Melania Trump
Had always believed American pop music more professional than Slovenian pop music. But no.
Jon Voight
I don’t speak to Angelina much any more. Can’t explain it.
Jeremy Corbyn
What I mean was, Labour MPs will support Article 50 if they want to. But not if they don’t. Although I’ll tell them to. Although I might not, either. Stop harassing me.
Nigel Farage
No, let me finish. We’re at the Bad Boys of Brexit party in Washington! Although it’s rather quiet.
“Do you think he’ll come?” says Arron, who is looking anxious.
“Of course he’ll come,” I say. “What sort of person would go to a massive ball in their own honour when they could be here, drinking warm beer and eating fish canapés with us?”
“Maybe I didn’t spend enough money,” says Arron.
Piers Morgan
I’m on Question Time. That’s literally the only reason I’m not in Washington, because I was totally invited. We’re really good friends. Maybe I didn’t mention.
Jeremy Corbyn
Actually I’m not sure anybody is really listening.
Friday
Donald Trump
The big day. We started with breakfast. The best breakfast. That weird Brit Nigel Farage wanted to come and make it. “Let me finish!” he said. “They call me Mr Breakfast!” Limey freak. What the hell’s a kipper? He comes near me again, he’s getting shot. Then we met with the Obamas.
Barack Obama
“Donald,” I say, solemnly. “I have left you a letter in my desk. As is traditional. I hope you find it interesting. It’s my Kenyan birth certificate.”
“What?” says Trump.
“Just kidding,” I say. Then I tell him I wish him all the best, and there’s no hard feelings about all that Kenyan, Muslim stuff, and that maybe our nation really can heal.
“So much winning,” says Trump. “So much.”
“Inshallah,” I say.
“What?” says Trump.
Hillary Clinton
I’m so glad it’s raining.
Kellyanne Conway
The president-elect says it’s not raining and I think we should take his word for it.
The Supreme Court chief justice
“So you’ll put your hand on the Lincoln Bible?” I say.
“Have you washed it?” says Trump. Then he says he’ll be swearing on his own Bible, too.
“Why?” I say.
“It’s smaller,” he says.
Donald Trump
American carnage! America first and also last but mainly first. We stand at the birth of a lewd millennium. We’re going to discover space! The forgotten people will not be forgotten except for the people I’ve forgotten. Now arrives the hour of action. Maybe two hours, some days. I will fight for you with every breath in my body and every hair on my head. I’m going to build tunnels and a wall, but not tunnels under the wall. Winning like never before.
Steve Bannon
No, we haven’t already discovered space. That was a hoax. Read the internet.
Jared Kushner
I’m still a good person, right?
Melania Trump
Have I left the iron on?
Donald Trump
And then we’re whisked away by the Secret Service. Who are not, by the way, the secretest. I’d be way more secret than that.
“Dad,” says Barron. “That was all really boring.”
“Tell me about it!” I say. “Just sitting there. I haven’t tweeted in, like, ten whole hours.”
“Here’s an idea,” says Ivanka. “Maybe we could do it every day?”
TOURIST EXODUS LEAVES GIGOLOS HUNGRY FOR LOVE
Jerome Starkey, Banjul
FEBRUARY 7 2017
BUSINESS WAS BAD for the gigolos. The restaurants were shuttered, the hotels deserted and the nightclubs, usually full to bursting with middle-aged female sex tourists, had been silenced by the threat of war.
When a political crisis in the Gambia forced thousands of tourists to flee last month, the young men locally known as bumsters were among the hardest hit. They are the men with gymnasts’ physiques and an affable patter who loiter on beaches and outside bars to meet middle-aged western women looking for more than just a suntan.
“It’s because of poverty,” said Amadou Sarr, 33, as he sat outside a bureau de change, one of the few businesses still open on the main tourist strip in Senegambia, a cluster of resorts near the capital Banjul. “You know, you find a white lady, you help her, she helps you. It’s because we are poor and we believe they can change our lives for the better.”
With wages for menial workers about £20 to £40 a month and unemployment among the under-30s running at 38 per cent, many young Gambian men see the hordes of European tourists, half of them British, as their ticket out of poverty.
The most successful bumsters have followed their lovers back to Europe, according to Mr Sarr. Others have received cars or homes or regular cash stipends as a result of their liaisons, invariably with older women.
“You don’t ask for money,” Mr Sarr explained. “You tell them, I look after you, you look after me.”
It was rarely as transactional as conventional prostitution. “In new relationships she gives you food or money and later, in the future, when she sees you are good she can change your life. She can give you a new life,” Mr Sarr said. “I am 33 and I want a woman who is maximum 61, or 65, you know, who make each other happy.”
Was he physically attracted to women twice his age? “In the Gambia age is just a number,” he replied. His last girlfriend was 51, from Nottingham, and they were deeply in love.
“There are some bumsters who put one lady on the plane and meet another off it. They are not good bumsters. They give us a bad name,” he said. “I am looking for someone who wants to get me a house here and I will sit here and wait for you and be honest.”
