grail

September 23rd, 2026

Oh, had enough, eh?

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Discussion (47)¬

  1. Cleese is a brilliant comedian, but he also supports Restore. It is possible to be both a brilliant comedian and a hateful jerk. Restore is essentially a British version of the worst elements of malignant Trumpism.

    Quoting from Wikipedia:
    —
    Georgios Samaras, an assistant professor at King’s College London, stated that “[Restore] know that a percentage of Reform is openly fascist, and they are trying to attract that audience.” His view was that “Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain are the expressions of neo-Nazism in this country”, without “being openly, symbolically, and stylistically Nazi”.
    —

    So Cleese supports a British neo-Nazi party, but he lives in California, apparently with his fourth wife. With the other three, I supposed he’s had divorces made in heaven.

    His suggestion that people vote for Restore is certainly not satire. What leads me to that conclusion is that it’s uncontaminated by humour.

    It ought to be enough to say that all creation stories from all religions are verifiably false, and that therefore religions are false. That ignorant people from antique times had no special knowledge. And if that’s not enough, just read the Pardoner’s Tale.

  6. Good Lord, what madness rules in brainsick men,
    When for so slight and frivolous a cause
    Such factious emulations shall arise!
    Good cousins both, of Manchester and Everglades,
    Quiet yourselves, I pray, and be at peace.
    Not since the Diet of Worms has there been such consternation, rivalry, and outright opposition to the meaning of such new but well-worn terms as woke. Nobody uses woke unless they are maggot munching menial servants of the king, no matter which side of the pond they occupy.

  7. Ignatz, what about religions without a creation story? It’s very possible to be an atheist Quaker or a Buddhist Quaker.

    I’m an atheist, and not a Quaker, but I’ve found myself respecting the Quakers I’ve met – they’re sensible people, prosocial, not dogmatic. It’s hard to disprove “There’s a part of ourselves that works to improve ourselves, and if we sit quietly we can hear it.”

    A lot of religions do indeed make bad people worse by damaging their thinking and creating bad social structures. But #notallreligions, eh?

  8. M27Holts:
    Cleese supports Restore. He’s said so.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/27/john-cleese-trusts-rupert-lowe-of-restore-more-than-rivals/

    Restore attracts and contains fascists and neo-Nazis. That’s what they’re made of.
    https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/22/inside-rupert-lowes-restore-britain-with-neo-nazis-reform-defectors-and-associated-rogues/

    Which of these assertions do you claim is false?

    Read back what I wrote. I wrote that Cleese supports Restore and that Restore is neo-Nazi, by virtue of attracting and containing such people.

    I never said Cleese was neo-Nazi. There’s another alternative. He could just be a hateful old man, who likes to be obnoxiously controversial.

    Also, I think Islam deserves all sorts of criticism. Nevertheless, Restore are what they are. Their policy page. https://restore.vote/. Says “Only British People by Birth and Heritage should be able to vote in British Elections.”. Heritage means white.

  9. Jain, world’s oldest surviving organized religion, also maintains that there’s no beginning, which I assume also means no creation. This may not completely absolve them of teaching false ideas, though, as that is the basic business of religion.

    As for Cleese … he’s 87. From a glance through the wikipedia page, he has been generally on the more enlightened side of politics – woke? – but in recent years – in his 80s – has become nostalgic for an England he remembers, and has gotten caught up with the immigration thing.

  10. Postdog? I bend my knee to no man, tho I have eaten cheese with live maggots in it. I used woke as a generic slur for modern zeitgeist malaise. I am sick and tired of DEI policy bollocks and the fucking arguments I have had had as a consultant when employing competent staff and the fact that we can’t give a job to a certain person just because they tick certain boxes when I always advocate that a meritocracy and yhe only thing to consider is their ability to do the job required….

  11. I jacked my first job to go contracting when after interviewing three perfectly good young graduates, HR wheeled in an older woman with halitosis, who in terms of competence didn’t interview well at all. I advised HR that candidate A was best suited but they gave to job to the older woman. I tendered my resignation the next day and promptly earned four times az much…so they did me a favour….

  12. Woke used to mean awakened but now is a slur against progressive ideas. Its use puts it in the same category as that hilarious right-wing term, alternative facts. This Orwellian disfigurement of language leads to epistemological nihilism, an aberration up with which I will not put.

