Too sexy for their jabs

One of the worst aspects of celebrity culture in the modern age is the pressure to “go political”- to potentially alienate at least half of your fanbase through putting your political beliefs front and centre. Taylor Swift was one of the holdouts until recently, before she was bullied into making contrived statements against Donald Trump which were almost certainly ghostwritten.

So now over 90 percent of celebrities can’t shut the hell up about who and what they voted for. And these contain some surprising names- Right Said Fred, for one. You’d think a band that came out of the 1980s London gay scene would be politically left-leaning, but they’ve jumped on the (predominantly right-wing) antivaxx train. Again, this is a band who originated in the 1980s gay scene, against the backdrop of a pandemic which disproportionately affected their community. You’d be hardpressed to find someone who was involved in the LGBT community in the 80s who didn’t lose a friend to AIDS. And no doubt if there was an HIV jab out at the time, the Fairbrass brothers would applaud it for its potential to save the lives of their friends.

I am a believer in free speech. I think you should be able to say whatever you want as long as it doesn’t directly incite violence. Yes, even if it’s as unbelievably stupid as the antivaxx propaganda out there. But when even Z-list celebrities feel the need to “get political”, we need to rethink the obsession with politicising everything. We are told that “the personal is political”, and as such politics should permeate everything from pillows to chocolate. We should stop basing our tastes on the political opinions of the creators of our tastes. When you look at the far-right dissecting media to find out whether any of the people involved may be deserving of triple parentheses, you find it ridiculous and with good reason. But you cannot simultaneously uphold basically the same thing with religion replaced by political affiliation. God forbid that celebrity be a liberal or a conservative, even if it doesn’t influence what they put out!

Up until a few years ago, even issues such as sexuality or skin colour were not seen as inherently “political”. They were only political if we made it so. We didn’t care if Dave next door was a conservative, or if Nora from down the road was left-wing. Now we’re more divided than we have been in a long long time, and guess why? Politics.

I don’t suppose anyone wants to know how S-Express votes.

Freedom Day, jubilations and anxieties

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, coronavirus cases across the UK are blowing up due to the Delta variant. And while hospitals are not overwhelmed with patients due to the jab, other fields are losing workers due to self-isolation requirements.

Yet, tomorrow the government is still opening everything up. Stadiums can seat capacity crowds, music venues and nightclubs can reopen and social distancing rules are no longer to be implemented. Some shops and transport authorities- including my local Transport Executive- are still requiring masks, and they have every right to as private companies.

If this was pre-jab, no doubt we’d be in strict lockdown by now. But we’re not. And this makes me both happy and anxious. I have a DJ gig coming up in the next week (kenahora, knock on wood, it takes place) yet I have to get my hair trimmed on Wednesday. I’m going to continue wearing my mask until at least the day of the gig, and probably in crowded indoor places. And in winter I’ll be wearing them 24/7 indoors due to all the bugs going around. You wonder why colds, flu and noroviruses are almost unheard of in countries where it’s the norm to wear a mask in winter?

Furthermore, having family members who are clinically vulnerable is also driving up my anxiety. Hopefully, they will not take this as “everything’s 100 percent back to normal now”, even though they can in theory. As for me I’m young and double-jabbed so it doesn’t concern me much unless I’ve got something planned (come mid-August, I won’t have to self-isolate if in contact with a person who tests positive, but I’d still be encouraged to test myself).

But there are signs that this wave might be over sooner rather than later. The Tim Spector/ZOE study suggests that cases are plateauing, and this is generally one to two weeks ahead of official figures. So many of us will go into autumn/winter with at least some protection from Delta.

A person’s humanity should always come first

I don’t know when it became so controversial to say things like “we’re just one race, the human race”.

After England’s defeat in the Euro 2020 final, the two penaltytakers who missed- who are black- were subject to some of the vilest racial abuse. A decade or so ago, racism had almost been eradicated. But in the last few years it’s made a disturbing comeback, especially in football.

In the 70s, Viv Anderson recieved racial abuse every time he played. He had bananas thrown at him and monkey chants from all four sides of the ground. When he became the first black player to represent England, many thought of him as merely a black man in an England shirt. He could never be “authentically English” because he wasn’t white.

…okay. Let’s completely disregard that Britain is a nation of immigrants. The indigenous Celtic Britons were displaced and absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon population, who had their origins in Germany, who in turn were absorbed into the Norman population and culture. Over time, immigrants from further afield came to Britain- firstly largely due to the nobility marrying foreigners of a similar status (or through the taking of war brides- at least one of the Crusader knights brought home a wife from the Holy Land). Then we had the Huguenot refugees, the Romani and Jews, and from the 40s onwards influxes from former British Empire colonies including the Caribbean.

Who is authentically British then? There are no full-blooded indigenous Britons left. Englishness and Britishness has long been a matter of nationality, not heritage. The quintessentially British royal family is the product of one of the biggest melting pots ever to exist. The blood of every European nationality flows through their veins, as does the blood of Ghassanid Arabs, Umayyads, Mongols, Jews and likely even black people. For hundreds of years, quite hypocritically, the royals were never seen as truly British. But over time, we learned to accept them as British, and then we accepted black people as British with no reservations. We were moving towards a moral colourblindness. When Paul Ince became the first black captain of England, there was virtually no media fanfare because people had learned to see him as a great footballer first and everything else dead last.

But over the course of the last decade, we’ve seen the narrative shift from “judge not by the colour of one’s skin but the content of one’s character” to “race trumps everything else. You must see this person as black first, human second.” And we are back to seeing Rashford, Sancho, Saka, Sterling etc. as “black men in England shirts” as opposed to merely “England players”. What I’m trying to say is, the current fixation on race and identity is only fuelling more racism. There is no excuse for the abuse these young Englishmen endured, but the othering of black Britons through racial identity politics in the name of progress is at least partially to blame. It hardly seems a coincidence that a spike in racism coincided with the change of narrative.

