Monday, May 4, 2009

The UK is more culturally diverse

One of the stranger characters in Skypeland is PM, a member of a Greek Cypriot family that immigrated to the UK from Cyprus. The first thing that you notice about PM is that he has a sort of "nasal drip" problem. PM sniffs and snorts constantly, seemingly suffering from a permanent headcold. That is, his snoot is apparently constantly leaking snot. Therefore, PM has earned the nickname, "Mucus".

Mucus, even though he is an olive-skinned descendant of British immigrants, fancies himself a "proper Brit". Mucus does speak a form of English, but PM has a thick and almost incomprehensible accent that is nothing like "received pronunciation" (previously known as "the Queen's English").

Mucus constantly brags about how wonderful the UK is and attacks the US and the Jews as the source of all the evils in the world and all the world's problems. Mucus likes to blame the US for things that the Brits and other European colonial powers did, such as the initiation of the slave trade, and the demise of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

PM says he is not anti-American because he knows many Americans. PM believes there is a secret superhighway between Mexico and Canada. Mucus worries about the Amero and the North American Union. Mucus says that Russia will soon own the US. PM alleges that the Queen of England owns all the food on earth through the Windsor Group. Mucus claims that Cuba is vastly superior to the United States. PM is worried that green card holders in the US are given a fast track to US citizenship if they serve in the US military. PM complains bitterly about the use of the electric chair in the United States, and believes that he knows of better ways to execute prisoners. Mucus is upset that Osama Bin Laden has not been convicted of the World Trade Center attack. even though Bin Laden has bragged and bragged about 9/11. Mucus claims that Bin Laden is secretly on the CIA payroll so he could attack the US as part of an "inside job". Mucus says that all the 911 hijackers are alive in Paris because their identification documents were stolen when they were in America. PM knows that the airplanes were flown remotely by wire on 911 because in the 1970s it was possible to fly a plane by remote control from Australia to the United States. PM thinks that it is impossible that there are any tunnels in the Gaza Strip because the Palestinians do not have any tunnel boring machines and they have no way to get rid of all the "muck" that would be in those tunnels. Mucus claims that the US troops are growing poppies in Afghanistan and that it is the fault of the US that there are heroin addicts in the UK. Mucus has heard that the death toll from the Holocaust was not really 6 million, but is really 3 million, and somehow this number was magically inflated. Mucus claims that it is extremely unfair of the US to give 3 billion dollars of aid per year to Israel when the US supposedly does not give any money to Africa. PM also claims that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of US President George W. Bush, spent two years in prison as a war criminal for his activities during World War II.

When PM was asked if he spoke to his family about these sorts of theories, PM said that he didn't of course. Mucus said that if he spoke about such things to his family, they would think he was nuts.

Mucus discounts any suggestion that the UK has ever acted in an inappropriate manner, ignoring centuries of rapacious predation on the Asian, American and African continents, colonialism, officially sanctioned drug-peddling, wars of aggression, occupation, appropriation without compensation, subjugation, privateering, taxation without representation, slavery, genocide, discrimination and intolerance. Mucus somehow seems to think none of that occurred, or if it did, it was not the fault of the Brits. PM is sure that the Americans are much worse than the Brits ever were.

The dominant cultural element in the United Kingdom is English culture, and the English are revered by Mucus. Mucus identifies with proper Englishmen and attempts to emulate the English and is very proud of the English. However, even in the British Isles, the English aggressively attacked and subdued their neighbors through long and bloody campaigns against the Welsh, the Scottish and the Irish. Somehow Mucus is unaware of all this, or chooses to ignore it when he screams about how awful the US is and shrieks that he hates Americans (and Jews and Israel, of course).

PM is completely mystified with the concept of a society created from assimilated immigrants from a wide range of nations. He constantly sneers at the US and similar nations, not quite understanding that most people in the US are immigrants and a mix of many different national groups and that this is normal and even a source of pride for most Americans. Mucus and his British buddies and many from the Muslim world think that this is a terrible indictment of the US, and so frequently attempt to use it as an insult. Instead, all this shows is that the people attempting to slander the US are mired in some sort of outdated tribal mentality. No wonder they have been in hundreds of pointless little wars for centuries, and have had to rely on the US several times to bail them out, in events like World War I, World II and the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Mucus will repeat anything that someone tells him as though it were the absolute truth, such as the claim that "the Queen of England owns 52% of Montana". When asked for a reference for this, PM presented the homepage of Montana State University as the source of his information. I guess Mucus does not quite understand what it means to give a reference for a piece of information. Of course, when people said this was inadequate, Mucus became extremely irate.

