Category: Two-Minute Hate

Disgusting People

Waste Of Time

Two-Minute Hate

So I went for my annual checkup last Wednesday, and caused the usual response from Dr. Whatsit: “Bugger off and stop wasting my time; I have sick people to look after.” (Oh, and I’d lost nearly ten pounds avoirdupois since my last check-up — most, I suspect, since I returned from Britishland and stopped consuming all those pies, fish & chips, Turkish Delight and Wadworth 6X.) But that’s not the topic of this post.

All the staff were wearing pink instead of their normal blue scrubs, so of course I had to ask the (stupid) question: “Why are you all wearing pink?” and met with the obvious response: “To raise awareness of breast cancer.”

FFS: is there a sentient human being living on this planet who isn’t aware of breast cancer?

The PGA golfers (male and female) wore those silly little lapel ribbons; the NFL players, back before they became unpatriotic little shits, also wore them; and the entire South African (male) cricket team wore all-pink uniforms during an international competition a couple years back. It looked like a Mary fucking Kay convention with cricket bats and helmets, not to mention gay.

By now, I think that if you wanted to raise awareness of breast cancer, you’d have to charter a skywriting aircraft to fly over the jungles of Borneo or the Amazon, because those poor ignorant savages don’t play golf or watch football and probably don’t know the first thing about cricket (thus joining 99% of Americans, but that’s a topic for another time).

What Americans do know a great deal about is breast cancer — but basically, that awareness is worth exactly diddly, because as with so much doubleplus feel-goody bullshit, you can’t do anything with that information — other than to give money to the American Cancer Society, which already has more money than the average Central European nation, but which always seems to need more for… what, exactly? It’s not like the ACS owns cancer hospitals (like the Shriners); no, it seems as though the ACS needs more money to “make people aware” of a disease which everybody fucking knows about already. So basically, raising awareness really means “raising money”. I don’t have a problem with this, I just want people to be honest about their motives.

Oh, and get this: death rates from breast cancer are down 39% since 1989 (from the ACS website, no less). No doubt it’s because of increased awareness of cancer, not vastly improved medications and treatment. (And yes, I know the ACS funds research into the thing — I just think that they could fund even more if they stopped all these timewasting “awareness” drives.)

Cancer is a horrible, lousy, terrible disease. We all know this — some of us, like me, from first-hand or immediate second-hand experience of it — and honestly, I think we can stop with the childish pink ribbons and such because we run the risk of trivializing it.

And by the way: death rates from breast cancer among women are about 21.2 per 100,000.

For men, the death rate from prostate cancer is about 20.1 per 100,000 — statistically about the same as female breast cancer — yet I’ll bet that more people are “aware” of breast cancer than of prostate cancer. I wonder why that is?

Simple Question For The NFL

Two-Minute Hate

…and in fact for all the people who are refusing to stand for the National Anthem:

If you don’t stand for the National Anthem, what DO you stand for?

And I mean that in every sense of the word — because my immediate reaction is: you don’t stand for shit. Also, I don’t want to hear any bullshit about your First Amendment right to protest. This nation’s Constitution proudly protects that right — and the very least you can do is acknowledge that protection by showing respect to its anthem.

This picture turned my stomach:

…and today, after wearing it proudly for thirty years, I will be throwing my Dallas Cowboys coat in the trash because that’s where it belongs.

So you listen to me, Jerry Jones, you arrogant, bloviating fuckwit: you’ve just lost the right to call yourself “America’s Team” because you don’t get to have it both ways. And that goes for the preening, pampered and overpaid prima donnas who call themselves your “players” as well, may they all die from football-related concussion. You’re nobody, you’re nothing, you’re dead to me: you, your team, all the other teams and the whole fucking NFL.

You don’t exist anymore. Fuck Off And Die, the lot of you.

Idiots

Two-Minute Hate

So last week came this tragic tale of a female kayaker who was murdered while canoeing along the Amazon River. Of course, there’s a lot more to this story than meets the tale, because sentient human beings (of which she is no more, and probably wasn’t then either), would ask questions about this foolhardy venture, such as, “Why was she doing this alone?” and “Why didn’t she listen to the warnings?“, as evidenced by this:

The 43-year-old was specifically warned about the danger of the water she was about to go through but insisted on sticking to her schedule as she was “losing time”.
In her last known conversation, the 43-year-old said she felt she had no choice but to carry on in order to complete her 4,000 odyssey from the Amazon source to the sea.
Tragically, her bravery and determination led her straight into the path of cold blooded killers who shot and stabbed her in her tent.
Shortly before her death — stunned that a foreign female canoeist was heading alone towards pirate territory — residents of a riverine community called her over as she passed by.

