Brexiteers and Right-wing voters are dismissed as 'gammon',
What in Australia is called "ham steaks" is called "Gammon" in Britain. Gammon is red and the British Left refer to conservatives as gammon on the rather amazing presumption that only conservatives ever have red faces. Typical Leftist loss of reality contact
The swinish multitude is back. Only we call them gammon now, not swine. A couple of centuries ago, at the dawn of the modern democratic era, the rabble that wanted more of a say in public life were looked upon as pigs. Today, they're looked upon as pig meat.
I'm fairly sure that's a demotion. At least pigs are alive, and pretty intelligent, too. Gammon, in contrast, is inanimate flesh, unfeeling, unthinking, liable to decay. That's us, apparently. That's the throng now.
Gammon has become the insult du jour of the British left in recent years.
They use it to refer to a certain kind of voter. Right-wing, pro-Brexit, angry, red about the face — hence 'gammon'.
These gammon-cheeked scourges of electoral politics, who are normally working class or lower-middle class, are held responsible for all the supposed political ills of our time, especially populism.
These 'flushed, middle-aged Brexiteers' look like cuts of a 'hearty pork steak', says one observer, and they're ruining the political life of the nation with all their 'ranting about Brexit and immigrants'.
People with some knowledge of British history, and in particular of the historical struggle for democratic rights, might find all this talk of pig meat a little familiar.
The metaphor of pigs has stalked the debate about democracy in Britain for hundreds of years. Indeed, one of the great democratic journals of the 1790s was actually called Pig's Meat.
Why? Because it was a response to the anti-democratic prejudices of the establishment and in particular to the political thinker and philosopher Edmund Burke's handwringing over 'the swinish multitude'.
Burke viewed the revolutionary masses as the hoofish destroyers of culture, and radical pamphleteers responded with satirically piggish indignation. We demand 'The Rights of Swine', said Pig's Meat in 1794.
Burke introduced the pig trope in 1790 in his Reflections on the Revolution in France — a deeply conservative attack on the tumult across the English Channel.
'Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude', Burke warned.
There it was. The nightmarish vision of the swine, of the pig-like, unlearned crowd, overpowering what Burke described as 'the spirit of [the] gentleman, and the spirit of religion'.
Radicals in England, stirred rather than horrified by what was happening in France, responded with great ferocity to Burke's piggy jibe.
In 1793, there was the publication of an anonymous pamphlet titled An Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude.
It giddily ran with the pig metaphor, contrasting the economic difficulties of the 'poor porkers' of England with the lives of luxury enjoyed by 'lordly swine' such as Burke. It was hugely popular, sold under the counter in bookstores and pored over in taverns.
There was also Hog's Wash, published by radical journalist Daniel Isaac Eaton between 1794 and 1795. He revelled in giving voice to the swine. Imagine pigs, he wrote, 'demanding that political liberty shall be the same to all — to the high and the low, the rich and the poor — what audacity!'
He also published a piece in Hog's Wash that said we should 'rid the world of tyrants'. It was interpreted as an attack on King George III and Eaton was hauled off to court. But the jury acquitted him, to wild public acclaim. People celebrated in the streets and even cast medallions in honour of this spokesman for swine.
Alas, the law eventually caught up with the swinish rebels. As the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman describes it, 'by the end of 1795, the government [of William Pitt] had got its act together'. It passed two new laws against the heresy of radical agitation.
Radicals recognised the jig was up for the swinish multitude. One poetically wrote: 'Having destroyed the best men in the nation, / we SWINE if we are not mistaken / must screaming and gnawing our tongues for vexation; / be butcher'd and made into bacon.' Bacon — that's how the swine of England ended up during the Age of Revolution, fried and sizzled by the reactionary rulers of the day.
Fast forward a couple of centuries and now they're gammon. Pig talk is back.
Of course, today's fretters over democracy, and especially populist democracy, are too sophisticated, or at least too politically correct, to use phrases like 'the swinish multitude'. And yet, strikingly, they have been drawn back to swine-like language.
They have reached, once again, for the metaphor of the hog. They are, in a repeat of history as farce, talking about the plebs as pig meat. Gammon, like Burke's swines, are viewed as the enemies of culture: unrefined, insensitive, lacking in due regard for the expert class. So widespread was the use of the gammon slur in liberal and Leftish chatter post-Brexit that, in 2018, the Collins English Dictionary chose it as one of its words of the year. 'Gammon: a person, typically middle-aged and white, with reactionary views, especially one who supports the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union.'
