Tonight I'll be back on TV with Tucker, live across America at 8pm Eastern, with a rerun at midnight Eastern/9pm Pacific for West Coast viewers. Hope you'll tune in!
~It's a lively start to the week - Election Day in Canada and the umpteenth do-or-die Brexit vote at Westminster. I was struck by the placard of the Remainer at right: "Put It To The People" - ie, let's have a second referendum.
Of course, it's already been put to the people - and the people voted to leave. At which point the losing side took the people to court, whose modish Blairite pseudo-Americanized judges ruled that only Parliament could effect withdrawal from the European Union and so, rather than putting it to the people, it had to be put to the politicians. Hence the last three years of obstruction and subversion.
Were the Devizes Remainer to get his/her [See Dymphna Gates below] wish and have it put to the people all over again, presumably, per the "Supreme Court", that would have no more standing than the last time. How long the people will put up with having it put to them like this is an interesting question. Right now, the best chance of Britain ever leaving the EU rests neither with people nor politicians but with a few exasperated Continental prime ministers who'd like to be done with it all.
~Meanwhile, back in what passes for the real world, from our old friends at The Sun:
Police Investigating 'Hate Crime' After Transgender Woman Turned Down for Porn Role 'Because She Has a Penis'
The lady in question, Miss Ria Cooper, was contacted by a gentleman on the Internet who wished to film himself having sex with her and sell the resulting cinematic masterpiece. He subsequently found out she was packing a little more than he was up for, and reneged on the deal because she "has a c**k". Miss Cooper took the matter to Humberside Police, who are now investigating. If you have difficulty keeping track of these useless northern English constabularies, West Yorkshire policemen are the ones who fail to investigate the grooming gangs for years on end; whereas Humberside policemen do their own grooming - or at least Barnaby Cooper of their "customer services crime team" does.
I've no idea what a "customer services crime team" is, but it accurately conjures the bureaucratized lethargy of a land where everything is policed except crime. So it was surely only a matter of time before the coppers started enforcing the human right of a transwoman to be shagged on camera by a heteronormative cismale.
This is almost a perfect distillation of our age and its strange blend of puritanico-libertinism:
You want to roger this bird in a pornographic movie? Hey, who are we to judge?
You refuse to roger this bird in a pornographic movie because she's hung like a horse? That's outrageous! We most certainly are going to judge!
I think it was Ann Coulter who observed, after their victory on same-sex marriage, that Big Gay had decided to go door to door shooting the survivors. So they hunted down every recalcitrant "homophobic" baker in the land and demanded: "Bake my cake!" The litigious alleged-transgender Jessica Yaniv took it to the next level, hunting down every Muslima waxologist in the land and demanding: "Wax my scrotum!"
But really isn't this where it all logically winds up? If what we used to call male and female genitalia are now utterly irrelevant to whether one is male or female - at least as far as women's bathrooms, women's sports and women's prisons are concerned - why should you have the right to discriminate against sex partners on such an outmoded basis? Any day now, in some playground somewhere in England, transcutie Sharon will ask little cisboy Jimmy to the school dance and, when he declines, sue the pants off him.
~I see Ria Cooper began transitioning when she was fifteen. At the age of eighteen she got cold feet and de-transitioned back to being a bloke. A couple of years after that, she felt ready to get back in the saddle and re-transitioned. One can see why she'd want to hold on to the meat and two veg lest the pendulum swing again. I was struck, though, by the way The Sun formulated her original "gender identity": Miss Cooper, was, as the reporter puts it, "assigned male at birth".
Oh, my. The Sun was the bestselling redtop that gave the doughty and beery masses daily knockers on Page Three, "Freddie Starr Ate My Lunchbox", and a star columnist, Garry Bushell, whose solution to the Aids pandemic was to propose homosexuals be tattooed at the base of the spine with "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here".
And all this for a paper whose answer to the question "Is it a boy or a girl?" is now to check what transient status has been "assigned". Was Garry merely "assigned male at birth"? Is he still? If Ria Cooper files a complaint, will he have to eat her lunchbox?
Don't let The Sun go down on me.
~But in contemporary Britain what really is conservative? At Manchester University the statue-topplers have come for Gandhi - on the grounds that he despised black Africans as "savages". And, if you're agitating to have old-school imperialist white-male statuary like Cecil Rhodes at Oxford toppled for the sins of the unwoke, what's sauce for the white goose is also sauce for the Gandhi.
In The Spectator, Tom Slater feels these two cases are different:
While Rhodes – one of the most enthusiastic British imperialists of his day – was responsible for the death, suffering and subjugation of millions, Gandhi led a movement that gave rise to the biggest democracy the world has ever known (independent India), expanded freedom to millions upon millions of people and inspired millions more around the world to agitate for their own liberation.
This is a conservative magazine in 2019?
The war on statuary is a war on the past - all of it, without distinction. If you don't grasp that, you should be writing for The New Statesman.
Oh, and leaving Africans out of it, the #MeToo stuff would be enough to do for Gandhi.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our centennial observances for Pierre Trudeau, and my assessment of his kid's chances of continuing in pop's old job. Saturday's movie date considered the big-screen Downton Abbey, and Sunday's song selection celebrated a Bacharach & David classic. If you were too busy this weekend searching for Andrew Scheer's principles, I hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week commences.
If you've been thinking of joining The Mark Steyn Club, we have a trio of members-only events coming up next month, and we'd love to see you there.
Catch you on the telly tonight with Tucker, and with some Canadian election analysis afterwards.
