Pity the political historians of the future

I mean, for serious, the present day is bizarre if you stop and think about it from the perspective of what, if we survive the Orange Supremacist's attempts to dick wave at “ Crazy Rocket Man”, will have to be included in future political science textbooks:

“Okay, so there was a huge fascist revival that first came to public prominence as a harassment campaign against one female game developer.”

“The fascist revival adopted a cartoon frog as their new mascot and god. When a fascist was explaining this on television they got punched in the face and it became a meme. It also became a sort of competitive sport at his future speaking engagements.”

“The fascists founded a fictional nation, made a flag for it and named it after their frog god.”

“Okay, so internet memes and their political significance...”

“Here is a photo of the future 45^th President of the United States failing to sell a Stone Cold Stunner at Wrestlemania 23. Here is another photo of his appearance in Home Alone 2.”

“A massive vote winner was the promise to save an obsolete fuel industry whose entire US infrastructure employed fewer people than the Arby's restaurant chain.” (Totally true fact, I swear)

“Another vote winner was a promise to build a wall across the entire US/Mexico border. There follows fifty-sxeven pages of detailed costings and basic geography that prove how impossible that would be.”

“In Great Britain, the generation who spent twenty years telling their children not to believe anything they read on Wikipedia collectively decided 'but if its on the side of a bus, it must be true'.”

“After claiming their opposition was soft on terrorism, the Conservative Party lost their majority in an election they had no reason to call and ended up entering a coalition with the political offshoot of a terrorist organisation.”

“The Kremlin used social media to try and stop British pensioners from getting their flu jabs.”

“There was an annual controversy amongst conservatives about Starbucks holiday themed cups that got so entrenched that in 2017, in sheer desperation, they decided that a pair of simplified cartoons hands drawn on the cup were both so slim they must represent a clear advocacy for lesbianism.”

“In a separate incident, US conservatives ritually destroyed their coffeemakers in support of Sean Hannity.”

“The coffeemaker incident was tangentially related to an Alabama election where 'Republican pedophile or Democrat not a pedophile' was a genuinely hard decision for thousands of people.”

“The president supported the pedophile, by the way.”

“There was a transphobic conspiracy theory concerning the chemical composition of soy milk.” 

Christmas Warfare

(Content warning: Trump, also Alex Jones' face).

"Mine now. China!"

It really is the most tiresome of all conservative talking points this idea that there's a war on the idea of Christmas. Donald Jodocus Trump, the Woody Allen of US presidents, recently used it as a talking point in a speech to the Pseudo-Christian Hypocrisy Values Group (or some such bunch of cretins, anyway) to huge applause because these people are so desperate to feel oppressed its pathetic.

Of course, Trump had to go as far as possible in making his goat-bothering audience feel as masochistically oppressed as possible by claiming you never heard anyone say Christmas anymore. Bearing in mind this is the same man who recently claimed he invented the word “fake” we should be grateful he didn't claim that Christmas was itself a Trump-branded event.

There is no war on Christmas.

Every Western government maintains Christmas as a bank holiday (or whatever the local equivalent is); every corporation that sells product to the public spends millions upon millions on Christmas branding to the point that a particular Coca-Cola advert is literally considered an absolutely mandatory component of the season; every broadcaster has dozens of special projects made for broadcast over Christmas; an entire Hollywood genre exists to make movies about Christmas.

No other holiday gets that. Easter comes close which is, again, a Christian festival.

But these people are so desperate to feel oppressed that they'll take whatever they can get. They see people who are actually marginalised getting attention and concessions and actual legal rights and they feel left out because they have the collective emotional maturity of a five year old noticing their baby sibling (gender neutral phrasing there, suck it, social conservatives!) is getting more attention than they are.

So they latch on to the fact that the Starbucks coffee cups have “Happy Holidays” written on them instead of “Merry Christmas” (yes, this is an actual thing these people lost their shit over last year, I am not even slightly joking) because this is such a blow against the fact that the whole of Western society rearranges itself to accommodate this one religious observance. In their minds the mere acknowledgement that other winter festivals exist (and they exist in almost every culture) and that people might celebrate them is an act of terrible censorship and probably also somehow tied in with issues of ethics in games journalism.

Its fetishistic, this desire they have to be downtrodden, it really is. I remember the good old days when socially conservative pseudo-Christians just stuck to being self-loathing closeted homosexuals. Bonus points if they were also a televangelist!

"Lister... DO. YOU. HAVE. A CAT!?"

Also, is it just me or is Alex Jones (who claimed recently he lost custody of his son but we all know that was just a child actor hired to garner public sympathy. I know, I was shocked when I found out too) starting to look like Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf?

Not relevant but I was on a roll.