Know the enemy and know yourself

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 In this week's installment of history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, Mango Mussolini's Squadristi descended on the capital and metaphorically, if not quite literally, tasered themselves in the balls.

In common with most far-right rallies/insurrections, there were flags. Lots of flags. So many flags.

America's Swastika, AKA the Confederate Flag was a popular choice among the flag-shagging Trumpist ultras because of course it was:

Image credit Reuters.

Now the thing about this "Confederate Flag", as  quite a few people know, is that it wasn't the national flag of the Confederacy. The reason that this now-established and instantly recognisable symbol of white supremacy differs from the national flag(s) of the Confederacy is an interesting one. It's all to do with identity, and not just in the obvious, ideological sense of political identity, but in the direct, practical sense of distinguishing friend from foe.

 When the Confederate States seceded, like every new state, they wanted a flag of their own, and this was what they came up with:

As you can see, it's inspired by the flag of the USA, but with fewer stripes and a Betsy Ross-style circle of seven white stars in the blue canton, representing the original seven breakaway states (more stars were added to the original design as the number of rebel states joining the Confederacy increased). 

Can you see what's wrong with this picture? Well, if you were a Confederate soldier, going into battle under this banner, you soon would have. It looked way too much like the opposition's flag, especially in the heat of battle, or when the wind dropped so the design of the flag wasn't clearly discernible.

By the end of 1861, the Army of Northern Virginia had come up with a solution. A flag (based on a previously rejected proposal for a Confederate national flag) which looked nothing like the ones the Yankees were carrying in to battle. It was a square battle flag with a dark blue saltire on a red background, outlined in white, and bearing the Confederate states' stars on the arms of the saltire:

The rectangular variant of this flag, as carried by the Trumpist in the first picture started life as another  battle flag inspired by the North Virginian version, namely the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee.

As for the original national flag, the unfortunate symbolism of it looking like the other sides' flag, plus all those friendly fire incidents, made it unpopular and the Confederates decided to go for a rebrand.

And, boy, was this one a doozy. 

One part of the redesign actually made rational sense. The new flag design took the USA-like stars-on-a-blue background design out of the canton & replaced it  with the dissimilar Confederate battle flag. 

But the background colour of the flag was pure ideology, with zero concessions to common sense. Out went the red and white stripes of the previous versions, replaced by a pure white background. 

 

And, just in case you were in any doubt what that white background was all about, on April 23, 1863, Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson and William Ross Postell, published an editorial championing a design of a battle flag on a white background, later called 'The White Man's Flag:'

"Our idea is simply to combine the present battle-flag with a pure white standard sheet; our Southern Cross, blue on a red field, to take the place on the white flag that is occupied by the blue union in the old United States flag, or the St. George’s cross in the British flag. As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."

So the ideology was there, right in your face. Something you couldn't say about the practicality of the redesign. OK, you couldn't mistake the bearer for a damn Yankee on the battlefield. What you could easily mistake his flag for was a white flag of truce, with hilariously tragic consequences.

White supremacists, folks. Shooting themselves in the balls since 1863.

The mainly-white flag (AKA the "Stainless Banner") was such a tactical self-own that a third major redesign of the Confederate national flag was inevitable from day one. By 1865 the Confederates had got their shit together sufficiently to design a national flag that didn't signal surrender to the enemy, by adding a vertical red identification stripe to the design (this iteration was nicknamed the "Blood-Stained Banner"):

Unfortunately for the Confederates, by this stage time was running out for both the Confederacy and for recognition of the final version of its national flag to become embedded. Which is why the only flags of the insurrectionist South that are widely recognised today are variants of its distinctive battle flag.

I'm indebted to the folks at Snopes for the straight dope on the flags of the Confederacy.

 So now that we're all up to speed with Confederate vexillology, we're also better equipped to engage in the battle of ideas with those inevitable apologists who claim, falsely that Confederate iconography has nothing to do with white supremacy and racism, and that the Civil War wasn't a war to defend slavery and white supremacy, but "States' rights" or some such nonsense.

So, if you're some alt-right wannabe edgelord hanging around waiting to "destroy" me with BS talking points like this, come at me, bro. I'm so ready for you.

I know the enemy.

Update: Rebecca Watson gave a great summary of the probably apocryphal auto-tasered testicles story:

 

Zoom book club recommends...

 

寧為太平犬，不做亂世人">寧為太平犬，不做亂世人

A slightly late Happy New Year to everybody out there in Blogland. How are we all enjoying living in those interesting times the Chinese (allegedly) warned us about?

