I’m delighted to note that this column is already turning into a Slog favourite on the same level as At the End of the Day. While I think their appeal is the same, each uses a different tactic: ATEOTD simply describes what is normal and natural, while TTC uses irony to illustrate nitwits drifting towards the abnormal and unnatural. But that’s probably just pretentious post-rationalisation. Truth is, both columns are usually a joy to write.
We open tonight with an ironic belter. Sunny Hundal is the man who recently observed, “Are we allowed to criticise or have a stance against a democratic decision, or not?” – to which the obvious answer is yes, just so long as (a) you don’t kill democracy by destroying HM Opposition in the process and (b) you don’t use anti-democratic methods to try and overturn that decision.
In Britain, the general rule is that the electorate decides, and then you give the decision at least five years to judge the right/wrong thing. Sunny’s approach is to work hard at overturning the electorate’s decision within 24 hours.
For those behind Owen Smith (eg, Sunny Hundal) the preferred approach to overturning is to find risible excuses for declaring opponents ineligible to vote….and blocking their viewpoint on Twitter. So I found this tweet from Pauline Lane deliciously apt:
The thing with Twitter is, once you’ve offended a pinched goblin, it’s like being Mr K in The Trial: the judge tells everyone else in the Court about the offence of which you’re accused, but you the Accused are not allowed to hear it.
From up to the minute we move down into the archives, with this Fraser Nelson tweet on Referendum Eve:
It’s a chart. It looks official, clever and authoritative. It says the Brexit camp is going to lose. It is wrong, by a factor of 75%. That’s not a margin of error, that’s a full bloody foolscap page of totally misleading information.
Here is a natural fact: the art of market research is discerning when someone is lying to the interviewer. The Establishment had so marginalised the Brexit voters, they were unwilling to admit to voting Leave in research. So busy were the Camerons and Campbells in marginalising, they created one of the greatest error margins in history.
Hahahahahahaha. That was me laughing in a thoroughly 52% and entirely reprehensible manner. For I am but an uneducated scumfascistbigotracist, and I don’t know how to behave.
I include this Bloomerberg thing as an example of execrable taste in exterior car colours, and truly ginormous silliness.
BMW is now being outsold by Mercedes, and it’s not hard to see why. Do you know anyone – or even anyone who knows anyone – keen to spend £750,000 on a car painted light bronze? If so, you are moving in the wrong circles, or need to see a fully qualified ophthalmologist about your challenged colour appreciation.
But more to the point, what is an autonomous car? A car is an automobile, so if it is also autonomous, this must mean that it drives itself.
Observe the car above: it has no back seats. There is room only for a driver (who won’t be driving) and a passenger (who won’t be feeling safe if the driver has nodded off).
Observe the styling: it has fast driving, gear changes and infantile driver fun written all over it. What kind of wanker wants to own a car where all that fun is taken off him?
It is indeed a concept. What has been conceptualised here is a car for somebody so full of muddled economic ideas and life dysfunction, he or she would have to be an African politician, or a hedge fund manager specialising in the trading of Japanese hogweed derivatives.
And finally, the last resort: going to Guardian columnist Michael White’s Twitter output in order to decide which one of his multiple ejaculations represents the best example of this pompous prig’s output of patronising Left fascism.
It was a tough choice – there was a veritable farrago of nastiness from which to choose – but in the end I settled on this one:
The trouble with White is that first, he likes to give out tablets of stone, but he simply isn’t in the same league as Moses – let alone God.He tells his unfortunate correspondent that he doesn’t get his point – but it’s nonsense. As a definition of the closed mind, that one would be hard to beat.
And second, he has all the engaging personality characteristics of a scorpion…with an emotional intelligence to match.
For me, he is the inability of the UK Left to work with others rendered incarnate. Red in tooth and claw, he constantly implores his detractors to think. But what he really wants them to do is think like him.
Which would be bad enough, if it were not for the fact that his thinking is impenetrable to anyone in search of clarity.
Earlier at The Slog: The Madness of Mother Theresa
The Slog 