Latest news with #Hitlers
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
If you're reading this column, Elon Musk has messed up
Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media's last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos's supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social media sluices, such as Ketamine Ken's Twitter, currently X, essentially an ape with a megaphone standing in a crowded marketplace shouting unsubstantiated rumours at babies, and showing pornographic photographs to children. But was it ever thus? Did it just take the unalloyed unpleasantness of Elon Musk to make us see ourselves as we always were, toilet paper people fluttering on the whims of wealthy men's media outlets, 8 billion dogshit golems, Frankingsteins made of farts? A radio phone-in about social media on Monday made me understand, with sudden clarity, that horrible hysterical stories drive engagement more than thoughtful true ones. Sorry it took me so long. And so digital media surges right towards the money and JD Vance calls it freedom of speech, as if a barely sentient tapeworm reaching towards a clump of rotten offal was acting with some kind of moral imperative. A black-cab driver tells a passenger imprisoned in their back seat that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer's father; your sister-in-law casually announces that most benefits are claimed fraudulently; and JD Vance informs Europe that it's illegal to pray in your own home in Scotland. The world thinks what rich men want it to and the truth is a touring lineup of Lynyrd Skynyrd with no original members that you're still listening to in the hope its version of Free Bird will kick ass. So what is the point of writing supposedly funny columns about current affairs for a broadsheet newspaper like the Observer? An adjudicated sex abuser is in the American White House, Boris Johnson is in a moated manor house, and I'm supposed to poke fun at them from a three-bedroom terrace house. Liberal media has failed and it doesn't have the funds to fight back. I've been writing these columns for 14 years now, and fascism and sea levels are still on the rise despite me doing some really good jokes about both of them. I am comedy's Cnut. Why feed myself through the news mincer when I'm still going to be looking at a world full of damp Hitlers when I die on the end of a Russian bayonet? Sometimes these screeds take me a few hours, slipping out like baby giraffes, wobbly and slimy but standing. And sometimes they take me dead-eyed haemorrhoidal days on end to finish, baking in the back passage of my brain like something malevolent that gestates in Donald Trump's colon after a week of KFC family bucket meals. Over the years I have come to love negotiating acceptable levels of profanity with the patient section editors, and trying to bury odd ideas in the prose to see what the brilliant artist David Foldvari will do with them. On balance, I've spent 7,000 hours writing 400,000 words of remunerated sarcasm. It's the longest piece of continuous employment I've ever had and is my last line of defence when people say, correctly, that I have never done a decent day's work in my life. I don't think I did this job especially well for the first 150,000 words. Was there any real value in anything I wrote in those pre-Brexit days of comparative political equilibrium? How many trees died just because I found politicians like David 'Dave' Cameron and George 'Pencils' Osborne merely inchoately reprehensible, instead of utterly contemptible, in those simpler sillier times? And then, as Dave said, 'doo, doo, doo, doo … Right.' And it was never the same again. Brexit was the making of these spews. It sharpened them because it exposed an interconnected web of corruption worming through Westminster, and made me appreciate the privilege of having a platform to piss on people from. But how many forests fell fruitlessly, five years ago, when I finally revealed the full secret cabbalistic name of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl's-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben's-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson? I had my own viral moment in miniature. But was it worth it? And yet, as I wandered the streets in lockdown, ordinary Observer readers and their dogs regularly stood at reasonable distances and told me these columns made them feel less alone, and for a moment I understood how Christ felt when all those lepers told him he was a really great bloke. I doubt anything like that ever happens to Giles Coren. Or to Jesus, to be honest, who was probably sick to the back teeth of all those selfish lepers. But here's the rub. I appreciate that, as someone who is too tight to advertise his tours, and who has not been invited on to The Graham Norton Show, the market penetration achieved by online circulation of a popular Observer column probably sells me more than a few standup comedy seats. Maybe I need this. That said, twice as many people come to see me live as read the Observer, though this can be explained by lots of angry middle-aged men bringing their bored wives with them. But since Elon Musk showed social media how to downgrade the visibility of liberal comment and monetise the outraged engagement caused by right-skewed clickbait, I have watched my online views wither. Social media is engineered to suppress the material you are reading now. If you have been directed to this column online somehow, then somewhere there's a rightwing billionaire that needs to rejig his algorithms. Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf all year with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Blackstone development consultant delivers residents voting history to commissioners
WALTON COUNTY, Fla. (WMBB) – Four of Walton County's five commissioners acknowledged they received a document that included the voter registration information of 18 people. All 18 had spoken against the so-called Blackstone project's proposed 2,400, two-story homes in the Mossy Head community. 'Ya'll have just become the little Hitlers of the world because people are scared to death that their names could have been read out today, and their voting records, that is an excellent embarrassment to the county, and it's an embarrassment to these developers,' said a resident. Commissioner Dan Curry says the document was placed under his office's exterior doormat by Halsey Beshears, a consultant involved in the Blackstone development. Curry says Beshears tried to set up a meeting between the two of them to discuss the document. 'A couple of days later, he did call me to go over the document, but I figured he would go over the questions that those 18 folks stood up there and asked, but instead he proceeded to just tell me exactly what was on the document with their voting history. And I just as didn't get a good feeling about that,' said Curry. Curry says the document was misleading at first glance, with the front page containing renderings of lot sizes and a model home. 'But then I flip the page and it's handwritten. You know, 18 people spoke, so many didn't vote for you, or not me personally, but didn't vote for the commissioners. Three don't even live in the area. So I mean, to me he's trying to insinuate that none of those 18 people really count,' added Curry. Beshears says his intention 'was to provide equal transparency from speakers at commission meetings as their testimony moves commissioners' opinion, the commissioners have the right to know who is speaking.' Beshears goes on, writing, 'There was never any ill intent to sway a vote either way. The information I provided was all public record and nothing wrong as a commissioner made it out.' FSU Panama City students practice underwater crime scene skills Commissioner Curry says he worries this incident will hinder citizens from wanting to speak at meetings in the future, especially about controversial topics like the Blackstone development. 'You have this opportunity where you have probably 14 or 15 of these people have never spoken at a bcc meeting before. Do you think they're going to come back and speak again? They're going to they're going to think long and hard before they do that because who knows what's going to be slid under somebody's rug the next time around,' said Curry. It should be noted that most voter registration information is public record, but not all. 'Some of the folks may have stipulations where they're not a public record, ex-law enforcement judges, stuff like that, that stuff is redacted,' said Curry. After reviewing the document, Walton County Supervisor of Elections Ryan Messer released a statement saying: 'I can confirm that the voter information was publicly accessible and did not contain protected or confidential data. However, in a few instances, the document appears to contain inaccuracies when compared to official voter records.' Feb-28-ReleaseDownload Walton County's Republican Executive Committee urged Messer and other county officials to conduct an investigation to determine if criminal charges are warranted. Beshears says he welcomes an investigation to help spread awareness of what is public record, saying the same process served him well during his terms in the Florida House and in other consulting jobs. But Curry says the information was irrelevant in his decision-making process. 'I don't care if you're a democrat. I don't care if you're a republican. I don't care if you're an independent. I don't care if you voted or you didn't vote,' emphasized Curry. Commissioners voted 5-to-nothing against the development, saying it was for the public's overall well being. 'By putting they don't live in the area, or they live in Defuniak Springs or they live in South Walton, you know, it still concerns everybody,' said Curry. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