Like most people, I've spent most of the past year doing whatever it takes to get me through the day. Like reading books, then meeting up with friends to talk about them ... only with an extra helping of everybody being on the other end of a Zoom call and a side order of silently screaming "You're on mute!" Happy days.

Apart from the social interaction, however degraded by Zoom fatigue, reading groups have two great features. They introduce you to books you wouldn't otherwise have read, and reading a more diverse selection of books means that some of those books will fulfill what those old Heineken adverts used to promise, and refresh the parts other books cannot reach.

Our last two books were good examples. Both fiction, but each one refreshing completely different parts:

Exhibit A: Fifty-Fifty by Steve Cavanagh.

Exhibit B: Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler.

No significant spoilers ahead.

On different levels, I enjoyed both books, although they're chalk and cheese. Of course, opinions differed, but I'm not here to debate whether any specific book was "good" or "bad." I am here to say that your reading diet, like your actual diet, is healthier if it's varied. 

Fifty-Fifty is a plot-driven courtroom drama and thriller, which kicks off with the discovery that a colourful Italian-American former mayor of New York has been brutally murdered in his own home.

Yikes! Be careful, Rudy!

The central mystery is that, when the ex-mayor was murdered, the only other two people in the house were his grown-up offspring, Alexandra and Sofia Giuliani Avellino. In this whodunnit, each sister accuses the other one of the murder and there seems to be no conclusive evidence to show which one of them actually did it (or, for that matter, whether the two sisters conspired together to do their old man in).

Enter hard-boiled criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, defending the sister who, his gut instinct tells him, is the innocent party. Is Eddie's instinct right? Expect the classic whodunnit menu of red herrings, the killer(s) covering her/their tracks with acts of ruthless brutality and twisted ingenuity, unexpected plot twists and startling revelations.

Fifty-Fifty is your classic airport thriller done well (in my opinion). The part of me it reached was the part that wants straightforward entertainment, puzzles and distraction. It's not going to change me on a fundamental level. Now that I've read it and know how the mystery gets solved, I've no particular desire to re-read it, but it passed the time pleasantly enough.

But it does what it does pretty well. It's easy to dismiss this sort of genre writing, especially when, like Fifty-Fifty, the book gets singled out as a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick of the week, the literary equivalent of getting kissed by your mum at the school gates and for ever blowing your chances of hanging out with the cool kids.

But, literary snobbery aside, think about these facts. It's easy to write. Almost all of us leaned that stuff at school. But it's hard to write well enough that people want to read what you've written, and carry on reading it for several hundred pages. Even if you have this talent, it requires a pretty special blend of talent, determination and luck to actually get published. Most books which make it into print don't sell that well. Fifty-Fifty did pretty well and, although it reads well enough as a stand-alone novel, it's only one of a series of books that Steve Cavanagh's written about the reformed con artist turned criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, showing that the guy's not just a flukeish one-hit wonder.

But it's also a work of genre, which stands at a remove from the real world. It contains several tropes of the crime genre. Eddie Flynn, for example, is an instantly recognisable type - the dogged, incorruptible, rebellious, maverick outsider hero with a troubled personal life. The same goes for what he's up against - out there, there's a devilish plot, an elaborate game being played against law enforcement and natural justice, planned by a brilliant, but warped, mind (or minds - you'll have to read to the end to find out which). We've been here before, from the evil schemes of Professor Moriarty and Hannibal Lecter, to the elaborate mind games of a TV series like The Bridge. 

Now I'm no expert on crimes and solving crimes,* but I'm pretty sure that, in real life, this isn't generally how it works. From what I gather, solving crimes is a team effort and most stuff gets solved by following established, tested procedures, at least in functioning systems of law enforcement. Where there's systemic corruption, incompetence, or even just institutional groupthink, some team members need to stand up and go against the flow but, in real life, I don't think most crimes end up being solved by some Eddie Flynn or Philip Marlowe type going rogue and kicking doors open.

As for violent crimes, yes, in a lot of real-life cases the victim and perpetrator are known to one another, so that's like the crime scene in Fifty-Fifty. But that's where the similarity ends; in real life, these sorts of crimes are mostly unplanned or poorly-planned and easy to solve. Even in those very rare cases of ruthless, high-functioning game-playing killers who plan and carry out their crimes methodically, the offenders rarely turn out to be warped geniuses of the crime fiction trope, but exceptions who fall through the cracks due at least partly to luck, or to an outbreak of the groupthink. incompetence or corruption I've already alluded to on the part of the authorities.

