Thread by @doctorow

I take a weird, uneasy comfort in jokes about us living in "the stupidest timeline," a terrible final season of a flailing TV series whose hacky writers' room is throwing a torrent of rubbish into storyline in the vain hope that it will recapture the public's interest.

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It's one of the ways I manage to contemplate #cumgate - one of the stupidest scandals of the UK's Boris Johnson administration (which is really saying something) without wanting to crawl under the duvet and rock back and forth.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pan…

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The thing about hacky writers' rooms is that they can inspire superb rants from outraged viewers who are agog at the stupidity of it all. It turns out that these rants are even MORE cathartic when directed at high-stakes, real world idiocy.

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Which is why I want to seriously recommend that you read @MarinaHyde's incredible, furious, virtuoso sermon on Cumgate, Boris Johnson, and the UK Tories.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Highlights below.

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"Perhaps on Sunday you watched the entire nation being lectured on what constitutes fatherly responsibility by Boris Johnson, a man who won’t even say how many children he has, and leaves women to bring up an unspecified number of them."

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"Perhaps on Monday you watched the Guardian’s Rowena Mason being lectured in journalism by Johnson, a man sacked from a newspaper for fabricating quotes from his own godfather, and who blithely discussed helping a friend to have another journalist beaten up."

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"The difference is that [Tiger] Woods had a problem with cocktail waitresses, while Cummings fucks entire public health messages in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Also, he’s not remotely sorry."

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"All populists secretly hate their people, and Johnson is no different. But that 'secretly' is key. His decision to keep Cummings brings his contempt for those he is meant to serve into the open. He would rather endanger their lives by compromising a vital health strategy."

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"This is actually a simple story: man with no ideas is too terrified to sack his ideas man."

Image:
Robert Scarth (modified)
flickr.com/photos/robert_…

CC BY-SA
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa…

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