UKIP: ‘We’re Not Bigots, But…’

Did you know the floods were caused by gays
And immigrants jam the motorways?
That bigots need to be represented,
And maternity leave should be resented?
Don't let us see breastfeeding mums!
There's no link twixt crime and guns.
Bring back caning in our schools!
That Hitler bloke; he weren't no fool.
Incest follows if gays tie the knot!
Foreign medics are clumsy clots.
World war two was caused by Jews!
Breivik's thesis was full of truths.
Exercise stops you turning gay!
Slum-landlords are totes okay.
HIV? You got it on purpose!
The biggest waste is our health service.

We're not bigots, we just state facts.
We're not racist, we just hate blacks.
We're not tryin' to cause a big sensation;
Just workin' for a straight white nation.
—Daz

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Chapel Hill

Elements of this post have been bubbling up in my head for some time now. Well the bubble finally erupted to the surface.

I expect we've all heard by now of the murder of three Muslims, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. First and foremost, let me say that my thoughts are, as any decent person's should be, with the family and friends of Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. To lose three loved ones at the same time is tragedy enough. To lose them in such a fashion can only, I suspect, be worse, and to lose them at such a young age, with almost their entire lifetimes ahead of them, worse yet.

The murders were, ostensibly, over a parking space. I say 'ostensibly' because, frankly, I don't believe it. I thoroughly believe that such an argument may have been the tipping point, and may well go down as the official cause, but life, and sadly all too often death, is never that simple.

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Dear Bloggers: A Request

Here's something I'd like to see from my fellow bloggers. If abuse of any kind—violent, sexual, racial, child-abuse, marital abuse, bullying and so on—forms a major theme of any post you make, consider that it's highly possible that at least some readers will be interested in the topic because they're looking for help. I think, therefore, that it's a good idea to add a link and maybe a phone number to a relevant organisation, where such help may be found, to the end of the post. Obviously I can't tell anyone to do this, but I would ask you to consider it.
—Daz

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1750 Or 2014?

Trying to get some sort of post together, regarding the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, I've been somewhat hampered by time-zone differences and by the rapid nature of what's happened. Several attempts to write something have been scuppered by finding that a zillion other people, on Twitter, Facebook, and many, many blogs, have already said what I'm trying to say. Which wouldn't really matter if I were a US citizen, but a little-known blogger from the wrong side of the pond can't really make much of a difference, so merely repeating what those zillions say would be pretty damn pointless.

On the other hand, I do want to say something, even if all it amounts to is a bit of a fist-bump, as I put it elsewhere, of solidarity. Or maybe as one of hopefully many voices, speaking to racist authoritarians, "This is twenty-fourteen, not nineteen-fourteen. Shit you used to be able to hide from the occasional reporter with his Box Brownie camera, you can't hide from the camera-phones, the Twitter-feeds and the YouTube viewers. The world is watching you now, live and in real-time, whether you ban the official press or not. And we don't like the view."

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Curiosity And Juxtapositions

I was talking, the other day, to a chap who's a few years older than me and remembers the first landing on the moon. He also remembers another story which I've never seen mentioned before. The day before the astronauts completed their momentous journey, which represented the achievement of humanity's most cutting-edge technology, a man, John Fairfax, completed another journey using one of the oldest forms of transportation technology. He became the first person to row single-handedly across the Atlantic.

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Racism & Islam In The UK

I'm getting sick of people (usually not British, often American) throwing up the phrase 'Islam isn't a race,' as if it's a killer argument, when confronted by stories of British Muslims, or those who defend their alleged right not to be offended, playing the racist card. Not because it's wrong (it isn't), but because it fails to take reality into account and is, frankly, not fucking helping. I've seen many Brits try to explain this to Americans, and usually to no avail. Too many Yanks, even educated, progressive, liberal ones, seem to have some sort of unconscious idea that their constitution applies to the whole English-speaking world, and that all Western culture follows exactly the same rules and patterns that theirs does.

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