Although the rules of the genre are not the same as the rules of real life, Fifty-Fifty does a pretty decent job within the conventions and limits of the genre. Most of what happens is internally consistent and believable within the world of the book. The police and court procedure stuff sounded convincing and well-researched to me and, though it was a work of genre fiction it also touched on real-world social issues from unequal access to justice for rich and poor, to sexism, which gave it more of a feeling of heft and believability than many less accomplished crime novels.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a different kind of novel altogether. From the opening, I had a sinking feeling that this book wasn't going to be a barrel of laughs:

"You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps himself to himself; his routine is etched in stone."

Sure enough, it turns out that Micah is a self-employed tech guy, living the proverbial life of quiet desperation, just about getting by with very few limited and unsatisfactory relationships with his fellow humans, scraping just enough of a living to afford a rented apartment which he keeps spotless with an unvarying cleaning routine. In his rented box, Micah writes notes to the other residents of his block, complaining about their persistent failure to flatten their cardboard packaging when the recycling goes out on bin days. 

At this point, I cheered myself up by checking the page count. Only 178 pages? Phew! At least it looked like I wouldn't be spending too much of my down time with Micah and his rather bleak little life.

So I stuck with it, and was very surprised at how much I ended up enjoying this book. Unlike the event-packed Fifty-Fifty, nothing much happens for most of the book. Only once does something fairly major, dramatic and unexpected happen to Micah, But what does happen turns out to be surprisingly compelling.

Unlike Fifty-Fifty, the entertainment here isn't straightforward. There's lots of everyday miscommunication and conflicts, especially between orderly, routine ways of living and messy, spontaneous lives, observed in a way that can be simultaneously sad and hilarious (there are points where both you're seriously willing Micah not to innocently say that wildly inappropriate thing he's about to say to his semi-detached girlfriend and can't help finding it funny at the same time).

There are puzzles here, too but, again, they're not the slightly detached clear-cut "It was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room" puzzles of the whodunnit but as messy, ambiguous and often unresolved as the ones from everyday life.

As for distraction, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it. Except that, by a chapter or so in, there is. It's just a change of mental gears from Fifty-Fifty, slowing down and seeing the universe of small detail you miss when you're speeding, pedal to the metal, through the big, noisy world of the plot-driven thriller. 

That's a wonderful thing about books. They're fractal - you can zoom in or out to any scale and still be drawn into a dense, engaging landscape where you can uttely lose yourself. 

I don't think I've done justice to how well-written and unexpectedly absorbing Redhead By The Side of the Road is, but just take my word for it and give it a go. After all, what have you got to lose? It's only 178 pages and, if you're stuck in lockdown while the world around you burns, you might as well try something new.

Anyway, as the omnishambles that was 2020 lurches into the existential horror show of 2021, have a good one and stay safe, everybody. I don't know about you, but after a weird and terrible year, I'm starting to feel a bit more chipper about life. There are obvious reasons to be more cheerful (we have vaccines, alleluia!), but I'm sensing another sort of shift. 

Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a feeling that we're pretty damn close to rock bottom and the only way is up.  The abject failure of the Trump putsch only heightened a sense that a toxic boil is bursting and change is coming. It feels like a time for reflection, a time to take stock. So, after sharing a couple of literary discoveries from the last year, I'd like to close by sharing my piece of music of the year which, I think, perfectly captures the zeitgeist.

It's not celebratory, in fact it's downright mournful. But it's also spine-tinglingly powerful, beautiful and utterly appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back and enjoy the legend that is Annie Lennox and the socially distanced London Voices Choir, totally smashing it with this awesome rendition of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:

"We have always been surrounded by terror and by the beauty that is an inseparable part of it."

The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký.

 

 

*If you are, examples, corrections and clarifications are welcome in the comments (comments moderated by me, but I'm happy to publish any reasonable feedback).

No logo - domestic science edition

Baking soda. I love this stuff like Donald Trump loves hydroxycholorquine.

I've used it to remove tea and coffee stains from cups and mugs for as long as I can remember, a tip I picked up from my mum. But by trial & error (mostly trial - it usually works & hasn't harmed anything yet), I've found out that it can replace a huge range of branded, specialist cleaning products around the home.

The biggie is baked or burned on food residue on pans and hobs. This stuff knocks spots off any branded specialist product I've ever used, whether mixed to a gritty paste to scrub hobs, or added to hot water to soak a pan or baking tray before scrubbing.

You can also ditch those creams they sell for cleaning stainless steel sinks and taps - baking soda will shine them up better at a fraction of the price.

Washing machine drawer getting scummy and mouldy? Baking soda is your friend.

Fridge getting a bit smelly? Baking soda again.

Pongy food waste bin? Ditto.

Limscale and other crud you'd rather not think about round the toilet rim? Marigolds, a plastic pan scrubber and a paste of good old baking soda.

