35 Comments

An actual dangerous idea is not that the monarchy is an out of touch symbol of an oppressive etc. patriarchy, but that it is a toothless, atrophied institution shrinking in terror from the abusive mediocrities that have wormed their way into power throughout the degenerate and decadent institutions controlling society ... and that we would all be much happier, much better off, if a more muscular monarch were to ascend the throne and cast these bought men into the stinking midden in which they belong.

For all this contempt for the kings and queens that presided over Britain's golden age - to say nothing of the royal families of the Continent - the contrast with the venal corruption and petty-minded criminality of their democratic inheritors could not be more telling. Were the monarchs of old a bit sociopathic? Sure, at times. But at least their perversions were not so pitiably small. Moreover, the image they projected, the ideal they represented, was something that encouraged everyone to hold themselves to a higher standard ... something the bureaucrats and branch managers administering the managerial state neither know how nor care to do.

Expand full comment

Moreover, what did they and their societies, their folk, achieve? They sailed the unknown seas. Mapped the currents and tides and continents. Computed the latitudes and longitudes and the mass of the earth. Settled continents. Built cathedrals and concert halls and filled them with music and musicians of unmatched skill and valor. Ruled over a people who were proud to be who they were and who were even if sometimes abused by the rulers, were always protected from foreign invaders.

This ruling regime of sinecures is just a rabble. A filthy, ignorant, petty rabble so indolent and stupid they can't even see that they too will be replaced by their gollums. They will be lucky if we replace them before their pets do.

Expand full comment

Precisely. Moreover, say what one might about them - they never tried to replace their own people in their own land.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

This is why Harry's fall from grace was so painful. He was - or seemed to be - a warrior prince in the ancient mold, whose like we've not seen for ages. Then he went woke and neutered himself.

Expand full comment
May 1, 2023Liked by Morgoth

It's that long since I even had a tv I'd forgotten Boyle and the rest of the so called edgy lefties still exist. Have I got News for you- remember that right on show- Sneery entitled middle class t***s. We used to think they were jabbing upwards, speaking truth to power. Then we learn they're the ones who were slowly turning pointy sticks downwards at us ordinary folk. " never done a days work in their bloody lives " my old dad used to say. Devoid of any principles they just go with the flow, wherever they can stay relevant and keep the money rolling in.

There is a line from a poem ( might be Kipling) Good people sleep soundly in their beds because strong men stand guard at the gates. It's still not safe out there so I'm going back to my book; Cattle droving: Scotland &Ireland Through Cumbria to the South.

Cheers Morgoth: Strong man guarding the gate!

Expand full comment

Very true. I remember the first hint I got about ‘Have I Got News For You’. It was when Paula Yates appeared on the show in 1995/1996? She had just dumped the leftist bore Bob Geldof for Aussie rock star Michael Hutchence - not entirely impossible to understand...Ian Hislop was relentlessly nasty to her throughout the show. Yates interrupted him, as you would a naughty child, to ask him to please stop but he didn’t. It was only when Paul Merton told Hislop that if he didn’t stop being mean he’d ‘clock him one’ that Hislop finally relented. The episode was a real window into a nasty mindset on the show. I remember thinking that if they could direct such meanness towards one of their own ‘media class’ what must they really think of us ordinary plebs?

Expand full comment

I watched that episode on Youtube a while ago. I thought Hislop was appalling and it permanently changed my opinion of him. Considering susbsequent events, I wonder how he feels about it.

Expand full comment

I know. That’s exactly what I was thinking too. I watched the very recent Channel 4 documentary on Paula Yates. It was an ugly reminder of the power that the tabloids once had in Britain, a power diminished after the fall of the News of the World and the phone-hacking scandal. Yates and Hutchence were convinced that their phone calls were being hacked into -of course, we know now they were just two of the first to be listened in on...I remember the tabloid treatment of their relationship. They were on the front page of every tabloid everyday for over a year. It’s unbelievable looking back. Monumental harassment. Undoubtedly, it helped drive both of them to an early grave.

Expand full comment

Hi, LadyofShalott, hope you are keeping well. Geldoff told her that they both needed to watch out as he was 'Above the law'. Simple demographics would support him and Geldoff obviously had the last word on it all. As for Hislop, he's still the annoying snarky kid from the early-70s 6th form common room. Jokes that haven't been funny for years and now he finds himself on the side of real power anyway.

Expand full comment

Lovely to see you and, yes, Geldof diid indeed see himself as ‘above the law’ as you rightly say. Band Aid and Live Aid had bestowed him the status of feudal Lord in Britain. Of course, Live Aid was Paula’s idea but it made Bob a saint, He could do no wrong and woe betide anyone who went against him. Yates had already fallen out of love with him long before she left him. Geldof was a very difficult man to live with by all accounts and then along comes Michael Hutchence - as a woman, i don’t have to ponder for long on what happened there! None of us are going to live forever - I am certain that is what Yates was thinking. The hateful battle came over the children of course. Geldof’s monumental pride could not allow that. Like you, I remember the scandal around this very well. The tabloids pretty much destroyed Hutchence and Yates. In the recent Channel 4 documentary, Yates talks of being accidentally sent her obituary by a tabloid - not accidentally I think...

