Roaches in Roachia. – The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on February 7, 2014

Roachia, so the ever reliable urban dictionary informs me, is an online roleplaying community with its own religions, culture, and lifestyles where users can create up to three characters and live a virtual life, engaged in complicated and twisting plot lines. A bit like Narnia, but instead of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals, the latest incarnation of Roachia involves middle-aged ‘children’ who are part of the new religion of ‘you will be believed’ with its mythical paedophiles, high priests and a chattering #hashtag jury.

When C. S. Lewis was talking about his inspiration for the fictional land of Narnia he said:

The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.

This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it’.

The fictional Roachia story that has been unfolding in Preston all began with a Fan carrying a signed picture and a polite reply from an actor – and then one day 40 years later she tried to make a story from it……Life imitates art!

The #hashtag jury has no truck with ancient methods of justice; ‘innocent until proven guilty’. They know you are guilty from the moment you are accused and publicly pilloried. Thus Bill Roache being cleared by a jury of his peers can only be an example of a corrupt judiciary, masonic influence, and even ‘poor evidence gathering’ by the local police. Not enough women came forward to claim that he must have raped them – they just couldn’t remember when; or where, or, well, anything about it – but he definitely did it!

I feel very sorry for those women – they are now forever labelled liars and fantasists; yet their true crime was to be taken in by the high priests of this new religion. I feel very sorry for the dozens, possibly hundreds, of young girls – and boys – currently being sexually abused in family homes up and down the country.

What must they be thinking as they watch these farcical ‘celebrity’ trials collapse?

‘But the newspapers all said Jimmy Savile was guilty – without any trial’! ‘If I go to the Police whilst my abuser is still alive I will be labelled a liar – best I keep quiet until he’s dead then’.

The high priests of the ‘You will be believed’ movement have a lot to answer for. They have had their fame, their financial rewards, their celebrity and Twitter followers – and they have left behind a tattered justice system that will do nothing for the credibility of little Agnes Bluebottle, abused by a nobody, a nothing, a paltry ‘Uncle Fred’ that nobody has time to investigate – our wonderful Police are too busy holding inquiries into inquiries into inquiries to find out why you can’t get a conviction on a man when you haven’t got any credible evidence – something a first year law student could tell them the answer to.

‘You will be believed’ has been called a ‘new religion’ – but something bothers me about that simile. This religion is well nigh unique.

Most religions have some sort of written record that the true believers learn by heart. True, it may claim that 5,000 people were fed from five fishes – and you may read those claims and scoff. You can at least read those claims. And then scoff.

This religion is based upon a holy book, known as the ‘Yewtree tablets’. The high priests guard it well. They claim that it contains testament from hundreds of people touched by the new Devil – Jimmy Savile. They say that these testaments must never be investigated, cannot be exposed to the light of day. Just recorded in the great tablets – and those who gave testament must be rewarded from the great public coffers – in secret.

Now one or two of those who gave testament couldn’t wait for the great public coffers to be opened, and took the media shilling in the meantime – and were exposed to a scoffing public as charlatans, fabricators, fabulists. They claimed to have been touched by the ‘Devil’ years before he visited the premises in which this heinous crime was said to have occurred, or in a car he didn’t own until ten years later…..and much scorn, vitriol and spittle was heaped upon the head of heretics, such as I, who pointed this out!

‘Aha’! said the high priests of Youwillbebelieved, ‘so I’ll grant you that that story was a load of poppycock, but we cannot expose the rest of the stories to your gaze, because it would traumatise the anonymous testamentors -and they are telling the truth, absolutely, without question, you can take our word for it’.

Its a new Christianity for the Secular age – but nobody is allowed to know the testament of the tablets. You are just told that events ‘occurred’. In secret. To anonymous people. Known only to the high priests.

And #Ibelieve cry the faithful. (And to be inclusive #Ibeleive cry the dyslexic. No really!)

‘Tis truly a miracle in an age of unbelievers. Can you believe that these faithful believers know not what it is that they believe? They’ve never been allowed to know.

{ 54 comments… read them below or add one }

Chris February 7, 2014 at 3:16 pm

According to the broadsheets, Nazir Afzal was sneaking in & out of Hartley’s trial looking concerned. No wonder Keir Starmatron wants to implement his Professional Victims Charter double-quick….

Jonathan Mason February 7, 2014 at 4:04 pm

What was the Hartley trial? I missed that one.

Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 4:10 pm

Er, are you going to tell him Chris or shall I?

Moor Larkin February 7, 2014 at 4:13 pm

J R Hartley was a dirty old paedo too??!!!
Oh no!!!!….

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 9:00 pm: No, he was a mediocre writer. Isn’t that bad enough?

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Ian B February 7, 2014 at 9:06 pm: Apparently his days as a schoolmaster came to an abrupt end when was caught “fly fishing”.

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wichfinder February 7, 2014 at 9:46 pm: he looks like one the dirty old sod.

