Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
Remember when masturbation was something everybody did but no one talked about? It was not most people’s idea of a conversation starter. Certainly nobody boasted about being a self-abuser. It was seen as a sorry substitute for sex, a sad stand-in for intimacy. Not any more. Masturbation has been reinvented as ‘self-love’, a healthy and
I wish people would stop trying to raise my awareness. I can’t so much as surf the web or stroll a high street these days without being accosted by one of the aware, who is always hellbent on making me as aware as he is, usually about some disease or, if you’re really lucky, the
Jerusalem Talking to Israelis feels a bit like talking to fans of Millwall FC. ‘No one likes us, we don’t care,’ sing Millwall fans. Israel is the undoubted Millwall of global affairs, loathed by almost every Westerner who considers himself decent and they’ve adopted a similar cri de coeur. ‘Europe doesn’t like us. Americans
There are lots of weird campaign groups around today, but none so weird as a band of unmerry men called ‘the intactivists’. If you’ve never heard of the intactivists and you’re a bit squeamish, or you are reading this while lunching on a sausage roll, then you might want to turn the page now. Intactivists
In the modern political firmament, is there any creature more ridiculous than the agitating intern? Interns are rising up. These one-time coffee-makers have reimagined themselves as history-makers, fancying that they are latter-day Wilberforces striking a blow against the ‘internship slave trade’. They’re demanding back pay, retrospective remuneration for all that hard graft in air-conditioned offices
It’s the funniest scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. A parable-seeking mob gathers outside Brian’s home. They think he’s the messiah and will dispense some wisdom they might live their lives by. Instead he tells them to think for themselves, because ‘You are all individuals’. ‘We are all individuals,’ the mob intones, robotically. ‘I’m
Last week, at the select committee on the same-sex marriage bill, a lawyer for the Christian Institute revealed that a teacher had been disciplined for refusing to read to her charges a book about gay penguins. It is par for the course to teach kids about adult stuff through animal tales. So it makes sense
When John Kelly was transported from Tipperary to Tasmania in 1841, for stealing pigs, he couldn’t have imagined that 170 years later there’d be an exhibition of paintings of one of his offspring at Dublin’s plush Museum of Modern Art (until 27 January). Yet here he is, Ned, the 19th-century Oz-born bushranger and cop-killer, as
There are many weird things about Las Vegas, from the truck that drives around offering ‘Hot Babes Direct To You’ to the entrepreneurial hard-up young man on the Boulevard who holds a placard saying: ‘Kick me in the nuts for $20. No joke. No protective cup.’ But the thing I find weirdest is that you
Two hundred years ago, the creepy Revd Thomas Malthus would take to his pulpit to rail against the copulating lower orders. Author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus was one of the first promoters of the overpopulation thesis. If people — especially poor people — didn’t stop having so many babies,
If, like me, you thought the British Board of Film Classification was staffed by red pen-wielding fuddy-duddies, think again. At the entrance to its office in Soho Square, I’m greeted by its youthful, engaging press officer. Wearing what I think young people call ