The Ever Raging War Against The Toff Twats – A Response to Otis Ferry’s Interview in The Times

Posted in Politics Tirades with tags , , , , , , , , on December 28, 2009 by helenparker1212

Merry Crimbo one and all, or ‘Wintermass’ to all those with poles up their bums. I have just had the good fortune to pick up The Times 27th December issue, and stumble upon an interview with Otis Ferry, taken by one Camilla Long. I have to say it was one of the most entertaining things i’ve read in a long time. I just had to blurt a response.

Otis isn’t happy you see. He is not happy that Simon Cowell and “some bitch from Islington” are on Newsnight, he is unhappy that John Craven has not yet replied to his email citing the dictionary definition of ‘perversion’, and he is not happy he can no longer legally enter his jodhpur and chase fluffy vermin across England’s green and pleasant lands without running into a black or an Asian or a Pole or an anti-hunt protestor. Or worse, a black Asian Polish anti-hunt protestor.

Otis and his father Bryan Ferry are big hunters you see. BIG hunters. You remember his father right? The guy who thought the Nazis’ style and their rallies were “just amazing. Really beautiful.”

Yeah, that guy.

Well his son is a chip off the old block let him tell you. It seems poor Otis is very worried about dear old England. What with Simon Cowell, and the fox hunting ban, and all the blacks and Asians. No sorry, ‘immigration’. Yes, it’s immigration he’s worried about, even though he admits he doesn’t “understand how it works”, and he hates “the thought of depriving poor Mrs Punjab of her ‘right to come here’ “. But he is convinced you see, convinced that we have simply run out of room for new people in this country.

Yeah you noticed that didn’t you; “poor Mrs Punjab”. I literally began rubbing my hands with glee at this point.

Anyway, as he “focuses his shrewishly handsome features” on Camilla Long, he postulates on the “sheer shitness of our country” and then recalls the “namby-pamby” nature of his prison stint in comparison to his boarding school days. Apparently private education not only provides a better quality of education, but also a better quality of sodomy and shanking as well. Readers take note.

And inmates too, in case he ever gets banged up again; “namby pamby” he called you.

Anyway where the hell was i? Oh yes, fox hunting. Camilla Long, taking a break from fellating Otis’s ego, deigns to broach the subject of the 75% opinion poll result against fox hunting, to which Otis replies “well, if you’ve got a lot of morons following Simon Cowell”. He also suggests the best remedy for the general population’s ignorance is to “round them all up” and go to work on them in a Clock Work Orange style torture cinema. Yes, and while he’s at it, perhaps he could round up the immigrants and turn Mrs Punjab into a lamp shade to add to his father’s Nazi paraphernalia collection.

The fact is Otis appears to be suffering from the congenital scourge of the upper classes (which he so desperately aspires to be part of but never truly can because his grandfather was a pit-pony keeper). Yes, the upper class scourge of being generally fucking insane. But his racism and his ignorance is actually not what repulses me about this odious little cretin. No. What really brings the bile up in my throat is the fact that this little twat, from a working class background, has styled himself into an ersatz toff.

And not just any old toff.

A toff twat.

Otis’s betrayal of his working class family heritage leads me specifically to the bigger picture behind the fox hunting ban which he is so publically apoplectic over.

If anyone ever tells you we banned fox hunting because of cruelty to animals they are either lying outright, or woefully misguided. We didn’t ban fox hunting because we’re worried a fox might get it’s throat ripped out by a dog every now and again. In fact we do care, but only from afar.  As far as our sofas. As far as the digi-box and satellite dish signals can keep us.

The truth is we don’t give a shite about the piddling affairs of a few foxes in the shires. We have more pressing concerns. like money, and how the fuck we get it. It’s an age-old concern the majority of us share, as did our ancestors before us from time immemorial. But there are a few…a privileged few, who have no such concerns, and never have.

We do not give a shit about foxes.

What we do give a shit about, as our ancestors did before us,  is the gradual destruction of the British upper class.

Fox hunters bemoan the loss of a tradition and a way of life known in this country for hundreds of years, even the odd thousand or whatever. What they don’t realise is that we are deliberately trying to destroy them. Since the end of WW1 we have been trying to destroy them. And we still haven’t succeeded, but damn it we are getting there.