  13. “Woke” is an extremely useful term for a puritanical, quasi-religious ideology that advocates radical social and political change. The word may not have meant the same thing in the past, but words are sometimes appropriated and take on new meanings. Deal with it.

    The thing is, the woke don’t want to be named. They don’t want you to call them politically correct or social justice warriors either. So what term are we to be allowed to use? You can’t fight something if you can’t name it. (George Orwell made this point, and I think the woke intuitively understand it).

    Frankly I think the woke should just own “Woke” and “Wokeism” and get on with it. They could do worse.

  14. Hence the conundrum. What you can name, you can fight better … but understand less.

    Progressive, woke, fascist. This is where we came in, isn’t it? Cleese … well, no one directly said he’s a fascist, but there was this implication. Perhaps he hasn’t hung portraits of Hitler and Mussolini in his drawing room. bit whatever. The battle lines are drawn!

  15. The essential qualia of woke is the ID not being responsible for any action they take or situation they find themselves to be in…it’s complete and utter.bollocks…end of…

  16. Take Lard Arses as an example. Physics tells me that lard-arsiness is an effect when the lard-arsee puts more energy into their system than their generated output energy due to bone-idleness and a refusal to do any “work”…nobody gets to be overweight by eating salads and fruit as we are not cattle…sugar intake is usually the culprit and the fault of the lard arse unit for stuffing their faces with cream cakes and coca-cola full fat…

  17. Seems to me that “woke” has replaced “commie”.

    And I find it rather revealing that “antifa” (anti-Fascist) is also used as a negative descriptor by some.

    I know there are virtues that conservatives can hold to, and likewise vices that liberals sometimes exhibit. I posit that the right looks for justice, while the left looks for mercy, and both sides can forget those two virtues each require the other.

  18. I’ve reluctantly come to accept that there may be some inherent complexes or something that cause people to sort out into conservative or liberal types.

    Cleese here illustrates a couple of elements – on one hand, a literally conservative idea of preserving remembered cultural values, and on the other hand, the attachment to a leader – note that his crime is telling us he trusts the Reform guy more than the alternatives. That’s a fatal conservative weakness – they will always be betrayed – but the it isn’t really a personality flaw. I believe for example that if you’re on good terms with conservative colleagues at work, they will be on the average the least apt to stab you in the back. And literal conservatism has its merits, the ability to appreciate what you have and how it works.

  19. I’m utterly incapable of expressing my disgust with right wing ideology, so I’m going back to my first love, doggerel, with this addendum to my opening plagiarism of WS.

    the things we wanted to do
    the Tories said we never could
    when Labor elected him
    they knew that Burnham would

  20. M27Holts — I don’t think the obesity epidemic has much to do with willpower. I don’t have much willpower when it comes to food — put a cream cake in front of me and I will stuff my face! — yet it’s never taken me much effort to control my weight. Contrast this to the many, many stories of people who struggle really, really hard to lose weight but just can’t seem to manage. But when these same people start taking GLP-1s many say that suddenly the “food noise” in their head goes away, they stop being obsessed with their next snack, and they think “Is this what it’s like to be normal?”.

    So no, I don’t think it’s willpower. And it can’t be genetics either, because people were much thinner two generations ago, and genes don’t change that fast. Most likely it’s something in the unhealthy diet that has been foisted upon us over the past 60 years or so by our corporate feedmasters, but I’ve seen other possible explanations as well, such as forever chemicals, nanoplastics, or new viruses. But I don’t think it can be willpower.

  21. Jobar — “Commie” is a disparaging synonym for “Communist”, but they mean the same thing. “Woke” is something new, and while there are parallels with Communism — enough to justify the term Cultural Marxism — my understanding is that the remaining old style communists have nothing but contempt for it. I see Progressivism and Wokeism as being related in much the same way as Christianity and Calvinism: in both cases the latter is a puritanical sect under the umbrella of a larger faith.

    Also, have you ever actually seen actual, black-clad antifa activists? I have, and they are damn scary.

    [I tried submitted this comment earlier today and got weird error messages, so I’m trying again now, but apologies if it shows up twice].

  22. All this crap is meant to manipulate the masses.

    I was born a few days after the US Senate censure of famous red baiter Joe McCarthy, but the Commie boogeyman was still under people’s beds for decades after, still is for a few I guess. What a great tool that was!

