05 June 2017

Not reeling, thank you very much

Jack Holmes has an Esquire article about John Oliver's commentary on the attacks in Britain:

The American media's default reaction to this past weekend's terror attack in London was to assume the British people were "reeling". The word, which means "to lose one's balance and stagger or lurch violently," implies the country had lost its way and was staggering around in the dark, consumed by shock and fear. However, as John Oliver, a Briton himself, explained last night, the Brits found this characterization flatly insulting. He derided the notion that Britain "was somehow weak enough to be brought to its knees by three monumental assholes."
As Oliver reminded us, we've already seen tremendous examples of British resilience and fortitude, particularly the determined pint-drinker and the man whose wonderful speech on the BBC about maintaining British values in the face of terror went viral. This is, after all, a country whose biggest cities have seen much worse. That Keep Calm and Carry On poster your college roommate pasted on your dorm room wall is actually from the Second World War, when Nazi bombing raids were leveling buildings in London on a nightly basis, and the Brits responded by going to work and doing their jobs as normal and sitting on the rubble drinking a cup of tea.
Of course, not every Brit's reaction was calm or embodied British values. Nigel Farage, the absolute tosser who led his country into Brexit on the back of xenophobic fear-mongering and outright lies about expanding the national healthcare budget, went on Fox News to declare that "the calls for internment will grow." (Farage is a noted ally of President Trump, and is "a person of interest" in the Russia investigation, according to The Guardian. He is also a former investment banker and eighteen-year European Parliament member, who bills himself as a populist outsider.) By this, Farage meant that Britons would soon demand that Muslims in Britain be put in internment camps as, in an act of national disgrace, the US did to Japanese-Americans during World War Two. That was the opposite of Britain's Keep Calm and Carry On ethos then, and it seems unlikely that our closest allies will make the same mistake now.

Rico says it's a 'mistake' they may be forced to make, if this shit keeps up...

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