In the bureau de change behind him, one of more than a dozen shops on the street offering cash remittance services, the man behind the counter said that most business came from tourists sending money to Gambian friends. “Romantic friends, friends with benefits, you name it. Mostly it’s tourist friends who are sending money here.”
A well-to-do British woman, who asked not to be named and refused to give her age, said that she had found love with a Gambian man when she first came on holiday two years ago but insisted that she was not a sex tourist.
“Some women do literally just come here to have sex with a black man,” she said. “The sort of women who do that are not the sort of women who are going to get a man in England.”
Mr Sarr was more sympathetic: “Maybe they don’t want to be lonely.”
He said that business had collapsed when the tourists left but he had a new idea.
“Put my name and my number in The Times,” he suggested. “Any woman who wants a good man, they can contact Amadou Sarr.”
BIG BRANDS FUND TERROR
Alexi Mostrous
FEBRUARY 9 2017
SOME OF THE world’s biggest brands are unwittingly funding Islamic extremists, white supremacists and pornographers by advertising on their websites, The Times can reveal.
Advertisements for hundreds of large companies, universities and charities, including Mercedes-Benz, Waitrose and Marie Curie, appear on hate sites and YouTube videos created by supporters of terrorist groups such as Islamic State and Combat 18, a violent pro-Nazi faction.
The practice is likely to generate tens of thousands of pounds a month for extremists. An advert appearing alongside a YouTube video, for example, typically earns whoever posts the video $7.60 for every 1,000 views. Some of the most popular extremist videos have more than one million hits.
Big advertising agencies, which typically place commercials on behalf of clients, have been accused of pushing brands into online advertising to boost their own profits.
Companies are concerned that they are paying huge markups
for digital promotion and receiving “crappy advertising” in return. Leaked documents from one “top-six” agency show that about 40 per cent of its advert-buying income in 2015 came from hidden kickbacks as well as from “other income”. One source said this mainly derived from mark-ups applied to digital commercials.
Analysis by The Times of online extremist content reveals that blacklists designed to prevent digital adverts from appearing next to it are not fit for purpose.
On YouTube, an advert for the new Mercedes E-Class saloon runs next to a pro-Isis video that has been viewed more than 115,000 times. The commercial appears a few seconds after the start of the video, which plays a song praising jihad over a picture of an Isis flag and an anti-aircraft gun. A commercial for the F-Pace SUV from the British carmaker Jaguar runs next to the video.
The luxury holiday operator Sandals Resorts is advertised next to a video promoting al-Shabaab, the East African jihadist group affiliated to al-Qaeda. Last night a Sandals spokeswoman said that it made every effort to stop its adverts appearing next to inappropriate content. It said that YouTube had “not properly categorised the video” as sensitive.
Adverts for Honda, Thomson Reuters, Halifax, the Victoria & Albert museum, Liverpool university, Argos, Churchill Retirement and Waitrose also appear on extremist videos posted on YouTube by supporters of groups that include Combat 18.
After The Times informed Google, which owns the social media platform, it took down some of the videos. It is understood that in some cases advertising revenues had gone to the rights holders of songs used on the videos rather than to the video owner.
A Google spokesperson said: “When it comes to content on YouTube, we remove flagged videos that break our rules and have a zero-tolerance policy for content that incites violence or hatred.
“Some content on YouTube may be controversial and offensive, which is why we only allow advertising against videos which fall within our advertising guidelines.
“Our partners can also choose not to appear against content they consider inappropriate, and we have a responsibility to work with the industry to help them make informed choices.”
Several brands have accused agencies of not acting in their best interests. Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at P&G, the world’s biggest advertiser, warned last week: “We have a media supply chain which is murky at best and fraudulent at worst. We need to clean it up.”
Many of the companies said that they were unaware of and “deeply concerned” by their presence on the sites. They blamed programmatic advertising, a system using complex computer technology to buy digital adverts in the milliseconds that a webpage takes to load. Many agencies have their own programmatic divisions, which often apply mark-ups to digital commercials without the brands’ knowledge.
One Combat 18 video on YouTube, showing an armed man standing in front of a burning swastika, hosts an advert for the hospice charity Marie Curie. An authorised Nissan dealer’s adverts appear on the official YouTube pages of far-right parties including the BNP and the English Defence League, while Sony is promoted on an anti-semitic video entitled: “The cunning of the Jews”.
The retailer Argos is one of a number of brands advertised on sexually explicit YouTube videos. The V&A and Waitrose advertise on the website of the far-right party Britain First. Commercials for HSBC, Eurotunnel and JD Sports appear on “alt-right” and Islamist websites, including one promoting a “Holocaust Amnesia Day”.
Adverts for John Lewis, Dropbox and Disney are embedded in sunnah-online.com. The website hosts lectures by Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, a preacher banned from Britain who has argued that a husband cannot be charged with rape, and Esa al-Hindi, a terrorist sentenced to life imprisonment. Lloyds Bank is advertised on eramuslim.com, a site banned last month by the Indonesian government for allegedly promoting hate speech.
