C**ts Of All Kinds

I randomly started thinking about this today when going out to buy a newspaper. I remembered the time last year when I went to see Jimmy Carr live. One of his gags involved something to do with immigrants, then he said something like: "the kind of thing that would annoy Daily Mail readers - or as I call them, cunts".

I myself am a Daily Mail reader (and cunt, apparently) - although admittedly this is somewhat begrudgingly as I don't in fact think that ANY national newspaper accurately reflects my own views. But I don't take offense at this joke. I see it as fairly ignorant, a manifestation of a leftist hatred that demonises anyone right-of-centre as inherently evil. But that's all part of freedom of speech, baby.

But it got me thinking. This joke was perfectly fine. But read the joke again - the implication of it is not even that the Daily Mail promotes an ideology that leftists depise; it is that ALL Daily Mail readers are "cunts". It may well all be a joke, and that's fair enough. However, why is it, then, that if one was to make a joke which ended, "Muslims - or as I call them, cunts"; or "blacks - or as I call them, cunts", they would be denounced and probably imprisoned? Why does making the same joke, only this time racially framed, make a difference to how such jokes are received? What makes the two things different, apart from the baseless PC multiculturalist dogma espoused by our mainstream media?

And the implications are more troubling still. It is fairly common now to see criticism of a race in general, or of Islam in general - NOT against all people belonging to those groups - STILL being singled out as taboo, offensive, hateful, or whatever. We live in an age and a society which has one set of standards for something, and another set for others, with those others largely being races.

This should NOT continue. People should stand up for free speech. They should not be afraid to make jokes which offend the most offendable of people. As a shout-out, I would recommend to anyone a comedian named Paul Eastwood, who performed on our cruise ship on our recent holiday, and made one or two Muslim jokes and a couple of other racially-charged ones. There is no hatred involved; in his own words, "This is the great thing about being British; we can laugh at ourselves and we can laugh at everyone else". I could not agree more. We need to stand up for these kinds of values more often.

We can't have the Guardian-readers ruling the country, after all.