Maybe in another decade the pendulum will have returned to colourblindness, and I really hope so. People- and not just white people- are getting sick of hearing about race this and race that, and the climax is not going to be pretty.

What’s in a name?

Not moths.

Since it isn’t coming home, now time for something completely different.

So the New York Post, admittedly the American version of the excretable Daily Mail, is reporting that the American Entymological Society will change the common name of the “gypsy moth” due to “gypsy” sometimes being considered a slur.

The thing is, most people described as “gypsies” have no problem with the word and even wear the label with pride. The main bone of contention is that it derives from “Egyptian”, which the Romani people were referred to upon arrival in Europe due to their dark complexion. Later, it was established through linguistic and genetic evidence that the Romani were largely of Indo-Iranian descent, with their homeland most likely in the modern-day Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab (in fact, the German Roma are called Sinti!). In a way, it’s like the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas being referred to as “Indians”- it was a mistake that stuck, and to this day many prefer to be called American Indians.

As many of you know, I have Romani and Irish Traveller heritage. The word “gypsy” does not offend me in the slightest despite its etymology. In fact, as there are so many iternant groups, not just the Roma, it’s easier to have a catchall term. The slur is “gyp”, meaning to con or to swindle. It can be compared to “jew” when used as a verb. Should we, therefore, remove the word “Jewish” from our vocabularies because it contains a slur? I understand that the gypsy moth can cause some pretty serious damage, but never have I made the connection between them and the Romani people. The most common Romani stereotypes revolve around theft and occultism, not property damage. If magpies, known for thieving everything from other birds’ nests to jewellery, were called “gypsy birds”, I could perhaps understand the objection. But “gypsy” here seems to be a reference to their long-distance travel.

Now, there are many who would object to what they might call a “defence” of the term- even though I am reticent to call it that- because 1. I am not “full-blooded”, and 2. I am not “culturally” Roma. These objections fall flat on their face. I might be a diddicoy with no Romanipen, but I am still (partially) ethnically Romani and Irish Traveller. Returning to the Jews, does a completely secularised Jew- or even a Christian Jew- cease to become an ethnic Jew? No! Nobody would strip them of their right to speak as Jews even if they practice a different religion or live in a secular culture or are even half-Jewish or less! So I should be allowed to speak as a diddicoy on issues affecting the Romani people.

Once again, this smacks of the majority group thinking what’s best for minorities. I think I could refer to it as “gorgersplaining”- non-Romani being referred to as gorgers in the Romanichal dialect. It creates an implication that minorities are unable to think for themselves and have to get whitey to do it for them (even if they themselves are largely white). Like so many well-intentioned antiracism efforts of late, it just ends up reconstructing the WASPs on top, everyone else at the bottom status quo we were getting so close to completely ridding ourselves of.

The final takeaway- the white saviour complex is bad, except for when it isn’t.

The more I look at the new BBC logo, the more it grows on me, but it could be much better

So I only just learned that the BBC is getting a new logo (see right; way overdue considering they’ve spent half of the last decade gradually ditching Gill Sans companywide), and that it was rolled out on some overseas services as early as February.

First impression was… “this is crap. I could cook up a better logo in five minutes in Paint”. But it’s growing on me. The current trend in design is “keep it simple, stupid”. Alas, I still have concerns that the new logo will be outdated in a few years. The 1997 logo has managed to survive just under a quarter of a century and still looks fresh, but this logo will probably look outdated in half that time. Personally, I blame the spacing between the boxes.

Furthermore, I would have liked to have seen a return to the parallelograms. The 1997 logo came about partly due to the launch of the BBC website and concerns that the old logo did not sit well on the computer monitors of the day. Now we’re all using high-quality LCDs, where’s the issue?

Here’s how I believe the BBC should have gone about things (five minutes in Paint!):

Two crucial things that so many logo designers ignore these days are heritage and longetivity. You can’t just break with the past in lieu of a formless blob which will look hideously outdated in a matter of years; no! You need to keep past, present and future in mind. And I think my mockup does just that.

GEDmatch broken?

I logged into GEDmatch tonight to maybe help verify a particular link in my family tree, only to find:

• One-to-many crashes at 100000 kits;
• Running an admix calculator- any admix calculator- logs me out;
• One-to-one autosomal comparison throws up no segments whatsoever, and this includes BETWEEN MOTHER AND CHILD:

This is me and my mother. Every site, including GEDmatch, says we share just about half of the same DNA. As such, I expect 22 segments for 22 chromosomes. And yes, I’ve tried this in the “new and improved” GEDmatch too. Same “result”.

I am sincerely hoping this error is fixed quickly. I’m a subscriber, and as a subscriber I expect top-notch service for my money.

In other news: I’m assuming you were watching the big match yesterday? Nope, not Sheffield Wednesday and Celtic (which former Gamesmaster host, proud Scotsman and proud man of the hoops Dominik Diamond skewers brilliantly here). My little old country has gotten to a major final for only the second time ever! Granted, Southgate is one of the least adventurous managers on any stage yet alone the world one, and Sterling and Kane still oscillate wildly between shit hot and just plain shit, but it’s something. Football may (whisper it!) just be coming home.

The cherry on the top was Harry Kane’s fluffed 103rd minute penalty. Unable to get it past Schmeichel first time round, he scores from the rebound. Limbs ahoy! Unfortunately, this led to me watching the rest of the match behind my fingers, fearing that once again England would screw it up in a semi final.

Maybe one year Sheffield United might win a playoff fin- oops, getting a bit too carried away there.