If we maintain and increase and enshrine into constitutional law the socialist ideals we have come to take for granted in this century and the last, then we will eventually, via taxation, bankrupt these cretinous moneybags of their historical inheritances which were made from the blood of slaves and serfs and our ancestors actually. If we bother to remember them. No Englishman’s wealth just fell out of the sky, even the fucking Queen is aware of that.

And yet these parasites, and spawn of parasites, seem determined that they are entitled to retain their ill-gotten gains. that they have somehow earned their inheritances.

Their wealth was not won with the power of their minds, though. certainly not. No amount of education, no matter how expensive or selective or superb, can break through a thousand years of inbred spastication. You can be well-educated and still be a retarded fuckwit, just look at the house of Lords for proof. Those wobbling, dribbling titans of social standing are so genetically degenerated that, if put to it, no professional animal breeder worth his standing would allow them to ejaculate into a sock, let alone a woman.

If we don’t succeed in bankrupting them of their financial inheritances with socialist taxes, then their own inbred genetic mutations will eventually prevent them from breeding anyway.

The only thing that could throw the final solution to the upper class menace is if people – befuddled by Cameron’s very convincing human suit – vote in the Conservatives in the upcoming general election. That would be fucking bad in every kind of fucking way.

Alright New Labour are swine, but my god at least they’re OUR swine! The expenses scandal was telling in more ways than one. They all have their snouts in the trough, we know that. But New Labour expenses claims are so reassuringly working class it hurts. Basically New Labour MPs are like teenagers who suddenly realise they can steal out of mum’s purse. So what do they go and buy??

Porn. Bathroom installations. Toilet seats. Dry cleaning.

What did the Tories (ex or otherwise) claim for?

Moats. Duck Houses. Bell Towers.

Case and point, my fellow crusaders.

Case and fucking point.

STARGATE UNIVERSE & DEFYING GRAVITY – Who is responsible for this shit??

Posted in TV Tirades with tags , , , , , , , , on November 3, 2009 by helenparker1212

Ugh! I just had to suffer through yet another ridiculous episode of Stargate Universe in the vain hope that it might have suddenly become tolerably alright, as opposed to utterly shite. Needless to say I was disappointed. Again. This episode was called ‘Water’ (get it? cos the other episodes were called ‘Air’, ‘Darkness’ and ‘Light’, get it?) and basically what happened was they ran out of water this time, and then there were some alien mosquitos, and then they trapped them in a barrel and threw them through the stargate, and then people went to get some ice, and some douche fell down a cravasse but then got rescued and was alright, and then that annoying man in charge mumbled something to the camera. The end.

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I’ve given it a fair chance, I really have, and as an avid Stargate fan I am more inclined to leniency than most viewers, but there is simply no way to polish this turd other than to call it what it is. A steaming pile of horse excretia. The moment the action begins all I’m thinking is, who is this person? Why is she listening to an iPod? Is Robert Carlyle aware of how awful this is? Why is the mumbling man ruffing Carlyle’s hair? Why is that angry black guy so angry all the time? What exactly is the point of any of this?! ARGH! After four episodes why the hell do I still not know or care about who any of these people are?!

But Stargate Universe is not the only new and much hyped sci-fi drama which has failed dismally to engage me. Defying Gravity, the ‘Grey’s Anatomy but in space!’ botch offered to us by BBC2 has already been as good as cancelled in the US with rumours of its sets being dismantled and its time-slot moved into the graveyard. Defying Gravity’s problem is the total opposite of SGU in that we are inundated with the reasons why these characters are doing what they are doing, and they say each other’s names alot so there’s no confusion about who’s who. But the fundamental problem remains: we just don’t give a crapolla about them and what they’re up to. This person fancies this person, and that person cheated on his wife and misses her, and they all want to shag each other and might be turning into aliens by the way.

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The unforgivable flaw in these programmes is simple. THEY ARE FUCKING BORING. People stand around and talk a lot, and every now and then someone falls over or cries. In the first episode of Stargate SG-1 people got kidnapped and killed, people got together into teams, aliens blew shit up and mangled people, and everybody sets off to kick butt for the American way. In the first episode of Grey’s Anatomy people get shagged and killed, people get together into teams, surgeons sew shit up and mangle people, and every body sets off to kick butt for the hippocratic way.

