Dolce & Gabbana designs hijab range – this is supposedly offensive to Muslim women

The Guardian is killing me… I don’t even have the energy to comment on the utterly moronic piece above. Talk about a professional victim.

That’s right. I am not happy with Hermione Granger being played by a black actress in the upcoming play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Part I and II (move over Shakespeare), and in this day and age that makes me a racist. Oh no.

Right-On Rowling is of course gushing, but then again just imagine what she would have had to put up with from the media and (shudder) Twitter trolls had she expressed anything less than wild enthusiasm… luckily she knows which way her bread is buttered.

She is also being her own revisionist:

Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified.

Whatever you say, Jo. Never mind the fact that Hermione regularly blushes pink or turns white with fright in the books, eh?

She is also never described as having frizzy hair. Bushy, yes. Frizzy, no.

As for her being played by the unmistakingly Caucasian Emma Watson in all eight films, this is apparently irrelevant as it’s officially Not Jo’s Fault:

And yet she was very vocal about nipping things in the bud when she wasn’t happy with them, like when Chris Columbus wanted some Hogwarts pupils to be American or when the Half-Blood Prince script had Dumbledore reminiscing about a pretty woman he used to know (“No! He’s gay!!” JK apparently shrieked). The line was cut.

Not so powerless when it suited her, it seems…

Meanwhile, having correctly identified a gift that will keep on giving for ever or at least until the play opens, every randomly non-white Guardian writer (no need to be black, any other ethnicity will do) has now been tasked with inflicting their uninformed – it’s perfectly clear that none of them is a Harry Potter fan – opinion on the rest of us, insulting anyone who disagrees with the Official Party Line into the bargain:

Can Hermione be black? What a stupid question

Uh, thanks.

The Guardian, by constantly repeating the mantra “white by default”, keeps trying to brainwash us all into thinking this is a bad thing – in a country where nearly 90% of the population is white. Sorry, I meant hideously white.

This made me hyperventilate:

In the Prisoner of Azkaban, she is described as “very brown”.

She is described – by Harry who hasn’t seen her for two months – as very brown BECAUSE SHE JUST CAME BACK FROM HER SUMMER HOLIDAY!

If she were indeed black, would he suddenly notice that fact after knowing her for two years?

More silly quotes:

The default assumption of whiteness is so strong and unspoken, it’s a hard habit to kick.

And it needs kicking why? If an author wants us to know a character isn’t white, they’re free to use their words after all.

The same is true of our heteronormative culture, which is why JK Rowling had to spell it out to us that Dumbledore is gay.

She did not spell it out, she mentioned it in passing during an interview. “Our heteronormative culture” is not to blame either. It just so happens that Dumbledore’s sexuality is so utterly irrelevant to the storyline that no one had even speculated about it. He’s over 100 years old, for a start!

If it hadn’t been for that little script issue I mentioned earlier, it would never even have come out (har har).

Hermione is in a Muggle-born minority

Minority? Says who? This is entirely made up by the writer. If anything, the pure-bloods are an endangered minority in the Potterverse. The Muggle-born and half-bloods are doing just fine.

She is also an activist who understands and will stand up for the oppressed, whether people, giants or Hippogriffs, and who campaigns for an end to the enslavement of elves.

This is quite laughable. She’s a clueless activist who actually understands nothing about the causes she is fighting for. Her campaign to free house-elves is a dismal failure, because she is so convinced of being right that she fails to appreciate that the house-elves do not want to be freed (the Hogwarts house-elves even kick her out of the kitchens for going on about salaries and holidays) and that Dobby is an anomaly – who is already free anyway and wants nothing to do with her as he clearly thinks she’s bonkers.

Amusingly, this actually screams “leftie white middle-class guilt” to me… her parents must be Guardian readers.

So, let’s recap the main characteristics of the character: Hermione was given a rare, literary name for pretentious reasons:

It’s a name from Shakespeare. It’s in ‘A Winter’s Tale’. Um … although my Hermione bears very little relation to *that* Hermione, but it just seemed the sort of name that a pair of professional dentists, who liked to prove how clever they were … do you know what I mean … gave their daughter a nice, unusual name that no-one could pronounce! I mean, parents do that!

(It’s actually a name from Greek mythology, Shakespeare just borrowed it)

She enjoyed a comfortable, rather privileged upbringing: her parents are dentists who go to the theatre in the West End, who like skiing and camping holidays, who take her to France… I simply do not expect a book character with this kind of background to be black. It is of course possible, but not very probable.

