In Which The Author Attempts to Tackle The Many Challenges Facing Feminism In The Modern Era

Women, eh?

Discuss.

Pro-Democracy Iranian Killer Cyborgs From The Future Prove I Was Right Yet Again

Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran?

Dear God, I missed this piece of waffle from the Hitch back in July of this year, stumbling across it today by accident.

Some context - Hitchens' article was penned back during the anti-government protests in Tehran, when every UK and US-based bullshit-artist on the blogosphericals was busy painting his ballbag green in solidarity and waving it at a webcam in the mistaken belief that a glorious blossoming of Persian liberal democracy was imminent.

A reasonable summary of Hitchens' piece - A supposedly conservative group has condemned the Iranian government and I once spoke to an Iranian cleric who referred to the invasion of Iraq as a "liberation", facts which I will now use as yet another excuse for me to pretend that I have not, in fact, been absolutely wildly fucking wrong on pretty much every important issue in the region beyond "religious extremism is like, a bummer, man" for the past eight years.

Now, I can see Hitchens' points from two angles here. Firstly, he is undoubtedly far more well-versed in the political and theological traditions of the region and, were he to walk into the room this very second, would surely school me brutally with the fruits of his knowledge and experience. Therefore, his views on the subject deserve a certain level of respect and it is entirely conceivable that the ideological undercurrents of Iranian society are favourable to moves towards greater democratic openness.

On the other hand, bollocks on stilts. I fully expect to open the paper in 2019 to find Hitchens' name under the headline The Sucking-Off Of Sanjar - Did The Toppling Of Saddam Lead to The Esfahan Teenager's Behind-The-Bikeshed Blowjob?

He could lard the article up with anecdotes about Iranian teens responding to his questions by waving loose fists in jerk-off motions at him, plus some snazzy graphics depicting the pre-invasion Iranian blowjoblessness rate, then wrap the whole thing up with some half-assed maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon all Iranian teenagers will experience the gift of freedom's sookie platitude.

Some might think this harsh, but really - Hitchens went to Iran and all he found was a cleric who was delighted the Americans had fragged Saddam Hussein, and this is evidence of... Well, not a democratic revolution, that's for sure. Thanks to that whole Iran-Iraq War that killed about a million Iranians, they were wearing party hats and tooting little kazoos the day Saddam dangled. In terms of predictable outcomes, pro-invasion Iranian clerics are about as likely as stabbed Glaswegians on Old Firm derby day or champagne-and-caviar-canape sick on the streets of Edinburgh in August.

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Bonus Hitchens, for anyone who's disgusted by my crude sexual imagery - his most recent article is called Engaging With Iran Is Like Having Sex With Someone Who Hates You.

In a similar vein, reading Hitchens these days is like having your neck nuzzled by an amorous manatee while it slimes a clammy flipper up your shirt and assures you that it will totally respect you in the morning.

Update!: It's only just occurred to me how truly weird the having sex with someone who hates you analogy is here. Any psychologists who read me - and I wouldn't blame you for being here, since you must have a field day - feel free to interpret for the sane.

Tel Aviv Must Be Destroyed

I try to avoid taking a partisan line on events in the middle east, but after reading today's reports I can only come to one conclusion - we must attack Tel Aviv as quickly as possible, bombarding them with every weapon in our armoury in an effort to overwhelm their defence using the element of surprise.

It'll be a hard battle and the Israelis will fight to the last minute, but with a little luck we should be able to destroy them before they've even realised what's happening. We'll have to be ruthless and crush any resistance instantly and brutally, and we may even need to target certain key individuals who need to be taken out of play completely, but if we keep our composure we should be able to decimate the opposition and claim victory.

I'd play McGeady in behind MacDonald myself, but the manager is the unpredictable type and so prone to odd decisions verging on tactical genius that I wouldn't be surprised if he subbed on a terrapin at half-time and we still won 4-1 - we'll just have to see. Should be a decent game either way... On to glory, Bhoys!

