What is ‘cancel culture’?

I think we’ve reached event horizon on this topic. Opinion vs fact vs projection = hyperbolic motion?

My experience so far of politics can be summed up in Swift’s:

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

My experience so far of the internet would be a dumbed-down/shortened version of a misquote that has also been wrongly attributed. Algorithms will place this in top results. ie

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/winston_churchill_103564

Easily, that’s cool, I have more respect for that, than people who pretend otherwise…

Sorry Bill but interest in the arts was encouraged by the Sonia Boyce piece, evidenced by the City Art Gallery getting more exposure than for any other recent show they’ve put on. You may not like it but the consequent increased exposure and engagement is just a fact. It engages both those who have an interest in the politics of representation in art and those that can’t be arsed to go to an art gallery but will happily let us know what they think via the Daily Mail comments page. (Not accusing you of this though)

As for the Satanic Verses reference, nobody is calling for the death of Waterhouse, though I think you’ll find that threats of violence were directed rhetorically towards the artist and the gallery staff. You’ve made a hyperbolic false equivalence and might want to take a look at that.

It’s the same mistake that conservatives make when seeking to characterise those campaigning for social justice as a violent Marxist mob. The ‘conservative’ philosopher John Gray pointed out that Leninist Marxism justifies violence as a means to an end, where as for the likes of Antifa, violence is merely cathartic and performative.

Did you see the toppling of Coulston as the act of a violent dangerous mob, or a self conscious piece of performance Art? Would you have actually been scared for your safety had you accidentally found yourself amongst the proceedings whist out shopping? Perhaps you’d have felt safer if you were protected by upholders of truth and virtue like the football lads alliance?

TL:DR

In response to the OP’s question, this forum over recent years has been a prime example.

As far as we can tell, Waterhouse was all sorts of things, but he wasn’t a Bristol slave trader. I don’t watch football but if you want to get a wider (ie working class) audience then it’s a splendid idea to portray them as a drunk racists. Take down Waterhouse and you really need to think about all those Greek statues with the big willies in the V and A, completely naked cherubs, damned pornography on the INSIDE of roman houses and that’s before I start on that Bacon. Most days I am a violent Marxist mob.

Take down Waterhouse and you really need to think about all those Greek statues with the big willies

Well, Yes and No. I think in the west we really do need to re-adjust our view of what art is and what it’s for. Those Greek and Roman remains have a huge influence over all of our lives still, at least in part due to a bunch of stuffy old men about 150 years ago who pretty much ranked the entire world by aligning “worth of culture” directly with what they consider outside or inside of either the Greek or Roman influence, from Art all the way to Writing.

Waterhouse painted the way he did directly as a response to that influence. I can’t blame him (as a man) to want to paint what interested him – young women and their bodies –  but he wasn’t honest or brave enough to be a bit more Gustav Courbet* about the whole thing. Flabby soft porn is about the least offensive thing I can think to say about Waterhouse, and there are a hundred Victorian painters just like him. You could place any number of them up on a gallery wall, and the response of everyone looking at them would be similar. It’s mostly “How come all these young women seem to have ice cream cones where their breasts should be…” followed by “How come a piece of see through silk seems to be all that they like to wear when all the men seemed to be fully clothed” and finally “How come, if he’s interested in naked bodies do none of them seem to have public hair” And that’s pretty much the Victorians all over…

That we still think they’re relevant is a pretty sad indictment of the priorities of most of the art world.

* Look up Origin de la monde

There’s a bit too much missing here. Consider the impact of Millais’ ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ as reflected by Dickens’ condemnation. Holman Hunt depicts a feisty and proactive woman in ‘The Hireling Shepherd’. Burne-Jones showed the grace and power of women in ‘The Wheel of Fortune’ (a much better picture in the D’Orsay). The Marxist politics of William Morris (and Madox Browne) and the evolving suffragist movement and De Morgan’s ‘The Worship of Mammon’ and ‘The Gilded Cage’. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on ‘rational dress’ which became a feminist protest around clothing and bicycling. You need to contextualise (all of) this stuff to fully grasp its motivations and impact.
Cancelling culture (and people) was popular with Stalin, Mao and Hitler, even Trotsky wrote a favourable review of the antisemite fascist LF Celine’s ‘Le Mort a Credit’, he didn’t call for it to be cancelled.