Guardian articles on this topic, as well as being tediously predictable, are also getting stupider by the day: “Muggles gonna hate” is the latest headline!

Seriously. It is becoming increasingly hard to tell the Guardian apart from the Onion.

And here we go again with the “white as default” obsession:

If race isn’t specifically assigned as black or Asian, then it’s assumed to be white. White people make up less than a third of the planet’s population but because of the way society is structured, it can sometimes seem as if the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny are assumed to be white too.

The planet’s population, uh? How about we look at the population of the UK, where Hermione was born and grew up? 3% black people in 2011. Three per cent.

And suddenly it’s a very different story!

If we can let actual non-white historical figures like Jesus, Cleopatra and Gandhi switch races

Cleopatra, along with the rest of the Ptolemaic dynasty, was actually Macedonian Greek and not Egyptian – but never mind.

If the lord of the jungle (Tarzan) and the king of hip-hop (Eminem) can be white

Oh dear… Tarzan is the son of an English lord and lady, who is orphaned as an infant and raised by apes. How on earth can he not be white?

So, just because I do not agree with this gigantic, author-approved retcon, I am now officially a racist. I’m not overly bothered though.

Sorry, what was that? Am I now going to boycott the play and sell my hideously expensive stalls ticket on eBay? Of course not, don’t be ridiculous.

If you’re an English speaker, anyway. I’m torturing myself with this title to be honest.

Anyway, back to the point: Documentary on clueless people who keep getting uglier and uglier tattoos

“Matt also has “cunt” tattooed on his shoulder. Abracadabra boss Dave shakes his head. “We wouldn’t do that,” he says. Well, you say that, Dave, but looking at your website here, I see there’s a photo of you tattooing a picture of Gordon Ramsay on to someone’s leg. I can’t really see the difference, to be honest.”

So that’s the Guardian officially calling Gordon Ramsay a cunt. This is probably because what Gordon Ramsay does (running restaurants and fronting cookery programmes, just so we’re clear) is far, far worse than stabbing teenagers to death at Victoria Station, and that’s why he fully deserves the epithet. Unlike others who “might have gone on to university” if they hadn’t become murderous bastards before taking their A-Levels that dastardly justice system hadn’t decided to interfere.

Also, he’s white (what an arse, really), which probably forces tattoo artists up and down the country to overshade his picture otherwise he’d be “invisible”. That’s right, getting tattoos of white people if you’re white yourself is apparently surprisingly difficult. No race issue is ever left unturned by the Guardian, is it? Of course, the reviewer wouldn’t even dream of joking about, say, Will.i.am getting an invisible tattoo of Martin Luther King or even black people being invisible in the dark. Because that would be beyond the pale. But this

“Anyway, Matt’s having a picture of his baby daughter over the C-word. She’s white but Dave’s doing her black, presumably because otherwise she’d be invisible. I can see that it’s difficult, portraying skin on skin, and you have to do it a few shades darker to show up. That’s why this other white fellow Carl has a picture of a black Miley Cyrus on his leg, I guess. Interesting.”

somewhow isn’t. Interesting indeed.

Homeless families aren’t happy living in B&Bs

Poor old Guardian. The article started so well, with sad stories of people, all with children in tow (non-parents don’t matter in the media), being forced to share one damp, tiny room in a grotty hostel with unpleasant, sometimes violent, neighbours, all because they can’t afford decent accommodation anymore – they got evicted when housing benefit caps were introduced by the evil coalition.

Then the journalist shot herself in the foot by telling us where the people in question used to live:

1. In a £500 a week (!!) two-bedroom flat in St John’s Wood, entirely paid for by housing benefit. Person doesn’t work due to arthritis.

2. In a flat in Hammersmith, partly paid for by housing benefit. Person works part-time.

3. In a flat in Maida Vale. No info on who paid the rent but person is a carer – not usually a fantastically-paid job.

4. In a shared flat somewhere in Central London. We are told person cannot afford to rent nearby – how did she manage before? Surely there is more than one flatshare in the area.

Apart from the fact that these locations are all very expensive, with Hammersmith being a bit further away and less extortionate than the rest, all the people interviewed keep complaining about having to leave the neighbourhood where they have their roots / GP / job / kids’s school / friends / etc.

