Sent by several Readers, especially my Brit buddies, this.
Category: Two-Minute Hate
Disgusting People
Of Course They Have
Here’s one that should come as no surprise to anyone:
Afghanistan goes back to the Dark Ages
Just a point of order: when, precisely, did Afghanistan — or any of the -stans for that matter — ever leave the Dark Ages? To continue:
The Taliban have ordered dozens of people to be killed by stoning and four convicts to be executed by having walls collapsed onto them, exposing the scale of brutality under the regime.
Figures released by the Taliban’s own Supreme Court show the group also publicly flogged more than 1,000 people across Afghanistan in 2025, including at least 150 women.
The data points to a sharp rise in corporal punishment, with Kabul recording the highest number of cases.
Official Taliban statements reveal that 1,030 people were whipped in public this year for offences including theft, running away from home and acts deemed contrary to Islamic law.
Well, yes: when you govern according to Islamic law, the Dark Ages is pretty much a given.
Mind you, I’m not altogether opposed to a few public floggings. I can think of a number of people (like this one or this one) who could only benefit from same, and our society might well be the better for it.
But a flogging for drinking booze and/or wearing a miniskirt?
Forget that crap.
Sand In The Shoe
Over here, a couple of guys gripe about ten most irritating things about modern cars. To save you time, I’ve listed them here, with my thoughts:
- Beeping — It’s like being locked in your car with a nagging Catholic/Jewish mother: do this, don’t do that, why haven’t you etc. etc. Whether it’s seatbelts, lane changing (more of that later) or any one of the many things that someone else thinks that you should/shouldn’t do, I am often tempted just to cut the fucking wires to the speaker.
- Wireless phone chargers — I haven’t come across this nonsense myself because I last bought a car in 2015, but the guys in the video sum it up perfectly: it makes your phone hot, and doesn’t perform as advertised unless your phone is perfectly positioned. It’s all part of making everything bluetoothed instead of cabled.
- Artificial engine noise — First they soundproof the car, and then because some drivers would actually like to hear the sound the car makes, or want their car to sound all shouty without the necessary engine to make it so, the car pipes in fake engine noise. If that’s not a good analogy for the A.I./fake/digital/artificial times we live in, I can’t think of a better one.
- Voice-activated assist — I call this “creeping Alexa”, where one has to rely on some fucking software to recognize your voice (which it often can’t, with comical / disastrous consequences), all instead of you just turning a switch or pushing a button. And speaking of which:
- Screen buttons instead of actual switches — There’s no excuse for this, and this has nothing to do with “safety” (the usual excuse) because the plain fact of the matter is that screen switches are cheaper than mechanical switches, and that saves the manufacturer money (which savings are never passed on to the customer, needless to say). And speaking of safety: the screen buttons require that one be at the correct screen to enable the things to work; if not, one has to scroll backwards or forwards until the correct screen puts in an appearance — and all this requires taking one hand off the steering wheel for an extended period, and taking one’s eyes off the road. Anyone else see a potential problem here?
- Modern headlights are too bright — I’ve noticed this trend, and it’s fucking dangerous to other drivers, especially in rainy and/or night-time conditions. You’re not having to land an airliner on a narrow runway; you’re driving down a street, FFS, with oncoming traffic. (And if you’re out in the boonies and need brighter lights, add a spotlight bar.)
- High-gloss finishes (e.g. piano black) — I don’t even like shiny finishes on gun stocks (hello, Browning!), and I see no need for something similar in a car that is basically a dust/fingerprint collector.
- Subscription services / features — Once again, just another way for auto manufacturers to bleed money out of the customer once the car has been sold. The nice part of this is that not having some of these features (seat warmers, etc.) has the effect of taking us back to earlier times when we managed perfectly well without all these luxury geegaws. But I await with bated breath the time when things like windshield wipers, turn signals and high beams all become something you have to pay monthly fees for, instead of them just being part of the (horribly-inflated) sticker price of the car. And when I say “bated breath”, I mean when the breath becomes “unbated”, that will be a signal to load up the AK.
- Start/stop buttons — I have ranted about this piece of automotive excrescence more times than I can count. Yes, I know that you can disable the thing; but the latest wheeze from these godless fucks is to make it reset every time you switch off the car, which means you have to disable the function as part of the starting procedure every time you want to drive somewhere. The days of getting in, turning a key and moving on are so far in the distant past that one wonders how the Three Wise Men made it to Bethlehem without satnav — which, by the way, is fast becoming yet another subscription service.
- Lane assist / traffic distancing — It’s one thing when these functions beep at you as a warning; it’s another thing altogether when the functions takes over the driving for you. Apart from the foul nanny philosophy behind the thing, it can also be life-threatening.
Now go and watch the video — especially the last couple of minutes — because those guys are funny where I’m just fucking enraged.