BillMC, am I correct in my interpretation of your claims, ie:

1. Waterhouse’s ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ wasn’t a painting that was carefully/specifically chosen as part of the performance/event, it was chosen because it was physically easier to lift?

2. They (MAG) weren’t planning to return it to the wall (at least anytime soon)?

3. It was only re-displayed because of the subsequent public outcry prompting Manchester City Council to ‘make’ (curator) Clare Gannaway put it back on the wall?

I ask because all the above seem to be at odds with what I can verify online from any sources. This is quite a serious business as it casts huge doubt on the veracity and intellectual honesty of all the staff and artists involved.

Here are Boyce’s afterthoughts at the time:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/mar/19/hylas-nymphs-manchester-art-gallery-sonia-boyce-interview

Though the neatest summation I can offhand is from a different interview where she says:

The decision to take down Hylas and the Nymphs emerged from the discussions. “It wasn’t unilateral,” Boyce says. “There was a lot of ambivalence, but the consensus was that as one of the acts that would take place on the night of the takeover, this painting should come down.” She adds: “My role is to say: ‘If that’s what you want to do, let’s make that happen.’” The work was taken down and visitors were invited to write their comments where the painting had hung.
The takeover programme had never attracted much attention in the press, and so there was “no anticipation that this was going to have such far-reaching impact, or even be taken to the media”, Boyce says. But the artist Michael Browne, famous for his paintings of Manchester United footballers, saw the event, and posted on Twitter that it culminated in “the permanent removal of Pre-Raphaelite painting Hylas and the Nymphs, because the female staff view it as negative, bad taste, out of date. Is artists [sic] freedom in danger?”
This, says Boyce, “is how things in some ways unravelled and spiralled”.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/interview/sonia-boyce-hylas-and-the-nymphs

It wasn’t the first one chosen. I’ve no idea what their long term intentions were apart perhaps from decolonising the room (that had been flagged up in the gallery).

By far the most thorough independent research/analysis I could find on the event is this source. (postgrad research on the planned event and response to event)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342696232_From_takeover_to_debacle_An_analysis_of_the_Nympghate_network_using_Twitter_data

It does seem to partially address the MCC claim/misunderstanding linking it to a BBC Report? Bill may be able to verify further?

One actor that is ‘silent’ from this online space and narrative is the Manchester City Council (MCC), the local government entity that ‘sets the budget for the Art Galleries and is involved in major decisions about the city’s galleries’.22 It can be assumed, then, that MCC is a very inuential actor in their relationship to the Gallery and one that plays an operational role in the Gallery’s brand network. MCC, however, is not active in the Nymphgate conversation and so their inactivity may be construed as absence. Alternatively, MCC appears in users’ demands to dismiss Gannaway and the Gallery’s leadership, as well as to reconsider their allotment of public funds. More importantly, MCC is brought into the conversation in a BBC report stating that they ‘announced that the painting would return to the wall’,23 leading users to believe that the Gallery was mandated to reinstate the painting (Figure 13).

The conclusion:

7. Discussion and Conclusion

The takeover at the Manchester Art Gallery was supposed to be a business-as-usual event, but then the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan giving way for an online community to take shape with a narrative that effectively left the Gallery out of the picture. In this article, I have explored how the Nymphgate community and conversation were inuenced by a series of human and non-human actors, as well as by the technological affordances of the platform. I have illustrated how, although the Nymphgate network was instigated by the Gallery, the narrative created by the community was shaped in the continuous performances of other actors. In other words, although the Gallery set out to organize a community around their takeover and to create a discourse stemming from this event, they effectively ‘deleted’ (or ‘silenced’) themselves from the conversation.

Which leads me to ask. Exactly who is the ‘censor’ in this? Were Gannaway and artists ‘testing the ground’ for some mass authoritarian Nazi Feminist culling of naked pubescent white-boobs to replace them with old black ladyboobs? Or was it what they claimed it was, at face value. And the real censors in the whole debate are the ‘PC CROWD GONE TOO FAR’, er, CROWD’ – who effectively silence **** everything by framing every contemporary art event as ‘literally Black Gay Hitler with a vagina’?

