Always Outraged, All of the Time.

As the year comes to a close, the news has been following the same familiar pattern of outrage and despair over trivial things, which is strange because the world is replete with things that people should actually be getting outraged about. Yes, it is all well and good pointing out that babies are getting raped and teenage girls are having their genitals hacked to bits by their relatives because they think that Allah wants to rethink the whole clitoris thing, but according to the local news such things pale into insignificance when compared to the fact that occasionally people say silly things very quietly. 


I am of course referring to the fact that the England cricketer Graeme Swann was lambasted last week for commenting on his brothers Facebook page that the national team had just been "raped" in Australia. He didn't call a press conference and announce that rape should be legalised, or perhaps write a column in the Daily Mail and extol the virtues of horsing one into a stranger and hoping they didn't notice, no, he simply told his brother that his team had been "raped" via Facebook, and this somehow saw him placed on a pedestal alongside Fred West. Oddly, it seems that the casual use of the word rape as a slang term for being soundly thrashed is pretty common in this day and age, and I recall a football commentator being similarly pilloried a few years back for saying a player had raped another when he left him in his dust on the wing. It must be a storm in a teacup, because using a word casually obviously doesn't mean that you endorse the meaning of the word. This is evidenced by the fact that my grandmother often says "Bugger me!" but still has never been given the shock of her life by a passing stranger. 


 The Chinese are outraged that the Japanese Prime Minister went to visit a grave. It seems a tad hypocritical to complain about such a thing when the Chinese are currently almost as famous for torture and state sanctioned murder as they are for sweet and sour sauce. Not that I would like to endorse the truly awful behaviour of the Japanese during the Second World War, but it seems a bit silly to get so offended about a guy visiting a grave, when this type of thing is still actually happening today. The Chinese apparently had more prisoners killed during 2013 than the rest of the world put together. This would not actually be such a big deal if they at least ensured that the people they were hanging or shooting had actually done something wrong, but apparently the Chinese Police are about as thorough as a partially sighted private investigator with a drink problem. On that note, the United States has seen capital punishment decrease by around 10 percent this year, which is actually a pretty sad thing in my eyes because they have due process. 


 Plenty of people get outraged about that as well, and like to whinge about how cruel it is to kill people merely for doing things that are so monstrous Peter Mandelson would blush if he was asked to watch. The whole thing would only be cruel if the state was murdering convicts via the medium of crucifixion, and they were always left to hang by their recently nailed wrists in front of a big screen TV that was playing "Dude, Where's My Car?" on loop. Those limp wristed hand wringing always outraged types also claim that even if the process of elimination was entirely painless, the knowledge of their eventual demise is a form of emotional torture all of its own, and nobody should ever have to endure the knowledge that they will soon be killed. If mental cruelty is such a big deal, surely the most humane way of doing things would be to tell the convict that they were pencilled in to be killed with lethal injection in October 2034, and then quietly sneak in at 4am that morning and shoot them in the head?

 The people of Catalonia are outraged because a Spanish copper poked fun at them by asking if they would prefer to be ravaged by infantry or tanks if they voted for independence. The fact that the whole thing was clearly meant to be taken in a lighthearted manner and was prefaced by the word "humour" apparently being lost on all of those poor souls that are desperate to be offended all of the time on Twitter, which of all the social media tools seems to be the most pathetic and hand wringing. 

 I even saw an outraged feminist on Twitter complaining about supermarkets selling FHM because they have semi naked women on the cover, as if FHM is demeaning to women! If anything FHM is demeaning to men, because from the outside it actually looks like it might be worth reading, but when you open it you don't even get to see any nipples, and certainly no crotch shots. As such, the magazine is an appalling halfway house located somewhere between a pornographic magazine and a novel. Its far too tame for a hand shandy, and far too dull to read. In fact I would rather read the back of a toothpaste tube while sat on the toilet, and If I ever need some quick relief, Id be better off trying to fap one out using the Virgin Atlantic brochure.

 It all seems a little unfair considering I haven't heard any of the so called "Meninists" complaining about the fact that girly or gay magazines have much more much male nudity on the cover, to the point where full blown nudity is acceptable as long as they hide the guys bellend behind a rolled up magazine. Which begs the question, if some fully naked footballer was adorning to cover of a magazine, but was using FHM to hide one of his testicles, would the rolled up magazine cover be more offensive than the publication itself?

 Regardless, as we move into 2014, my new years resolution is to not get as offended by people who are always offended. Fortunately, my resolutions only ever last a week, so I will be able to blog my rage and spite into 2014 with few issues.  

 Happy New Year fellow ragers, and let us hope that 2014 is as much of a mess as 2013.