Bondi Reflections
Right up front, I’m going to say that I hope I’m never in a situation like one of the several mass shootings we’ve just seen. I’m no hero, I’m too old for that kind of thing, and there are too many bad outcomes (for me) should I get involved with — i.e. by shooting back at — asshole gunmen on a spree.
That said, I also hope that if the situation is inescapable that I will have the gumption to perform my civic duty, i.e. by not running away and hoping that law enforcement will take care of everything, and doing my level best to end the threat.
I also hope I don’t get shot by the frigging cops, which is what seems to have happened in Sydney because to the untrained and panicked eye, the target becomes any guy holding a gun (or, in the case of the OzCops) and even standing next to the gun he just used, with his hands in the air.
What a shit show.
For those who think that I’m being silly to imagine such things happening, living as I do in north Texas: let me remind everyone that there was just such a mass shooting at an outdoor mall in Allen, just up the road from my house, only a couple years ago. (What makes it all the more chilling was that both New Wife and Mrs. Doc Russia had gone out shopping in Allen, and might well have ended up at the mall in so doing.)
So no: if we’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that this shit can happen anywhere. And we would do well to be prepared to deal with it.
Once again, I’m absolutely not hoping that I get involved in some of this mayhem; but at the same time, I will admit to doing some mental role-playing in my head, dredging up all the old “Coinops” (counter-insurgency operations) drills I learned back in those far-off days when we all carried muskets and bayonets.
One thing is for sure, though: I will not be a helpless victim.
Malice Aforethought
I haven’t been keeping up with the Trump vs. BBC saga much, because as a rule trials make my eyes glaze over. This one, however, may be different:
MAKE no mistake, Donald Trump’s $5billion (£3.7billion) defamation lawsuit against the BBC, filed yesterday, is a formidable document: it is a tightly constructed, meticulously argued claim that accuses the Corporation not merely of error but of intentional deception on a scale that, if proven, could be the most damaging legal defeat in its history.
Filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the complaint names the BBC, BBC Studios Distribution, and BBC Studios Productions as defendants. It seeks $5billion in damages for defamation and for alleged violations of Florida’s consumer protection laws.
What makes the filing so potent is that it weaves the BBC’s factual admissions, internal whistleblowing, patterns of bias in BBC coverage, timing, motive and governance failure – caused essentially by the BBC acting as its own judge and jury – into a coherent narrative of wrongdoing.
…and the article just gets better and better as Dave Keighley lays it all out for TCW’s Brit readers. Read the whole thing.
Best part of all this? The suit has been filed in Florida, where Trump’s a longtime resident (at Mar-A-Lago, for my Brit Readers). In Florida (as opposed to NYfC or Kollyfornia) the jury is going to be made of Floridians, nay even a goodly number of Trump voters who, if all goes Trump’s way, will deliver a sound financial wacking to the BBC’s corporate pee-pee.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of smug, Leftist assholes, who will have their bias and underhanded skulduggery exposed to the entire world.
It’s just too bad that in the end, the financial penalty will be borne by the BBC’s license holders, i.e. the public, rather than by the BBC executives who perpetrated this travesty.
But hey… all the more reason for the Brits to dump the whole licensing bollocks altogether. The public hangings can come later.
Some Pushback Required
Okay, here is where all my hackles start rising, and my sense of fair play starts to load up some spare magazines:
The UK’s West Midlands Police used fictitious evidence to justify its advice to ban Israeli fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team from attending a match in Birmingham last month, the force’s chief admitted to a parliamentary committee Monday, as MPs grilled police brass on the basis of their controversial decision.
The Aston Villa soccer club announced in October that no Maccabi fans would be allowed at a November match following a police assessment that classified the event as “high risk” and suggested banning Israeli fans from the stadium.
In the report presented to the club that suggested banning Israeli fans, police presented information about a 2023 match between Maccabi and West Ham, which the report said was the Israeli club’s “last appearance on UK soil to date.”
“The most recent match Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in the Europa Conference League on Nov 9, 2023,” the report read.
Well, fine, except:
However, no such match was played, and Maccabi has never faced off against the East London club.
Here’s the outcome I would like. This asshole cop, and every single cop involved in this disgusting fabrication should be fired, stripped of their pension and benefits, and face charges of fraud (or whatever the official term for wrongdoing by a policeman may be). Under Hammurabic Law, they’d all be executed for bearing false witness, but sadly, we’ve come a long way (too long a way) since then.
Basically, these dickless Tracys invented a reason to avoid a potential clash between two groups of people so that they wouldn’t have the responsibility of policing it. And they could hide behind the fact that Maccabi are a Jooooz team, so who cares.
In the broader picture: if these little shits can do this, any police force can, and most probably will. (In totalitarian states they already have, multiple times.)
Disgraceful.
