infelicitousness

 

The actor Stephen Fry was interviewed on the internet by the psychologist Jordan Peterson this week.

During the conversation Stephen Fry referred to a character called Felicity who appears in a short story by Gustav Flaubert.

I recall Mr Fry referring to this character before in his introduction to one of Richard Dawkins' atheism books.

In his intro to the Dawkins book, Mr Fry had written: "Flaubert's Coeure simple, the old servant Felicity on her knees, telling the rosary and looking up with reverent wonder at the stained glass window above the altar, is not ripe for scorn; but the dogma relayed from the Vatican by the cardinal in his palace, dogma that keeps Felicity on her knees, the palace stocked with wine, and the populace plied with nonsensical edicts and eschatological threats... well, that is fair and necessary game."

When he again whipped out Felicity during this week's chat with Jordan Peterson, I recalled cheerfully my earlier attempts to refute him on this point.

I had said that I knew Felicities on their knees, and that in many cases the Felicities on their knees are the powers in our lives, the light in our homes, the love in our hearts, the intellectual compassionate principled guidance in our towns and villages, the conscience driven campaigners in our cities, the enlightenment in our countries and the bringers of hope to our jaded, cynical, war weary world.

They are quite simply in my experience the motion that impels.

For many of us they have made life worth living.

Clearly my analysis of the Catholic church's heroic role in bringing the truth of the gospel through twenty centuries and the effects on human living that this truth has had, differs substantially from Stephen Fry's.

But another thought struck me this week while he was brandishing Flaubert's fictional Felicity in Jordan Peterson's face.

Since Stephen Fry is so concerned about the  self abnegatory implications of people praying on their knees, perhaps we might consider the people he has put on their knees in a most abject and desolating false faith completely unrelated to the mystical glory that transfigures all those who pray to God.

I am referring to Stephen Fry's role in launching that concatenation of invidious, salacious, mind enslaving nonsense known to humanity as the Twitter website.

Or more correctly the Twitter cult.

For lo!

The Twitter site was launched in 2006 with a publicity campaign disguised as a news event that featured Stephen Fry deliberately colluding in a staged incident whereby he pretended to have been suddenly helplessly trapped in a lift, and that while trapped he was whiling away the hours updating the public about his situation in real time via text postings from his mobile phone to the newly launched Twitter site.

What a rare and happy coincidence it all wasn't.

But this was how the Twitter cult began.

With a staged news event featuring Stephen Fry to lure the gulpens in.

Once the citizenry was hooked on this particular brand of trivia, the rest was history.

Yes.

Stephen Fry's staged lift entrapment which he purported to be real, launched Twitter. Surely he bears some responsibility for all that followed.

I mean for all those hundreds of millions of  suggestible people on their knees, truly trapped in the cosmic indolence, idiocy, irrelevance and inanity of visiting Twitter sites, writing on them, reacting to them, publishing proudly their own most vacuous sneers, sharking on people who are deemed by the conformist mob to have fallen from grace, spouting verbiage, insulting, profaning, obsessing publicly, for an audience that does not care or does not exist, and thinking their prostrate conformist exhibitionism amounts to something meaningful, when all it does is keep leftist, atheistic, abortionists such as Jack Dorsey the CEO of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook, and Susan Wojcicki CEO of Youtube, none of whom have ever done a day's work in their lives, living in palaces on all our dimes.

Nor is Stephen Fry himself known to appreciate the rewards of spartan living.

He too lives in a palace.

I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.

No offence to any palaces who may be reading this.

And for the record again, as far as nonsense edicts go, we would be hard pressed to find anything in the entire history of the Catholic church (even such slanderous histories as are routinely contrived by leftist pseuds) to rank with the society destroying saccage casually perpetrated on a daily basis by the present generation of conformist liberal atheists including Stephen Fry, against the most innocent among us, by their acquiescence to the monstrous nay ludicrous, morally and scientifically aberrant, clinicians who are telling children aged four that they are women trapped in a man's body, altering their natural development using gender suppressant chemicals, and then performing a mutilating sex change operation on them at the age of 15 which doesn't even work.

The correspondence with Stephen Fry regarding Felicities is now closed.

By which I mean I will no longer scream maniacally at televisions when Stephen Fry appears on them.

an open letter to irish parliamentarian richard boyd barrett

 

Dear Richard.

Last week you claimed that the State of Israel is a colonialist construct.

Footage of your comments has been approvingly posted on the internet by a character styling himself Ali Dawah.

Ali Dawah is most famous for recently advocating the judicial execution of the millions of people opting to give up Islam as their religion.

Some highlights of Ali Dawah's remarks advocating the mass murder of people leaving Islam: "... little weaklings giving up their religion... Spreading corruption in the land... Under an Emir it (their execution) will be done... We're proud of that... And you know what, we will be watching..."