In fact, when challenged on any claim, Mucus always seems to fly into a rage. PM fancies himself as a learned man (although PM always states that he is not educated, the arrogance oozing from Mucus is almost thick enough to cut with a knife). However, Mucus did not even complete his A-levels and was only employed for a short time as a laborer on the Chunnel Project, where he became an expert in "muck".

Interestingly, PM seems to be feisty once in a while, but only a few days a week, usually around Sunday. The rest of the week PM is very calm and docile. It is conjectured that the reason that Mucus is lively on Sundays and for a few days afterwards is that he has had a good meal on Sundays, and the rest of the week lives on very meagre rations.

PM displays an "incredible" range of knowledge on a variety of subjects, in all senses of the word "incredible". Mucus clams that the reason he rolls his own tobacco is because regular cigarettes are laced with "saltpeter". Another time PM expressed doubt that dead leaves could be used as part of compost for soil enrichment because he felt that leaves do not contain any important nutrients for plants, since dead leaves are mainly composed of "potassium".

Today PM announced that the UK is far more culturally diverse than the US. I said that this sounded like the claims of several Irish visitors to Skypeland, who say that Ireland, with 0.5% nonEuropeans, is more culturally diverse than the US, with its 41% nonEuropean population (not counting the 30 million illegal immigrants in the US, who are mainly nonEuropean). Mucus became extremely agitated at this suggestion, and said that these figures did not matter, since the US is "10 times larger than Ireland" (actually, the US is over 130 times the area of Ireland, and has 74 times the population of Ireland). PM claimed that if the larger size of the US were taken into account, Ireland would be found to have more nonEuropeans proportionately than the US and therefore Ireland is more culturally diverse than the US. Now that is an incredible example of incisive analysis. Mucus sure has reason to be pleased with himself, doesn't he?

I am not sure if Mucus knows what percentages mean. I am not sure that PM knows what the phrase "culturally diverse" means. I do know that PM got extremely angry about this and became belligerent when anyone disagreed with him. Mucus is positive he is correct in asserting that the UK and Ireland are more culturally diverse than the US, and have a greater proportion of nonEuropeans than the US.

I guess this just goes to show what happens if a person doesn't do their A-levels. Or possibly in Mucus' case, can't do their A-levels.

Addendum

Today, PM confronted me with the claim that this blog post was "full of lies". I asked him what was a lie in this blog post, and PM was unable to give me a single example. He just charged me again with lying, and so I again asked him to give me an example of a lie. Even though I asked him well over 20 times to give me a single example of something incorrect in this blog post, he was unable to do, and instead just sputtered and fumed and cursed.

I told PM that if he could come up with a response, detailing what he thought were "lies" in this blog post, I would consider including his version. And the offer stands, for him as for others who feel they have been unfairly maligned in this blog, even though they are anonymous in here. The danger is, of course, that in their frenzy to try to "correct the record", that they will make themselves look even worse. But if they are determined to do it, far be it for me to save them from themselves.

Addendum II

PM came into Skypeland in high dudgeon, puffed up and proud of himself, and determined to show how much of a liar I am. I said he should give me a written list of the "lies" in this blog post, but he demurred. Instead, he said something like,

That first sentence is wrong. My father comes from Cyprus but my mother comes from Yorkshire. My grandmother comes from Yorkshire. I am English born and bred. Want me to show you my UK passport? Listen to my voice. Do you hear any Greek Cypriot in my accent? it just proves what a stupid cunt you are. What a twat.

I tried to explain to PM that at least half of his ancestry was Greek Cypriot, but he was not interested. He felt that it was irrelevant that his father was a Greek Cypriot; because PM was "born and bred" in the UK, and had a UK passport, there was no way that he could be a member of a Greek Cypriot immigrant family.

Ah, I see.

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