Yachts wrong with the world
Donald Trump, whiteness, superyachts and other evils
What’s going on? I thought we all agreed with Joe Biden that Orange Man was the one “existential threat” to democracy. But now he’s been shot, we’re all supposed to pretend he’s just another ego-driven senior who wants to be President? And why is Biden making grovelling phone calls to him, and apologising for saying it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye”? I thought that’s what we wanted? Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi who once called Trump “dangerous” and “evil”, now says “political violence of any kind has no place in our society”. Weak! Feeble! At least we have the satisfaction of seeing the GOP belatedly come to realise that hurty words are literal-violence, after Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance said the idea “that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs … led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Didn’t they realise it before? When we said these things, we were always trying to actually kill him.
Du Lives Matter?
The Welsh Government told me that they spent no money whatsoever on this guide from last year, which translates words of social justice into the language of dragons. Members of the “Welsh Language Terminology Task and Finish Group in the field of race and ethnicity equality” met virtually 8 times over two years but were not paid a bean. It’s a real shame, because we should be rewarding those who have gifted Welsh speakers the word for intersectionality (croestoriadedd) and microaggression (microymosodiad). Would-be-Welsh speakers are also told to capitalise the word for Black, “Du” when referring to people but not to capitalise the word for white, “gwyn” in similar contexts. “Whiteness” (gwynder), we are told, also must not be capitalised as the term “has no cultural dimension”. Whereas “Blackness” (Duder) must be because it’s “A positive term that defines the characteristic of having dark skin colour and the positive cultures that may be associated with this.” I for one love that we’ve revived a nearly-dead ancient white language, just to tell white people they don’t exist. It’s also refreshing to finally be allowed to return to a 19th Century-style hierarchy of races. Presumably it goes: Du (Blacks), gwyn (whites), Y cwn ffycin Saesneg (the english). [Are you sure about that last translation? — Ed]
Focus on the race
To stay progressive, it’s important not to notice certain things. When the US Women’s 100m Hurdles champion Alaysha Johnson qualified for the Olympics, she cried on camera and said it encourages people who “look like me” to keep trying, adding “everybody all the time said that I wasn’t good enough, said that I didn’t deserve … this is for everybody that looks like me that was ever doubted … I’m making a way for everybody in my position.” It’s best not to notice the fact that there was only one white woman running in the race and she seemed to come last. First we saw colour, and it was racist. Then we were colour blind, and that became racist. So we started seeing colour again, and lo, that became racist again. It’s hard to keep up, and it’s better for white female athletes if they don’t.
Read my lips
The new “Children’s Laureate” has dropped a truth bomb, claiming that reading is an “invisible privilege” which many children in Britain are being denied. Frank Cottrell-Boyce, says studies show that children who have not been read to when they were young face “massive barriers” as they go through life. I for one had no idea that reading was so important. In my working-class Primary school I was the only one in the class who learnt to read, and I only did it as a dare. But who is at fault for this lack of literacy? The rich of course! “For too long, the life-changing benefits of children’s reading have not been taken seriously… We’ve lost a thousand libraries. In the meantime, sales of superyachts have risen by 42 per cent” Cottrell-Boyce said. For a second there he was getting dangerously close to blaming hardly-working parents [surely hard-working? — ed.] rather than the billionaires who presumably closed the libraries themselves personally to avoid tax. [I’m not sure that’s how it works — ed.] Sales of superyachts are actually down by 17 per cent at the moment, but illiterate children are hardly going to realise that. My interfering editor points out that UK billionaires pay about £6.billion in tax and public libraries cost just £725 million a year, to which I masterfully reply: “Just look at the rising sales of a specific luxury good!” In order to be inclusive, this article has been narrated by an underprivileged robot so you can hear my truth bombs without possessing the unseen and previously unacknowledged advantage of word recognition.
I chain, I sawed
Argentina, a country that once prided itself in welcoming gold-laden refugees from war-torn central Europe with no questions asked, is now being run by a chainsaw-wielding madman who will stop at nothing to lop off all traces of minorities. Javier Milei, who has called abortion “aggravated murder” has chopped the Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity from his government, a department which had been transformed by his predecessor from a boring office focused exclusively on women assigned female at birth, to a celebration of all women, celebrating gender identity and queerness. Milei, whose only redeeming quality is that he still wants Britain to give up the Malvinas, has been trading insults with leftist leaders like Brazil’s President Lulu, calling him “a corrupt communist”. I’ll admit, the Brazilian President does have quite a large section on his Wikipedia page titled “Corruption Scandals” but since Lulu didn’t learn to read until he was 10, I think I know what we can blame it on.
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