    Three years later, Eisenhower deployed the US Army in Little Rock, Arkansas, in support of school integration. To me, that’s a key point at which the US government after 100 years decisively abandoned hope of a national consensus, and took sides. That led to the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan, and here we are. What’s maybe not so obvious, is that this division led to symmetrical deformities on both sides. The kind of thing where everyone’s competing to be the purest of the pure, and you get far enough out there that you can look a bit absurd. That’s where “woke” came from, and at about the time the social media environment became available to make the most of it.

    The point I’m trying to get to here, is that neither side is making any good use of these words as a means of understanding anything. Woke, progressive, whatever – they’re labels that are attached to straw men, for the exercise of inflammatory politics, to manipulate people who aren’t independent thinkers.

  23. JB. I run on average 6000k per year since I was 11 years old. Thus my metabolism is very high and I can eat what the fuck I want because the moment I eat anything my body glows with heat and i go to the toilet 4 or 5 times a day. Fat Twats think they can lie on a couch and ram high calorie food in their fat faces and wonder why their slug slow metabolic rate turns them into Jabba the Hut….and yes I am a fitness facist….

  24. The obesity epidemic is the abundance of high carb food, which was rare in hunter gatherer times. And the genetic drive to seek out and stuff sweet stuff down your gob, even if you are not hungry….

  25. “All this crap is meant to manipulate the masses.”

    I have to respectfully disagree. I believe Wokeism is a real thing that poses real dangers. I may be right or wrong about this, but I don’t see how the ancient boogeyman of Joe McCarthy is relevant to the argument. I also believe liberals have very legitimate fears and complaints about Trump and MAGA. What I do not believe is that the fears of both sides (and other sides as well; we should not forget that politics is, um, nonbinary) have been conjured up out of nothing by shadowy manipulators. Words like “woke” and “fascist” and “racist” and “antifa” do not refer to straw men, they refer to real things. Yes, partisans can use those words to inflame, but they can also be used in careful arguments by people who are independent thinkers. We need such words, because without them there are things you just can’t talk about.

  26. M27Holts — 10 miles a day since you were 11? Impressive! (Or if you’re fibbing, it’s an impressive fib).

    But I think you are missing my point. Some Fat Twats do diet and exercise, but it does them no good, because their bodies are always demanding more food. I’ll bet you don’t spend all day feeling especially hungry, so you don’t need to exert much willpower to avoid getting fat. But imagine that unless you ate three times as much as you are eating now you were always totally famished. Do you really think you could handle that through sheer willpower? GLP-1s don’t boost willpower; what they seem to do is counter whatever has gone wrong with those people’s bodies so they they have normal appetites again. As to what originally went wrong, it may well be diet, but once the damage is done it’s hard to reverse. Willpower can help, but the root of the problem is not a lack of willpower.

  27. Now, here’s a fairly thoughtful argument, with factual information and everything. I will add my anecdotal perspective – awkwardly thin all my life, despite an ability to put the food away that often causes remark, and that includes plenty of eating between meals and other unwholesome habits — and only accidental exercise. Run? Ha ha, once when I was short of time to catch the train. My guess is that this problem does have something to do with diet, but far from the simple input-minus-output logic that might be our first thought, and far from the only factor..

    But … woke? Our excerpts.

    To the left once a person isn’t a woke wanker they immediately classify as a Nazi

    Nobody uses woke unless they are maggot munching menial servants of the king, no matter which side of the pond they occupy.

    Woke used to mean awakened but now is a slur against progressive ideas.

    I used woke as a generic slur for modern zeitgeist malaise.

    puritanical, quasi-religious ideology that advocates radical social and political change.

    The essential qualia of woke is the ID not being responsible for any action they take or situation they find themselves to be in … it’s complete and utter.bollocks

    Seems to me that “woke” has replaced “commie”.

    There isn’t even a pretense at real agreement on what this means. People who use it, don’t care, because they’re communicating on a sort of “feels” level.

    If there are radical social and political changes being advocated, then the odds are pretty good that specific people are advocating for specific changes, and good arguments can be made against a specific change. That’s purposeful. This goes as well for “progressive” and other ill defined labels. (Antifa not so much – you won’t find anything significant to discuss about that.)

    “Look out, the Wokesters are coming!” is just mob psychology, the type of tool that’s been used for centuries to rally the tribes.

