Monday, January 31, 2011

Dear Mel, 

I don't want you to die. But I do want you to slip over on a banana skin, fall down, hurt your bottom really, really badly, and spend the rest of the day feeling very stupid.

Or be arrested for hate crimes and held over night in one of those nice "holiday camps", with only a smelly bucket and two big, butch lesbians for company.

Heterosexual love and kisses

Andy

3 comments:

Nick Mazonowicz said...

Because of course gays, muslims and blacks are NEVER subjected to any sort of abuse on teh internets.

John Fast said...

Andrew: Your post is very witty and makes its point very clearly, and yet somehow I also find it (slightly) troubling.

I suppose I would find it a bit more troubling if you belonged to a religion which preached tolerance and forgiveness for one's enemies, and even more troubling if you had written many good essays about such ethical standards, and most troubling of all if you had decried hypocrisy by others, especially those who accused others of hypocrisy while practicing it themselves.

I guess I'm glad all of those are just hypotheticals, eh?

Anyway, heterosexual hugs and kisses to you, from a fellow-Christian and fellow-gamer who loves your essays, even though he only agrees with half of them.

Andrew Rilstone said...

@John: Are you aware of the context of this? She had followed up her piece about how gay control every aspect of British society with a piece saying that gay had been calling for her to be killed, and this proved that society was under attack, etc etc. Of course, no-one had really issued death threats, but they had said thing like "I wish she would drop dead". (Remember "Twelve Angry Men"?) She had also, by the way, claimed that her theory that straight people were now being hounded like communists in the 1950s was proved by the fact that several people had described her as an evil "witch". Apparently not knowing that "witch" is a fairly common term of abuse for an older, unattractive woman, if only because it rhymes with "bitch". I, of course, find the term rather sexist, but she would presumably think that if I said people shouldn't use sexist vocabularly, it would be political correctness gone mad...bedrock of our society...freedom of speech...communist plot...grapefruit segments...

In which context "I don't want you to die, but I do want you to slip over on a banana skin" and "I don't want you to die, but since you think prisons are so nice and luxurious nowadays, I wouldn't mind seeing you locked up in one for a day or two" may not have been the best joke I have ever made (that was the one about Thor's hammer) but it was, I thought, an OK bit of satire.

I take Sam's point about not automatically regarding sex-workers as paraiahs, but I'm with C.S Lewis on this one. We need more violence in politics, not less. People like Philips shouldn't be able to show their faces in public without having things thrown at them. But we should be British about it, obviously. Tomatoes and rotten eggs, not rocks.

I think a group of citizen throwing rotten tomatoes at a professional liar are more like a father slapping a naughty child, or a policeman arresting a public enemy, or a soldier serving in a just and lawful war, and less like two citizens having a quarrel, when, yes, the instruction to both parties is to turn the other cheek.

It does seriously shock me that the way the BBC - who are, by hypothesis, controleld by a claque of queers and bolsehvics - reacted to Mel's homophobic rant was to invite her to appear on Question Time (a mainstream political talk show) and treat her as if she was a normal person with a valid point of view. And no-one thought there was anything very odd about this