970 and it’s failing now.

This will most likely get moderated and yet it should be considered because it is relevant.

Consider: Female President of the USA + THREAT + PMT = Armageddon
Peter Buck

In between albums, the esteemed REM guitarist is currently exploring a parallel career as Rory McGrath.

There are simply too few Women up to the job or are simply too Female biassed to be fair. Harriet Harman – the extremely anti – anything Male MP – is ONE case in point.

I challenge the Media to hold a Survey of the Political knowledge of any ordinary Woman living in any ordinary street and publish the Results.

The only acceptable exception was Margaret Thatcher – she worked for the whole Country – NOT just Women…
Tez

Tez. Blokey blokey diamond geezer Tez. What is he? Is he a confused egalitarian? Is he a razor-sharp social satirist with a finely-honed instinct for corrosive irony? Or is he simply a pigshit-thick Sun reader waddling down a provincial high street at 1am on a Sunday morning, chilli sauce down his top, pants round his ankles, pathetically tugging at his lager-shrivelled cock?

Women in power scare me. Have you ever asked a women in power something and it seems she says no just because she can? Also, i think that the public looks to men more for their leadership. When you think of some official, what comes to mind, a woman or a man?
Locke

Say what you like about Locke – and I have: I’ve been saying he’s an embarrassment to anyone who ever owned a penis; I’ve been saying those women would have likely cauterised themselves shut before ever acceding to his grubby requests; I’ve been saying he’s a weak, whining, slimy column of trembling flesh barely fit for doner meat – say whatever you like about him, but at least he’s honest.

There was a bit of natter last week after an Ofsted review concluded that half of all children considered by their schools to have special educational needs may have been misidentified. And understandably, for there’s a fine line between a child who genuinely needs specialist intervention, and a relatively mainstream child who requires a particular approach from their teacher.

But that’s the fucking woolly liberal pansy way of looking at it. Enter AtillaIsBack, who weighed in several times on a CiF debate with an agenda all of his very own. That agenda? Try to demonise as many Middle England bugbears as possible, without resorting to evidence, reason or intellect.

Thanks, Tony!

It seems to me that none of these children have special educational needs. Their brains appear to be capable of functionning perfectly. All this SEN stuff is a load of gobbledygook, to disguise the fact that they have not been raised properly by their parents. Basically their parents probably did not talk to them and play with them in the way normal parents do. In that sense the Cons are correct.

So what is the solution? First thing stop giving single mums houses. The first mum sounds like a perfect example of bad women being able to breed because it is all handed to a plate on them, whilst responsible people are barely able to afford rent let alone a family. Let them live with their parents.

Second restore discipline. They’ll soon learn, without the expense of paying for all these extra staff members. If they know that you can make their lives hell and physically restrain them if they misbehave/ act violently/ or disrupt classes, then they’ll soon sit quietly. Once they sit quietly they will learn quickly.

Another tool, would be to force naughty children to do daily PE if they misbehave. Tiredness is the best way to make children sit quietly. The exercise would do them good.

Another point I would like to add is how many of these SEN children come from immigrant families. If it is a lot, which would not suprise me, then it shows yet another reason why immigration is just a massive expense to the taxpayer, requiring “multiagency professional” where none were needed when every pupil was from the British Isles.
AtillaIsBack

Textbook. Jab an accusing finger at single mothers and the poor, and then insist the way to salvation lies in approaches both completely nebulous, like ‘restoring discipline’, and depressingly prosaic, such as ‘beating the shit out of the poor sods’.

But wait! Can immigrants also be shoe-horned into this? Fuck, yes. You’ll find Atilla bending over backwards to oblige there, in just about the most laboured way imaginable: “I have no idea at all if x is responsible for y, but if I find out it is… ooh!”

And another thing…

Also how can 1 out of 5 people have special needs? That seems far too high to me. If that is the case we need to change our whole economy, because these people are not likely to be productive unless we restore maunfacturing or stop letting poles take all the trades jobs.

Hence I think the true causes are bad parenting, poor discipline and teaching, and no doubt lots of pupils who can not speak English properly. There must be millions of immigrant children and children of immigrants in UK schools. But the government can not admit to the absolute millstone they are around other pupils’ necks so comes out with all the SEN guff. The same goes for what I call the children of the welfare state. Children of drug addicts and the like. Labour would not dare admit that the wlefare state is collectively lowering our intelligence.
AtillaIsBack

Labour? Check. Welfare state? Check.

I wonder who else we can implicate in this whole sorry mess?

Feminism and neo-liberalism together are to blame for this situation.
AtillaIsBack

House!

Should the government ask you for policy ideas?

I’m sure this is a proper dickhive of idiocy, but I spent five hours the other night trawling an entire Mail thread on Wayne/Jeni/Coleen, and quite frankly, I can’t be arsed having a decent rummage. Y’all will have to be satisfied with what Tony sent our way.

Anything thats of non use needs to be out.I have many ideas of how to save and prosper but its too much to post here.All men have minds and its not just those in charge who have great ideas.The public has men of great minds out there but they are unheard of and mainly have to expierience deaf ears by those who proclaim themselves as higher knowledge than thee.SO most ideas fall by the wayside and common sense is thrown out.Ignorance is of no shortage by those who have title.Most self serving and unwilling to take the publics input are put aside and scoffed at.This is the mistake of the ages and we as a whole are held back by decisions and ideas of these deaf ears and serve none but themselves or their parties.Mans ignorance attests to all this.No wonder we cannot move forward.
Michael

Common sense, and the people who eulogise it – is anything more depressing? Obviously, leave aside all the wars and shit, and the senseless brutality of nature, and the sheer futility of all human endeavour, and the fact that each one of us is ultimately alone, captive on a rock hurtling through a godless universe towards its eventual destruction, and all the other stuff. Put all that to one side, then ask yourselves: is anything more depressing than common sense and the people who eulogise it? Surely not.

Common sense is the artificial inflation of the value of meagre knowledge. It’s the intellectual equivalent of ‘having a good personality’. It’s the consolation prize for those too dim to achieve anything beyond remembering to breathe for long enough to reproduce. It’s the same level of earthy wisdom that deems modern art ‘crap’, pure research ‘a waste of time’ and Strictly Come Dancing ‘entertainment’. It’s the undentable armour of the stupid, and you’ll never catch them without it. You take it away from them, they’ve got nothing. They’re left naked in the laughing face of their own inferiority, with no choice but to confront the meandering pointlessness of their lives. Which is a lot to confront all in one go.

They cling to it out of fear. Pity them.

Nation gripped by scandal, Juicy Jenni, Coleen, football, blah blah. Slave to its nature, as a dog eats its own sick, the Mail tackled Juicy Jenigate last week in typical fashion, by publishing a bunch of ‘racy’ pictures accompanied by a bit of hand-wringing and finger-wagging. Which, you’ll note, required the talents of four writers.

But it’s the readers we’re interested in. And in equally typical fashion, their comments run the full gamut from patronising armchair psychology, through sanctimonious prickery, all the way to utter batshit mentalism. Some (most, probably) are simply horny. But almost all agree on one thing: ‘Juicy’ Jennifer Thompson’s most unforgivable crime is being, in their considered opinion, less attractive than Coleen Rooney.

Thanks go to Kris. Commence the unpleasantness.

Its the Beyonce generation ie do anything for money!!
Paul

Does Paul know something about Beyoncé that I don’t, or are his cultural references just very limited? Who knows? Who cares? I don’t. Next…

I hope she’s going to pay tax on that.
With the country’s finances as they are, earnings are earnings, and as her advertised ‘client’ probably avoids heavy taxes by using offshore accounts, it’s only fair she should contribute.
As she would be self-employed (sounds somehow wrong said that way), I suppose she should be able to charge for the pill, or whatever contraceptive measures she uses, BUT she should pay for the medical checkups to make sure she hasn’t caught any sexual diseases.
PeterH

Here we go. Practical advice from PeterH for any budding escorts out there, alongside an apparent suggestion that the service sector pick up any slack left by its wealthier customers’ creative accounting. Which is a great idea. Say next time Bob Diamond pops into the newsagents for some Red Mill, an HMRC official rushes in as soon as the transaction is complete and slaps a big old fuckin’ tax bill on the counter, as Diamond strolls out laughing with bits of corn snack fluttering from his mouth like golden snow. The government gets to pursue those unpaid receipts as aggressively as they like without scaring off the rich people, and the less rich get crushed in the process. Osborne’ll love it.

From the dawn of humanity, women have been the corruptors of men. Everybody remembers it was Eve who ate the apple and began the descent of humanity.
Jeremy Tapsill

Mrs Tapsill find the receipts again, did she?

Lets be honest if it wasn’t for his money he would have to pay to sleep with someone ironically …
Chris Butler

It’s true. I earn a pittance, and prostitutes only ever give me ironic sex.

Women must realise that men like both steak and burger. This escort is Wayne’s greasy cheap burger. Us men like greasy burgers once in a while but we always prefer the steak waiting at home.
Matty Hayes

If this comment isn’t bad enough by itself, you’ll shit when I tell you that Matty is really talking about an actual steak. He’s married to a steak.