Update! Curses, foiled once more, this time by a player named Lala. Being defeated by inferior opposition is never fun, but to be undone by a Tellytubby just adds insult to injury.

How Much Bullshit Would The Spectator Chuck, If The Spectator Could Chuck Bullshit?

"We went into a desert war in Iraq with Snatch Land Rovers and soft-hat tactics designed for Northern Ireland. By the time we realised the extent of this error, we had lost our grip on bomb-hurling militants and were effectively driven, defeated, out of southern Iraq.

That was the moment America woke up to the truth that Britain was now an empire with no clothes."

Thus spake Trevor Kavanagh in the pages of The Spectator, setting up what I suspect will be the incoming Tory government's grand narrative for how the nation managed to march itself into two catastrophic military clusterfucks and one horrifying financial disaster.

Want the short version? Here it is...

We wuz robbed.

The longer version is rather more frightening, being that because 1) Labour released the Lockerbie bomber, and 2) the British military fucked up Iraq and Afghanistan because it was underfunded, and then 3) the economy tanked because we spent too much on the NHS and Gordon Brown urged the bankers to take too many risks, THEN...

Britain is a nation in decline and the Americans Trevor Kavanagh hangs with hate our British guts.

It's difficult to know where to begin unpicking this ridiculous, risible horseshit. Let's leave the Lockerbie and the financial crisis stuff for another day, because readers' eyes are going to be bleeding by the time we've dealt with the military aspect.

Firstly, it's vitally important to remember that Fuck what Trevor Kavanagh's American mates think about any and all matters military.

Secondly, we must also recall that Fuck them right in the eye 'til their ears bleed. Thirdly, I think it needs to be said that We wuz robbed as an analysis of abject military failures has been the cry of practically every defeated force in history. It has a very recent pedigree, but in American rather than British society, and we should be very, very suspicious of commentators pushing that line today.

After all, Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly the first time that the American military, despite being the most heavily-armed and terrifying war machine on the planet, has wound up reversing itself out of an abject, calamitous bloodbath, grumbling that it never lost a battle and anyway, those damned pyjama-wearing farmers didn't fight fair.

There's a reason why our American cousins spent the seventies and eighties making boo-hoo movies about how much it sucks when a veteran can't even bang a Mexican hooker because he's been shot through the spine* and how much Vietnamese ass Rambo would've kicked, if only those goddamn pen-pushers and hippies had let him do his job.

I mention this because the idea that Iraq and Afghanistan have been heinous, horrifying fiascoes from the word Go because the government didn't cough up the cash for more boots or helicopters is sheer, smearing-your-faeces-up-the-wall-level insanity.

Consider this - the Americans spend in the region of six hundred billion dollars every year on defence, the same as the rest of the planet combined, and you'll notice that they haven't fared any better than our guys. Our enemies daren't openly show their faces by day or night because the Americans can vapourise them from a thousand miles away with mind-bogglingly expensive weaponry in the blink of an eye.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the only effective weapons the local psychos have to hand are garage door openers for setting off ancient mines and shells. We've got complete satellite cover, heavy armour and unopposed air superiority - they have the carbomb. Our armed forces outman and outgun them in every imaginable area bar pure vicious cold-bloodedness.

And Trevor Kavanagh - amongst others - wants to tell us that, with a bit more body armour and a few more choppers, we would've kicked Jihadist ass and retained the respect of our richer, better-armed cousins?

Man, that is some World Cup-winning stupid bullshit. Allow me to offer a more plausible theory on the situation.

If you look across the pond at the post-Vietnam hangover, you'll see that apart from weepy, woe-is-us movies, it produced one major political resource - wingnut idiots - in vast, vast numbers.

This happened because the American right wing spent thirty years telling itself that the Vietnam War was lost because some faggy news presenter went all limp-dick on national TV, and because of the damn longhairs, and because their brave boys weren't allowed to drop quite enough poison or high explosives on the country to convince the locals to stop fighting.

