Showing posts with label Satire. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 June 2022

Political Cartoon of the Day: Beggars Can't Be Choosy

Beggars Can't Be Choosy

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow

Tuesday, 31 May 2022

Best of political cartoons: Taking a bite out of the dollar

Taking a bite out of the dollar

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow

Saturday, 28 May 2022

Comedy is America’s lifeline to sanity, but the thought police aren’t laughing

Ricky Gervais faces sticks and stones for questioning transgender ideology

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.

Comedy is America’s lifeline to sanity, but the thought police aren’t laughing

There’s a rule of thumb that goes, “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” (The quote is usually credited to Bernard Shaw, but its origins are disputed.) The same rule applied hundreds of years ago when court jesters told the king painful truths nobody else would dare while trying to keep him laughing at the same time. This underscores one of the unspoken purposes of humor, which is to allow serious topics to be broached while blunting the pain the conversation may otherwise invoke. Yes, we may disagree on a particular subject, but at least we are adult enough to poke fun at those differences. Those healthy attitudes are long gone, at least for one half of the American populace.

Entertainment protocol today has been inverted to read: ‘Even if you are funny when you tell people the truth, we [the mob] will kill you’. In other words, America, the land that has given rise to countless comic talents over the years, has lost its sense of humor. That much was apparent judging by the howls of faux outrage following Ricky Gervais’ Netflix Comedy special ‘SuperNature’. Like the black comedian Dave Chappelle before him, Gervais forced his audience to take notice of the 900-pound psychedelic elephant rolling around in America’s living room, which is transgender ideology and the inherent dangers it poses for millions of people, mostly women.

“Oh, women!” the British comedian starts. “Not all women, I mean the old-fashioned ones. The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs. Those f***ing dinosaurs. I love the new women. They’re great, aren’t they? The new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and c**ks. They’re as good as gold, I love them. And now the old-fashioned ones say, ‘Oh, they want to use our toilets’. ‘Why shouldn’t they use your toilets’? ‘For ladies’! ‘They are ladies — look at their pronouns’! ‘What about this person isn’t a lady’? ‘Well, his penis’. ‘Her penis, you f***ing bigot’! ‘What if he rapes me’? ‘What if she rapes you, you f***ing TERF wh**e’?”

What liberals found to be so appalling and “hurtful” about the above monologue was not the vulgarity – let’s face it, progressives are no strangers to lewdness – but the accuracy of the ‘joke’. Yes, sometimes the truth hurts. Gervais laid out the contradictions of the transgender movement that the mainstream media has been at great pains to ignore, and that is the very real risks it presents to biological females.

Let’s remember that one of the first things Joe Biden did as president was to sign an executive order that allows Americans to go about their lives “without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” In other words, American men and women now have the right to use the bathroom and changing room facilities, as well as compete in sporting competitions against females, “no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.” Incredibly, transgender women are even being locked up in prison alongside biological females with all of the predictable consequences, namely pregnancies behind bars.

Instead of the liberals listening to what Gervais was attempting to tell them, which is that the lives of biological females are threatened by such inclusive ‘open door’ policies, the left did what the left does best: It sent out a search and destroy mission to drive Ricky Gervais either into an early retirement or, judging by the tone of some of the tweets, an early grave.

Such a response to a comedy routine exposes the main problem with the social justice crowd, which is their utter lack of maturity to discuss and debate controversial ideas in a public forum. Even more maddening is that the entire concept of ‘transgender’ is a relatively new phenomenon, and, like all new things, it is naturally going to court a lot of controversy. Yet, those who wish to ask some honest questions or warn about the dangers of exposing impressionable children and teenagers to such concepts are written off as ‘haters’ who are suffering from ‘transphobia’. Amid this intellectual dark age that is descending upon the US, where many universities have become epicenters of radical ultraliberal ideology, one of the last places for conservatives to have their opinions vocalized is through the medium of comedy.

“Comedy is a reflection,” the American actor and comedian Alan King once said. “We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We’re reflections. It’s a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.”

King, if he were alive, would be shocked to see that that vital function of comedians to hold a mirror up to society is slowly falling by the wayside. While a few brave comedians like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are still willing to suffer the slings and arrows that come with this dangerous new territory, the consequences may eventually be considered too great of a risk. That will be a loss not only for the comedy scene in America, but for the entire nation as it attempts to navigate its way through extremely confusing times.

Don’t cancel your court jesters, America, they are your lifeline to sanity and civility.

https://www.rt.com/news/556167-us-comedy-transphobia-gervais/

Political cartoon of the day: Above Their Fray

Above Their Fray

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow

Wednesday, 18 May 2022

Political cartoon of the day: Crowning Achievements

Crowning Achievements

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow

Saturday, 14 May 2022

Political cartoon of the day: Plugs

Plugs

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow

Thursday, 12 May 2022

President Bidenflation Blames Everyone Else

Bidenflation Blames Everyone Else

Inflation is up 8.3%, but the man most responsible has nothing but scapegoats.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/88288-president-bidenflation-blames-everyone-else-2022-05-11

Sunday, 10 April 2022

South Africa: President Cyril Ramaphosa, now what the heck does the Hope you want us to sell cost? It’s a hard sell because, unlike you, we are all broke

The Prez wants us to be ‘merchants of hope’. But setting a price list for the merchandise isn’t easy.s

Oh, hope. Yes, we all need hope. This has become excruciatingly apparent during the past two years of plague, lockdowns and further economic decline in South Africa. But whatever is happening, whichever shit-storm is ravaging the land, we can’t do without hope.