To answer my own rhetorical question, I would say ‘the mob’ most commonly get to silence and censor. From what I see – ‘the mob‘ can be played by a number of actors. The mob can be the silent majority, or the ‘in group’, or ‘the mob’ can be a minority group of noisy activists. The other type of censor is the authoritarian executive? The one who has the legal power to remove or censor something.

Who has actual power and influence?: Is a curator a dictator?
Who has actual power and influence?: Is a patron a puritan?
Who has actual power and influence?: Is a twit a Twitterer?
Who has actual power and influence?: Is real news the ‘fake’ news, or is fake news the ‘real‘ news?

Sorry to resurrect this thread but the video below was lobbed at me by the Al-Gore-Rhythm and sort of managed to summarise my own thoughts on “cancel culture” (i.e: it doesn’t exist, people just don’t like being challenged when they espouse bad ideas out loud)

Enjoy:

Here we are again.

Is the BBC committing suicide or is it being openly murdered? It’s so weird at the moment that I can’t rule out both.

This reporter/report from the BBC reporting on ‘reports‘ about the BBC removing lyrics for the Proms. The youtube comments are depressingly predictable.

But what’s the story? Even (especially) Bozo has chimed in to ‘defend’ Britain from the BBC’s supposed PC ‘wetness’. Can anyone identify what is going on here?

“The BBC had earlier confirmed that both songs were to be performed as instrumentals, clarifying that the decision to exclude the lyrics was driven by physical distancing restrictions limiting the number of musicians in the Royal Albert Hall.”

Absolutely nothing to do with BLM and Boris is a **** stirrer, trying to create a culture war.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/27/bbc-conductor-issues-statement-over-proms-controversy

^. From that article:

The culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, said Rule Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory were highlights of the Last Night of the Proms and he had shared his concern about their possible removal with the BBC.

So…our culture secretary (who is on record saying the BBC is needed to guard against ‘fake news’) is now himself spreading fake news in order to ‘guard‘ us from what? From his fake version of the BBC‘s decision to not have the choir this year?

So let me get this right, the Culture Secretary Tweets these ‘not quite outright lies, just glaring distortions of the trith, and here are the lines to read between, nudge, nudge…’ directly to the Twits, and there we have The Ministry Of Propaganda ensuring a narrative of lies now gets underway before the truth ever gets it’s boots on…? How exactly is such morally-bankrupt dead-cat-slinging from a ‘culture secretary‘ either preserving and/enriching our ‘culture’?

Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory are highlights of the Last Night of the Proms

Share concerns of many about their potential removal and have raised this with @BBC

Confident forward-looking nations don’t erase their history, they add to it

— Oliver Dowden (@OliverDowden) August 24, 2020

They were never cancelling it you can’t have choirs due yo Covid. That’s it nothing else to it.

If I had a penny everytime someone posted a Guardian link on here…

Why could they not have a solo or recording. Or a zoom choir!?

And the ‘Oh we just meant this year’ thing is not fooling anyone. Fire up the helicopters.

nothing else to it

There is now. Death threats included. Not to mention a huge surge in ‘defund/cancel the BBC’ sentiment across the country.

That’s it nothing else to it.

Lies are the weapon used against the whole country now… and most people don’t know they are lies, a reasonable number know but don’t care they are lies, and those of us that don’t fall into either category play the conman’s game for them if we vocally challenge the lies… they need people who care about the truth to be their pantomime villain for the conned and conniving to boo and laugh at (and in some cases fear and hate). Challenge the lies and you just fuel the anger, or you can just shrug and ignore the world around you as it descends into a throng of easily manipulated mass anger. Either way, few people will thank you for pointing out the con, we’re past the point of no return in the UK now. I’ve even stopped try trying to help family members see behind the lies now… it does no good.

^ How/why did a country become so accepting of tabloid lies though? Of dishonesty and distortion in general? The ‘post-truth’ situation I’ve heard about. Tell me about that?

