ErinyesKnight

Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju if you wanna find out more about them!

@fullheartedlyprovocative

Very good point! Many people who aren’t from the UK are probably not aware of the impending disaster that is Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I keep describing him as a clown, incompetent and overall destructive to society as a whole, but i’ve failed to go into detail. And the reason is simple: There’s just far too much to cover in a concise and efficient way. It is very literally a massive rabbit hole that knows no end.

But i should probably collate some of his more memorable moments, so that everyone can get a rough idea about who he is exactly and why we’re all dead inside. 

Bojo is often described as clownish, but don’t let that fool you into thinking he’s harmless. He’s as Machiavellian as a politician can get, and he weaponises his clownish behaviour in order to cover up his corruption. He has this down to an Art. 

A recent example of his perception manipulation:

During the Brexit referendum, Boris was heavily campaigning for Leave, and he infamously commissioned a big red Bus with this message on it, claiming that the 350 million currently going to EU membership will be redirected to the UKs NHS (National Health Service), this was a massive deal and fueled the leave campaign. 

This was also a massive lie, and he was (rightly) hated for it.

The Bus Lie hung over Boris long after the referendum. When you’d type up Boris Johnson on Google, it would suggest the Bus scandal as an auto-complete search, bringing up countless articles on the lie that had clearly tarnished Boris’ reputation.

However, during the leadership campaign, Boris did something extraordinary. While being interviewed about his leadership bid, he was asked what he does for fun. This was his response:

Hilarious. Ridiculous. Blustering. Making it up as he went along. It quickly became an interview widely mocked across social media and news outlets. Why did he make himself sound like such an idiot? Why buses? This is why:

He is not only immune to being mocked, he has weaponised it to cover up his biggest controversies. Typing up “Boris Johnson Bus” now yields funny clips of him struggling to get through an interview talking about painting little buses. His Bus Scandal has almost been entirely pushed out of the picture.

That is only the tip of the Boris shaped iceberg. 

His clowning has gotten him national and international mockery. Who can forget that time Boris (while Mayor of London) got stuck on a zip-line because he was too heavy?

Or that time that he got overly competitive in a game of rugby against kids and tackled a child.

Or that time during a recent Leadership debate where he pulled out a literal Kipper and waved it about, declaring that “we will get our Kippers BACK when we leave the EU!”

What a silly man. How completely harmless he must be.

Well while the nation struggles to get these images out of their heads, collectively we have forgotten many of his greatest sins.

One sin still hangs above him… An ongoing scandal that has endangered the life of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. 

In 2017 Nazanin had travelled to Iran from the UK to visit her parents, when she was detained by authorities under suspicion of coming to Iran in order to train journalists. In 2017 when Boris was Foreign Secretary and during Nazanins trial, Boris made this statement to the news:

“When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it,”

This was considered damning evidence that was used against Nazanin. She is still imprisoned today. Her husband in the UK has been tirelessly campaigning for her release, going on a joint hunger-strike with her. Boris refuses to take any responsibility for his comments or apologise for what he has caused.

This isn’t the first or last time Boris has been reckless with his words.

Very recently, Sir Kim Darroch (the UKs (now former) ambassador to the US) suffered a memo leak, in which unflattering remarks regarding Donald Trumps presidency surfaced. The leak was unfortunate, but the comments made were not unprofessional and entirely expected from a foreign diplomat. But Trump wasn’t happy and applied pressure to the UK government to fire Darroch for doing his job. The entire UK government united behind Darroch and supported him…… well… almost the entire government. During a live debate, the final two leadership candidates were asked about the Darroch situation, and whether Darroch would remain in his job if they become PM. Boris refused to comment and avoided the question as usual. However since Boris was the favourite to win, Darroch realised he had no hope, so he resigned. Boris was cited as the main reason and was widely criticised. 

Before Boris was a politician, he was a journalist. And in recent years, a very unsavoury recording surfaced from his time as a Journalist in 1990…A phone recording between him and Darius Guppy, where the two conspired to have a reporter physically hurt. (Somehow this is the only youtube video available on this…)

Boris has also been known to have absolutely no filter and speaks before he thinks. Such comments are a result of this.

