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News Round-Up
Sunday, November 18th, 2007 12:57 amIt's been a long time since I've had time to check my online news sources (unless you count BBSpot as a news source), so my occasional news roundups have become so occasional as to rank with events like an uneventful day in Iraq or a silver wedding anniversary in the British royal family. So, let me do something to amend this state of affairs.
A sure sign that elections are in the offing is the Tory Party and its media outlets (the Daily Telegraph in this case) trying to create panic about immigration. Now I have to concede that there have been times when immigration was bad for Britain: Hengest and Horsa, Erik Bloodaxe, William the Bastard ... these were the kind of people who give immigrants a bad name. But what all these "waves of immigrants" that made the British "feel swamped by an alien culture" (to quote Margaret Thatcher) have in common is that they happened before the twelfth century. I for one am not going to worry that "Britain is experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration with more than half a million foreigners arriving to live here in a single year." Meanwhile, only 400,000 people emigrated, "more than half of whom were British". So we're getting a lot of foreigners and only losing a few. Cranking up the racism, the Torygraph points out that most of the incomers are not those nice Polish plumbers but from countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. You know, those [whispers] brown people. I remember the first time they come over to swamp us with their alien culture back in the '70s, and it was pretty damned good. Anyway, I'm one of those Brits who emigrated, so I suppose none of it really concerns me any more.
Another favourite theme of the right-wing press is our education system, which was dealt such a grievous blow by progressives in the 1960s that even eighteen years of Conservative government could not restore the glorious days when, to quote Blackadder, "education could go hang, so long as a boy could hit a six, sing the school song loudly, and take a crumpet up the behind without blubbing." Evidence of persistent namby-pamby pinko liberal nanny-state political correctness in our educational institutions is a five-year-old being expelled for throwing a toy brick at a playmate. The boy in question is said to have "special needs", which is a nice way of saying "retarded". Too bloody right he is - when I was that age, I was throwing real bricks at my friends.
Of course it isn't only liberals and socialists who threaten British society; feminists may prove even more dangerous, considering that they may once have wiped out an entire race. According to an article in the Boston Globe, hairy-legged feminists were responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals. Well, not exactly - after all, in those days, everyone had hairy legs, regardless of their sexual politics. What the theory actually claims is that the Neanderthals' equal-opportunity policy on hunting may have lowered their birth rate, hunting being the dangerous occupation that it was in those days. It's fairly conjectural, but does tie in with the widely-accepted idea that the reason that in nearly all primitive societies hunting is a male occupation is that males are expendable; women are too valuable to be thrown at sabre-toothed tigers. On the other hand, there's also a theory that the Neanderthals died out because we ate them - take your pick.
Finally, the latest news on the state of the universe is that there may be An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything which gets rid of all those messy superstrings, parallel universes and suchlike, and models the universe on an E8 root system. I don't know what an E8 root system is, but I've seen the film, and it looks very pretty.
A sure sign that elections are in the offing is the Tory Party and its media outlets (the Daily Telegraph in this case) trying to create panic about immigration. Now I have to concede that there have been times when immigration was bad for Britain: Hengest and Horsa, Erik Bloodaxe, William the Bastard ... these were the kind of people who give immigrants a bad name. But what all these "waves of immigrants" that made the British "feel swamped by an alien culture" (to quote Margaret Thatcher) have in common is that they happened before the twelfth century. I for one am not going to worry that "Britain is experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration with more than half a million foreigners arriving to live here in a single year." Meanwhile, only 400,000 people emigrated, "more than half of whom were British". So we're getting a lot of foreigners and only losing a few. Cranking up the racism, the Torygraph points out that most of the incomers are not those nice Polish plumbers but from countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. You know, those [whispers] brown people. I remember the first time they come over to swamp us with their alien culture back in the '70s, and it was pretty damned good. Anyway, I'm one of those Brits who emigrated, so I suppose none of it really concerns me any more.
Another favourite theme of the right-wing press is our education system, which was dealt such a grievous blow by progressives in the 1960s that even eighteen years of Conservative government could not restore the glorious days when, to quote Blackadder, "education could go hang, so long as a boy could hit a six, sing the school song loudly, and take a crumpet up the behind without blubbing." Evidence of persistent namby-pamby pinko liberal nanny-state political correctness in our educational institutions is a five-year-old being expelled for throwing a toy brick at a playmate. The boy in question is said to have "special needs", which is a nice way of saying "retarded". Too bloody right he is - when I was that age, I was throwing real bricks at my friends.
Of course it isn't only liberals and socialists who threaten British society; feminists may prove even more dangerous, considering that they may once have wiped out an entire race. According to an article in the Boston Globe, hairy-legged feminists were responsible for the extinction of the Neanderthals. Well, not exactly - after all, in those days, everyone had hairy legs, regardless of their sexual politics. What the theory actually claims is that the Neanderthals' equal-opportunity policy on hunting may have lowered their birth rate, hunting being the dangerous occupation that it was in those days. It's fairly conjectural, but does tie in with the widely-accepted idea that the reason that in nearly all primitive societies hunting is a male occupation is that males are expendable; women are too valuable to be thrown at sabre-toothed tigers. On the other hand, there's also a theory that the Neanderthals died out because we ate them - take your pick.
Finally, the latest news on the state of the universe is that there may be An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything which gets rid of all those messy superstrings, parallel universes and suchlike, and models the universe on an E8 root system. I don't know what an E8 root system is, but I've seen the film, and it looks very pretty.
