Drive-By Sympathy

Last weekend incredibly tragic news broke that a 19 year old girl had been gunned down outside a Blackburn supermarket in a drive-by shooting.

There were many notable characteristics about the victim. She was “beautiful, much-loved, bright, passionate, hard-working, and ambitious”. She was involved in charity work and was studying to fulfil her ambitions of becoming a solicitor. The one characteristic that overrode all of these however, at least in the minds of cynical and irresponsible ideologues, was that she was a Muslim.

 

24 Carat Goldblum

I’ve long enjoyed the work of eccentric actor Jeff Goldblum. The calibre of films he’s appeared in over the years is wildly varied but his stilted and quirkily emphasised delivery of even the most pedestrian and poorly scripted dialogue can render fodder like Independence Day reasonably enjoyable, despite the less than helpful presence of Will Smith.

Last weekend though, Ru Paul’s Drag Race – a garish reality TV competition about cross-dressing performers – became an unlikely vehicle for Goldblum to instigate a dialogue of actual substance.

 

The Gilding of Mehdi Hasan

If I were to write a list of things that could make life under a global pandemic lock-down exponentially more torturous, I doubt I’d have an imagination sadistic enough to conjure up the atrocities that have been inflicted upon us recent days.

First up was the news that the BBC were replacing Match of the Day with re-runs of Mrs Brown’s Boys: a bawdy and archaic cookie-cutter sitcom roughly as amusing as a cancer diagnosis in a Christmas card.

Next, a naked Madonna broadcasting from a candlelit bathtub full of rose petals, informing us from behind a mask of six figure Botox that we’re all in the same boat really.

 

Approaching Racism

“I’d rather punch 300 innocent people and 1 genuine Nazi, than punch no Nazis at all.” – Godfrey Elfwick

Stardate 2020 is in full swing and yet our primitive and tedious obsession with race and skin-colour trundles forward with grating obstinacy. Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle received something of a hard time in the media not long back since she and her husband announced some boring decision about their boring lives in a boring tone of voice that I’m too bored to go into. Almost inevitably this castigation of the young Duchess, we were told by “experts”, was motivated by the fact that she’s a black woman – this despite her being significantly lighter-skinned than I would be after a lunch-hour in a beer garden on a reasonably clement day.

 

Race-baiting with David Vance

One of the more troublesome aspects of social media allowing virtually anybody to appoint themselves to the role of independent journalist, is that unscrupulous propaganda merchants will eagerly take advantage of this unregulated space for the purpose of circulating lies and thereby furthering their own nefarious agendas. And without a virtually limitless capacity for research it’s sometimes hard to know whether the reports you’re reading at any given time are accurate and trustworthy.

 

Questioning Corbyn

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was interrogated by veteran interviewer Andrew Neil for the BBC on Monday evening in preparation for the up-coming general election, and the results were not pretty to say the least. In fact Corbyn’s performance was so car-crash appalling that conservative websites are simply using the full unedited and unannotated video as pro-Tory promotional material.

Far from the anti-establishment renegade, and breath of fresh air to British politics that his supporters invariably characterise him as, we were instead presented with a squirming and irritable supply teacher whose medley of equivocations, banalities, and routine auto-responses were indistinguishable from any other career politician you might care to name, save perhaps for his rare level of ineptitude and the visible frustration he allows himself to display over having his political positions questioned.

 

Rattling the Cage

Founded in 2003, self-described “advocacy group” CAGE (formerly Cageprisoners) first exploded into widespread public consciousness when the identity of notorious decapitation enthusiast “Jihadi John” was revealed to be their former client – West London I.T graduate Mohammed Emwazi.

In a swiftly organised press conference, CAGE Research Director Asim Qureshi addressed this awkward revelation, and in doing so spectacularly misjudged the British public’s appetite for insulting exhibitions of wobbly-lipped, teary-eyed pity for a man who’d recently sawn the heads off of eight innocent people in ISIS snuff-porn.