The idea that the war was an impossibly fucked-up and murderous mission that was unavoidably destined for sheer humiliating failure... Not so much.

Well, the Americans got everything they wanted for these new wars - funding, fanfare and all those pinko reporters kept off the battlefield - and it was still a brutal, horrendous debacle from start to finish, one that looks like it might finally tank the Republican Party into fruitcake irrelevance for good.

Here in Britain, however, there's an incoming Tory administration that might like to keep war on the table, just in case, but might have a small problem with the whole insane military adventurism turning to utter shit thing curbing the public's enthusiasm.

Who knows, what worked for the American right might just work here. After all, tying a tasty stab-in-the-back narrative to your political opponents worked a charm for Richard Nixon, and it never hurt anyone, much.

*Much credit due - Taibbi.

Whoever Fights Monsters...

...Should make sure that after they've pinned them down, there's still one guy left over to drive the stake through the fuckers' hearts.

Frank De Boer still looks like one of those wolfed-out Buffy vampires, though.

This Week's Faces Of Evil

And so to prison for the latest shower of slapstick suicide bombers, who at least managed to avoid setting themselves on fire and getting kicked in the balls by a baggage handler this time.

No doubt that'll be a great comfort to them as they spend the next several years staring at walls, mopping floors and discovering that You know, the Koran's a right good read and proper holy and that, but maybe Razzle isn't so bad after all.

Like so many before them, this particular gaggle of twats played right to the rulebook by recording suicide videos and getting caught red-handed, before demonstrating their hardcore ideological commitment to their cause by pleading not guilty and trying to wriggle out of the charges. Not clear what religious edict it is that says Thou shalt throw thyself upon the mercy of the court like a gaggle of wailing, weepy wusses but no doubt some hook-handed loon will be able to think up a good excuse.

That's not what's caught my eye today though. I don't mean to be nasty, but all I'm saying is, take a look at this joker...

Now, I don't like to draw conclusions about people based upon their appearance, but I'm willing to make an exception for convicts and the only fair summary is surely Johnny No-Stars, Clean-up on aisle eight! Clean-up on aisle eight, Johnny No-Stars!

That was Assad Sarwar, and there's nothing wrong with either looking like or being a moron. Problem is, I'm seeing a pattern developing here - check out the boat race on Benny Hill bomber Muktar Said Ibrahim*...

Again, decent people don't judge a book by its cover, but if Ibrahim's face was a book, it'd be Pooh Goes To Plopland and the reader would require crayons. But that's not all - below, we have shoe-bombing laughing stock Richard Reid...

...I could go on and on.

I've been thinking this through, and I've come to the the amazing realisation that Al-Qaeda are working on the Father Ted model - one schemer, one blubbery drunk and one ignoramus. Obviously, the schemer does the plotting, the drunk builds the bombs that don't go off and the idiot is in charge of fucking everything up beyond belief so that the lot of them spend the next two decades fantasising about virgins in a prison cell.

I can just see scheming one explaining to the idiot how these painted harlots are small, but the ones at Tiger Tiger are far away, while the drunk sits in the corner shouting Arse! Vorgins! Cretinous plans for mass morder! at the television.

That would leave obliterated Pakistan-dweller Rashid Rauf as some kind of beardy Bishop Brennan, forever sweeping into the room roaring and demanding to know why everybody is watching Hollyoaks instead of martyring themselves. Come on, schemer Ted will say, I know we're supposed to love death more than life, but while Rauf shoots them a blazing, disapproving eye**.

Anybody got a number for MI5? I think I'm onto something here...

*The Cue Yakkety-Sax 21/7 bombers, as a Viz reader pointed out, should really have struck on the twenty-fourth instead. The 24/7 bombers sound like they're ready to strike fear and terror into the hearts of the populace at their convenience.

**Literally A blazing eye singular, if it's Abu Hamza. It's an old gag, but the authorities really wasted their time prosecuting the hook-handed cyclops when they could've just made a crocodile swallow a clock and had it chase that lad all over Finsbury Park.

