Tag: Post-Truth
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Dropped Boule
For those who are writing off the current EU vaccines debacle as a one-off, think again. What happened with the short-lived invocation of Article 16 was simply a more blunderingly spectacular demonstration of the bullying, self-serving, tosh that spawned a solid, broad generation of Brexiters out of 2016’s floating-voter middle ground. Five years on, and…
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Chapter and Verse
In the hours following the US Inauguration pomp and ceremony, CNN triumphally announced that Amanda Gorman had ‘… reminded America of what poetry can do’. Well, indirectly at least. Absolutely nothing. We had just watched the world’s most powerful nation saved from the brink of implosion, and once again, aspirations masquerading as values had heralded…
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Not the Point
I have long been aggravated by comma abuse in writing, and that goes for both the scattergunners and the stinges. However, rules are not straightforward, and when you have a flow between linguistic registers sometimes within the same piece, commas are infinitely tricky and controversial. Even that last sentence was, for several reasons. That one,…
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Squirm Ban Führer
Another day, another assault on the freedom of speech by right-on, winkle-dicked, Big Tech bottom-feeders. This time, social media Sturmbannführers at You Tube have driven a metaphorical Panzer through the frontier of my channel and spiked one of my cringeworthy promotional videos. Last month, I received a missive from Team YT to inform me that…
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Trouble in Sight
It looks like they are all going after Trump now, albeit four years too late. He urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and to cheer some senators, ‘and others not so much’. He droned that they ‘would never take back the country with weakness’. Now, I am no expert in the technicalities of…
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The Wheels on the Bus
While playground politics trundle on, let’s revert to an old favourite and arguably where the present penchant for political misdirection started to grow arms and legs. You’ve got it – the big, red, Brexit bus and those now infamous words: We send the EU £350m a week / let’s fund our NHS instead When Vote…
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Wiping the Slate Clean
The ferocious war of words on the merits of the EU deal has already been gathering pace. A pointless one because the concept of ‘good’ is wholly relative to subjective perspectives and values. But as certain as death and taxes, the mouth-froth preceded any meaningful analysis. Yes – at the point that the crass crescendo…
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Missed Strain
A new virulent danger to the national well-being is no real revelation – we’ve been under the cosh of an insidious mutant strain of lying for some time. It started off as a plethora of playful political porkies, transcended schoolboy pranking into wild whoppers, and finally morphed into monstrous mendacity. So detached are our prevalent…
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Base Graft
We’ve had backstops, level playing fields, hard & soft Brexits and a veritable shower of various other petals of EU word-confetti. The UK has of course added its own: oven-ready, Canada-Plus and Australian terms. All of them designed to label something that their patrons never progress to articulate beyond a one-liner. And now, there is…
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Jibber Jabber
This week, I received my very first flu jab, which was unexpectedly painless. In fact, I was so euphoric afterwards, I logged on and purchased £5k worth of Microsoft licences. In all seriousness though, it is a toughie to comprehend that one of the primary anti-vax rationales is a conspiracy theory that we are all…
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