Well, I’m sorry but tough titties. Are they not aware that everyone is in the same boat? I lived in Fulham for five years and loved every minute of it. Yet when my circumstances changed and I could no longer afford the rent, I left, broken-hearted, for the unexplored wilds of Zone 4. I am now in Zone 6 (here be dragons) and whinge about it on a regular basis. I’ve had to change jobs as the commute was not realistically doable any longer. Still, I never expected the state to keep me in the style to which I’d become accustomed. So why do they? And why is the journalist enabling them? (stupid question, I know)

My dear Guardian soft-hearted milksop, it’s very simple: nobody has a God-given right to live in central London at everyone else’s expense. And when they ask

“I’ve had the same GP for 20 years, the same hospital. All my daughter’s friends are here. Are we meant to change all these things?”

the answer is :”Yes. Yes, you are. It would be miles better than the grotty B&B in my opinion, but suit yourself.”

The journalist even had the nerve to pre-empt her readers’ legitimate indignation:

“Housing is an emotive subject because most people are struggling to pay rent, or a mortgage, making life-altering decisions about where to live based on how much they can afford to spend – so making the case for the state to be subsidising large chunks of rent for other people to live in London does not instantly elicit sympathy. If you’re in any doubt about this, just glance below to read the comments that inevitably follow pieces on this theme.”

Is that passive-aggressive or what?

On top of that, the people featured appear remarkably helpess and incapable of doing anything for themselves:

“Rana and her mother have responded by no longer using the communal kitchen. Instead they buy food from KFC and McDonald’s.”

That can’t be cheap or healthy (expecially for a child). I’d rather buy bread and stuff and make sandwiches and salads in my room. You don’t need a kitchen to prepare simple food; I once camped for three months with no facilities whatsoever, only a little portable gas stove to heat water. I didn’t crave cooked food once.

“The family don’t cook, because all their saucepans are in council storage […]. They too are surviving on takeaways – junk food and sandwiches.”

“She is not allowed to use the kitchen after 10pm, which means she can’t do any cooking when she gets back late from work, so has taken to eating McDonald’s on the bus on the way home.”

See above. It’s like for these people there’s absolutely no middle ground between home-cooked hot food and takeaways. I’m confused.

“The family stay inside a lot, because they don’t know the area; there is no garden, and they don’t know where the nearest park is.”

Are you kidding me? How about going for a walk one day so they, y’know, find out? There are no snipers in the street, I assure you!

Having said all this, here is my submission for the 2012 Rip-Off Britain Award:

“The family don’t cook, because all their saucepans are in council storage (along with their winter clothes) and it costs £45 every time they access it to get something out.”

Fucking outrageous. If Big Yellow tried to pull this one they’d be out of business within a week. You have to hand it to councils, they could certainly teach the Mafia a thing or two about extortion.

School colour-codes pupils by ability – Guardian worries about segregation

First of all, I am amused at the picture: it just so happens that the boy in the purple tie (which tells us he’s in the ‘gifted and talented’ stream) is black, whereas the other two (average and thicko streams) are white. I don’t believe for one second that this state of affairs was engineered by the Guardian photographer for subliminal propaganda reasons. Nope, I don’t. Nuh-huh.

Second, can I take this opportunity to point out how much I HATE the American-invented label giftedandtalented.

HATE.

“But Murphy says that without setting, the school wouldn’t have survived. He says that he has heard of other schools using different colour uniforms to mark different “houses”

Duh, everyone has! It’s a well-known fact that Gryffindors wear red, Slytherins…

Ahem.

“Courtney cites famous research conducted by American teacher Jane Elliott in the 60s, in which blue-eyed children did better and began bullying brown-eyed children after being told that they were superior.”

What’s that got to do with streaming in schools? I didn’t realise having blue eyes depended on academic results. Just how stupid are these people? As for the bullying issue, maybe that’s why children in different streams are kept separate from each other, genius.

Anyway, ‘scientists’ in the Sixties and Seventies breastfed chimpanzees and believed introducing children to sex was pedagogic. Who gives a shit about their experiments.

I personally have no problem with streaming in schools (even though this particular example  sounds a bit more extreme than most); quite frankly I would have loved to have experienced it. It doesn’t exist in France (it’s elitist! It’s against equality! Horror of horrors!) so for my entire school career I had every single lesson with my whole class (on average 30 people).

It certainly didn’t make for the best learning environment. I was very good at languages and was therefore bored out of my mind as the teachers repeated the same old information a million times. I was abysmally crap at maths and physics and was therefore bored out of my mind as I rarely understood what was going on – even after having the same old information repeated a million times. Talk about a lose-lose situation.

But what’s more important here? Politics and ideologies or allowing pupils to reach their full potential? Do I really want to know the answer? Hmmm.

And then I read the first sentence of the first comment, and now I want to kill.