He had referred to black people as “Piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”

In 2018 he had referred to Muslim women wearing burkas as looking like “letter-boxes”

At a conference on Libya in 2017 he claimed that the country could become a thriving luxury resort once they “cleared the dead bodies away”

In 2013 he claimed that Malyasian women went to University because they “have to find men to marry”

In 2006 he claimed that Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender”

All of this… and we haven’t even covered his politics yet.

This is the big reason why he’s becoming PM and it’s simple. He’s lying to everyone.

He’s promising everything to everyone. He’s promised a soft brexit to some, a hard brexit to others. But he refuses to explain how he would achieve either. He’s only now clearly settling on the side of a hard-brexit, or what’s considered a No-Deal brexit (walking away from the EU without striking a trade deal), but he has no answers for any questions posed to him. 

His debating strategy, and interview strategy is to make people laugh until they forget what they asked him.

When asked “Is austerity a dead duck at this point?” he ended up rambling about ducks for a solid minute and making the audience giggle before giving a very vague and nothing answer

When debating with leadership rival Jeremy Hunt, he won over the audiences heart by interrupting Hunt with immature jokes.

After declaring that he knows exactly what he’s doing in regards to a No-Deal brexit, he tells everyone that he will follow “Paragraph 5B” of a document that will supposedly solve the Brexit crisis. He repeats “Paragraph 5B” constantly, giving the impression that he’s a man of detail and knows the entire document like the back of his hand. When asked if he knew what was in Paragraph 5C, he simply states “no” and tries to play it off like it’s funny. Without a studio audience to laugh at him, he was simply left in the silence of an astounded interviewer. This is one of the many reasons why he had avoided as many interviews as possible during his leadership campaign.

The fact is, no one knows what he really stands for, no one knows what he’ll really do. He’s a wild-card, or more appropriately, the Joker card. He seems crazy enough and chaotic enough to go through with No-Deal that people are voting for him. But so many people are going to be disappointed. This is a man who says he’s always wanted to be Prime Minister ever since he was 15. He wants power for the sake of power. And for some reason, the Tory party are handing him that power.

me: No! 

I packed off to college in 1998, before many of you were twinkles in anyone’s eyes. Back then, internet piracy was just really taking off, and it was accomplished by means of FTP server. These servers had “ratios,” meaning that their owners expected you to upload a certain amount of data in certain file formats before you could download a certain amount of data in that format. Most servers were 1:2 (Simplified, I upload 1 .mp3, and I’m allowed to download 2 .mp3s) or 1:3. There was a lot of trash to sort through, but you found your treasures eventually

I took to this internet piracy like most other freshmen took to drinking at frat parties. I stayed in Friday nights downloading music and movies. I had everything my 18-year-old heart could desire - these were the Wild West days of the internet, when the dorms had ethernet, but the universities hadn’t bothered to set any kind of codes of conduct. You could download and upload whatever you wanted, and no one was going to stop you.

One evening, when my roommate was out of the room having a healthy social life or some damn thing, I was on yet another FTP site - a really good one this time, full of stuff I wanted. It was a 1:1 server, an unforgiving ratio, but I had spotted goodomens.mp3, and I had set my lights on trading for that audiobook. I’d read the novel in high school, see, and I wanted to hear if the narrator did any funny voices.

We had ethernet, sure, but you have to understand what speeds were like back then. It took me half the night to upload that many tracks of Third Eye Blind and Goo Goo Dolls and whatever the hell else I had lying around my hard drive in 1998 to reach the ratio, and it probably took the other half to download the audiobook. But eventually I had my prize, and I booted up Winamp (It was a music player; ask your parents.) to listen.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality

It was Queen. More than a gig of Queen tracks strung together and labeled as the Good Omens audiobook. I’d been, as they say, played for a sucker.

Now, there are one of two conclusions you can draw from this little misadventure:

1) Good Omens fandom has had a wicked sense of humor since the very beginning,

or

2) Anthony J. Crowley had the File Transfer Protocol figured out at least as early as 1998, and he was prepared to take advantage of that knowledge.