Pig meat became a byword for what the metropolitan elites view as those small-village Little Englanders who make deficient democratic choices.
And however much the deployers of the gammon jibe say it's only a reference to a person's complexion, so calm down, the fact is it echoes the old loathing of swine remarkably well.
Gammon, like swinish multitude, is fundamentally a reference to people lower down the social ladder: culturally stunted, uneducated, too dim for politics.
One Left-wing writer describes encountering a 'nest of gammon' on social media — nest: are they pigs or insects? — and says these soulless creatures require 'regular spoon-feeding from the trashy tabloids' to tell them what to think. Gammon '[spit] out talking points found in fascist organs like the Daily Mail — or, for those preferring something less intellectual, the Daily Express', runs a much-quoted online definition.
Brexit may only have been a ballot box revolt rather than a full-on revolution and it might not reshape our epoch quite as thoroughly as the French revolutionaries did theirs. But it was a historic democratic moment and one which, yet again, reanimated the pig phobia of the establishment.
It is striking that for all of today's discussion about so-called cancel culture, about whether it's acceptable or not to 'cancel' the speech of the offensive and the ignorant, one of the most terrible acts of cancel culture is rarely mentioned — the cancellation of democracy.
We are living through a furious carnival of reaction against the democratic ideal. The populist moment has dragged into public view the cultural elites' extant terror of entrusting political decision-making to the people.
The fallout from the British people's vote for Brexit and the American people's vote for Trump was extraordinary. Views that were once only expressed in the privacy of a boozy dinner party exploded into public life.
People who once would only have dared to hint that the masses are pig-like in the comfort of their own homes, while clinking glasses with a like-minded highbrow, were now giving utterance to such corrupt thoughts in the public sphere.
We are no longer successfully keeping 'the mob from the gates', said Matthew Parris. We now know, he said, that 'huge numbers of voters' can be 'horribly if temporarily misled by false prospectuses, by lies, by unreasonable hopes and by sudden fears and hatreds'.
A pro-EU former adviser to the UK Conservative Party wrung his hands over the 'democratic extremism' of the Brexit era, for it 'takes a noble idea, that everyone's political views should count equally, too far'.
What an interesting concept — democracy going too far.
More here:
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The truth about transgender surgery... in numbers: Just 16% of gender dysphoria patients go through with the operation, but up to half suffer life-threatening complications
Only a small number of people with gender dysphoria have surgery to align their bodies with their desired sex — but the rate of complications is high.
One of the largest surveys of trans adults earlier this year indicated that one in six (16 percent) go under the knife to alter their physical appearance.
But research suggests that up to half of trans men and women suffer post-op issues or pain so severe they need medical attention or additional surgery months later.
The complex operations involve crafting the genitalia of the opposite sex using veins, arteries, muscles and skin from other body parts. The surgeries are risky due to surgeons having to connect delicate and complicated networks of blood vessels, as well as creating the ability to urinate.
For trans men, devices are often implanted to allow them to achieve erections and more enjoyable sexual experiences.
Patients are often left with infections, pain and difficulty using the toilet or having sex post-surgery.
One of the biggest studies of its kind by the Women's College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario, Canada, earlier this year found that more than half of trans women who had 'bottom' surgery were in so much pain years later they needed medical attention.
For trans men who often have a mechanical device implanted, studies suggest a fifth need the implant removed within a year.
Sex change operations have been at the center of political debate in recent years amid concerns that patients who get them are vulnerable and not fully aware of the risks.
For example, studies suggest those who are transgender are six times more likely to suffer from autism, and up to 70 percent of trans youths are depressed.
But some studies, including one by the National Institutes of Health, suggest patients are happier after the surgery, further complicating the issue.
A large study last year found more than a third of penis implant procedures to give an erection had complications so bad further surgery was required.
Nine months after the procedure, more than a fifth of patients had had their devices removed, either due to infection or mechanical failures.
Some 67 of the prosthetic penises were inflatable, and 13 were semirigid.
An inflatable implant involves a silicone pump inserted into the scrotum, which can be squeezed to generate an erection.
A semirigid implant uses two flexible rods which keep the penis semirigid so it can be easily bent down or up during sex.
