England continues to sink:
A revamp of the scout movement will allow boys and girls to earn badges for skills such as skateboarding, making a fruit salad and racing quad bikes.
(This is the Boy Scout association in Great Britain — I don’t see this practice being adopted on these shores for at least another six months, or after Hillary! is elected president and everything becomes Kinder & Gentler, etc.)
I can’t wait for the new merit badges in Crying, Hugging, and Nose Blowing. Seriously, British society gets more schizoid by the day. On the one hand, the entire country becomes a vomitorium every holiday. On the other hand, their much-beloved welfare state has gone beyond mere provision of jobs, council homes, and health care right into regulating increasingly petty aspects of all life, while in the meantime selling out more and more of the native population’s culture in order to placate that of what is basically Britain’s (and the rest of the West’s) avowed enemy. Then there are the much-hated CCTV cameras, which it must be admitted are a convenient plot device for many of the new shows coming out of the UK these days. On shows like Torchwood and the new Doctor Who both the good and bad guys use these things with aplomb, with no mention of their ambiguous status among non-fictional Britons… though perhaps Big Brother’s spy eyes have finally been accepted by the citizenry as being an inevitable part of modern life, the way security cameras installed by private companies are over here. And last but not least, as more and more Dangerous Sharp Things are removed by official fiat from the fingers of British citizens lest someone cut himself (leading, I am sure, to the days when all food will be provided pre-mushed so there will be no need for anything but spoons — or in other words, British food will be back to its old format), the above-mentioned tv shows as well as some others that have been allowed to filter over into PBS channels and BBCAmerica feature plenty of good old-fashioned violence; the lead female character in Torchwood is even allowed in the first episode to have a fun time learning to shoot a gun. Even the new Doctor turns out to have blown up his own home planet in a war, though it must be said he is supposed to feel real bad for doing so. Popular TV shows are as good a way of judging a society’s state of mind as any; the evidence here states that the British people are not yet ready to go quietly into that good sheep paddock — on the other hand, they’d rather all the dirty work be done, or at least be able to be blamed, on “outsiders,” whether foreign (as in, from a galaxy far, far away), or members of a Mission Impossible-style “beyond the law” group of pals. They won’t even clean their own homes without Kim and Aggie badgering them.
Anyway, this worries me on two fronts: one is the fact that I’d like to go back to England before its transformation into the Islamic Socialist Republic of Great Britain; two is the fact that whatever happens over there inevitably wends its way across the ocean to these parts — and we’re really not so far behind as all that. (Though I can’t imagine Americans putting up with this sort of thing at all. On the other hand, if the cameras were equipped with laser beams that would cause the offender to disintegrate in a puff of smoke, there might be a debate, split between the “this is cruel and unusual punishment!” and “wow that’s really cool I’ve always wanted to do that to people who spit on the sidewalk” contingents.)
(Via.)
Update: a-aand right on cue, here we go: a Muslim cashier at a Marks & Spencer store refuses to do her job — that is, she refuses to let her pristine, holy fingers touch an “unclean”Christian book in order to key in the price. At least the customer complained. I am sure that the next step will be to charge the offender — that is, the woman who tried to buy the “unclean” book — with a “hate crime” for forcing the Muslim woman to have to see a product which she must have seen every damn day in the store she works for. By the way, the nasty, dirty book was a collection of children’s Bible stories titled First Bible Stories. Ewww! Haram! (Via.)