Andrew Marr’s not having a good week.
I’ve just been watching ‘Kick-Ass’ [WARNING SMOKING AND DRINKING], the movie in which an everyday geeky kid dreams of being a super hero and saving the world. Has Andrew Marr not grown out of that phase yet? Clearly Paul Mason (You can’t keep a good man down…yep he’s back) hasn’t as he tells us of his bizarre utopian child-like dream of a world where capitalism is banished and lovely things happen and everything is free….and oh yes those nasty far-right people are saved from their dreadful little lives and turned into decent, latte quaffing Guardianistas who just want to love and be loved, and oh yes, do good things.
Sounds like I’m joking don’t it? I’m not, it’s just another day at BBC Central and Start The Week.
Marr is looking towards a dystopian future where the digital world means we’re all redundant, nobody wants to pay for anything, which is just as well because the only people with money are the masters of the digital universe….and capitalism is history.
Paul Mason is brought on as the prophet of doom with a narrative that is jammed packed with excruciatingly left-wing socio-techno-psycho-babble, as inventive and outlandish as any comic book heroics and more deserving a place in the BBC archives filed under satirical comedy than serious comment on the economy….was he really Newsnight’s economics editor?
Just a few examples of his crazed mind….apparently Apple, Google and Facebook aren’t capitalist…they’re not producers but ‘rent-seekers’ Hmmm….The utterly ruthless Apple with more cash in the bank than the US government not capitalist? Google and Facebook worth billions and selling billions? Not capitalist? They sell hardware, software and services.
The Uber app is apparently something anybody could have thought up and produced….except of course it’s not just an app, not just a few lines of software…..just like the Black Cab ‘Knowledge’ is what you might call an app and yet is so much more…anybody could do that…if they put the work in….and yet it is treasured and highly valued skill. Uber is worth $50 billion on paper but is making losses as it invests to buy market share (as Saudi Arabia slashes the oil price to kill off the Frackers) …capitalism dead in the digital economy? Don’t think so. Apps, Mason might have noticed, sell for millions if successful…..Internet entrepreneur sells app firm for $30million – just three months after he founded it
Mason dismisses software as if it is worthless and meaningless. Tell that to Microsoft.
He mentions Linux as free and an example to be emulated…and yet it’s not..it’s a billion dollar business….just as Wikipedia and Firefox are ‘free’ but always ask for donations to keep going or live off the goodwill and free services of its users.
Mason then tells us that the car-wash is the perfect example of how the machine takes over from the man….except of course people still flock to the hand-wash…usually done by East Europeans on a low wage. There’s one down the road from me and its always full of customers…..so there’s always a place for the human and the vinyl record, as Northern Soul fan Mason should know.
Even more bizarre than Mason’s fantasms is the shoe-horning into the programme of a narrative about the Far-Right….seemingly Marr just wanted to attack the Far-Right and thought up a great excuse to do so conjuring up a wonderfully convenient line that only had a passing connection with reality and the subject under discussion.
We heard that groups like the EDL were angry white people, working class, left behind people, marginalised outsiders who were really protesting about economics. This is of course the same narrative that the BBC uses to explain Muslim extremism…it’s not Islam but economics…never mind most extremists are from good families and highly educated. The EDL most definitely weren’t up in arms about Islam (why would they be?)…. some were racist scum…it was all a consequence of industrial decline….a decline of the utopias based upon work (Mason™)…and oh yes…they were adopting the identity of ‘white Christian’ as the only way to stake a claim and a place in society.
Let’s think what the BBC are trying to do here……firstly by saying this is all about economics they are attempting to dismiss the claim that the likes of the EDL are protesting about Islam and the Islamification of Europe which we know is exactly what they are protesting about…in other words the BBC wants us to believe there is no real problem with Islam in the West….it’s all a front for racist losers wanting to be noticed.
Second…trying to label them as ‘white christian extremists’ is trying to equate them with the Islamists and in drawing such a parallel tries to say ‘look Christians are extremist too…so therefore Islam isn’t the only religion that spawns terrorism and extremism’. Except of course Christianity doesn’t tell you to kill the unbeliever or charge them protection money.
We also heard that the government is victimising immigrants and refugees…all in order to pander to the Far Right….so anyone who wants to control immigration is Far-Right then? The usual BBC toxic narrative.
Marr tells us the Middle East and North Africa is full of young people, and we need young people to????…to do those jobs that Marr and Co just spent 45 minutes telling us were history.
As always fantasy and wishful thinking overrides reality with the BBC lefty dreamers.
I’m glad I wasn’t alone in my reaction. Mason wasn’t the only fantasist. They all seemed to be feeding off of each others fantasies with Marr as the idiot in chief, finishing everybody’s sentences and brimming over with excitement at the apparent imminent demise of capitalism. And of course white people are angry because they are racists. You have covered the whole programme in detail, so there is not much to add.
One thing that did strike me was that in this new imagined age of artificial intelligence there will be far fewer jobs, yet apparently we desperately need more immigration (from North Africa, for some reason). Mason assured us that you only had to look this up on the internet, where all the facts and figures were. Perhaps we need them to operate the car washes.
I myself DID wonder what a Roman orgy of self-abusing , mutual tossings off in a Aqua Sulis jacuzzi back before JC came to save them(Not Jeremy Corbyn either!) would have been like.
Well Marrs Marsh Gas attempt at a show yesterday at least gives us the soundtrack…and if you too fantasise about removing Dame Jennis gastric band with Richard Coles dentures…as licensed slaves blow bubbles into your bathing water with ethically sourced reeds with warm botulism a prospect at every blowback from Laurie or Paul-then Marrs Maelstrom of Malodorous and Multivariant Mush would have been the place…and will no doubt always BE the place until we stop being liberal sponges for their left hands during the communal and synchronous menses!
Cyril Fletcher calling UKIP haiku next?….thanking Marr(Master) Baker for his globules…but-of course-thanking-CHIEFLY YOURSELVES!!!!
All together now!…. “I`m just a Sachs machine…down at the old Bull at Bush House!”
I channelled Leonard Sachs there-and that`s about the ONLY Channel that the BBC has ever given us since 1976 or so!
I listened to that crapola, this morning. You haven’t mentioned that thick woman who couldn’t follow where Marr was trying to lead her. She was advertising her latest book, ‘All White Men Are Fat Racist Pigs’ or something like that. Has there ever been a survey of how many TV’s get smashed while people listen to the BBC? Perhaps the insurance firms have some figures.
Personally I use the remote control/off button to reduce the profits of tax dodgers (according to the beeb) of the likes of Amazon et al.
I heard some of the repeat. Unbelievable and insane. Apparently in 10 or 15years all vehicles everywhere will drive themselves. Trucks, buses .car, maybe motorbikes. No jobs left for the workers. No jobs left for the middle class. Only jobs for the media elite and the EU and the UN and the rest of them.
Who are these people?
Didn’t watch the show but I didn’t have to. Same old shite. There has to be something wrong with anyone who thinks differently to them. White men (who have created or allowed this tolerant, liberal utopia) are all bad. Immigrants (even those whos brothers and sisters have created the Islamic utopia – IS) are all good and will only benefit the country and enrich us. Even though this clearly doomed vanity project has never been attempted in the UK before or any other civilised country other than invaded ones, its going to work in the eyes of the Al Beeb. Anyone who disagrees with this leap in the dark are racist. Incredibly that logic makes sense to the fascist left