  28. JB. I’ve run/ warm down walked more than 90 miles this week and my garmin is telling me that I’ve covered 5135k in a rolling year calculation. So I failed to replace the word run with move my arse….and I’m 61, when I was 17 I was running double marathons twice a week and loads of warm down distances….I am a running junkie so My approximate guesstimate of 6000K average isn’t too far off the mark since I have walked and run everywhere for 50 years….it’s definately over 5500k….

  29. Right. Now i’m on my high horse…Take Covid, the British Government locked every fooker down so they didn’t descriminate against fat, old, unfit, stupid smoker bastards. What they should have done is locked down the groups I just mentioned and let everybody else get herd immunity. All the.members of my running club caught covid and all suffered a one or two.minute degredation to their training times…

  30. Being really fit is better than any drug high and no dangerous side effects either, but trying to explain how it feels to be fit to an unfit, overweight smoker or whatever is like trying to explain what it’s like to see to a blind person…

  31. A long run in solitude is also food for mental health….see no drawbacks at all and running is free!!!!

  33. M27, I hope you can keep up that much cardio for years to come. I’m a few days shy of 71, and know too many people whose knees, hips, or ankles have given out on them. (Though knee replacement surgery has given some people a new lease on life.)

    And the smokers and fatties around my age are dropping like flies, or already dead. Oddly enough I know a couple of heavy drinkers who don’t smoke that are still chugging along – but liver disease has taken out others.

    Myself, I’ve never been much of a runner, though as a younger man I could hike 25 miles a day toting a 60 lb pack. But I grew up helping my family run a dairy farm, and for most of my life have chosen to make my living doing physical labor. I still do lawn care and landscaping in the warm months – and since I live in Georgia I often work in heat that can be dangerous if you don’t know how to deal with it. And I tell people that my goal is to retire about 3 days before the funeral.

  34. Ha, Jobar, a year ahead of you and still with original knees etc. in good condition. I “retired” 18 years ago – work is not for me.

    I credit my low mass to a scarcity of fat cells. Your fat cells can multiply until age 24, and from there they can only get larger. My few fat cells are all comfortably full.

  35. I’ve been self-employed since back in the early nineties, Donn, so I get on really well with my boss – despite how hard he works me. 🙂

    I’m still all original parts too, except for the lenses in my eyes – and frankly those are rather better than the ones I was born with, since I was quite myopic.

    At 5′ 11″ and 180 lbs I am in fine shape – I weigh the same as I did when I graduated Ga. Tech in 1977. Better than my two brothers, both younger than me; I mentioned the one who just had heart surgery, and the other has had both knees replaced.

  36. Donn Cave —

    If your argument is that “woke” shouldn’t be used because it is pointlessly inflammatory and gets in the way of real discussion, I don’t think your quotes support it. Let’s see. One quote is mine, arguing that there is nothing wrong with saying “woke”. I stand by my words: I see them as a reasonable characterization of an extreme ideology, and not especially inflammatory. Two quotes were from postdoggerel and Jobar, who argued the opposite, but neither strikes me as particularly inflammatory either. The remaining four were all from a certain M27Holts, who, well, is off doing his own thing.

    So OK, the word can be used in an inflammatory way, but why is that a problem? “Racist” and “fascist” can also be used to inflame, but would you argue that we therefore should never use those words? It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the real objection to “woke” is that it negatively characterizes (slurs) progressive ideas, which are Good, while using “racist” and “fascist” is fine, because those words are directed against rightist ideas, which are Bad.

    It would be different if you are arguing that unlike racism and fascism, wokeism is an invented -ism that doesn’t exist in the real world. But that’s a difficult argument to make, because so many examples of bizarrely extreme speech and behavior from the progressive left have been documented, and if those examples don’t form a perfectly coherent ideology, well, racism and fascism aren’t all that coherent either, yet we are still allowed to talk about them.

    There are sooooo many examples of wokeism, but here is a recent account you might find interesting. It was the cover story of the September issue of The Atlantic magazine, and was written by a non-woke but otherwise basically liberal black academic who took a job as a professor at Bates College, a fairly typical American liberal arts college. Read it and see if you can find any way to avoid thinking “those people are out of their freakin’ minds!”

    Why I Quit the Tenure Track

  37. I read that article, jb. It forcibly reminded me of something from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long; “A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.”