SGU and DG have both failed to do any of this stuff in four episodes, let alone in their opening pilots. I just don’t get it. Sci-fi is an extremely popular genre with infinite material and potential to exploit. So with all this potential at their disposal, how on earth have the producers of these two programmes managed to fail so miserably? And, more importantly, how on earth were they allowed to produce this tripe in the first place!? Did someone go on holiday? Or take a nap while these programmes were in production?? Was no one keeping an eye on these projects? Did it never occur to anyone involved that “Oh, this is a bit shit and will probably flop and get cancelled”?

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People like to spout bollox about studio executives interfering with programmes to make them more populist, generally copying other successful programmes. If this is the case then what the hell were the studios doing while these programmes were being made? Why weren’t they interfering? Asking dumb questions like “so where are all the aliens? This is sci-fi right?” and “where’s the peril?” I fully understand the desire of a writer and a producer to create something fresh within a genre, however, shirking your genre entirely because you are apparently embarassed by it (Stargate Universe I’m talking to you!) is utter folly, and has apparently resulted in two dramas which had so much potential, but which have, ultimately, fallen flat on their arses. And faces.

PANDORUM – DON’T BELIEVE THE SHITE

Posted in Film Tirades with tags , , , , , , , , , on October 15, 2009 by helenparker1212

It was Orange Wednesday, I was in the mood for entertainment on the darker side of things, and it was a toss up between Zombie Land (much hyped) and Pandorum (slated and ignored). I chose Pandorum because the tv advert looked fukin ace and because I never listen to douchebag film critics. And guess what, I was proved correct as per usual because I was treated to a little gem of a film which no one else seems to know about because they listen to douchebag critics. And I especially don’t reguard the opinions of the nonentities who write on web sites like Rotten Tomatoes.

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The main criticism appears to unoriginality. Well, to this I say so bloody what? I refer back to my review of Jaume Collet-Serra’s House of Wax of a few years ago, a slasher with all the typical generic traits which is still a bloody good horror film. How many times do these donks have to be told? Generic loyalty is NOT A SLUR! Pandorum is a film with flaws, this is undeniable, but you know what? It’s still a bloody brilliant film. Its cinematography is magnificent, it is genuinely frightening, Ben Foster is a revelation, Dennis Quaid is Dennis Quaid, and it has several great twists at the end which leave you sufficiently impressed, perhaps even enough to go see it again, like I will on Saturday, and this time I’m going to pay full price.

Yes.

It’s that good.

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SEARCHING FOR GOD… ON THE TV.

Posted in TV Tirades, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 5, 2009 by helenparker1212

“I’m gonna find God.”

“God.”

“Yes.”

“God.”

“Yes. He isn’t in heaven, he has to be somewhere.”

“Try New Mexico, I hear he’s on a tortilla.”

“No, he’s not on any flat bread.”

If you’ve been watching Supernatural Season 5 (and if you haven’t then you’re an idiot) recently, either on tv or online as I have been forced to due to the arbitrary bastard nature of delayed British releases of US tv shows, then you’ll have noticed the narrative arc has taken a distinctly religious turn. Moving beyond the typical supernatural fare of demons and monsters, the angels and humans are now on a full on quest to find Him, the big G.

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His presence has been cautiously hinted at throughout the series (a programme premised on the supernatural could hardly ignore the biggest supernatural entity of them all) even before the angels showed up in season 4, and now finally the man Himself is being hunted down by his discontent and feuding creations.

This thrilling and also slightly ominous prospect of an actual glimpse of God begs some serious questions of the audience. For starters, do we actually even want to see God? How would he be portrayed? Would he be Alanis Morrisette? Would he be empathetic? Would he be to blame? Would he be seriously pissed off? So many possibilities for the writers, we can only sit and wait to see how their imaginings of the divine head honcho unfold. They have taken a bold step to say the least in invoking Him as a potential character, or even as a potential material presence.

But the Supernatural writers are not the only ones grappling with the enormous responsibility of invoking God as a cast member. In fact there appear to me more and more American tv dramas dabbling in religious narrative arcs. Joan of Arcadia, Wonderfalls, Carnivale, Tru Calling, Saving Grace, Pushing Daisies, Reaper, Battlestar Gallactica – the list goes on.

