If you’ve got an interest in Celtic and in Scottish football chatter you would need to have been spending time on top of Kilimanjaro without internet access this week to have missed the latest story about an internet racist stumbling into the public eye with all the grace of an elephant stomping through a minefield.
This particular eejit made a video of himself walking through a city centre pub signing a racist song about Scott Sinclair.
Then he posted it online.
The thing with these people; they’re never going to get their Mensa cards.
With the government worrying about extremism online at least they never need to concern themselves with West of Scotland KKK elements constructing their own viable devices. They would blow themselves to smithereens trying to figure out what end to put the batteries in.
I watched the video in question with the bemused fascination you’d have if someone within your line of sight was doing something grotesquely stupid but which couldn’t result in serious injury or death. You know it will end badly, and you’re waiting to see that, but you’re also pondering the person himself, wondering how someone could be so dumb.
When Sylvester Stallone was a kid he had one of the most ridiculous ideas one can imagine; he climbed onto the roof of his house and leapt off, carrying only an open umbrella. He was convinced – he said years later – that he would float to the ground like Mary Poppins. His father’s response to finding him in agony on the tarmac was to say “This kid will never be President of the United States.” And on that we’re all agreed.
That’s what this was like. Like watching someone prepare to try that.
How did that halfwit see this story ending?
That he walked out of the pub in one piece was a minor miracle in itself. The wrong person hears that little ditty of his and he certainly wouldn’t have. But putting it online was an act so reckless it makes doing the deed look like an application to join the Brains Trust. The stupidity of publishing it can barely be contemplated by a rational mind, and it sums up the kind of person who would sing such a song, or carry such sentiments in his head, in the first place.
These people are thick.
Just take a look at the specimens who turn up at the average EDL protest – or, if that doesn’t tickle your funny bone try their Scottish brethren; all the ugliness without the smarts – and you’ll see what I mean. If you could somehow string their collective brain-cells together you wouldn’t have enough to keep a digital wristwatch tickling. They even look like extras from The Hills Have Eyes. Can you imagine the average IQ?
Tell me, do you think they rent banjos for their get-togethers, or do they bring their own?
I’ve got to know the fine folks at Show Racism The Red Card over the last month or so, due to the whole Scott Sinclair thing, and they were stunned by this thing, by the nature of it and by the nature of the person who did it.
You know, it’s almost comforting to talk to them and realise that for all they’ve seen and been involved with that this stuff still shocks them. Thankfully for them it’s not their job to figure these people out any more than it’s mine; that would keep you up nights and to nobody’s gain.
But they do have a job on their hands trying to educate people out of this nonsense.
I don’t envy them that, and I wish them well.
These acts don’t stop with the offence they commit against all of us; what this guy did was an act of sabotage against his own life and the lives of people around him. He’s already lost his job; if he’s got a family they’ll suffer from the damage that does as surely as it will curtail his own trips to the boozer.
They must be so proud of daddy, and how he looks out for them.
And he’s not the only one, of course.
Initially, social media had misidentified this guy, which is one of the dangers of the internet age, but the person they thought was him was scarcely a more tolerable human being, with social media pages weighted down with the kind of filth you’d scrape out of the bottom of a burst sewage pipe. And peppered amongst the spewing hate were pictures of his family, and that’s staggering on so many different levels.
Those people didn’t ask for that, for association with such a warped perspective.
They didn’t do anything to deserve that taint, that stigma.
They sure as Hell didn’t do anything to deserve the myriad attendant consequences which could accrue to standing alongside someone who advertised, so blatantly, his hatred for so many different types of people. Imagine the police give this geezer the same look they’re giving the guy in the video; that’s his job, his livelihood, possibly the home they all live in … catastrophic for his kids, who he clearly views as potential collateral damage in his private war with the world.
I’m not asking these people to give a shit about the rest of us, but they can surely keep their hatred where it doesn’t put those around them on the block.
Who does something like that?
Who takes such a risk with people he’s supposed to love?
These people are a danger to everyone around them, and their attitudes contaminate those people as surely as night follows day. And you worry about their families on a whole other level than just that their actions might have consequences for them.
You can’t be so publicly loathsome and have us trust that you’re raising children to be open minded and tolerant.
You’re wrecking them by shoving these vile ideas into their heads.
I literally do not know where these people come from or what goes through their minds when they do this kind of thing; perhaps I don’t want to. But I know that there are too many of them in our society, as events in London and Manchester have shown us only too well. This isn’t a football post either; I know many Sevco fans who hate these people even more than I do, on a societal level but also because of the shame they bring on something those folk love.
The irony of all this is that most of them consider themselves patriots, nationalists, warriors on the front line for their “culture” and beliefs.
But they are the ultimate pariah’s, the ultimate citizens of nowhere, with no country that would even look the road they are on, and no culture that would embrace them but that which exists in their own minds.
When I write about them I always hope it’ll be for the last time.
It never is.
I won’t do that here, except to say that if we’re lucky it’ll be the last for a while.