The rods are made of metal wire and wrapped in a silicone jacket. The implants may also be used in biological males who have erectile dysfunction.
For male-to-female transition, the procedures on offer include breast augmentation, where breast implants are inserted into the chest.
Voice feminization and facial feminization surgery include operations such as forehead and brow bone reshaping, jaw and chin contouring, nose reshaping (rhinoplasty), hairline advancement, and tracheal shave — a procedure to reduce the size of the Adam's apple.
Trans women can also get an orchiectomy to remove the testicles and a vaginoplasty to create a vagina, clitoris, labia majora and labia minora using a patient's existing genital tissue.
John Hopkins University found that up to 30 percent of transgender women who have had a vaginoplasty suffered an infection linked to the operation.
Dr Richard Santucci, an experienced surgeon at the Crane Center for Transgender Surgery who carried out a study on penis implants to give an erection, told DailyMail.com that in transgender patients, the procedure has 'a crazy high complication rate compared to cis males'.
Bottom surgeries such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties — genital reconstruction undergone by women transitioning to men — cost around $25,000.
'It is quite clear from the most up-to-date studies that vaginoplasty and other genital surgeries don’t work in the way that people hope they will,' said Stella O'Malley, psychotherapist and director of campaign group Genspect.
'The reason why there is so many problems is because this is an incredibly difficult surgery. Young vulnerable people need to know about the challenges they will face post surgery but few of them do.'
As gender-affirming surgery becomes more popular, an increasing number of 'detransitioners' who regret having the irreversible procedure have come forward.
One such de-transitioner, who goes by the name of Shape Shifter claimed he regretted his mastectomy and vaginoplasty after they led to fistula and other painful consequences.
He said woke doctors did not warn him of the negative consequences of surgery because it would be 'bad for business'.
The surgery itself was performed by Dr Sherman Leis of The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery. Leis is regarded as the United States' most experienced gender reassignment surgeon.
But soon after the operation was completed in 2015 in his mid-20s, Shape Shifter quickly realized he had made a terrible mistake and that he was just a gay man who enjoyed presenting in a feminine way.
The procedures he has undergone — which include the removal of his penis and the creation of a 'neo-vagina' — are irreversible.
They have left him with osteoporosis, scoliosis, a 'vagina' that his body believes is a wound and which it tries to close up, as well as a host of mental health conditions, including depression and a reduced sex drive.
Shape Shifter believed that making the initial switch to a woman would make him finally feel happy in his own body, but he ended up feeling even more depressed than before the surgery.
Meanwhile, Canadian detransitioned woman Michelle Zacchigna, 34, who goes by the pen name Michelle Alleva, had a mastectomy 11 years ago.
She wrote in a blog post: 'I have met so many people who have been irreparably harmed by that same "treatment".'
She said: 'I know people with ongoing vocal pain from testosterone use. I know people who are devastated by their inability to ever breastfeed their children.
'I know people who might never enjoy sexual intimacy again, either because they are horrified by their own bodies — because their libidos are completely shot — or because sex is now physically painful.
'I know people who have been made infertile by this 'treatment.' (I, myself, have sat sobbing as I process the reality that, during the darkest years of my life, I was insistent on eradicating one of the last indicators of 'female' I had, when I had resolutely wanted to bear children my entire life before then.)
Much more here:
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Fans are Outraged After Beloved Children's Cartoon Features Lesbian Clip
A children’s cartoon beloved not just here, but all across the world, is taking heat after a year-old radical gay episode began making the rounds on social media again, angering parents who are wondering why paeans to the LGBT movement have to be shoved into shows aimed at toddlers.
In the episode of the popular “Peppa Pig” cartoon series, Peppa Pig learns that one of her friends is part of a “two mothers” family, a storyline that is an effort to indoctrinate little ones as early as possible with the gay agenda.
In the LGBT episode entitled “Families,” which originally aired in September of last year, Penny Polar Bear is shown in the kitchen of her home as her “two mothers” are feeding her spaghetti.
In the clip recently re-shared to Peppa Pig’s TikTok channel as a “pride month” post, Penny Polar Bear says, “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti.”
The LGBT episode came on after a petition campaign started about three years ago that urged the writers of the series — which at that time had already become an international hit with more than 250 episodes produced — to include radical gay content which, until then, had not shown up to corrupt the series.