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Is there something in the fact that all of these tv series are American? Possibly it’s the simple fact that because America makes a lot of tv programmes it will logically have larger selection of similar themed programmes. It would be extremely lazy to just accuse the American quality television industry of bible thumping. We Brits make a lot of soap operas after all, and it’s not because we all live in the economically deprived back streets of cities, drinking in grotty local pubs, shopping at the market, and shagging the neighbours for all their worth.

Not most of us anyway.

And what does it say about us, that these tv shows are just as popular in our own countries, some even more so, than they are on their home turf? Did we ask for these shows? Or are we being coached by a malign evangelical force at the top of the tv production ladder? Conspiracy theorists and anthropologists: feel free to step in at any time. Is the rise of ‘Islamic extremism’ and the militarism of ‘Asian values’ making us all rethink our slack Western agnosticism and our arrogant atheism?

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Is the religious quest the new front in the war on terror?

Will finding our faiths again make us less terrified?

Is tv the new pulpit?

Is that all a load of bollox and entertainment is just entertainment?

You have to wonder though, why there are no western tv programmes involving Buddah, Moses, Muhammad, or any other denomination for that matter. The west does seem, for all its cultural and religious pluralism, to be rather preoccupied with Christianity. Still. Maybe it’s time we all stopped trying to kid ourselves that we’re a secular culture when our entire civilisation is built on the foundations of our Christian heritage. It’s like trying to deny your parents are your parents. You might not like them, but you kind of sort of owe them your existence.

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Our loss of faith has been a relatively fast one. Over the last sixty years, religion has taken a back seat for the general western population (who don’t live in the American mid-west), church attendence has dwindled to next to nothing compared to the levels of our grandparents’ days, and young people today would not be seen dead in a church. Except for their own funerals – ah you know what I mean. How many people under the age of 30 do you know who go to church regularly or even irregularly? Two or three? There was a boost when the Poles came, but their goals are mostly to return to Poland – depite what the BNP would have you believe – so what then?

What has the rejection of God actually gotten us?

Society is in the shitter, we all know this, but does it have anything to do with the absence of a moral force in our lives? We claim we are intelligent enough to make our own moral decisions without religion to arbitrarily tell us how to behave, but isn’t that confidence just astonishingly arrogant? Do we really think we can be trusted to our own devices without the fear of an omnipotent power watching us and judging us? Without the fear of a punishment for our transgressions in the afterlife, even if we get away with it in life? Can we really get our heads around the notion that evil people escape when they die, because there is no Hell? Can we really deal with the horrifying, terrifying idea that death really is like dreamless sleep – absolutely nothing.

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I’m sorry, but it’s not shameful to have faith considering the yawning abyss that is the alternative. In fact, faith is the natural human condition. We have always worshipped, even when we were hunting and gathering and chasing wilderbeasts we worshipped. Who the hell do we think we are to claim we can just throw all that away? Bloody arrogant, that’s what. And bloody stupid.

Maybe these tv shows are proof that we haven’t thrown the baby of faith out with the bathwater of organised religion. We don’t need to go to church to have faith. It’s our actions, and our attitudes, and the moral codes we live by that define our faiths, not thumping great tombs of antiquated fairytales. The west shouldn’t be ashamed of the presence of Christianity in its popular culture, it should be proud of it, especially in comparison to other religious cultures which are so terrified of themselves they can’t even draw their own prophets, let alone put them in musicals in a nappy.

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I think God probarbly had a good laugh when he saw Jerry Springer the Musical. And that’s the beauty of faith. God is what you and you alone believe it/him/them to be, and no one else can tell you otherwise, which is why it is so important to explore, parody, criticise and expose religion in popular culture, whether in books like the Satanic Verses, in theatre like Jerry Springer, or in tv series like Supernatural.

It’s the day we start trying to censor our faiths that we really need to worry about.