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Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 4:18 pm

Sorry Jonathan, you have good reason not to have heard of Hartley Hare in the Dominican Republic – and I should have resisted the temptation to laugh.

Watch the video – all will be revealed…..

https://annaraccoon.com/2014/02/06/exposure-the-day-british-justice-died-spoof/

Jonathan Mason February 7, 2014 at 7:04 pm

Sorry, I did watch enough of the video to get a laugh out of the MWT spoof, but I missed that reference.

Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 9:51 pm: Persevere….Kier ‘Stam-m-m-m-m-mer’ is not to be missed. That one will go down in history.

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Johnny Monroe February 7, 2014 at 3:17 pm

Someone once said – alas, I know not who (so I shall paraphrase) – that the main problem with people saying they no longer believe in God is that they’re then liable believe in anything. Curiously, a secular society seems to need its heroes, villains, leaders and prophets more than an orthodox religious one. Maybe it’s programmed into humanity’s DNA after all, however sophisticated and above primitive superstition we like to think we are. What a profoundly depressing thought!

Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 3:20 pm

Similar thoughts have occurred to me – programmed into our DNA!

Johnny Monroe February 7, 2014 at 3:39 pm

Even when religion is effectively outlawed – such as during the Terror in post-Revolutionary France, the Soviet Union, North Korea etc – the God figure is merely replaced by the Great Leader looking down on his disciples from the exterior wall of every prominent building.

Ian B February 7, 2014 at 8:50 pm

It’s not in our DNA. Most primitive tribes have no gods as we recognise them; they tend to believe in some kind of animating force, and vaguely defined spirits, maybe ghosts, maybe ancestor founders. But gods are a civilisational phenomenon, and monotheistic Gods-With-Comprehensive-Philosophies an even more recent development. Persuading those remaining primitive tribes of the existence of God took an immense, focussed missionary effort from the 19th century onwards.

Which brings us, I think, to the real cause. European Christianity has never been a constant; faith has ebbed and flowed. The 18th century in England in particular was notoriously irreligious after the fanatical C17 Puritan regime. Much of the new ruling class of the C19 came from devout evangelicals and weirdos- Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and Spoon Benders. It became accepted wisdom that the secularisation all around them was a societal disaster, and the result was a pulse of intense Protestant evangelism which spread particularly across the Anglosphere and sloshed in wave after wave across the USA. It shaped the Victorian Era. Critical to it was a profound Post-Millennialism; the idea that if the way was prepared by Christianising the world, Jesus would return. So, a huge social reform effort resulted. Abolition of slavery (ok, good, that one), temperance, prohibition of sins like gambling, and a huge effort to reform sexual manners. And it was driven, interestingly enough, by mostly women; the Victorians separated into two spheres; the male dealt with the corrupted mundane world. The female- by which we mean upper class females, wafting around mansions, bored out of their minds, with nothing to do- took control of the moral sphere and thus the social reform movements. Men became characterised as insatiably corrupt lust beasts, whose perverse drives are inflicted on women, whose natural state is chastity.

But all revivals ebb after the flow, and secularisation set in again. By the late 19th century, even the evangelicals were secularising in many cases. They split into what we now see as the Progressives and the Conservatives; the Proggies sought secular justifications for their Christianised sharia. The Cons stuck to the Bible. And it was those Progressives who, “having stopped believing in God, did not believe in nothing, but believed in anything“. And that is why this thing looks religious. It swapped God for Marx and Freud and any other thing it could find; even loonies hypnotising each other to “reveal” that they had been kidnapped and mysteriously sexually fiddled with by aliens in flying saucers, or that in a previous life they were actually Anne Boleyn.

But that’s getting a bit ahead; the first wave of Proggies (led by the Suffragettes in their team colours of puritan white) ran out of steam in the 20th century. Temperance (prohibition in the USA) was a disaster; the sexual puritanism depressing- it turned out women en masse don’t like that pedestal much after all- and people wanted to have fun; first the Flapper Era (brought to a halt by the Depression and WWII) and then the post war era. Everyone started having fun again. When somebody was so thoughtless to invent a reliable means for girls who wanna have fun to do so without girls who wanna have fun having a baby nine months later, terror rippled through the elements upper class women who still clung to the otherwise ignored and disparaged Victorian model. Many, interestingly enough, were nice Jewish girls rather than the first wave’s primarily Protestant/Nonconformist cohort. The reasons for that deserve some (as yet, not done) historical research and analysis. But at the risk of racism, we might note the long-standing stereotype of the Jewish American Princess and her legendary frigidity (not to mention “patriarchal” family values). But that’s another matter.

The Second Wave of Progressivism in Victorian terms was kicked off by the (Radical) Feminists. The values were the same; the underpinning ideology this time not Jesus but Marx and Freud. The basic idea; women are chaste, males are lust monsters, precisely mirrored that of their great-grandmothers. Thus, they needed to engineer a rape panic, a general sex panic, then an incest panic, and then the construction of the “paedo” as representative of the end result of every male who is let off the feminine leash. And here we are.