“Children watching Peppa Pig are at an impressionable age, and excluding same-sex families will teach them that only families with either a single parent or two parents of different sexes are normal. This means that children of same-sex parents may feel alienated by Peppa Pig, and that other children may be more likely to bully them, simply through ignorance,” the petition exclaimed.
Indeed, the clip above with the “two mums” was barely enough for the radical gay lobby. The LGBT site Mombian.com insisted that the episode selling lesbianism to tiny children was “a little uninspired.” Mombian feels that one episode grooming tiny children is not enough and that Peppa Pigs needs “ongoing representation.”
It’s never enough for the radicals.
Remember, Peppa Pig is aimed at kids from ages four to six, and that says nothing of even younger children and toddlers who may watch the show just for the colors and music.
With that age group being so young, many parents are wondering why “representation” needs to be pushed on tiny tots at all? It’s bad enough they were showing a child character being forced to eat spaghetti without any sauce, but some wondered why toddlers need to be indoctrinated by the extreme left’s LGBT agenda?
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A troubled retirement lies ahead for most Americans
Social Security is toast. So is Medicare.
Too many of us old people live longer, so there are not enough working people to support us.
Soon both Social Security and Medicare will be broke.
Our politicians don't have the guts to do anything about it. Or even talk about it.
It's easy to see why.
Recently, France's president, trying to keep his country's pension system from going broke, raised France's retirement age from 62 to a measly 64.
People have been protesting ever since.
In America, politicians who even hint at such solutions get screamed at by misinformed seniors: "Don't touch my retirement funds! You took money from my paycheck for years; that's my money I'm getting back!"
But it's not. It's young people's money. People my age rarely realize that most of us now get back triple what we paid in.
When Social Security began, a government retirement plan made financial sense. Most Americans didn't even live until age 65. Social Security was just for the minority who did.
But now Americans live, on average, to age 76. I'm 76. Henry Kissinger is 100. Since most of us live so long, there are just not enough workers to pay for us.
Yet our vote-hungry politicians won't say that in public.
Even Donald Trump cowers, saying, "No one will lay a hand on your Medicare or your Social Security."
The most clueless, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, even deny the obvious truth. He shouts: "Social Security today is not on the line going broke!"
But it just is. Reserve funds are projected to run out by 2034. Medicare's reserves will run out even sooner.
Of course they will. When I first got Medicare, I was surprised how no one even pays attention to costs. Everything seems free.
"Get an MRI," says my doctor. I immediately do. I don't ask the cost. The MRI people don't mention it either.
Months later, I get a complex notice that says my MRI cost $2,625 and I must pay $83.65. Or sometimes, nothing. Who did pay? Blue Cross? Taxpayers? The paperwork is so complex that I don't even know.
Old people who scour supermarkets to save a dollar on groceries never comparison shop for MRIs or heart surgery. "Why should I? Someone else pays."
As my new video illustrates, Medicare is a bomb with a burning fuse moving closer.
"Sooner or later, it will blow up," says economist Dan Mitchell of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. "Politicians figure oh, well, maybe it blows up in five years or 10 years or 20 years. I won't be in office anymore."
Some claim raising taxes on rich people would solve the deficit, but it won't. There just aren't enough rich people. Even taking all the money from every billionaire wouldn't cover our coming bankruptcy.
The only solution is cutting benefits, raising the age when benefits start (sensible, since we live longer) or, Mitchell's preference, privatizing retirement plans, like Australia and Chile did.
America's politicians won't do any of those things.
So what will happen?
"The only other alternative is printing money," says Mitchell.
"I suspect that's what America will do," I tell Mitchell. "We'll be like Zimbabwe." Zimbabwe's president printed money to fund his deficit spending. When the currency collapsed in 2009, Zimbabwe was printing hundred trillion-dollar bills.
Yet politicians don't learn. In the current debt ceiling deal, Speaker Kevin McCarthy got President Joe Biden to "claw back" unused COVID relief funds and keep two years of non-defense discretionary spending roughly flat.
That's a little progress. But Biden wants to spend a record $7 trillion next year.
McCarthy said Medicare and Social Security were "completely off the table."
So the programs are still doomed.
"Sooner or later bad things will happen to senior citizens," explains Mitchell. "The government will either cut their benefits or all of a sudden start rationing health care. Or reimbursement rates will be so low that you won't be able to find a doctor or hospital to treat you."
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/05/31/time-bomb-n2623867
**********************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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