“Nice to see apartheid is alive and well in the UK education system.”

Nice to see Guardian readers are easily as stupid and blinkered as the Daily Mail readers they despise so much.

And since I’m on a (maki) roll, here’s another Guardian article for your enjoyment:

Sushi is yummy. Discuss

That’s right, I managed to find something to rant about in a article on sushi. You’ll see.

You might have noticed that China is quite trendy at the moment. Everyone is talking about it, inspired by it and going there on holiday. Well, not so long ago, it was Japan that was the red-hot destination and source of all things cultural, from manga to food. Hence the unstoppable rise of sushi. But poor old Japan has since suffered a few setbacks and been replaced in the hearts of the western world by its ancient enemy. That must have hurt.

It cannot be a coincidence that the remake of The Karate Kid is now set in China, with the kid in question learning kung fu from Mr Han. Mr Miyagi and his boring old karate are so 20 years ago…

We still love sushi of course but it seems to have become acceptable to sneer at all things Japanese, in the Guardian at least:

“Japanese sushi restaurants are sexist to an extent that would appal most westerners.”

Actually, most of us already know that Japan is, generally speaking, an extremely patriarchal society. Don’t go all bandwagon-jumping feminist on us now.

“The traditional ones discourage single women from dining in them altogether.”

Oops, too late. Anyway, single Japanese women are discouraged from getting too independent in all sorts of ways. I think sushi restaurants are the least of their worries. Things are slowly changing however.

“And an idiotic belief persists that women have warmer hands than men and thus might somehow the spoil fish by handling it.”

The Japanese do have many weird beliefs but then so do we. Isn’t the word “idiotic” a bit strong and, let’s say the word, judgmental for the Guardian? Huh?

“But so much [sushi-eating] etiquette, as with codes of wine drinking and matching, is based on an inferiority complex and designed to exclude. It’s best skimmed, selected from and mostly discarded.”

WTF Guardian? Is this how you respect other cultures and traditions? Bet you wouldn’t say that about an African custom you didn’t understand! Bet you wouldn’t say that about the burqa. Go on, I dare you.

“So began the infamous annihilation of this fish [tuna] and the shameful reluctance of the Japanese to stem its destruction.”

Yup, because we in the West don’t overfish at all, ever. I suggest you have a word with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He writes for the Guardian too, you know.

The Guardian is truly shameless. Every gardener knows the native English bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) is being threatened by an invasive, much more robust variety known as the Spanish bluebell (Hyacinthoides hispanica). As I strongly suspect the bluebells in my garden to be hybrids (also a bad thing), I was looking at pics on Google Images when I came across this old Guardian article.

Notice anything strange? How about this bit:

“Bluebells by the shed but are they good British or bad French? Anyone know?”

Suddenly the bad Spanish bluebell (hispanica, right?) has become French. Subtle, isn’t it?

Two articles have recently appeared in the Guardian, both so loaded with anti-French propaganda my jaw hit the floor. Everyone is always very quick to criticise the Daily Mail every time it publishes a xenophobic story (and to be fair, it usually deserves it) but it amazes me just how much the Guardian gets away with.

First, this: Poor French women have it hard in a macho country

I cannot comment on things like the pay gap as I have almost no experience of the French workplace but this article is stuffed with inaccuracies and wild generalisations.

“The women seem bedevilled by standards that are either unattainable (to be a perfect size eight) or demeaning in themselves (to be restrained, demure, moderate in all things, poised; a host of qualities that all mean “quiet”).”

I think the problem here is that the journalist is making the classic mistake of confusing ‘upper middle class neurotic Parisienne’ with ‘average French woman’. It happens a lot in the English-speaking press so I’ll let it go.

“Female representation in politics is appalling, due to very inflexible rules about the pool from which the political class is drawn. All politicians come from the highly competitive set of graduate schools Les Grandes Ecoles (apart from Nicolas Sarkozy) which, until recently, had only a smattering of women, and none at all in Polytechnique (it is sponsored by the Ministry of Defence: women are now allowed in)”.

Female representation in politics may be appalling but it’s got nothing to do with where they studied. There are lots of female students in Grandes Ecoles (anyone can get in so long as they’re Hermione-style brainy in order to pass the entrance exam, and can afford the fees as all these places are private) and girls have been allowed in the (hugely prestigious and incredibly hard to get into) Ecole Polytechnique since… *googles*… 1972!! This lack of research deserves a spanking.

OK, maybe only 16% of students are women but a) it’s a military academy, which appeals to a certain type of person and b) the uniform doesn’t really help, does it?

