It was nice to see a kids show written with care that wasn’t about “trauma” or “epic secretly dark lore!” Really bugs me I can’t find the second half of the series here in Oz. Even pirated. Guess there isn’t much demand for a low key kids show canned in its second series.
Reminds me of my granddad. Eighty-something, part of that hilarious genre of “literal World War 2 refugee who hates refugees” thought the gay marriage plebiscite was a travesty. Not because he had anything against gays, but because he thought straight people having a say in whether gays can get married or not was immoral. Old folk can surprise you.
When we had a vote for it, my friend's boomer parents all got together and told us their spiel about how we had to vote in favour of gay marriage (even if we had explicitly said we would). The closest I heard for the no position was some of my zoomer friends saying they didn't want it to be a shoe-in for troon shit with kids (which was big in the news even a decade ago where I am).
I do not understand where this stupid fucking idea comes from that the boomers and older people are all seething racists and spiteful pricks- these were the people who saw Jim Crow and forced the Democrat party to go full social welfare for blacks to the point that the "equality under the law" Republicans who were radical egalitarians in 1860 were seen as racists even today. The boomers were the ones who were fucking in nature reserves and taking LSD in their law classes, now that they're grown up and saying the excesses were excessive, we treat them like shit rather than maybe understanding that they have experience and regret these actions and don't want them repeated.
“I know a lot of ninety and a hundred year olds, and as we all know, there were no Union Jacks or joyful displays of patriotism on VE Day. Everyone just sat down for a struggle session about the fascist within.”
You know, BritBong midwits love saying Britain has never confronted its own flirtations with fascism, yet every second British science fiction piece is about that. V For Vendetta, 1984, Years and Years, Privilege, multiple episodes of Doctor Who, hell, even that We Happy Few game that shot itself in the foot with procedural generation was explicitly about Britain sliding into authoritarianism after World War 2. It’s almost as though British culture isn’t as stupid and un-introspective as Stirling thinks. Perhaps that’s even why a lot of intellectuals and ordinary people there don’t look at at him and see a bewitchingly strange, enigmatic defiance of gender norms, but instead a fat man in a hat. Actually, come to to think of it, he kind of looks like theFat Controller if he went middle aged troon.
Anyone who lived in 40s or 50s Britain could tell you that was the closest Britain ever got to a fascist state, you needed an identity card to even leave the house, which was checked everyday by the local bobby when you went to work, the pub, anywhere. This continued until well after the war (though obviously more loosely) until the National Registration Act was repealed in 1952. Rationing continued until 1954. The entire steel and coal industry of the UK was run by the UK. Major motor firms were nationalised to pump out the equivalent of people's cars, most people ended up living in prefab houses built by the local council (which continues even today).
I give Labour credit for being extremely ambitious especially after the UK was bankrupted well before the end of the war, but the authoritarian streak has always existed in Britain. British culture is just one of the very few to explicitly face and fight against it almost all the time, to the point it's a cliche of the Anglosphere. The earliest cultural signifier most people can place is Magna Carter, sometimes Boadicea's rebellion (which had far more to do with homerule than powerful states). The entire idea of modern civil rights and Liberalism stems from the idea of the "Rights of
Englishmen". The difference is that, today, it is typically
Parliament and not the Crown which tyrannises the population, the result of a hard-fought battle for Parliamentary supremacy. What Jim and a lot of anti-monarchists in the UK don't understand is that your average commoner today views the Crown, especially Elizabeth II, as the avatar of Englishness. This necessitates being a protector of commoner's rights even if that's sort of a convenient lie, which is why so many industrial Labour voters are also incredibly patriotic and love the royals. They're the ones who read the tabloids these effete university students loathe. A lot are also God-fearing men who might not be able to annunciate it but would definitely believe in the idea of Natural Rights handed to all men by God- the Queen also happens to be God's right hand man as head of the Anglican Church.
This is all to say that if Jim was actually productive and had been at the dirty end of coal he'd see the flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for what it really is, a rejection of Italian Fascism, a rejection of French radicalism, a rejection of German Nazism, a rejection of Soviet Bolshevism, and an ever onwards force for the progression of man like a tortoise, getting to the end of the race without having to kill millions of people to do it.