So let me see if I got this straight: this moron had created a self-imposed deadline or timeline for an already-dangerous venture, and then decided to ignore warnings and carry on.

If a man was trying to set a record by driving between, say, Chicago and St. Louis, was told that an ice storm had passed through Illinois, but decided to press on an drive at speed along the icy I-55 and then crashed and died, would we call his actions “brave and determined”, as some are calling the Amazonian kayaker? We’d call him a bloody fool, because he was, and so was Emma Kelty.

Here’s why I’m so dismissive of this tragedy on the Amazon: it was self-imposed and unnecessary. It’s like taking a shortcut through New York’s Central Park at 2am so you won’t miss a Gilligan’s Island rerun on your hotel room TV.

But enough analogies. Many years ago, a group of European tourists went on a “nature safari” in Botswana, during which they would “experience nature” or some such bollocks. You can guess what happened next. A lion came into the tent where a woman was sleeping, killed her instantly by crushing her skull in its jaws, then carried her off to finish his little gourmet meal in private. Well, there’s an experience in nature, isn’t it?

For all foolhardy adventures of this type, I have only two things to say: What the fuck were you thinking? and Mother Nature in the raw is an ice-cold bitch. Don’t even get me started about the folly of putting yourself in harm’s way without the proper means of self-protection.

And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter, because one should not spend too much time moaning about such tragedies, when people bring them on themselves by their arrogant stupidity.

Cultural Misappropriation

Two-Minute Hate

I notice that for some years now a linguistic plague has come upon us, and it irritates me more than Nancy Pelosi’s goggle-eyes.

I’m talking about people who pronounce city names according to the local idiom, e.g. “Barcelona” becomes “Barthelona” (probably the most egregious one, by the way). I think people are trying to fool others into thinking they speak the language, or trying to impress / over-awe their audience, or maybe it’s a “we’ve been there and this is how the locals pronounce it” piece of nonsense.

Stop it.

Here’s a clue: we’re speaking English, and English has a long and proud tradition of changing furrin names to suit our language — yea, even unto spelling, sometimes. “Köln” is pronounced (and spelled) “Cologne” (which is the French name for the place) but FFS at least pronounce it Coll-ohn and not Colloña (which is how the French pronounce it).

And let’s be consistent: for example, unless you also say “Moskva” (Moscow), “Praha” (Prague), “Firenze” (Florence), or “Wien” (Vienna) when you say those cities’ names, use the fucking Anglicism, because otherwise you sound like a pretentious tool.

And by the way, for that idiot I overhead in the airport the other day: the pronunciation of “Bruxelles” is “Brussels” and not “Bruxx-ellas”.

Also, to those TV newsreaders / reporters on U.S. TV stations: you may think it sounds cool to roll off a name or place-name which sounds like someone clearing their throat (e.g. Los Ancheles or Mechico Seety), but here’s the (real) news: you’re speaking to Americans who mostly don’t speak Spanish and therefore have no fucking clue what you’re saying. Save the linguistic purity for UniVision.

Great Moments In Stupidity #1,254

Two-Minute Hate

I remember once going to a class at university, and after the very first lecture deciding that this class was not for me because the professor was a.) a self-righteous do-gooder and b.) clearly incompetent, so I was not going to learn anything from the class and it would be a waste of my time. So I quit the thing and found another professor more to my liking who taught the same course. But I didn’t make a fuss about it — note how in the above story there are no names, no course titles and not even a specific college mentioned. It was a personal decision.

So you can imagine how I felt when I read how this journalista published an article about why she didn’t want her two-year-old child to be taught by fatties in kindergarten, and was then shocked — shocked! — when the fatties and their camp followers responded with vitriol.

Frankly, this little saga just gives me fuel for my forthcoming work, “Why Journalists Should Not Be Allowed To Vote” (a four-volume set, publishing date TBD).

Let’s ignore for a moment her specious reasons why she wouldn’t want a fattie to look after her kid, despite said fattie being “clearly a lovely woman: kind and great with children”, but equally clearly (to Mommie Dearest) a Bad Influence On An Impressionable Young Mind Because Fat. (I have no argument against this attitude because I’m also a fattie, and I’m sure a lot of women wouldn’t want me to teach their Precious Little Darlings either, albeit for slightly different reasons. Unless they wanted little Tyffenny to learn how to shoot, of course.)