Since Ali Dawah supports your intellectual attempts to delegitimise Israel, are we to assume you support Ali Dawah's open advocacy of the judicial murder of anyone who chooses to leave the peaceloving religion of Islam?

I think we should be told.

James Healy

miscellaneous extraneous aneous

 

(This week's best stories, hot off the printer. No jokes here. All these happened.)

FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES

A Ryanair flight has been hijacked by Belarussian State security forces seemingly in order to seize Roman Protasevich a Belarussian opposition figure. The air piracy gambit involved using a Mig fighter to force the plane to land in Belarus. Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O'Leary claimed this evening that KGB men were on the plane. Presumably he means Russian KGB agents, although the KGB now calls itself FSB (which stands for Fucking Shite Bastards). Initially I found it hard to believe that the KGB would fly Ryanair even as part of a kidnapping operation. But Belarus is reputedly controlled by resovietising Russian President Vladmir Putin so Michael O'Leary might be right if he was implying what I think he is implying. On the other hand clearly Putin and President Alexander Lukashenko (Putin's puppet dictator in Belarus) are mad to be messing with Ryanair or Michael O'Leary. I know Michael O'Leary and I know Ryanair. I mean I've seen them on TV. And I wouldn't mess with either of them. Or fly on their planes. Never mind hijack them.

THE THREAT OF MARXISM

Pop singer Richard Marx has published some sort of a threat on the internet aimed at American senator Rand Paul. The purported threat consisted of the singer offering to buy a drink for a felon who four years ago broke Senator Paul's ribs. Richard Marx' chagrin with the senator stems from Rand Paul refusing to eat Soylent Green. It was fun to see Rand Paul tonight on television, disparaging Richard Marx as a D list celebrity. The singer is most famous for a song called Hazard which is a song so exquisite as to be almost beyond description, exquisitely filmed for video, exquisite actress making Richard look good, and exquisite melody, lyric, orchestration and studio production. The thing is nearly perfect. The video dating from 1992 features the singer, at the time a youthful goony teddy bear of a man (no disrespect to any Teddy Bears who are reading this) trying heroically to look like a bad boy as he's pursued by the police for a murder he says he didn't commit. I always thought he probably did it. I used to shout at the video: "Shoot him." Since I formerly advocated shooting Richard Marx for a make believe murder in his song, I probably don't have a leg to stand on in getting sniffy about Richard Marx' implied threats to Senator Paul. But I would have loved if the news people had played that song during Rand Paul's interview. If I was running Fox News, they would have played the full song when Rand Paul said that Richard Marx was a D list celebrity and then challenged Rand Paul on his rating.

THE TASH OF CIVILISATIONS

The orator Hatun Tash was arrested in Hyde Park, London, earlier today for the crime of being surrounded by a mob of peaceloving Muslims who didn't like her tee shirt which had a caricature of the Prophet Muhammed on it. The British police took the easy way out. Arresting the victim. It won't save them. The French tried appeasement with Muslims during the first years of the War On Terror and their country has been a sea of Jihad murder, derailed trains, truck rammings into pedestrians, slaughters in theatres, suicide bombings, stabbings, beheadings, burning churches, unexplained plane crashes and terrorised streets ever since. The dysfunctions in Islamic culture threaten all humanity. Not just Hatun Tash.

That is all.

moment aria

 

mountains liszting

through the dawn choruses

of birdsong

elgar the forest with bliss

kiss the hedgerows

where bumble bees beethovening

in rose bushes

cavort on carousels of air

river mists

mozart the landscape

eternity dances

forward and bach

ghost story

 

"Do you believe in ghosts, Monsieur?"

Lautrec had that owlish quintessentially French expression on his face as he asked the question which made him look like nothing so much as a French owl.

"What is the word for owl in French?" I wondered aloud, ignoring his question.

"Hibou," he said, without turning a feather.

Rain rattled the window pane.

"This house is haunted," he exclaimed feverishly, leaning towards me suddenly with an intense light in his eyes. "It is haunted by the ghost of Remy Schnauwert Tiddly Bun."

I want the reader to read without knowing why he's reading, to be lulled strangely on by each sentence, almost unaware that he's being drawn in, until his imagination is engaged, and suddenly everything is elevated by his own response to what I'm writing, as the performance of an actor only touches alchemy when the audience is so lulled to consent that their collective imagination uplifts everything he does towards the Pantheon of great art, and at that moment he plays them as his instrument.

Genius lies in gaining the consent of an audience to imagine.

Some writer of contemporary renown suggested that every ghost story should begin with the hero putting on his shirt and use the evocation of that most ordinary of realities to gradually draw the reader into the realms of the fantastical.

There was a time when I thought to begin my every story with the words: "Do you believe in ghosts Monsieur?"

But this quickly seemed an intolerable affectation.

And besides, to stick to it, I would actually have had to write some stories.