We'll Meet Again... And Again... And Again, Ad Infinitum

I won't deluge you with a blizzard of links, because I think this thread at Socialist Unity and this article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft neatly summarise the point I'll be trying to make, i.e. that the mere mention of World War II is enough to make people lose their damn minds.

This week's seen the Mail jerking off over grovelling apologies from German Chancellor Angela Merkel (born 1954); semi-hysterical bedshitting over the Putin/Medvedev whitewash double act (Russian politicians in "self-serving lies" shocker) and wild alarm at Nixon-wingnut Pat Buchanan's revisionist history.

All of this is basically the background noise of British existence, with constant teary-eyed panegyric on the glorious dead and endless TV repeats of The Nazis - History's Most Evil Bastards. The iron rule of international sport is that the British will turn in a flash from reasonable people into snickering seven year olds, and commentators can never resist getting in on the act with snotty comments about the French football team's poor defending and the Germans' fierce aerial bombardment etc.

I mention all this because I'm currently reading Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, which I picked up specifically because it caused paroxysms of spluttering outrage from some the country's biggest bellends. It's a series of sketches and extracts from journals and newspapers of the time, all aimed at making this central point - World War 2 was one long, grinding atrocity in which all belligerent parties bent much of their power to exterminating civilians.

The individual points that have so enraged the patriots are, in short, that 1) Churchill was a war-mad nut who popped boners for saturation bombing of civilians; that 2) the allies were pretty much indifferent to the plight of the Jews, and that 3) avoiding total war might've caused less deaths than the total war that resulted, my take on these being 1) True 2) True and 3) Maybes aye, maybes naw, and unprovable anyway.

I think this is a representative example of how people react to the suggestion that the allies weren't shy about rubbing out thousands of innocents and that WWII wasn't the bestest and most moral war EVAR.*

Now, I've spent much of my life reading rah-rah histories of the period and watching nostalgic hokum like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. I have a damn good grasp of the era and I can be trusted to consider the opinions of pacifists and draw my own conclusions; I don't need to be protected from dangerous, national-myth challenging opinions by a gaggle of angry idiots.

And it's the challenging of national myths, not whether Lord Halifax said (x) to (y) in 1938, that is the problem for some people here. Well-reasoned consideration of our history often leads to uncomfortable conclusions, which may have knock-on effects on present and future policy, and that just Can't Be Allowed To Happen.

Would anyone like an example? No doubt it would be possible for us to spend eight years in Afghanistan blowing up civilians and psychos alike, losing two hundred soldiers while mouthing stock phrases like bad things happen in wars and we will not give in to totalitarianism that threatens our way of life without all the pom-pom waving WWII nostalgia.

One major difference between the two conflicts, of course, is that the Prime Minister didn't need to take the podium in 1947 to explain why we were fighting in the first place. Gordon Brown did it yesterday.

*If you want to test how deeply embedded this stuff is in our society, try saying Nuking Hiroshima was a war crime or Allied bombing killed more French civilians than the Blitz killed Londoners to friends or family members. Oh, and be sure to stand well back.

Let's Take Some Pride in Our Achievements, People!

Yet more disgraceful trashing of Great British culture by the MSM this week, as the BBC announces that the UK's teenage girls are the industrial world's worst drunks.

I'm long since past the point where these relentless assaults on our national character annoy me, so I'll just challenge any BBC journalist to visit a random bar in, say, Copenhagen, and track down five sixteen year olds who will even stand their round, let alone down three bottles of Smirnoff Ice in a minute. Best of luck, Beeboids!

And yet here in Scotland, the boozers teem with teens who will not only put their hands in their pockets on cue, but will match you nip and pint 'til closing time, then clatter you round the puss with a bottle of cider and fight the police like the Tasmanian Devil all the way to the back of the van.

Worst drinkers? Beat that, Belgium!