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ON LIB-DEM IDEAS OF TAXING THE RICH TO BENEFIT THE POOR

Posted in Politics Tirades with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2009 by helenparker1212

Sounds like a pretty bloody simple policy, right? The new Lib-Dem ‘big idea’ is that those with houses worth over a million pounds should pay slightly more tax than every other fucker, for the simple reason that they have more money – clearly, they must have more money if they have a big house. Right? And these people with their big houses – about 1% of the population – should pay more because they have more. Trouble is, this simple moral outlook has an even simpler scupper. Why the hell should we pay more tax simply because we have worked hard to earn more? And what about those who own a million pound house but don’t actually earn all that much? If they’re retired, or inherited it, or whatever excuse they have.

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In the economic system we have accepted to live by – and we have accepted it whether we like it or not – everybody has the opportunity to work hard and earn lots. You can go to university, get educated, and then go work in a bank and sell sub-prime mortgages and then cut and run before anyone can catch you and put a brick through your face. So why on earth should these people who have worked hard to earn well give their money arbitrarily to people who have shirked education in favour of state handouts and idleness? Why should they pay for pensioners? They have a state pension, don’t they? Well, there you go then, anyone can live on £80 a week, it’s not like pensioners need much money anyway, they don’t actually ‘do’ anything, do they? And as for these families living in council houses on the dole with eight kids. Well, they made their choices and got into that mess. Why should I, who have worked hard all my life, pay for these good-for-nothing scroungers?

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Sound familiar? It’s the kind of thing people blurt out when they’ve just looked at their wage slip and seen how much has been confiscated in tax.  OK, maybe not about the pensioners, but certainly the situation in this country when it comes to social welfare is particularly fuckin galling. On the news this week were two stories which hit home to me and sent me into exhorts of vitriolic rage. The first was the Lib-Dems’ new dream of arbitrary tax for the rich, and the second was the story of women attempting to escape domestic violence being denied refuge by councils attempting to save money.

On the one hand was a stupidly idealistic idea that has absolutely no chance of coming to fruition, and on the other is a desperate case for the implementation of this stupid idea immediately. The fact is that councils are shit, and they cannot be trusted to spend the money we give them responsibly. They allocate money for road maintenance when it is needed to finance child protection services so that vulnerable children like Baby Peter can be removed from their dangerous parents before they batter them to death. Road maintenance is important after all. Otherwise people will complain about pot-holes. And as for these women fleeing their violent partners, well, an entire family on the dole with matching heroin addictions have a much fairer case for social housing than she does. There are more of them, for a start. And she was probably a nag anyway.

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The fact is that you cannot justify the arbitrary taxation of the rich. What are we, communists? If we are then maybe we should be debating whether or not to put dole scroungers into factories and forced labour camps rather than debating the taxation of a whole 1% of the country. We have the infrastructure to protect the less wealthy in this country, it just doesn’t work very well. It’s not about underfunding, it’s about mishandled funding. Tax doesn’t need to go up or down, it just needs to be controlled and monitored as and when it is spent, and unfortunately this power lies in the hands of the government and the councils they umbrella. And they’re all fuckwits. But this is as much the fault of the rich minority as it is of the poor majoritybristol libdems

We are all responsible for the behaviour of the people we put in power. We knew all about MPs’ expenses long before the numbers came out, but we did bugger all, and we’re still doing bugger all. They still regulate their own expenses, we have achieved nothing with our media outcry. We sit on our arses and complain but we actively do, and thus achieve, nada, zilch, NOTHING. We all know what we have to do. We have to massively increase income tax. That’s THE GOLDEN RULE NUMBER ONE on the road to equality. This raise in tax can then fund and sustain the raising of the minimum wage to a decent level, so that exploitation is eradicated and financial stability is guaranteed for the majority over the minority. Those are the first actions that need to be taken.

Those are the absolute fundamentals. Everything else can wait, we just need those two first. Then we can build. And as for the argument that “the brightest minds will leave”, then let the treacherous little swines leave, there are plenty who will gladly step into their places. No end of them in fact. Everyone wants in on this country, all over the world they want to be here. So those that want to leave may feel free to do so. We don’t want you.

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ON THE POISONOUS NATURE OF UNIVERSITY FUNDING CUTS

Posted in Politics Tirades with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 21, 2009 by helenparker1212

OK, just watched Channel 4 news and am feeling incensed, so I thought I’d vent my spleen. Firstly on the news that the Liberal Democrats are shelving their goal of ending student tuition fees. There is a philosophy (you hear it in pubs a lot when people who work in offices and wear ill-fitting pin-striped suits get the credit cards out and start drinking sambuca) that claims people are naturally divided into those with the intellectual capacity for academic and economic brilliance, and those with the intellectual capacity to become hairdressers and bricklayers.