Is it like a game of two sides? Say football, except where the ball is public opinion and ‘facts/truth‘ are simply what one wishes to believe according to what colour/bias/prejudice you prefer? The team that has the best most lies wins and gets to call it ‘truth’?

tinribz, you have a better source? You say the BBC is lying? Do you support the Sun and Mail’s account of the reasons for Proms not having a choir for the finale this year? If so, what’s your fact-checking process and do you have link/s please?

I worry for the likes of trinibz, easily manipulated by the RW spin & culture war shit-stirring

Sunday Pie:

#CancelCulture doesn’t exist? Bullshit.

Full video here: https://t.co/e9AWJq3TwT pic.twitter.com/ovaqBVD9tf

— Jonathan Pie (@JonathanPieNews) July 9, 2020

We are deep in a Culture War and that isn’t going to change for the foreseeable future. As much as we can berate the RW for twisting everything to try and exacerbate cultural divisions the fact is there’s very little we can do to stop it, we have to fight it. If were calling it a culture war then surely the more ‘cultured’ side will win?

The RW will only succeed if they manage to escalate that culture war to an actual war. They are on this precipice in the US, encouraging terrorism in the form of police helping a child with an assault rifle murder people by giving him water and high fives then letting him go home for a cup of tea after the deed is done. So far in the UK the RW are relying on a few pissed up football hooligans so we’re not there yet.

Further divisions are coming down the pipeline, as much as we complain about the gutter press (telegraph now included in that im affraid) its going to go down the sewer when fox style faux news outlets are set up here, there’s two of them about to launch in the UK very soon.

A couple of weeks ago it was Dawn Butler, this week its the proms and Sky sending a few geriatric pundits to the knackers yard. It’ll be something else next week, buckle up for the faster ride, it’s a culture war not a political one, the Right wingers will be culturally marginalised by virtue of them cancelling themselves.

The RW assumes that when black faces appear on the TV screens as presenters or in advertising it is not because of political correctness it is because of commerce. Racism might get you elected but it’s not good for business and culture is tied more closely to business than to politics.

… as much as we complain about the gutter press (telegraph now included in that im affraid) its going to go down the sewer when fox style faux news outlets are set up here…

“The Rule Britannia debacle” that the entirety of the British press, top to bottom, has fully understood for seven days to be a wholly confected and idiotic hoax, and yet almost nobody in the business has bothered their arses to explain this to the public, in even a short tweet. pic.twitter.com/8LvzWKHdC5

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) August 29, 2020

We are deep in a Culture War and that isn’t going to change for the foreseeable future. As much as we can berate the RW for twisting everything to try and exacerbate cultural divisions

I don’t see it so neatly as that. Right vs Left? Or maybe I see it more neatly? ie bullshit vs not bullshit.

The ‘Left vs Right‘ pantomime will hang us. Probably has. Past tense? Read the papers, read the interwebs. Read this thread?

Somehow we (as a whole) are increasingly buying the view that ‘opinion trumps fact‘. This view is objectively false yet popularly ‘correct‘.

Once a majority opts to buy lies then those lies become ‘true’ and a culture transmutes with dishonesty (at best) as a foundation.

When the only ‘facts’ we accept are those that comport with our existing opinions. When the only story we seek is that which confirms our bias.

‘Facts don’t care about your feelings’ is a recent (ironically self-owning) encapsulation of the manufacturing (or misusing) of facts to massage feelings/bias/prejudices and so feed and a partisan gravytrain.

Neither do I see/sell it nearly as neatly as does the ‘Jonathan Pie’ character. Or is he really a character? As much as I like (and even require) Pie (as a refreshing comedy centrist) he’s yet still enjoying his cake both ways – and I don’t mean as a ‘centrist’, but as a celebrity indulging in hyperbole and unfiltered, generalised partisan prattle. In effect he’s feeding the same fire that he’s wholesale blaming on ‘the left/you/we/a tiny minority’ (a moving target, but always ‘the left’?

No whataboutery there.