“When there is a high-profile female face in politics, it is indicative of some force other than equality. At the local elections last week the two big winners were the Socialists, whose leader is Martine Aubry (daughter of Jacques Delors), and the National Front, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen)”.

Now, I’m not going to deny nepotism is big in France (although any journalist from a country where Chloe Madeley is considered a celebrity should perhaps refrain from commenting) but how about mentioning all the French female politicians who came from a perfectly anonymous background? Ségolène Royal, Michèle Alliot-Marie, Dominique Voynet, Christine Lagarde, Rachida Dati… there are many more. Where is that “force other than equality” now?

And now, brace yourselves for an absolute gem. I read it twice, looking for a clue that the interviewee was joking. Nope, she wasn’t.

“Thomasine Jammot, a cross-cultural trainer (who teaches travelling business people how they might overcome cultural misinterpretation, on their own or someone else’s part) [says] “There are many things you can’t do, as a woman, in France. You can’t be coarse or vulgar…”

Er, why would you want to be coarse and vulgar in the first place?

Oh, and by the way: yes you can. Maybe not in upper middle class Paris, but go and live in a working class area of northern France and you’ll find happiness there.

“…or drink too much, or smoke in the street. I would never help myself to wine.” “How would you get more wine?” I ask, baffled. “At the end of an evening, I might shake my glass at my husband. But no, I would never touch the bottle.”

What?! I think she has been touching the wine bottle, and many other bottles too!

I have my doubts on this woman’s Frenchness anyway. NOBODY, but NOBODY is called Thomasine in France. She may very well be a Brit married to a posh Frenchman and unaware that “Paris n’est pas la France”. That or her name was changed by the journalist (but then why pick such a weird name by French standards?).

“Your appearance will change everything, even for an interview for a job. In France you employ anyone you like. If the interviewer thinks that you’re too fat or ugly: dommage for you!”

How can you prove this doesn’t happen in the UK? All they have to say is “We don’t think you’ll fit in with the existing team”, and Bob’s their uncle.

“The pressure comes from society itself, not only from men but women. I am still a bad example to talk about it. I spend my life to look after my garden more than me. As a result, I never found a husband.”

This from Nicole Fiévet, 63. So she started looking for a husband in the Sixties. Very relevant to today’s France, isn’t it?

And now we’re about to find out what this article is really about: how racist France is!

“In 2002 it was made illegal to “passively solicit”. Mainstream feminists – politicians, unionists, various figures who had grouped together in 1996 under the title CNDF – supported the law; as prostitution constituted violence against women it obviously should be outlawed.

Activists countered that this denied prostitutes even the patchy safety of a busy street. They said, furthermore, that this was tacit racism, as these prostitutes tended to be from eastern Europe or Africa, and many were deported following the clampdown (even though there was a caveat offering clemency to any woman who named her trafficker; none ever did).”

There we go, it’s racist to ban street prostitution because the prostitutes aren’t white and French!

“in 2004 the ban on the veil came up, on the same grounds, that it represented a violence against women. Again, establishment feminists put up no opposition as, in the end, it is pretty sexist, to have your dress code determined by the sexual paranoia of your menfolk.

But this, again, had a terrible punitive effect on the women it purported to protect – in this case, girls were denied education if they continued to wear a veil.”

They were not denied education, they were either suspended or expelled from their state schools as they were deliberately flouting the law. Their parents were perfectly free to enrol them in private schools (which are not very expensive in France) just like the parents of kids who got expelled for any other disciplinary reason.

“In April, a new ban on the niqab, passed last September, will come into force. Would this have happened in a country where it was less routine, less state-sponsored, to judge a woman on her appearance? I think not, but it’s hard to prove.”

This is actually quite rude. She makes it sound like France is banning the veil because French men need to see women’s faces so they can judge them on their appearance! Where does that leave those other European countries that have already taken similar measures, not to mention Turkey?

See also this bizarre piece: French ‘sex object’ women are discouraged from breastfeeding

Here we go again with the crazy generalisations. To think my sister in Paris happily breastfed her two children for as long as she wanted, without ever having the slightest clue that she was being a dangerous revolutionary. Thank God for British journalists, eh?

And then we have this rather pointless offering which, despite being quite short, manages to contradict itself so often it looks like a printed weathervane:
The French are dirty – No they’re not – Yes they are – No they’re not – Yes they are – No more than the Brits anyway – Oi! You take that back – Yeah? Make me – I’m warning you – Whatever –

Er, sorry about that. Childish stuff is rather contagious.