No, what gets up my nose is that this priceless moron had to blab to the world about her silly philosophy — i.e. going to great lengths to shame fat people (and yes, she was doing precisely that), and then being bewildered when the reaction turns nasty.

Why couldn’t she simply have taken her kid out of the kindergarten and shut up about her reasons for doing so?

I dunno what it is about the modern world: why people do stuff like make decisions about situations, and then seek some kind of attention about that decision — for approval or validation, maybe? — by telling everyone about the reasons for that decision?

I know, I know; maybe Our Intrepid Scribe thought she’d be giving a voice to all those other people who want to snatch their children away from The Great Fattie Influence, and maybe she has. I’m sure a lot of people (mostly skinny, censorious busybodies, I bet) were nodding along in agreement with her original thesis. Well, I guess they aren’t as numerous (or at least as vocal) as the International Fattie-Symp Set.

Myself, I’m just enjoying the show: people who think that obesity is not only unhealthy but also a sin, versus people who think that everyone has a right to be obese, that “Fat Is Beautiful” withal, and that judgey people are Literally Hitler.

A plague on both their houses.

Morons And Twisted People

Two-Minute Hate

As Longtime Readers may know, my writings have occasionally caused Bad Feelings among a certain group of people: feministicals of both* genders (Pussification), members of the Perpetually-Offended By Perceived Racial Slurs Club (Let Africa Sink) and wannabe gun controllers, as well as all sorts of people of the liberal inclination who have taken exception to things I’ve written, even when obviously only played for a laugh or to highlight liberal stupidity [redundancy alert].

Those Bad Feelings have occasionally manifested themselves as death threats against me, which I’ve shrugged off because if I see them coming, I can take preemptive action (e.g. shoot the wannabe-assassin in the face with a .45 bullet or two). If I don’t see them coming, well… nothing to be done about it, really.

I won’t say that I’ve deserved such extreme silencing measures, of course, but I will at least acknowledge that my writing — i.e. something I’ve actually done as Kim du Toit — has caused said Bad Feelings. The people making the threats are sick fucks, and that’s all there is to it.

However, I recently discovered that there’s a whole sub-basement of Sick Fuckery, whose denizens are even worse than my brand of assholes. These are the people who have uttered death threats against Dutch actress Carice van Houten, not because of anything she’s done herself, but because of things she’s done while playing a character in a TV show. I speak here of Game of Thrones, of course, and apparently this hapless woman’s character is a pretty bad sort who causes all sorts of misery unto other characters in the show.

Now, I haven’t watched GoT, as the cognoscenti call it, since its first season when I realized that writer George R.R. Martin is a shit storyteller (explanation some other time) and the show was going to suck terribly. But apparently, some totally sick and twisted fans of GoT have somehow gotten the idea that the lovely Ms. Van Houten is personally, in real life, responsible for all those evil misdeeds of her character, and have uttered death threats towards her, I suppose, to try to end her HBO-based “reign of terror”. Here’s this eeeevil woman as herself:

Like I said, this transference of hostility portrays not only delusional stupidity, but industrial-strength delusional stupidity. These idiots make my set of armchair assassins look positively sane by comparison.

I’d like to say that we can safely ignore these fools because, well, they’re fools. But unfortunately, delusional fools such as these have an unfortunate tendency to become non-delusional murderers — John Hinckley over Jodie Foster, David Chapman over John Lennon and so on. So because of that, I want the police (regardless of country) to hunt these assholes down and send them to a non-delusional prison for a lengthy stay. This will achieve two objectives: 1.) it will take them out of our society for a while — at least until GoT finishes its final season and Carice van Houten can go on to star as, I dunno, maybe Maria von Trapp in the next West End production of Sound of Music — and 2.) it may act as a deterrent to the next generation of delusional idiots who want to attack people for abstract reasons. I emphasize “may” because with this kind of stupidity, there are no guarantees.

Oh, God; I just realized that by calling George R.R. Martin a shit storyteller and saying that GoT sucks as an epic tale that I’m probably going to attract these tools’ homicidal attentions towards myself. (I can only hope that they’ll bring a GoT-appropriate sword or dagger to the gunfight that will ensue.)

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the Barbury School for a little further instruction in shooting at moving targets.

*I don’t care how many “genders” are currently fashionable. There are only two — male and female — although there is a case for a neutered third gender which would include both male and female academics working in the Humanities Department at universities, whom nobody wants to fuck.