Yet he’s a bit all over the show in that video, and as short on the very ‘nuance’ (and as uneven-handed) as any tabloid (even as he grieves for ‘nuance’). The problem with satire today is that it reads now as a script from Inception. Meta-morphing. Jonathan Poe.

I do feel at least a sense of self-flagellation from Pie. Useless? No. I do share his frustration in that ‘we* should be better than this’. Yes. For that alone I am one of his biggest fans. Agreed. But then here he blames only ‘the left’ for today’s cultural shitshow.

So he/his character is also the pantomime. And he knows it. ‘**** in the street for coins’, as he put it. His character seems more widely accepted as a truth-teller of uncomfortable truths and I applaud him for that.

The pantomime must go on.

the Right wingers will be culturally marginalised by virtue of them cancelling themselves.

Yet Punch says exactly the same about you, Judy. You ‘woke’ feminist nazi soyboy Black Broadcasting Communist’s Cuck. Your buddies just cancelled Land Of Hope And Glory so what do you have to say about marginalisation now you just marginalised the majority of Britain’s Own People? It came back to bite you didn’t it? (I am being half-sarcastic here)

And on it goes. Out there in unwokeland vs wokeland.

Er..

Yes so eat your own shit

You only PROVE that you racistgammobs are LITERALLY Auschwitz!

No, YOU only prove that gayblackwokemobs are LITERALLY Solovetsky!

Etc.

It seems the pantomime must go on. People need the coins. Manufacturing is increasingly automated. Manufacturing consent is increasingly an alt career.

An emerging narrative manufactured from opinion over facts. And when actual facts emerge? They are too often enjoyed as an open door to further abuse the truth/fee partisan prattle – rather than a door to close on the whole sorry trend.

*Itself already akin to an ‘arsehole‘ even before it chooses how best to inform itself.

Seems to me that we are skirting close to cultural suicide. I can hear the nods. ‘Yes, because of THEM’

Each one of us diminishes ‘the whole’ every time we choose opinion over fact. Conspiracy over evidence. Every time we prop up lies/hyperbole/stereotypes as if they are ladders to ‘rightness’ because ‘wrong’ is a now a label rather than an unsubstantiated report.

This is not to say there are not bad-faith actors in all of this. There are. Many. Yet worse (IMO) are the legions of ‘bad fact‘ actors. And that is my take from this latest meme. The ‘bad fact actor’ could quite easily be all of us. Getting easier every day. Unless we demand better.

Additionally, useful idiots come in all flavours and colours. Dunning & Kruger don’t discriminate along party lines.

It’s an arsehole eating us all. A human centipede where each unhappy diner is happily convinced that ‘in front vs behind‘ somehow tastes better if framed: ‘us vs them’.

FYI one of the earlier writers of the Jonathan Pie character writes for Spiked magazine and almost every article is about the terrors of ‘woke’ culture.

https://libcom.org/blog/unsurprising-reason-jonathan-pie-rants-sound-straight-out-spiked-06022018

(Edit)

An emerging narrative manufactured from opinion (already often akin to an ‘arsehole‘ even before it chooses how best to inform itself) over facts.

And, when the actual facts emerge? They are all too-often misused. Misused to further abuse the truth. To feed yet more partisan prattle in the court of public opinion.

Seems to me that we are skirting closer to cultural suicide while ALSO ignoring the hands behind the curtain. I can hear the nods:

‘Yes, because of THEM’

Cultural changes arise out of practical experience. To paraphrase Ralph Miliband, ‘to over-emphasize the gap between culture and the economy reduces politics to a puff of smoke.’ A cultural war would be a shouting match to no avail. What is needed is people who can articulate and explain the nature of the circumstances in which we find ourselves at work, at home, in debt, etc and help organise ways forward ie theory and action.

Thanks for that grum. I’d long ago stopped watching Pie, because of the content not because I knew anything about the writers. That link comes as no surprise.

Thanks for that grum. I’d long ago stopped watching Pie

Novelty wore off after about his third video!

Just to throw in one inescapable fact: All other things being equal, the huge increase in life expectancy over the last 20 years has seen the make up of the electorate proportionally skew towards tha right. Never in history have the futures of the young been so dictated by the old. It might be that we as a society have changed less than we think, it’s just that the younger half of the electorate have less of an influence proportionally speaking than society has been accustomed to.