And this is, I suspect tl;dr. Sorry.

Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 9:30 pm

“and weirdos – Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and Spoon Benders”.

Fortunately the Raccoon Arms resident weirdo, the Quaker landlady, also believes in free speech and upholds your right to come out with dangerous heresies like that….
Don’t bank on getting a drink on the house though……
Only kidding – an excellent and interesting comment!

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 9:39 pm

Agree with this. Anna, as a Quaker, you certainly must get it. We’re dealing with lies. And lies always come from power-seeking. Power-seeking means “making things fit the way I want them to – to suit me and no one else – and as as they don’t actually fit that way, and I don’t give a damn about anyone else, I’ll force all the whole lot of them to do it my way. For me”. By lies. By violence. By whatever means necessary.

Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 9:41 pm

“making things fit the way I want them to – to suit me and no one else – and as as they don’t actually fit that way, and I don’t give a damn about anyone else, I’ll force all the whole lot of them to do it my way. For me”.

Ah yes, that one – the entire basis of the ‘Individual Human Rights movement’.

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 11:19 pm

as debunked, so eloquently, by CS Lewis years ago, in his definition of ‘omnipotent moral busybodies’

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

(OK, I know I’m fond of quoting that, but it just so sums up those in almost any position of authority in the modern age)

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 11:21 pm

WordPress stikes again

That was in reply to
Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 9:41 pm
“making things fit the way I want them to – to suit me and no one else – and as as they don’t actually fit that way, and I don’t give a damn about anyone else, I’ll force all the whole lot of them to do it my way. For me”.

Ah yes, that one – the entire basis of the ‘Individual Human Rights movement’.

SamBest February 8, 2014 at 5:21 am

WordPress is really playing up. But I love that quote. To think CS Lewis was actually predicting the Jimmy Savile fiasco.

Eyes Wide Shut February 8, 2014 at 9:05 am: Nothing particularly new here: no one in power ever says “We’re persecuting you for the hell of it or because we need to throw a few Christians to the lions, so to speak, and keep the plebs permanently cowed and off-balance””- it’s always for your own good. We’ll burn the heretic, so they can get to heaven; we’ll fry the brains out of homosexuals so they can turn straight; we’ll perform cliterodectomies on baby girls so they won’t be tempted off the straight and narrow and end up common whores. This really, really, really is not new. There are always currents swirling around in any society which can end up with mass lynchings, but more responsible societies try to restrain them. One of the ways of doing so is by insisting on due process, habeas corpus and the necessity of proving the prosecution’s case.

The only difference now is that some of us can remember a time our when society made a principled effort to behave rationally and decently. That’s beginning to look more and more like a temporary blip, rather than the inevitable outcome of centuries of progress, blah-de-blah.

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Ian B February 7, 2014 at 9:40 pm

Perhaps “eccentrics” would have been a better word; sorry

I’ll say “churches of diversity” in future…

Anna Raccoon February 7, 2014 at 9:43 pm: Nah, you go on speaking your mind – much better, much healthier.

It takes a Panzer tank to offend me. Though Andrew Withers managed it on foot.

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Ian B February 7, 2014 at 9:43 pm

Also, I should be struck down by divine lightning for missing out the Unitarians. Shame on me.

Johnny Monroe February 7, 2014 at 10:26 pm

A very good, thorough piece that made many points worth making. But whatever the motives of the 19th century social reformers, surely in a lot of cases their cause was just – nobody could deny bringing in compulsory schooling and eventually ending the practice of children working in mills and down mines was a just cause; and women being given the vote was a just cause. That many of these movements were led by wealthy men or women with dozens of servants is only because they had the luxury of not being distracted by soul-sapping menial labour six days a week; and at least they didn’t channel all their energies into dissolute, rakish pursuits like many of their 18th century predecessors.
Of course there was a puritan Christian angle to it, and some of it is hard not to ridicule; but to me the achievements of the social reformers at their best were worthwhile and did help end a good deal of suffering endured by the masses. I’m aware that’s not necessarily the point you were making, but I’m marooned in the wrong century, anyway, so that’s probably why I’m compelled to add to the discussion. I think this is also why I let off steam making silly little videos. It’s actually quite therapeutic. Maybe calling myself ‘Victoria’ was no accident? Don’t ask me. A split personality means your left hand never knows what your right hand is doing.