As for Hislop, I’ve read accounts by people in Private Eye that describe how he only got that job by basically hanging around Peter Cook like a lap dog. The late Willie Rushton, a founding member, had the measure of him. Richard Ingrams too. He wheedled his way in and got his feet well under the table. Then he nearly bankrupted the paper in 1989 by printing a false story about Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the Yorkshire Ripper. The libel courts awarded her 600,000 pounds, an enormous sum for libel then. He’s pure Establishment as you say.

Expand full comment

Absolutely. I can't believe Have I got news for your is still on the go. And when I see clips on youtube they look so pleased with themselves, I think they regard themselves as royalty, or better than royalty more likely. They are the big boys of so called satirical panel shows. How do people still watch that crap. I'm ashamed to admit I also used to listen to a lot of comedy on radio 4 (and thought I was clever/well informed at the time), what total dross all of that is as well.

Expand full comment

They are so convinced of their own superiority and moral righteousness. The ‘Sue Perkins’s’ of this world - she called for the January 6th Washington protestors to be shot for their so-called assault on democracy. I remember hearing that Radio 4 comedy show on which Jo Brand joked that Nigel Farage should have a milkshake of acid thrown in his face. Were either of them held accountable in any way? Were they heck. Brand got an even better gig on the crap Baking Show. Not a word from either of these women in support of Posie Parker and others trying to protect kids from chemical castration. They are pure Establishment.

Expand full comment

No, and Jo Brand was a massive feminist when she first arrived on the scene. It's amazing how all that mainstream comedy becomes totally insufferable.

Expand full comment

I know - I remember Jo Brand when she broke through on to tv in the late 80s/early 90s. She played upon her fatness - her put-downs of men were vicious - and she was fiercely feminist. Yet I’ve not heard one word of support from her for JK Rowling or Posie Parker. That blabbermouth Caitlin Moran also - she wrote a book on how to be a woman. Perhaps the sequel will be on how to be a trans woman? Bob Dylan once said that ‘money doesn’t talk, it screams’ and that really seems to apply to these people.

Expand full comment

Boyle’s a nasty misogynist. Happy to cruelly mock the biological female swimmer Rebecca Adlington - he said she had a face like a reflection on the back of a spoon..such wit. Oscar Wilde must have been losing sleep in his grave. But dare anyone mock a transvestite or point out the bleedin obvious - that practically zero of them ‘pass’ as women on the street - suddenly our Frankie comes over all gallant like Sir Galahad riding into battle to protect a fair maiden’s honour. Except they aren’t fair maidens. He has attacked the women’s activist Posie Parker on several occasions. He likes telling us biological women to shut up and bow to the men in dresses. You’re about as establishment as they come Our Frankie. Keep picking on the poor Down’s Syndrome kids Frankie - you’re good at that...

Expand full comment
May 1, 2023·edited May 1, 2023Liked by Morgoth

Here in the States, I remember watching the PBS series Victoria with my wife. At first it was rather banal but harmless stuff, and then they decided to make her a proto-feminist as the series progressed and threw in a homosexual relationship for good measure. This was common in the 2010's to keep this stuff out for the first season or two and then put in in when the audience is invested. Now they don't even bother and throw their garbage in your face from the first episode.

Expand full comment
May 1, 2023Liked by Morgoth

Brilliant.

I'm a former Leftist who quit that movement over mass immigration and then subsequently became apoplectically angry at "Rotherham" once I discovered the true scale of it. For a long long time I used to rail at Leftists for their culpability and their hypocrisy. Now I just feel contempt and to some extent a kind of bafflement that they have been so stupid. I mean, deep down they all know what they've done is wrong and in the Labour party the reason they can't bring themselves to discuss this is because they know intuitively that it has wounded their organisation in ways which, in the long term, may yet terminate it permanently. They become so outraged precisely because they know what an existential threat this poses to their project.

So who in their right mind would allow such atrocities to grow to such gargantuan proportions? Putting to one side the appalling suffering of young kids - who would not see that this isn't something which can be finessed forever? And that it would mortally wound their pretentions to moral superiority?

In purely strategic terms the stupidity is epic. And as such, for people who think they are so much cleverer than everyone else, you can only feel total contempt for them.

From the Gulag to the Holodomor to the Stasi to the Killing Fields to Rotherham , Rochdale, Telford, Newcastle - they just never seem to learn.

Expand full comment

I would just add to that that I think the Left also knows that it is in a big crisis of its own. Their own world has been turned upside down: what are they actually for anymore? Many of them hate the working class people they are supposed to be for. They may be culturally hegemonic (though in a bizarre denial of that fact) but the Money Power is more invincible than ever. They're not really anti war anymore but they do love racking over the coals from the imperial past. There are deep splits between the feminists and the trans brigade. And the Muslim issue is just waiting to explode properly in their faces.

