[Gilbert Shelton]
Since it would appear, from sundry disagreeable tokens, that we (the good guys) are now at war with the MSM (the bad guys), I am obliged to Fido the Dog for this:
Here at the Villa Underclass we do not subscribe to any dead-tree news publication; between those which are forced through our letterbox, despite occasional homilies to the contrary, we distinguish solely on the basis of flammability. Nor do we watch television. As part of my ongoing research (the eventual learned paper will doubtless have the title ‘Things That Give Me Angina’) I have discovered that listening to the BBC 8 o’clock news on Radio 4 is also hazardous to my health* and have promised Mrs. Underclass not to do it in future.
It is possible to be very disappointed in the internet; all that stuff about ‘the sum total of human knowledge, available to all mankind’ sounds a bit silly when the only evidence for it is Glooge and Wikiwhatsit. Despite which it seems to be the only hope for the future, which is why the bad guys of the world are so keen to convert it into a mass surveillance tool (e.g. here) or perhaps to do away with it entirely (e.g. in China).
The MSM is doomed. The idea of printing yesterday’s news on the day before yesterday’s trees and busting a gut trying to distribute the result against the clock in the hope that some of its content might still be relevant by the time the ink dries is about as optimistically Victorian as pumping inflammable gases into peoples’ houses with a view to lighting and heating them, in the fond hope that nothing will ever go wrong (pronounced ’stoichiometric’)**.
However, the cosy relationship between the mafia bosses who own the DTP and the mafia bosses who think they own us is and has been so cosy for so long that I don’t suppose that this will be in any way a brief or facile campaign.
Since the 21st century method is to create the ‘problem’ to which one already has the ’solution’, I rather expect there to be a spate of fake bloggers before long. They will associate themselves with tendencies which the government wishes to repress (such as our own), and will utter a selection of libels, incitements to violence, violations of copyright and statements of opinion which are illegal under the Political Correctness Acts.
At this point the MSM and the government will launch a coordinated campaign against blogging using the said pseudobogeymen as justification.
I have been boycotting the DTP for so long now that I’ve forgotten when I started (I think I must have been about 15). Whether we can persuade Joe Public to do the same is debatable; people who look at the pictures in the MSM wouldn’t want their mates to think that they had lost even this level of literacy.
The campaign I have in mind is one of eternal vigilance against infiltration. Before long we may well find, apparently as members of our own harrumphing-club, those who are not real harrumphers at all, but are intent upon mock-harrumphing in a provocative style calculated to make MSM readers believe that harrumphing should no longer be allowed at all.
Were I to conclude that I had found one such I would simply stop reading their blog, and remove its link (if any) from my blogroll.
Agent-provocateur: something for which only the French have a word.
* the thing that brought on the palpitations was, curiously enough, the government’s anti-pubs campaign; curiously because I don’t drink and detest pubs. For some time now the danger of pubs, full of unmonitored conversations and untaxed transactions, has been apparent to the enemy class, who have waged a pitiless campaign of attrition against them (while still quite happy to have drunken barbarians wrecking town centres every weekend, provided that they bought their tipple under the cameras of Messrs. Tesco). What got me going was that the BBC have been detailed off to blame the now clearly visible demise of pubs on the ‘lack of affordable housing’, which in turn is due to nasty, Tory-voting yuppies forcing rural house prices up. It was at this point that Mrs. Underclass diagnosed a relapse and suggested that really I shouldn’t do this sort of thing to myself any more.
** this idea is actually Georgian
LUC, I am not sure why you think that yobbos and ladettes would go to the trouble of:-
(a) Driving to Tesco, to stock up on alcohol (you _do_ have to drive there now and it’s always some miles away…)
(b) transporting the said drinks to a town centre, where you can’t park anyway,
(c) waiting till 2.00 am (ish) to start drinking it in short order, before throwing up and murdering passers-by (there aren’t any, except other “clubbers”…)
No. These people, who do what you describe, all obtain their alcohol, almost without exception, at in-town establishments called “clubs”. They pay far, far bigger sums for it, per shot, than even you as an engineer numerate in very very large Standard-Form-Numbers, could begin to conceive of.
For example, in 2001, I got inveigled into buying a “round of drinks” for three girls plus myself, with whom I was working in a local big-man’s call centre, in a club bar here, and it cost me £35, about £9 a drink (and I could net even hear what the barman was saying above the “music”.)
Tesco is not the problem. it is the alcohol-home of the penurious muddle-classes, who have poorly paid jobs and who have to work for a living: it is not the haunt of drunken town-center-wrecking hoodies and their ho’s.
But your point about false-flag-blogging ops is well noted, and I ought to flag it somewhere else.
I am a fan of cutting out the odd bit and tucking it away in scrapbooks, to begin with….
And, it is strange to me to note that no one much takes cognisance of the fact that in future the much of what is known about our late-modern & early-postmodern miseries very likely /will/ be inferred & re-constructed from the pages of newspapers and magazines all now deeply buried in the land-fills.
I know, I know, all that circulates in the blogosphere abides in Dr Hawking’s ‘light cone’ and, in principle, is recoverable — but, “these dumb bastards around here” (Mr Judson Andersen, Squawbunion County farmer, b 1919) are still rather far from that, eh? Whereas the archaeologists will /always/ be able to hire some Irishmen with mattocks and spades for good long time to come, that’s what these hibernian ‘Real IRA’ bunnies are FOR.
DD: I would not doubt your observations but where I live it appears to be somewhat different. There is only one nightclub, which is so beset by the licensing people that it is a model of respectability. There is a supermarket (soon to be replaced with Tesco’s) in the centre of the town, whose own-brand labels appear on many of the bottles left in the gutter on Sunday mornings. I suppose it is a geographical thing.
Did I read you aright? You don’t drink, and you detest pubs? Call me old fashioned, but sad to say, this lowers you in my estimation: you don’t drink, as they say, so when you get up in the morning, that’s as good as you’re going to feel all day… A good pub (increasingly rare, alas) is a very fine thing, a great English institution, unparalleled in the civilised world. When the last pub becomes a youth club with fitted carpets, or an offshoot of some soulless suburban eatery-chain, an important part of England will have died. The good pub is one of the few things remaining which make England (just) tolerable to inhabit. I am disappointed.
I gave up drinking at the age of 19, having given it what I considered to be a fair try, and having demonstrated to my own satisfaction and anyone else’s who cared to watch that alcohol affects me not as it affects the English yeoman, who becomes jolly, but as it affects the Russian peasant, who becomes gloomy. I would sit snivelling into my vodka. “Five years since Uncle Petrov died; and nothing has changed!” (etc.) Eventually I determined that every time I became depressed, I drank a bottle of vodka (as a Bauhaus functionalist one can hardly do less), and further that the main cause of the onset of depression was the previous bottle wearing off. At this point I retired, in order to give younger men a fair chance in the sport.
I detest pubs for the same reason that I detest all noisy, crowded indoor spaces; I have severe tinnitus, and cannot hear what anyone is saying if there is any background noise. After an hour or two of saying ‘What?”, trying to read lips, and being taken for an idiot in consequence thereof, I am fit to be tied.
You may have noticed, should you have been reading the blog for any time, that I make a point of defending the pub as an institution despite all this.
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