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 10:41 pm

I read it all, but I’m a masochist, so for others’ benefit, on review, this is also tl;dr

Weirdos? Quakers, Methodists, Baptists. Oh dear me. I suppose it depends on your starting frame of reference. Sure, many of the common Christian ‘footsoldiers’ may not be particularly gifted in the intellectual doctrinal aspects of spirituality, but treating what many of them actually did in practical terms, you know, the Fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, patience, kindness, and so on, and what many of them did to demonstrate those in practical terms, as some sort of weirdness is a touch disparaging, is it not? Why not add in the Sally Army as well, just for good measure. Trumpets, uniforms, sobriety, care of the poor etc. All desperately unhealthy things

As an alternative theseis, it’s been argued that the basic withdrawal of many Evangelicals and Non-Conformist Christians, from contemporary life, and the established church, in the mid to latter part of the 19th century was based on their Post Millenialism, ie, the devaluing of present ‘earthly’ activity in favour of the development of their ‘spiritual calling’, in anticipation of an immediate Second Coming, or Rapture, as opposed to an expectation of the sort 1000 years of heavenly rule which is the basic tenet of Pre Millenialism; as well, also, as their dissension from what they saw as an already apostate, Godless, clericalism and a need to depart from now irrelevant, established Churches. Not a lot of UK Evangelicals in the early 20th Century believed in active participation in the contemporary social, cultural or political spheres, effecting a withdrawal from ‘the world’ and its evils as they predominated in it. A lot of that still carries over in the older generation

Committed Christians, Evangelicals, have always been a minority, (as 1 of about 15 or so in a secondary school of 1200 in the ’70s, I can assure you that that’s true ), have always been unpopular for challenging people’s assumptions, but really have had precious little to do with the pernicious march to prohibitionism, authoritarianism, and the engendering of whatever was the last, or latest, moral panic.

Strangely enough, I met with one of my friends just this week, and we were discussing how unbiblical – that’s a good word! – criminalisation of homosexuality and prostitution was, and were at a bit of a loss to see why those, as well as the current attached stigmas, were all too readily ascribed to Evangelical Christians. If you believe in the dicta that one should ‘love one’s neighbour as oneself’, and ‘judge not that ye be not judged’, it would be more than a tad reprehensible to condemn others because they live differently from you on their free moral choice.

Not that we don’t believe there are better ways of doing things, and might wish to say so, but locking people up because they are gay, or denying gay people the freedom to live together, or condemning any of the other sexual activities things people freely choose to do together (something that Labour particularly seemed to recently see as reprehensible and deserving of punishment), well, that’s their moral choice and as long they are not doing direct harm to others (I agree that in itself has some soft edges) and we are not forcibly made to participate in, or condone, those, fine.

Even that’s not a blanket position, as Christian teaching accepts that, outside some basic almost absolutes, in which even some shades of grey can be found, what one individual might eschew, another may have no problem with, and which among us is omniscient enough to determine what really might be right or wrong, especially in an absence of personal guilt? Hence the judge not that ye be not judged….. Otherwise it all descends into Phariseeism, the placing of legal burdens on others, and a descent into the legalism and strictures of ‘the law’ from which Christians have ostensibly been ‘freed’. Now, who do you know that’s particularly good at that?

The present direct stigmatisation and criminalisation come from those ‘omnipotent moral busybodies’, on both Left, Right and so help me, even the Centre, if the Lib Dems ever really were there, who, setting themselves up as the ultimate moral arbiters, believe that others should not have free moral choice, and who consequently will impose their will on the unwilling non-conformists any way they can.

After all, it’s not as if you see any advocacy in New Testament teaching that the assembly of the ‘Lord’s people’ should be encouraged to whip up hatred of gays, or anyone else for that matter, and charge out of the church doors after the last hymn to find them all, and then proceed to beat the daylights out of them, is it? From what I have seen, the non Christians seem to be very good at doing that all on their own. (OK, their are some places where there are oddities, like the Ugandan church, but if you look around, you won’t really find much mainstream Evangelical support for that, not even in America, so help me.

But of course, Christians are bad people, and almost all of them are retrograde spirits. There never were deviant socialists or communists either, and the Khmer Rouge, Stalin, the various Kims, Hitler, and even old Mao himself (under whose regime my inlaws lived in the early ’50s, not something to be envied), they are all figments of fevered imaginations, as were also all those right wing miscreants from South America and the like.

We’re probably not saying things that are much different insofar as the end conclusions are stated. I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate with regard to your comments on the Christian influence in all this

As for the Jewish Ice Maiden. Mercifully, it’s only a stereotype, as my son is married to a very nice, hot, Jewish girl

Have fun, and a good weekend

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 3:39 pm

GK Chesterton : the master of paradox.