It could be as simple as something to look forward to – having a nice glass of wine at the end of another day struggling to earn enough money to put petrol in your car, say, or, if you’re living on the streets, the hope of a piece of plastic to keep you dry.

It could also be somewhat more complicated, as it often is if we attach our hopes to large entities or important people. We might hope Ukraine will win the war against Russia, or that Vladimir Putin will finally get ousted by his oligarchs or shot by his bodyguards. We might hope that our own president, Cyril Ramaphosa, might stop licking the toes of the murderous dictator mentioned in the sentence before this one, or might actually start to tackle some of the corruption that has taken food from the mouths of the poorest and kept South Africa’s economy teetering on the edge of collapse.

I would in fact caution against building up hopes that are too big, because those are the ones that usually turn out to be forlorn. Either that, or you can enlarge your hopes to the cosmic scale and hope that there’s a benign God who’s directing human affairs with compassion and care, or that there’s life after death, say – cosmic hopes seldom get dashed because their fulfillment takes place in a realm beyond human understanding.

Either way, it’s clear to me that we need to be generating a lot of hope for South Africans in particular, though most of the rest of the continent could do with some too, and there are fairly large regions of the world beyond Africa also crying out for something to look forward to – but let’s focus our minds on home territory.

Scrounging about on the internet for some hope, as one does (though it often leads to more despair), I came across something I’d missed when I examined the President’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) a few months ago. It was a few months, wasn’t it? Feels like centuries have passed since that moment, a brave attempt to give hope to South Africans, broadcast from Cape Town City Hall because the Houses of Parliament had been burnt down just before Sona. At least the ravaging by fire of Parliament allows us to hope that it will eventually be rebuilt, and that South Africa’s democracy will one day be able to face itself in the mirror.

But that’s not what struck me about Sona. What struck me was one little phrase, a few words in which Ramaphosa struck precisely the note I am trying to strike here, though I take note that his note was perhaps a little flat.

Hope must be sold

We all have to be “merchants of hope”, said the President. Merchants of hope. Now that made me think. My first thought was that this shows very neatly that our President is truly the neoliberal that the ragged leftover left claims him to be. It is, after all, a central tenet of neoliberalism that anything that can be monetised must be monetised. So hope itself must now be sold, in some way, because that’s what merchants do – they sell things.

I began to wonder how this selling of hope might work. How does one place a monetary value on hope? Or any kind of value? Perhaps it’s a kind of exchange value, as befits a society in danger of sliding back into a barter economy.

Look at hope and elections. Now, during an election campaign some hopes may be relatively small, such as those who hope for a food parcel from the ANC or a free T-shirt from the DA, but there’s an exchange going on here. Your vote isn’t valueless, because you got a food parcel or a free T-shirt, right? That’s something to write home about, if you can write.

In exchange for the hope of “A better life for all”, in the case of South Africa’s first democratic elections, we gave votes to the ANC. We paid for our hope in votes. That hope may have proved illusory, but, as they say, hope springs eternal, and South Africans paid in votes again for the hope that Ramaphosa would counteract some of the depredations of the Zuma years and steady the ship of state. Voting is a form of hoping, and South Africans get that chance to hope by vote every few years. It’s in the Constitution.

The whingey bourgeoisie

In the recent local government elections, my hope certainly was that we could oust the useless ANC regime running the City of Johannesburg – a regime that spent pots of money on nothing in particular, a regime that can’t fill a pothole or send you the correct electricity bill. I hoped that my vote might generate the hope that Joburg can be fixed, that it can be made livable once more, not just for whingey bourgeois subjects like me but for the four or five indigents haunting every traffic light in the city.

But if we don’t have votes to trade for hope, what are we to do? We may not have any money to pay for those hopes, but we can at least neoliberally put a value on them, so that if one day enough of the population gets a job they can buy a little hope for themselves.

If I sell you the hope that every South African child can get a decent education, that hope is worth about R27-billion in total, which is our present budget for state-run educational institutions. But, as a merchant of hope, one is selling that hope to citizens one by one, so we’d have to divide that R27-billion by our population of 60 million – and that’s a mere R450 for each individual hope. A bargain, surely, if we’re talking about the future of the nation, or the hope that our nation actually has a future.

There’s the hope that our police force might actually be able to solve a few crimes and protect citizens instead of extorting money from the populace, harassing the aforementioned indigents and selling off all that cocaine recently seized at the airport. Call it R108-billion, overall, nationally budgeted for policing. Again, performing the calculation above, we can see that that hope would theoretically cost the citizens of the nation R1,800 each. That’s not an awful lot. It’s way less than the alcohol bill for one policy meeting of EFF office-bearers.

One can carry on performing such calculations, refined by province or local government entity, until the cows come home – the cows of hope, that is. We can work out exactly how much each hope is worth to us merchants of hope.

For example, Gauteng’s budget for human settlements is just under R6-million. Given that the province has about six million inhabitants, that’s a mere R1 per inhabitant to generate the hope that one day the provincial administration will build enough houses for those who need them. It’s certainly a cheaper hope than the hope of a decent education for all, or for competent policing, so that’s another lesson: if you restrict your hopes to your province, they cost little more than a few Chappies.

Still, that doesn’t look promising for the merchants of hope. At R1 per hope we’d have to sell an awful lot of hopes if we’re to cover our office overheads. Dear Cyril, how does neoliberalism work again? DM168

Shaun de Waal is a writer and editor.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-04-10-president-ramophosa-says-we-must-all-sell-hope-but-what-does-it-cost/