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This philosophy attests that for a society to sustain itself these natural intellectual divides must be recognised, and that those with a low intellectual capacity should not be given hopes and aspirations above their intellectual stations. That we should not encourage or fund these people in university. Or really even in college or sixth form for that matter. Hell, maybe not even in GCSEs, unless they’re in hair-dressing and brick-laying, or leisure and tourism; those in the bad suits always need plane tickets to the Maldeves to be sold to them by someone; we can’t do it all by computer, we still have some realistic Luddite sensibilities. Still have. What was I saying? Oh yeah.

So anyway, this philosophy, it’s never quite been fully allowed to prevail, even despite the atrocious segregation of my parents’ generation between grammar schools and technical schools and no school at all, university places were funded with a grant. There were no tuition fees to speak of. Universities were supported by the state, even if they were still segregated into polytechnics etc. You could still go. The only thing holding people back was social apathy, i.e. their ignorant parents who were too busy down t’ pit or in t’ kitchen to give their children any intellectual aspiration. The fact is you could still afford to go if you wanted to.

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The dream ended however when my generation decided they actually mostly wanted to go to university and not t’ pit or t’ kitchen (in modern terms, retail and catering). Wow, the state said, there’s too many of them, we can’t give them all this money, we need it for the banks and for a few wars we might have. Thus, the tuition fee was born overnight, and universities changed from unifying climates of intellectual and practical social amalgamation and progression towards utopian enlightenment like what we always see in sci-fi films and stuff. You know, where they’re always wearing togas and wandering around pleasure gardens. And instead they became multi-million pound businesses interested in only one thing: MONEY. Our money. Loaned to us by the state, to be repaid by us to the state in kind over the course of our entire frikin lives. Plus interest. And if they couldn’t get enough money out of us, then they had an international market to select from. FOREIGN MONEY. They could triple fees for foreign students, and give them course places over the poorer natives. GIVE US YOUR MONEY AND WE WILL CUT YOUR TUTOR HOURS AND THEIR WAGES, BUT YOU’LL GET A NICER ARTS CENTRE. MONEY.

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The labour government – the fuckers – had a saving grace in their aim of 50% of young people going into further education. Half of the young population actively encouraged to reach for the intellectual sky and fuck what anyone else said. Half of the population shoved together on campuses and forced to coexist with every different social strata imaginable – an intellectual and social UNIVERSE, shoved together and mixing in scummy student accomodation, dodgy pubs and clubs, late night trips to Spar, home-sickness, sports halls and freshers week pissups. Even with the horrifying prospect of a $20 grand debt to haunt their adult lives, 50% of young people were going to be encouraged to go for it anyway, to better themselves and to enjoy themselves and to finally break down the social barriers their parents and their parents’ parents and their parents’ parents and their parents’ parents laboured under since the dawn of frikin time.

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Oh, but now we’re in a recession, suddenly universities can’t provide the places for this many young hopefuls. Suddenly the government can’t afford to loan this many of its citizens the money for intellectual and economic fulfilment. Suddenly university managers are tightening the belts and sacking tutors and reducing places and turning down local applicants in favour of foreign applicants who can provide triple the money. Now the talk is of reducing the 50% goal. To what though? Is the pin-striped sambuca drinking office philosophy going to win out over the basic fucking ideal of human endeavour??

This is not recession economics.

This is conspiracy.

This is odious, noxious stench of economic elitism seeping into our most important weapon in the economic struggle, the education system.

They will win if we allow the intellectual ambition of the majority to die.

FIGHT IT

FIGHT IT

FIGHT IT

FIGHT IT

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And if you want to go to university and the only thing you feel confident studying is hairdressing management or golf course management then you should go to university and study hairdressing management and golf course management, and no fucker should EVER make you feel like you don’t deserve to be there.