The irony in the phrase “cancel culture’ is that it is nothing new. What has actually been happening over the last few years is that those whose voices have always been cancelled have begun to speak up. I had quite an emotional conversation with my partner yesterday where she was describing 20 years freelancing where her viewpoint was often cancelled owing to her being non white. Some of the treatment dished out was absolutely disgusting and this was at international advertising agencies where everyone presumed they were liberal and non racist.

Back to the idea that the RW will cancell themselves in the cultural / economic sphere. Look at sport and the example of the SKY sackings, we might get polarised news media but we won’t get polarised cultural media. There just isn’t the market for a RW sports channel. Sports personalities are being pushed to show where they stand.

Look at the F1 drivers, of course it’s the choice of the individual to kneel in support of Lewis or not, if they don’t then it doesn’t mean they’re racist but it does make them a ‘legend’ in the eyes of the alt right. Stick to your principles by all means, but there’s a price to pay with regards your image. It makes you less attractive to advertisers.

Businesses that have come out in support of BLM have been described as cynical, paying nothing but lip service but lip service is better than no service. Unless you own a gun shop or a news outlet racism just isn’t good for business, pressure applied to the business sector has more affect than pressure applied to politicians as most businesses will always pivot towards the young with their advertising and messaging.

Algorithms seem to be working

Life expectancy improved from 78 to 81 since 2000, I can’t see what cultural difference that would make. Most of the key players in this debacle are middle aged or younger. Life expectancy has wide disparities, it wobbled and experienced a decline and Cummings is doing his best. Adele’s now getting it for ‘cultural appropriation’ for her hair-do. Blimey, will Michelle Obama get it for straightening hers (like many black women)? This really is quite a clever distraction to follow on from Brittania Waves the Rules and clearly people bite. If we all have a thoroughly good calling out we will show what perfect specimens we are and be absolutely no threat to anyone apart from a few fragile egos. And things rumble on unchanged.

I presume this isn’t “cancel culture”…?

AND HERE IT IS, why we've suffered 10 days of manufactured outrage at the "woke BBC" in the r-wing press

"BBCs new boss threatens to axe left-wing comedy shows"

Tory DG, Tim Davie, says BBCs comedy is biased against Tories, Trump & Brexit @lbc #r4todayhttps://t.co/hgx6nyH7aH pic.twitter.com/6pVjsZwVdN

— I Am Incorrigible FCA (@ImIncorrigible) September 1, 2020

Just remembered I never used to stand for God save the Queen at boxing matches, including York Hall. Not sure how that would go down these days.

Not sure how that would go down these days.

I don’t know what the rules are but after a week on and off of reading about it seems to go like this:

‘Some people were said to have refused to stand for our Country’s National anthem. The woke left have gone too far this time even more than yesterday and we have it on good authority that they will go too far again tomorrow.’

BBC News:

This current ‘Billshevik’ scandal is raging across social media prompting some pundits to ask ‘what is the point of having a country if it doesn’t represent the woke left’. Doris from Macclesfield says ‘I don’t know who these Billsheviks are, but I’m proud of my country and all these people want to do is to spoil it for everyone else. They take freedom too far and now they want to stop everyone else including God and the Queen. Well that’s so typical of the left.

We asked popular pantomime patriot and National Anthem Singer Christopeher Biggins for his thoughts on this latest (As he descrbes it) ‘War on Britain’

– Helloooooooo, Well David, I’m fine thankyou for asking. Well I say fine, I WOULD be fine if it wasn’t for these latterday Lenins casually removing all of our freedoms. Taking away the freedoms of normal Brits (laughter) like CANDY FROM BABIES because WE HAVE BEEN TOO KIND AND PASSIVE FOR TOO LONG. They take advantage of the National Character, David. We are known across the world for our generosity towards people of colour, and towards those of shall we say ‘different’ bents (chuckles), but take away my Queen? Heavens NO! Take away my GOD? STOP RIGHT NOW. RED LIGHT. They are so absolutely insane DAVID,! The Left believe they can cancel God. You can’t make this stuff up. Well you can. But because it’s TRUE!