The irony is, it’s all happened before. The Moscow Show Trials in 1950s Stalinist Russia, the Cato Street conspiracy, the Tudor Star Chamber, endless fictitious Popish Plots (eg the wild accusations made against all and sundry by Titus Oates, who seems to have been a bit of a kiddie-fiddler himself); they were all characterised by lack of any evidence whatsoever, heavy hints by the authorities that they “knew something they couldn’t tell the public becauseit wasn’t the right moment/would be too demoralising/might lead to malefactors getting away with it” and a willingness by people with real problems to deflect their unhappiness onto imaginary problems. Simply as a way of being heard at all. I would reckon the Roache complainants almost certainly do have something to complain about in their lives – but it ain’t a brief encounter with Bill Roache. Who knows what it is? Not something they can get public validation for, anyway, so they’re left with the narrative that the authorities have given them, and as you and I know, the authorities don’t give a f#uck

Jonathan Mason February 7, 2014 at 4:01 pm: Yes, good points. It also seemed before the Iraq War that Bush and Blair knew something so terrible that the public could not be told the whole story and would just have to take it on trust. Dick Cheney, for example, KNEW where the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction were hidden.

Fact is that these trials are just a load of baloney and everyone knows it. The CPS is just scared of standing up to these accusers like the LeVell accusers and the Roache accusers with their flimsy stories for fear of appearing to be soft on crime and paedophilia, so they let the cases go to trial where it immediately becomes apparent that the witnesses have no credibility–but the CPS can say that they let justice take its course and wash their own hands of any responsibility. Stuart Hall was a fool to plead guilty, and the prosecution side was even more stupid to renege on the plea deal with him, making sure that no one would plead guilty again.

All along regarding Savile, I have said that since there are hundreds of plaintiffs, why not let a dozen of the most credible who are not seeking compensation come forward just to set the record straight. And of course they won’t, because there aren’t any credible witnesses on Savile either. If there were, they would have sold their story for megapounds ages ago.

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Andrew Duffin February 12, 2014 at 9:27 am

The greatest modern religion is of course Global Warming.

Consider – it has its high priests; it vigorously persecutes infidels; it is based on faith not facts; it is not susceptible to scientific arguments, being above and beyond such things right from the start; it requires useless but highly visible sacrifices; it provides justifications and excuses for the temporal power to do what they wanted to do anyway, and received power and prestige in return.

Seems a no-brainer to me: people do need something like this, somehow.

Moor Larkin February 7, 2014 at 4:20 pm

Though the British legal system seems to carry many of the same attributes as the Portuguese one, so far our jurists seem different to those whose culture endured a long military dictatorship.
http://www.richardwebster.net/casa-pia-carlos-cruz-reporterX.html

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 4:46 pm

Cruz was sentenced to 7 years – he still maintains his innocence. I’m not sure if it was the military dictatorship per se which makes Portuguese society so prone to believing this sort of nonsense. It’s partly the mediterranean mind-set – in Italy, they call it “dietrologia” (the science of “what-is-behind-it-all”?). You gain cultural prestige by coming up with the most complex theories of what is going on, generally founded in some vast, amorphous, absurd conspiracy, rather than for a sober analysis of the facts leading to a logical solution.

In a lot of cases, there is a conspiracy, alright, (we are talking about out-and-proud, in-your-face massive widescale public corruption, which predated the Salazar years – fact is, the Army got in ostensibly to clean it all up). However, the conspiracies are deeply pedestrian. they are all to do with robbing the public blind and enriching the Old Boys Club. Somehow, this gets turned into “Satanic/masonic/paedophile forces” – when the reality is they are just common or garden gangsters. It’s almost as if the public doesn’t want to admit their own collusion with the gangsters (you have to go along to get along) or their unwillingness to do anything but grumble about them, so this fantasy world takes the place of real political analysis or civic engagement.

SamBest February 8, 2014 at 5:14 am: I blame the internet.

What was once confined to an idiotic publication like ‘Scallywag” that went bust because not enough readers brought or bought the rubbish has now been elevated to Gospel status by the Spiveys. Ickes and Baloneys of the world.
They treat Scallywag as though it were the new Dead Sea Scrolls and every paragraph an edict from the God of Pedo Exposers. Their sort of Round Robin siting of each other as a source and therefore, proof is becoming endemic but scarily, the Mainstream Media is picking up elements of it as desperate journos try to grab a piece of a shrinking pie.

Toss in some rum characters like the daft Chris Fay and the out and out con merchant Robyn Davison who I predict will do a Ronnie Biggs and return to the UK & Holloway- South America laughs at such fantasies ( she was never in Eucador but is in Brazil)and making a dollar there is very difficult , unless as is her wont, she also arranged a few ‘pensions’ before she departed * and we have a new set of prophets albeit with none of the glamour of Jesus’ lot.

You would think that this Grand Conspiracy that has driven so much of this Inquisition- and those on the sidelines do influence the compo claimants- being powered by the Almighty Powerful, the Rothschilds, Jews , Freemasons, Royal Family, Bohemian Grovers,CIA Mind Controllers, Blunt, Heath and Savile and so on would have by now established their New World Order.
Yet they appear to be a miserable failure. Except with their new religion.