ITV’s THE BILL Finally Grows Up

Posted in TV Tirades with tags , , , , , , , on July 17, 2009 by helenparker1212

I was recently watching ITV’s The Bill for the first time in around a year, when it began to dawn on me that something  was amiss. Thoughts such as ‘ooh, that was well filmed’ and ‘that was an excellent bit of dialogue’ began to enter my head, an occurence previously unknown to me in my fifteen-year-long relationship with this particular tv series. These were not my only causes for concern however, as it was then revealed that they are finally getting rid of that appalling ginger bloke Superintendent Heaton and the twenty-year dead weight of DCI Meadows. And to top it all off my two favourite characters, Smithy and Stone, proceeded to have the most epic wrestling match I’ve ever seen, on a par with Bates and Reeve in Women in Love, except, regrettably, with clothes on.

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‘Something’s going on here’, I told myself, ‘The Bill is never this good’. Something cataclysmic must have happened to their production team, someone must have died, or fired all the writers. Alas, my suspicions were confirmed as soon as I googled The Bill and discovered numerous press releases about the revamping, in conjunction with its new primetime post-watershed slot of 9pm Thursdays and Fridays. Finally, The Bill is growing up. Could this mean we are finally going to have a police series to rival its US counterparts such as NYPD Blue, Law and Order, or even The Wire?? These are examples of American Quality television, where the struggle between the strict series format and the demands of serial narrative depth have struck a balance with gritty plotlines and emotionally complex characters. This is a balance which British TV series such as The Bill and Casualty have never before been able to master, festering as a result in a sort of habitual limbo of vacuous characterisation, unimaginably dull filming technique passing for verite, and churned out, never revisited storylines.

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Much of the press surrounding this new move has mentioned a desire to concentrate on character depth and more realistic, contemporary and even controversial storylines. Given the show’s hour length and two nights run, it has the potential for a mini-series’ worth of material every week. There is a war raging in tv between series and serial, but the fact is that today’s audience demands the ’story of the week’ be balanced with an over-arching narrative which can allow for deeper character development. Those shows which do manage to strike the balance are much more rewarding and culturally worthwhile than those just happy to plod along unassumingly for 20 odd years, unnoticed and therefore uncancelled (Casualty). So bravo The Bill! It’s taken long enough, but if the previous four episodes of The Bill are anything to go by, it looks like we’re back on track for a return to Quality British tv which doesn’t involve any frikin Larks rising in Candleford.

How Did Israel Achieve Victory Over The Arabs Between 1947 and 1949?

Posted in Politics Tirades with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2009 by helenparker1212

The question of how the Israelis managed such an astonishing victory over the Arab world has only recently become a contested subject within Israel itself, after the rise of the ‘new historian’ movement in the 1980s. The myths disseminated throughout Israeli history were subsequently blasted, and new causes for the success were explored, such as the disunity of the Arab states during the civil war and the invasion, also the lack of intervention of the part of the UN and the British, but most significantly, the part Israel played in the expulsion of the Palestinian population.

palestinian woman

This essay examines in six stages the key elements at play during the two wars, which assisted the Israeli victory. It will examine the military preparedness and strategies of both the Palestinians and the Zionist in the run up to, and during the civil war. Then it will assess the influence of outside forces on the shape of the war. Lastly it will discuss the importance of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

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The Birth of the Horror Film: German Expressionism and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

Posted in Essays with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2009 by helenparker1212

“rarely before or since has a body of films exerted such a pull towards verbal paraphrase, in which epithets like ‘dark’ and ‘demonic’, ‘twisted’, ‘haunted’ and ‘tormented’ leap onto the page.”

(Elsaesser, 2000:19)

Robert Weine’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is unanimously agreed to be both a prime example of German Expressionist cinema, and also a seminal horror film. However, the film is also something of an enigma, combining as it does, a mixture of gothic, psychologically motivated narrative, and Expressionist set design. The film’s influence on the horror genre can certainly be attributed to this gothic narrative, but the influence of it’s Expressionist aesthetic has to be considered far more sceptically than it has been by past theorists. The question of why the Expressionist aesthetic influenced Film Noir so strongly, and not horror, has to be asked when considering the film’s legacy as horror.

This essay will attempt to address the legacy of the film within the horror genre, from its origins in Modernism, the Expressionist influence in its scenography and perspective, and the Gothic influence in its narrative and themes, specifically those themes which have helped formulate some of the iconic elements of the horror genre, such as the monster, the male anxiety, and the notion of the ‘other’.

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