– So Christopher, how did this latest debacle begin?

– Well David, it turns out a reporter traced Billshevik’s social media electronicpapertrail to a popular far-left cycling group where MAMILS high-five each other’s ‘wokeness’ as they ride their little toys through red lights, IMAGINE OUR SURPRISE!? Which is sort of confusing isn’t it David? Because those Leftist Lycra Loons seem to enjoy the colour Red, so why are they CANCELLING traffic lights? They are a rule unto themselves. But now they want to RULE OVER BRITAIN! It’s no secret that I’d be glad to see them gone from the roads for good, but they’re everywhere these days aren’t they David? Yes. I was walking my little dog last week and one of these LYCRA LOONS jumped, no, LEAPT from the bushes!!! Didn’t even ring his little bell! I thought he was trying to skewer my little FrouFrou! I was about to let him have it with BOTH BARRELS but then I saw that he had a beard and he wasn’t singing Rule Britannia. But then it sank in. The awful truth David. The awful truth is that we celebrities are walking a fine line between being canceled and being popular. But I have to stand up to this Billshevik Bicycle Brigade, even if the cancel me. I will go down singing. I always did (chuckleCHUCKLE). Which is why I’m here. My career is in tatters because of these Billsheviks.

– Thank-you, that was Christopher Biggins on the BBC 9 O Clock News sharing his concerns about so-called ‘cancel culture’ and the emerging ‘Billshevik’ row.

– And now for the 78th time, we have influential patriot Nigel Farage graciously taking advantage of his ‘essential travel’ waiver – visiting us from the USA as our esteemed guest in the BBC studio. Nigel will be telling us how one-sided and unforgivingly biased we are. The question this week is how The Left are trying to cancel the union and cancel Brexit. Joining Nigel on the panel is a white woman who identifies as a black man. Marxist Activist Reverend Bakari Blackperson from Speaker’s Corner who we chose to represent ‘the left’ to give Nigel a proper ratings-ready bunfight represents The Left.

– Over to you Nigel…

unless you own a gun shop or a news outlet racism just isn’t good for business

Why’s that?

Adele’s now getting it for ‘cultural appropriation’ for her hair-do. Blimey, will Michelle Obama get it for straightening hers (like many black women)?

The two aren’t comparable, black women have had to adopt Western styles as their natural hair is seen as unprofessional and unruly. There’s a huge amount of pressure on black women to lighten their skin too, all to fit in to a western ideal of what’s considered beautiful and wholesome. Adele’s received a lot of support from Jamaicans and black people in Britain and they recognise that difference between appropriation and celebration.

Adele’s now getting it for ‘cultural appropriation’ for her hair-do

Really. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that you’ve not looked very far into it.

I checked the Sky channel. Briefly

One Twitter user wrote: “If 2020 couldn’t get any more bizarre, Adele is giving us Bantu knots and cultural appropriation that nobody asked for

We are living in an age where the alleged thoughts of ‘one Twitter user’ is global news and even shaping our destiny as a culture. Or is it shaping the ‘careers‘ of ‘reporters‘?

It can be both?. Strike that. It **** well is both.

Am letting that sink in. Are you? Or do you have some serious evidence that Adele is under real fire from a lot of ‘influencers’? Meanwhile the economy is in shitsville, we are floating alone, rudderless in a sea of resentment, stupidity, abject cultural impoverishment, resentful division and an almost worshipful attitude towards dumbed-down bullshit.

What’s that Christopher?

Fear not fair people! Boris plans to rule the second wave. He will not be Covid’s slave. The left will not win this battle for our shores. We People Of Britain will go down singing before we let them win!

(At this point I want the long crook for my own neck). Play nice. Factcheck thrice.

They take advantage of the National Character, David

That’s an interesting choice of words, David Hume wrote a paper “Of National Characters”. He said of the English “We may often remark a wonderful mixture of manners and characters in the same nation, speaking the same language, and subject to the same government: And in this particular the ENGLISH are the most remarkable of any people, that perhaps ever were in the world.”
To which he added the footnote “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”