Grease and oil stains? Sodium bicarbonate to the rescue!

It's also, apparently, good for getting uranium oxide or depleted uranium dust out of your workwear, although I haven't had occasion to try this one yet.

And the list goes on....

When baking soda teams up with vinegar, it gets even better.

Health warning: baking soda is a great cleaning product, but please don't inject it as a virus cure.

Pro-Brexit voters knew what they were voting for...

...well, sort of.

Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.

Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.

I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.

So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave

The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.

It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.

In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.

"Oh, won't somebody PLEASE think of the polar bears?"

Alien archaeology (with spoilers)

I've been watching the old BBC series, Quatermass and the Pit on BBC iPlayer recently, and enjoying it a lot. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend it (or the film version), especially if you're planning to read the rest of this post (spoilers ahoy!).

I was struck was how unexpectedly similar some of the underlying ideas, themes and major plot elements were to a very different Sci Fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Namely:

• Both involve the discovery and excavation of an ancient alien artifact: the Martian spacecraft buried under London in Quatermass, the lunar monolith in 2001.
• In both stories, the authorities try to keep the discovery a secret with cover stories. In Quatermass, the alien spacecraft is explained away as an unidentified German V weapon that had fallen on London in World War 2. In 2001, the moon base is quarantined on the pretext of an outbreak of some unidentified disease.
• In both cases, the aliens who left the artifact behind altered the minds of our ancient hominid ancestors, pushing them towards greater intelligence and putting them on to the path to being human.
• In both cases the seemingly inert alien artifact is activated by being exposed to a power source, leading to the climax of the story.
• The human propensity for violence and its origin hangs over both stories. The Quatermass Martians bequeath intelligence to the hominids, but also their own propensity for violence, which we are told, stems form the insect-like Martians' instinct carry out periodic eugenic purges of their hives, in order to exterminate the unfit. In 2001, the aliens are presented as inscrutable, rather than evil, but it's also clear that, along with the gift of intelligence, their intervention also gifted our ancestors with the weapons, and perhaps the desire, to kill one another.
• Quatemass and the Pit ends with a warning that the human race may destroy itself if it fails to curb the drive towards violence and weapon-making abilities that came, along with our intelligence from the aliens. This theme isn't made so explicit in the film version of 2001, (in the famous jump cut from bone club to orbiting satellite, it's never made clear that the first few spacecraft are orbiting weapons of mass destruction) but the novel is a lot less coy about the continuity of human violence.

At first sight, it seems as if Clarke might have been, perhaps unconsciously, influenced by this 1950s TV series. But, despite the striking similarities, it's probably not that simple. Quatermass and the Pit was first broadcast on the BBC in the winter of 1958-9, after Arthur C Clarke had moved permanently to Sri Lanka, and the film version didn't come out until 1967, (filming of 2001 had already started in 1965).

Also, the two elements (the discovery of an ancient alien artifact and aliens encountering ancient humans) had been explored in two of Arthur C Clarke's earlier short stories, The Sentinel (1951) and Encounter in the Dawn (1953), so it could even be that Nigel Kneale was influenced by Clarke's short stories when writing this Quatermass tale, rather than the other way round. Or maybe the parallels are just coincidence, but they've intriguing enough to be worth a bit more digging when I've got the time/inclination. Who knows what I might uncover...

Revoke Article 50 - open letter to MPs

I'm trying not to make this blog one long despairing howl of Brexit pain, but life comes at you fast and we're now in national crisis territory, as the Operation Yellowhammer/Redfold civil emergency plans & explosive growth in numbers signing the petition to revoke Article 50 show us.

That's why this post is just an adaptation of a letter I've written to my MP, hopefully as a rough template/inspiration for others who've already written asking their representaives in Parliament to back a referedum on the final deal and been brushed off with a bland boilerplate reply and the asserion that the UK is leaving the EU on the 29th of March and we must all "unite" to make the mess we've been presented with work.

Please feel free to copy n' paste use, adapt, critique, write a better letter, whatever. But please try to do something. It may be more in hope than expectation of changing minds, but this shit is getting real now:

Dear *****

On **/**/**, you responded to my [email//letter] regarding the proposal for UK to withdrawal from the European Union and concluded by saying that we are leaving on the 29th March and that we need to unite to make it a success. As you will be aware, this will not be happening on this date, so I am writing to you again to urge you to think seriously about the choices you are about to make and their effect on your constituents and the country.

Firstly, I would remind you that, having done nothing to meet the demands of myself and other constituents for a vote on the final deal, when the details became available, you have had the privilege of being able to consider the deal and vote on it twice in Parliament already, with another vote to come.