The sick fuck.

how do the newspapers get all these pictures off facebook?
tom

Lust = anger
Jeff

tom, presumably, is after tips, but seems fairly harmless compared to Jeff, who I’m a bit concerned about, to be honest. If he isn’t already on some sort of register, can we please get him on one? Before it’s too late.

She has an exotic sexy look about her, but she is definitely not pretty or English looking,-maybe she realizes this and that’s why 1.)she feels the need to sell herself, despite not needing the money, and 2.) is obsessed with her appearance.

Shame on her, poor Colleen.
Miss B

And with unnerving clarity, Miss B has identified the real tragedy of Jennifer Thompson. Loveless childhood? Please! If there is a single, definable root to Thompson’s issues, it’s not looking English enough. If only she’d been born a bit less exotic and sexy, she could’ve had everything by now. Marriage, children, a £400,000 house of her very own husband’s own in which to pace back and forth, trapped, getting ever drunker and more desperate, scratching away at the paintwork until bittersweet freedom arrives in the shape of death or divorce… all of these things could’ve been hers. Damn that exotic, sexy look.

Some people just get dealt a bad hand.

Does indie culture, asks one reader of CiF’s ‘indie professor’ Wendy Fonarow, really offer its female participants sanctuary from sexual objectification and imposed gender roles? Or does it, in fact, offer nothing more than objectification of a less overt nature and an alternative but equally rigid set of expectations?

The indie professor responds cautiously. Outwardly, the indie scene might be less macho than others, but wankers get everywhere, and remain wankers even if they listen to fey guitar music. And just because one of them has swapped his pink Ben Sherman for a bootleg Dirty Projectors tour shirt, his raging cock issues won’t magically resolve themselves.

Another reader – SexyLikeLemmy, apparently – isn’t at all happy with this assessment. Not that he particularly disagrees with it. No, it’s more that he’s sick of journalists sullying the purity of his musical experience with their ‘political ideology’, such as that of expecting not to get sexually assaulted.

Thanks to Nicholas.

This is infuriating! Why am I surprised that a music writer would write an article completely void of anything to do with actual music. Why? Why do music writers always do this? What compels you to apply your own vision of how you think the world should be on every one else?

What is it with you fucking people? Why must you try to enforce some ignorant orthodoxy of your own on every scene that comes down the road? Why? Why can’t you just see music for music? Why must you always try to attach some political ideology to everything? It’s asinine and it makes YOU the only one running around trying to be the equality hall monitor.

Is that what it is? Where all music writers hall monitors when you were kids? Miss the power over the other kids?

Let me let you in on how it REALLY works out here in indie-heaven. Whenever a group of guys gets together to build a band they always have to take into consideration that they’ll get slagged off in the press if they don’t find some way to live up to indie expectations. Get it? Whose the real cultural enforcer? YOU PEOPLE!

Think about it, you got 2 guys trying to put together a band, they know damn well they BEST get at least one girl, if they can’t find one, they better get a gay friend in there some how. Who cares if they know how to play? That’s not important. What’s important is getting treated fairly. You don’t stand a chance in the press if you don’t play there little game. Fine, find some girl and stick her on the bass, just turn the fucking amp down live so she won’t screw everything up!

You writers know fuck all about music, what you do know about it thrusting your orthodoxy on everyone else.
SexyLikeLemmy

So there you go. The truth, if you can handle it, is that Kim Deal was only there so the Pixies could call themselves an equal opportunities employer, and Vivian Girls are probably some sort of bloody PC local government initiative.

But take heart, girls in bands. Because as useless as you are, you are at least marginally preferable to benders.

Thanks to Laura for discovering the splendidly named grumpovian, a proper, old-fashioned, mean-spirited bastard who, for reasons that remain unclear, was compelled to answer when HYS asked, how concerned are you about your sexual health?

Cease sex education immediately. What a lot of absolute tosh! In this world full of left wing do-gooder, liberal pansies, what do we need this nonsense for. We never had such a waste of time when we were at school, 50 or so years ago, and we found out what to do, as did the early cave men! We will be telling them how to use toilet paper next! Teenagers deserve what they get, as they have no moral scruples whatsoever, following in the footsteps of their parents. Don’t treat them on the NHS, but let them pay privately for their disease. Why should precious resources be diverted from real, and genuine sickness, to deal with the likes of some teenagers who, with their “sex education”, should know better!
grumpovian

Has grumpovian misunderstood the point of sex education, mistaking it for a simple how-to guide for youths so far out of touch with their essential natures in a digital age that they require step-by-step instructions in order to perform the most basic biological functions? Or is the raw, bleeding truth that he/she/it (I’m going to go with ‘it’) knows full well what sex education is, and simply wishes AIDS on the young?

If I wasn’t in a generous mood (and, as luck would have it, I’m not), I’d say the latter.