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Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 6:29 pm

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 4:46 pm
‘in Italy, they call it “dietrologia” (the science of “what-is-behind-it-all”?). You gain cultural prestige by coming up with the most complex theories of what is going on, generally founded in some vast, amorphous, absurd conspiracy, rather than for a sober analysis of the facts leading to a logical solution. ‘

I agree, but I can’t say why

therealguyfaux February 8, 2014 at 2:14 pm: “It’s all out there, hiding in plain sight if the sheeple would but take notice! The conspirators can’t be arsed to even conceal their machinations anymore! They’ve so conditioned us not to see what is right in front of ‘our lying eyes’ that they can get away with bloody murder! And let no one fool you– ‘George Soros on the Left/David Koch on the Right,’ controlling things from America– choose your bogeyman? Bah! Merely two cheeks of the same arse! When the chips are down, those two close ranks and take care of each other– laughing over a drink or ten at just how gullible us plebs are!”

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Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 6:36 pm

‘Its a new Christianity for the Secular age’

Come on, Anna. If the apostles, and the other early disciples had all been anonymous, they wouldn’t have been put in prison, martyred, crucified, burnt at the stake, or fed to the lions, would they? The early church was hardly a secret society. There’s no comparison.

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 7:09 pm

Lol. the whole thing is faith-based alright, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the religious impulse in humanity (which the last time I bothered to look had something to do with a development in our frontal lobes not shared with other higher primates).

It’s the usual mess. Power-mongers and careerists, all looking for the lever which will get them where they truly believe they belong: top of the heap, cream of the crop, New York, New York etc. etc. (Cue Frankie Sinatra). And below them a whole substrata of “More than my jobs worth” types who will get the certificates and do the training and mutter “Yah, boss, yah” in all the right places – ‘cos they absolutely do not care one way or the other as long as it pays the mortgage. Media, CPS, BBC, Political Parties, blue-chip corporations: that’s where you’ll find them. Then you have the sharks who are just looking for a buck, rather than power per se, and the coprophagous pilate fish, who swim alongside, and feed off the waste products generated.

What’s slightly different this time is we have the Interwoozies, which means the truly gullible (as well as the sane) can be readily identified by their exploiters, and be even more easily lied to because they are all in one place – digitally.

However: all is not lost. 12 good men and women took all of five minutes to decide the Roache case was flim-flam of the highest order – and despite my earlier comments, a judge let them know in his summing-up that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if they came to that conclusion

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 8:19 pm

Interwoozies? What a wonderful word!

Interwoozies of the World unite! Bring forward your neuron. What do you all mean, the one who has custody of it today is throwing a sickie? Never mind, so much the better. Now, I am MiG Ann Killy of Renard TV. I want you all to listen very carefully to these simple words. Jesus was blanc. So is Santa Claus. Le Bon Oncle Rup est un américain. Piers Morunus and Paulus D’Aceure, the latter of the merde courrier quotidien, are canonisable. Et tout cela est vrai!

Sorry, I get carried away at times….

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 9:08 pm

Are your quite sure your weren’t exposed to neo-logisms at a vulnerable age which led to your current obsession with portmanteau words, and the obvious damage to a coherence and cohesion, as evidenced by your last post?

Because you could have a civil case. I suggest you start with MashMakesSmashMakes Mash”.

(The evil giggling – the blank eyes – yo do remember, don’t you, it’s all coming back …..)?

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 10:59 pm: It was all Grandmorph’s fault

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyjXLfrojDE

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Carol42 February 7, 2014 at 7:36 pm

Just hope future juries show as much common sense.

Ian B February 7, 2014 at 8:24 pm

Except that it’s not just celebrities. Similar cases occur to the unknown too. The point at which I became aware of how far gone we are was reading a case in a local newspaper website of a man accused- and convicted- of historic sexual assault by two women. When he was fourteen. In 1966.

This is a very deep phenomenon. Yewtree is just the point it has burst into this particular celebridee arena. It is a manfestation of a very particular paradigm, created by the Radical Feminist movement, latched originally onto the Christian Right’s daycare/satanic panic and powered by the Therapy Movement and, via the media (yes Oprah, I mean you and your ilk) the elevation of the victim to a position of desirability. When many years ago Ben Elton did a sketch spoofing Oprah-shows with a show whose guests were “people who have no trauma and so are traumatised by being left out” he hit the nail on the head. To be a “Survivor” means attention and admiration.

The change from the “Get Over It” culture to a “Don’t Get Over It, Wallow In It” culture happened between the 80s and 90s, here in the UK. It benefits many groups; delusionals and compensation seekers, ideological feminists (the “glue” in the whole thing), law enforcers and self appointed crusaders, politicians, the media. It relies on the enormous appeal of pre-enlightenment paradigms and epistemologies; mysticism and faith, testimonial over evidence, emotion over reason. It depends on a bizarre and irrational realignment of the perceived harm of things suffered; rape is declared the worst crime of all, worse than murder; even just being touched in the wrong place is orders of magnitude more severe than having your head kicked in; the former is a transgression of infinite magnitude, the latter just a dull old crime. It requires that every morning, one believe six impossible things before breakfast. And the really terrifying thing? Pretty much everyone now does, and thinks it entirely normal.