The agreement has twice been rejected decisively by the House. All available polling evidence shows that it is at least as unpopular among voters as it is among MPs, satisfying neither those of us who wish to remain in the European Union, or those who wish to leave. The government has negotiated for two years and has come back with a deal which does not preserve the advantages we enjoy as a member of the largest free market on the planet, or meet the promises of the leave campaigns to somehow replace this great deal with a better one. It is, by any reasonable standards, a failure.

The unpopularity of the deal aside, it also puts the UK in a materially weaker bargaining position in international trade negotiations, subjecting this country to pressures which endanger our National Health Service, food standards and employment rights.

What are the alternatives?

The UK could leave the EU without a deal, an outcome so catastrophic that contingency plans for what would amount to a state of civil emergency are being prepared (Operation Yellowhammer/Redfold) and the House of Commons have rightly rejected this as an option, although if no deal is agreed this is the default position.

Voters could have, and should have, been granted a referendum on the final deal, but the Government have failed to seek our informed consent on the terms of exit  and, having run down the clock, it is hard to see how this can now happen.

The only alternative which remains, if you are not to harm your constituents, is for Parliament to press for Article 50 to be revoked. This is not my preferred option, but we are left with no good choices, only damage limitation. You will be aware of the petition to revoke article 50, which is being signed at an unprecedented rate. Do not underestimate the anger and frustration of those who have been driven to add their names to it, having been denied a final say in the most important decision affecting their future, as the result of a marginal result in an advisory referendum, so tainted by disinformation, foreign interference, gerrymandering and criminal electoral fraud, that the result would have been voided, if the referendum had been binding.

Unlike some of the more vocal leave advocates, I am not threatening violence or civil unrest, but be assured, if the UK is taken out of the EU, either under the terms of the Prime Minister’s terrible deal, or a catastrophic no deal, millions like me will not rest until every politician who facilitated this avoidable national crisis, in defiance of clear evidence and explicit warnings, is voted out of office.

Please do not act under the mistaken belief that your constituents or the nation will ever to unite to make this botched deal a success.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely

****

White supremacist does self-parody

If you take aggressive right wingers at face value, they're all about autonomy, self-reliance and individual responsibility. Suggest measures to reduce inequality, or positive discrimination to level up the playing field for disadvantaged minorities and they're outraged.

"People should stand on their own two feet", they cry. Policies to mitigate inequality and discrimination are just handouts to scroungers, they encourage a "dependency culture." Recipients are "welfare queens" (in the USA) or lowly vassals of the corrupt "Nanny state"* (in the Mary Poppins-loving UK).

In short, you, and you alone, are responsible for how your life turns out. Quit making excuses about where you came from. It's where you're going that counts.

Which is superficially attractive. Nobody likes a moaner, everybody admires people who make it against the odds. But I'm beginning to think that some of the most vocal of the rugged individualists don't really believe in the uncompromising message of personal responsibility that they preach.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a recent outburst from right-wing tough guy, Stefan Molyneux:

"White privilege” was 50,000 shivering winters while others in endless summers danced and sang and had easy eats year-round.

East Asians had it even worse. Siberia. Snow tigers.

You fantasize about “privilege.”

No.

It was suffering.

So pipe down.

 Our ancestors earned it."

 

O-kaay.

On one hand we're supposed to ignore a well-documented history of racism, systematic oppression, slavery and discrimination going back solidly for at least four centuries, which still obviously affects the life chances of people living today. The US Civil Rights movement and "No dogs, no blacks, no Irish" signs in rented rooms are lived history for baby boomers on both sides of the Atlantic. Black Lives Matter and the Windrush scandal are current. All this deep-rooted disadvantage, according to people like Molyneux, would just go away if poor non-white folk just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. We live in a meritocracy where disadvantaged groups are personally responsible for the continuance of their own misfortune.

But also, according to Molyneux, pale-skinned folk deserve their breaks, not because of what they've done. Not because of what their parents did, or their parents, or even their great, great, great, great grandparents. No, If you're white, you're born with bragging rights because you're distantly related to somebody who lived somewhere cold in the stone age. Extra credit for that less than 5% of neanderthal DNA you might be carrying. Award yourself a medal, why don't you?

The mask really slipped there, didn't it, Stefan? It's not really about taking personal responsibility for what you, as an individual, do in the here and now at all. It's about spreading a message of inherited, ineradicable superiority carried down through bloodlines over tens of thousands of years. It's racism, pure and simple.

So pipe down about personal responsibility. That's not what you really believe in at all.








*I've said it before and I'll say it again - it really is weird how the most vocal opponents of the Nanny State are people who literally have nannies.