In many ways what holds their project together is us and the fear and loathing that we engender in them. It's pretty obvious that many of the Free Palestine gang have pretty similar views about you know who and are similarly doubtful about you know what but coming out and saying it undermines their case against us!

Expand full comment

I got tired of Frankie Boyle about two seasons into Mock the Week, though in honesty, I did find him amusing for a time.

As an American, I can't in likewise honesty offer a full-throated defense of the British monarchy or any monarchy this side of the divine. Humans endowed with or who seize power inevitably abuse it and the best hope for a happy life is to prevent, as far as is possible, having humans hold power over you.

Yet you have my sympathies, since The Week That Was on through Monty Python, the traditions of British society that gave it strength have been undermined. Now your whole country is adrift as surely as if the British Isles were a raft floating in the North Sea.

Expand full comment

Comedy is largely dead except for a few who manage to slip past YouTube censors. Triggernometry manages to be amusing, but now when my son makes me watch one I see how careful they really are not to go too far. I lost respect for them when they failed to engage with you. To me that speaks of a high-handed pride of place I find disgusting.

My husband and I talk about how when we were young, in the late 70’s and early 80’s, whatever people were doing they would turn on Saturday Night Live, even at a party. You didn’t miss it. They parodied both sides of the aisle. Today they are about as entertaining as the evening news or CNN.

Expand full comment

How did they fail to engage? Genuinely curious. Was it on twitter or? Don’t like those two wet wipes at all to be honest.

Expand full comment

I believe it was on twitter but will leave it to Morgoth if he wants to revisit it. I believe it was a while ago and probably best left there. It was an example of scattershot slander by association without any interest in learning how that might have been thoroughly unjust.

Expand full comment

Many such cases

Expand full comment
May 1, 2023·edited May 1, 2023Liked by Morgoth

This is the nearly universal problem that "transgressive" humor has been running into for a while now. Once you've torn down all the institutions of traditional power, then poking fun at them isn't interesting or edgy. It's just boring. It'd be like watching some Israeli comedy where they make fun of rabbis or something...so what? The institution means nothing to me so poking holes in it means nothing to me.

Also, as Morgoth pointed out, they've been taking any historical or mythical figure and 'deconstructing' them for so long that it is no longer even offensive. I remember as a boy that I read a book called Parsival that deconstructed the legend, for me that was truly shocking and even made me angry. But that book was written in 1975 or so. Fast forward a half century and this incessant ruining of anything good, noble, or aspirational has made such things not even noteworthy. But as Morgoth said in his article, the left's self identity is so wrapped up in their image of themselves as the underdog that they can never acknowledge that they hold all the power. And more depressingly, they've already won the culture war.

Expand full comment
May 1, 2023Liked by Morgoth

Frankie is acting out typical Gen X nihilism. He's unfunny, frumpy and has no charisma yet has been given chances most people will never have and is still nothing but a pessimistic, negative hater biting the hand that feeds him and tearing down his own. I don't even have to look up his birthday to know which generation he is a part of, it's too obvious.

P.S. no Gen xers come at me, be honest you are like this

Expand full comment
author

I'm one, but I went rogue and turned the tables on them.

Expand full comment

I'm Millenial and I'll be honest about us, we are failure to launch generation

Expand full comment
author

Oh right..Millennial eh.. ok.

Expand full comment

I thought his series Trammadol Nights was absolutely dire and found it unwatchable, but people I knew at the time adored it.

Expand full comment

I've literally never heard of him

Expand full comment

Ah, yes, the ever nauseating trope of the 'Edgy Leftist', of which the insufferable Boyle is one of the principal cast. I continue to be amazed that these complete mongs still buy into their own astroturfed, trite, utterly jejune bullshit. It's all been done to death, year after year, decade after decade, yet somehow they still contrive to believe they are taking big risks and sticking it to The Man. They make me puke.

Expand full comment

Boyle bent the knee and sucked the cock off any TV producer willing to give him a bone years ago.

Shame - as there was a time when I really thought he didn’t give a shit who he offended which is what comedy should be.

Expand full comment

South Park is about the only even-handed topical satire around nowadays. Although I watched Spike Lee's movie Bamboozled recently which is genuinely funny even though it had a satirical aim to challenge stereotypes. It's a curious movie really as it is a black version of The Producers which kind of disables its own message by making the satire creator such a pompous and out of touch character. It's definitely worth a watch and probably could sustain a deeper analysis.

Expand full comment

The great Ty E of Soiled Sinema did one analysis of it.

https://soiled-sinema-backup.blogspot.com/2020/07/bamboozled.html

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Exactly, punching down on Downs’ Syndrome kids - what a man....I despise Boyle and always did.

Expand full comment