Yewtree is just one element of a far more profound cultural shift.

Eyes Wide Shut February 7, 2014 at 9:20 pm

Ian B, this is just tremendously well said.

Beyond Left and Right, the technological and economic oligarchy (not the same thing, but mutually interdependent) ruling our world, the thing that terrifies me most is that we are going back to Primeval Night in our social and civic relations. We fought so hard and so long for a society based on law, reasoned judgement, shared principles and values – and none of those things were easily found. We had to create them. And now with our Ipods in our hands, we’re prepared to give it all up and revert to a brutal world of sheer contingency, ruled by power-mongers and cowed, gullible sheep. Believing anything and everything which distracts us from the business of taking responsibility for where we are and who we are.

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 11:12 pm

But in an age where most people think rationalism has already triumphed, and the rationalists deride those who, heaven forfend, deviate from their norm, as being less intellectually endowed and portray them as slower witted or devoid of reason, what room or incentive is left for the common man or woman to legitimately, or bravely, cherish, foster and cultivate their own disbelief or scepticism?

Ho Hum February 7, 2014 at 11:15 pm: I should have ended that by writing….. ‘disbelief or scepticism of those they probably already perceive as more informed, or just plain knowing better’

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Chris February 8, 2014 at 12:05 am

It strikes me that what is sweeping the Yew-K is the antithesis of what would think as spiritual values. Make no mistake about it, the were really gunning for William Roache – within two weeks of being arrested he was charged, no messing. Whereas the Operation Yewtree targets have endured long bail periods which allowed the trawl to rake it allegations in double figures to ‘make mud stick’. Roaches somewhat unorthodox – yet simple and common sense – beliefs must have poses a serious threat to the Witchfinders. That we saw an 81 year old man being fitted up for basically “if people do wrong, deal with them – but I believe we should not condemn others” (not to mention ‘there’s been a pendulum swing in Britian… a witch hunt’) is absolutely astonishing vicious – and, if you pardon use of such a word, downright evil.
We seem to have fervent religiosity with no spiritual substance – the paradox that we should somehow forgive ‘victims’ (women) any and every mistake as they are ‘vulnerable’, yet condemn any man accused of even the tritest sexual allegation as a beast who must be caged forever – they must suffer, their families must suffer. and we should pay no mind to any of that – yet we should bend rules and change laws for “victims”. It is utter madness, and is making for a very unhealthy and unhappy society. William Roache went against the ‘name, shame & condemn’ tabloid mentality, and was set upon because of it. There is no compassion here whatsoever – ‘real people’ don’t think that way, only idiots who have lost their moral compass. Sadly, the majority of Under 25’s have been conditioned to point the finger and condemn, just as they have conditioned not to think about things – and all of them will have no safety net when something they have done without thinking is used against them, and everything denounces them in unison. The future isn’t bright right now, the future is pretty nasty.

Lucozade February 11, 2014 at 10:03 pm: Chris,

Re: “We seem to have fervent religiosity with no spiritual substance – the paradox that we should somehow forgive ‘victims’ (women) any and every mistake as they are ‘vulnerable’, yet condemn any man accused of even the tritest sexual allegation as a beast who must be caged forever – they must suffer, their families must suffer. and we should pay no mind to any of that – yet we should bend rules and change laws for “victims”. It is utter madness, and is making for a very unhealthy and unhappy society. William Roache went against the ‘name, shame & condemn’ tabloid mentality, and was set upon because of it. There is no compassion here whatsoever – ‘real people’ don’t think that way, only idiots who have lost their moral compass. Sadly, the majority of Under 25′s have been conditioned to point the finger and condemn, just as they have conditioned not to think about things – and all of them will have no safety net when something they have done without thinking is used against them, and everything denounces them in unison”

True….

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Ho Hum February 8, 2014 at 12:12 am

And just as if to show it’s apparantly never going to stop…. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26093695
If these are work phones, there may be a point, but if it is their own phones? And their houses are searched? It’s like the whole world has gone totally mad. Certainly since I was a lad.

But, never fear, in other news, our government has come up with a solution for this sort of thing for the long term. Ministers have decided that a referendum will be held in 2020 for Britons to decide once and for all if all boys should become girls, or all girls should become boys. Apart from resulting in the ultimate in harmonious relationships, this will guarantee that there will only offensiveness of the types acceptable to all.

David Cameron’s party are wondering if he has the cojones to come up with an opinion. Any opinion. Ed Milliband has come out in favour of being the girlie he’s aspired to be for years. Harriet Harmon is in favour of girls, as long as it’s compulsory for them all to wear trousers, Nick Clegg is pushing for – wait for it! – the ‘Futanari’ option – as LibDems believe in swinging all over the place.