    Academic insanity is all too common. Ever try to argue with a postmodernist? Years ago, on the Secular Cafe discussion board which I and 6 others founded, we had one that tried to argue we couldn’t say evolution was true, and creationism was false. Extremely literate, but crazy as a football bat.

  38. Here it’s about race, which as I wrote a couple days ago, is how we got here.

    We had our day of progress in what we now call the Civil Rights era – 1954 when Eisenhower brought troops to the discussion, to ca. 1968. Since then, as I wrote, there has been deepening division that has led to unhealthy politics on both sides. Harper’s writing about that. It happens. Bates is clearly an extreme example – he mentions that they looked at 32 other colleges and found none that had done what they planned to do – but sure, where there’s polarization, there will be people and institutions on the far end.

    Is that the problem? Let’s look at Bates College so we know the Enemy – they are Woke! They probably teaching Critical Race Theory! That isn’t a serious analysis. Your enemy is going to be thinking “so you say knotheads disagree with us? OK! They’re probably racists!”

    Sure, within that domain – private liberal arts colleges and the culture around them – Harper’s done good work here to pour some cold water on their fever dreams.

    But to make this into a culture war? Just plays into the hands of people who benefit from culture wars. Harper didn’t do that, he carefully laid out the case for what was wrong at Bates in specific terms. That’s what you do. If you have a case against some policy, make that case. Don’t say “that’s DEI, and DEI is woke!”, unless all you really wanted was to wave the flag and yell taunts on your side of the divide. People do that because the real thinking that’s needed to engage productively is hard.

    By the way, “fascist” is even worse, and I’d discourage anyone from thinking we et anywhere by “discussing fascism.” It’s about several European states in a particular time a century ago, that weren’t all that similar to each other, and it isn’t even easy to classify similar states of the time. Today’s politics are different, and if it’s fun to use the word casually in reference to current events, fine, but as a serious analysis it’s absurd.

  39. And it does have much in common with the Red Scare. DEI witch hunting and purges are under way, if the courts will allow it. Of course it’s circus clown action, because that’s USA 2026, but it’s the same anti-intellectual posture of authoritarian government.

  40. Another example of allowable descrimination (in this case those of us with a penis) I was working in an all female office, when a feminazi entered the office and just behind my desk put up a poster which stated “FROM BIRTH TO DEATH WOMEN ARE RAPED BY MEN, ALL MEN ARE POTENTIAL RAPISTS”, now to be fair, all the other women in the office immediately insisted that is was extremely offensive and desciminatory and told her to remove it. In a huff she refused and insisted that anybody removing it would be reported to HR as the KEEP WOMEN SAFE FROM MEN directive came directly from them…..I waited till she was gone and removed the poster and binned it….

  41. ‘Fascism’ derives from the word ‘fasces’ the ancient Roman symbol of a bunch of sticks bound around an axe carried to signify unity, strength, power and submission to authority. Any system of dictatorship or authoritarian rule is fascist and despite what they might have called themselves as National Socialists or Communists, Hitler and Stalin were fascist dictators. The same applies to Mao, Mussolini, Putin, Kim and all the other authoritarians who imposed their will upon and demanded obedience from the millions under their power.
    Fascism did not exist only a hundred years ago in Europe and lose its relevance as a word today and it is perfectly reasonable to use it in relation to the Orange One currently occupying the Oval Office, given his obvious dictatorial, authoritarian, anti democratic leanings and envious worship of those like Putin and Xi who actually have the power that he craves.

  42. Was Thatcher fascist? She was responsible for a lot of the problems that we face today? Your list was very XY oriented? Has there ever been an XX fascist leader?

  45. ‘Using language for fun’ is utter twaddle, as serious analysis useless and an assertion completely without foundation. The word has a definition and a recognised usage.

  46. M27, apparently Thatcher couldn’t possibly have been because she didn’t live in a particular place a century ago, which is rubbish, of course. I would be inclined to say that she had fascist tendencies and was certainly authoritarian (‘our people’) but did actually respect democracy and went when she was kicked out by the will of the people.
    The XY dominance is interesting but I suppose given the general historical dominance of men not surprising. Maybe the fascist XX could only express itself in the sidekicks of the main players, like Elena Ceausescu or Imelda Marcos, the only ones who spring to mind immediately.

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