Last night MPs called on Google to explain why hundreds of extremists were making money from advertising on YouTube. Users that intend to make money from advertising must be approved by Google, which is supposed to ensure that videos do not breach the site’s terms and conditions.
“This is deeply disturbing,” Chuka Umunna, a member of the home affairs select committee, said. “There is no doubt the social media companies could be doing far more to prevent the spread of extremist content.”
Programmatic advertising enables agencies to track potential customers around the web and serve them adverts on whichever website they are browsing. Some agencies have been accused of making huge undeclared profits as a result.
“Programmatic advertising is a big concern for us and the whole advertising industry,” Hicham Felter, a spokesman for ISBA, the trade body representing Britain’s biggest advertisers, said. “There is a greater risk of ads appearing in violent, pornographic, extremist and other ‘unsafe’ brand environments because of the volume and speed at which programmatic trading is carried out.” He added: “The suspicion is that the surge in programmatic trading is being fuelled by the profit media agencies can make rather than because it delivers better results for their clients.”
The six top advertising agencies each denied any wrongdoing, conflict of interest or sharp practice and said that their relationships with clients were transparent.
BEING OFFENDED IS OFTEN THE BEST MEDICINE
David Aaronovitch
FEBRUARY 16 2017
IN THE SECTION of its website headed “Attending a Performance”, between the bit on latecomers (they aren’t allowed in) and age restrictions (strictly nobody under the age of six), the Royal Court theatre in London has added a new paragraph headed “TRIGGER WARNINGS”. The theatre tells patrons that it is aware that various plays contain moments that “can be particularly distressing for some individuals” and that “if there are certain themes that you know would cause you extreme distress” then call or email, and someone — a theatre trauma counsellor perhaps — will be able to advise you if that play is triggerish.
Imagine explaining the plot of Oedipus Rex to an inexperienced and delicate would-be playgoer. “He does what to his mother? And both eyes?” The Society of London Theatres went to some lengths to suggest that the Royal Court’s action was nothing new. Had not the Lyric theatre once warned playgoers of a production containing strobe lighting, smoke and nudity? This seems an odd combination of different hazards. Strobes might provoke an epileptic attack and smoke could be a genuine risk for those with breathing problems. But what is the danger of nudity? (To the audience, I mean. I can imagine some of the pitfalls for the actors. Splinters, ridicule, etc.)
The Times’s report on the Royal Court went on to reveal the existence of companies offering writers the service of “sensitivity readers”. These helpmeets will give your manuscript the once-over to make sure that unintended offence is not committed. The author can publish safely knowing that no “Eskimo” has slipped through the Inuit cordon.
This last month there have been occasionally riotous attempts by some students in the US to stop the needy “alt-right” provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at universities, an act roughly equivalent to throwing Brer Rabbit over and over into the briar patch. And mostly based on the argument that his presence will create an unsafe space for people on campus. Hardly a day goes past without a demand from somewhere on the political spectrum for this or that website or image to be taken down by the service providers for fear of the effect they will have on someone else.
It is horribly obvious from the emails and tweets I get and the articles I read that so-called snowflakery is a gift to genuine bigots. It is now routine for any complaint of racism, antisemitism or violent misogyny, however well-founded, to be greeted with the “liberal snowflake” jibe. I find myself in near-constant disagreement with Diane Abbott but her revelations this week about the grim racist and sexist abuse she’s suffered over the years, largely in silence, is a reminder that stoicism is not always rewarded. Readers, just because someone is called a racist doesn’t mean that they aren’t.
&nbs
p; Even so, up to now I have worried principally about the effect of banning people and words on the people who are banned (which could be any of us) and on the societies where the bans take place. But there is a substantial argument that trigger warnings, sensitivity training, safe spaces, no platforms are all based on an assumption of fragility: an assumption that can do harm to those supposedly being protected. In other words, the students who are told to fret about their campuses being a maze of hidden triggers, or who wish to be excused the appearance of unpleasant or challenging views, are likely to be weakened as a result.
Take the triggered playgoer. Let’s suppose there is some upset in the past that can be reignited by a drama on stage. There is no therapeutic regime I can think of that would advise dealing with that upset by avoiding all possible suggestion of it. Usually the best way to conquer a phobia is habituation. If normal life contains discourse that is upsetting, then it’s best to deal with it.
Sir Simon Wessely, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific this week. He reminded listeners of what the establishment, including psychiatrists, believed would happen to British civilians when the bombing of cities began in the Second World War. They’d panic, go mad and run for the hills. But in the event, as Sir Simon said, people “proved more resilient than planners had predicted, largely because [the authorities] had underestimated their adaptability and resourcefulness”.
Indeed this is one of the main conclusions of his distinguished career in psychological disorders, best summed up as “people are tougher than we think”. Sir Simon pointed to the experiences of those caught up in the 7/7 London bombings. Many of those directly affected received a “debriefing” with a trained counsellor. But when Sir Simon and others came to examine the outcomes they discovered that the counselling had often made people worse. Nowadays the policy, he said, is to wait and see if people are still distressed 10 to 12 weeks after a shock, at which point they can be offered help that is usually valuable.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 15