(if you don’t know what that is, this is really really NSFW!!! – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futanaria – I could hardly believe that existed – hermaphrodite is apparently too tame these days)

Moving on, UKIP have denounced the move as an EU attempt to emasculate the UK, thereby losing more than 50% of their vote immediately. Pro Mo and Pro Mo groups have both come out in favour, but with a sharply cutting division of opinion, wanting a result that is either 100% circumcision, or 100% FGM. Alec Salmond anticipates a triumphant 100% vote for independence. Democratic Unionists defy the odds by pleading with Dublin for Irish Unity. As it did yesterday, and probably will tomorrow and the day after, The Telegraph anticipates the end of the world as we know it. The Guardian instantly makes plans to move to New York, lock, stock, and barrel. The Mail backs 100% girl, as vagina monologues will then become acceptable as an editorial communication medium, and in anticipation of 100 million extra click on its sidebar for bimbos. The Mirror prepares a special with a silver reflective front cover for New Gender Day, with the headline, ‘Who’s a pretty [To be filled in on the day], then?’. One way tickets to Switzerland sell out as the last of the sane head for the Exit.

I thought ‘Cultural Revolutions’ only happened under authoritarian dictatorships, populated by uneducated, ignorant masses – I’ve a feeling that there’s something wrong with that statement, but I can’t quite put my finger on it….

Anna – please feel free to delete any or all of this if you wish. It’s on topic, if a bit squiffly so, but if you think it might be too much for any of the more delicate souls who pass by here, especially those who look without commenting, just knock it out. I certainly wouldn’t be offended

Bob J February 8, 2014 at 1:52 am

What’s the odds on the tabloids going after Roache’s ‘love cult’ and their unnamed leader. They like to have the last word.

Ian B February 8, 2014 at 2:37 pm: According to the Fail today, they’re still trawling up allegations-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554598/Cleared-Corrie-star-Bill-Roache-facing-fresh-anguish-three-women-make-new-sex-assault-allegations.html

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SamBest February 8, 2014 at 5:19 am

Of all the most recent news, the idea that Hartley Hare has corrupted youth is the most disturbing. Even more so than Sooty. Both were my favourites.

GildasTheMonk February 8, 2014 at 11:39 am

I suspect Our Lords and Masters will be most disappointed with recent verdicts. There is nothing like a moral witch hunt to divert attention away from the real ills of the world. Some D lost celeb gropes a girl in 1972 – millions of pounds are spent on inquiries and court cases. But bankers and politicians bring the nation to its knees, recklessly losing billions in the pursuit of greed and speculation, saddling this and the next few generations in debt – nothing.
The real monsters always go free.
G the M

Frankie February 10, 2014 at 12:12 am

In the absence of that now seeming optional element ‘EVIDENCE’ from this particular trial I had little doubt that William Roache would be found innocent… eventually. Oh… the tedious business of having to prove the guilt of a defendant beyond all reasonable doubt!! It’s SOOO last century darlings! I think that society would be much better served if the matter of justice operated on a system similar to that on ‘The Voice’ or that the accused should have to undergo trial by ordeal, perhaps something akin to the game show ‘Total Wipeout’ – they could ‘run the gauntlet’, bayed at by crowds, a false step landing rendering them guilty; survival would make them better people with a story to tell their adoring public. It would be so much more in keeping with what society thinks is important these days!

I have to say that ‘Cock’ Roache (a nickname he apparently went by on the film set of Coronation Street, according to testimony from his fellow actors to the press) did not do himself many favours and, it seems, basically delivered himself up for trial by a series of comments to the press – for example: ‘I am a boss shagger – I bedded 1000 women’… ‘abuse victims bring it on themselves because they are being punished for sins committed in a previous life’.

The trial itself may yet yield more potential ‘victims’ coming out of the woodwork, anxious to try their luck at the coconut shy that seems to be the present method of trying celebrities accused of giving their fans ‘the business’ or touching them up inappropriately.

We shall, no doubt, see.

Moor Larkin February 10, 2014 at 9:37 am: I recall Glen Hoddle lost the England footie manager’s job when he said disabled people were in wheelchairs because of sins in a past life. What does link Bill with his accusers does seem to be that they all “believe” in some crap, and none of them have much reason….. to do so.

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Lucozade February 11, 2014 at 9:51 pm

Re: “This religion is based upon a holy book, known as the ‘Yewtree tablets’. The high priests guard it well. They claim that it contains testament from hundreds of people touched by the new Devil – Jimmy Savile. They say that these testaments must never be investigated, cannot be exposed to the light of day. Just recorded in the great tablets – and those who gave testament must be rewarded from the great public coffers – in secret.

‘Aha’! said the high priests of Youwillbebelieved, ‘so I’ll grant you that that story was a load of poppycock, but we cannot expose the rest of the stories to your gaze, because it would traumatise the anonymous testamentors -and they are telling the truth, absolutely, without question, you can take our word for it’ ”

Lol, most people haven’t changed that much from the middle ages….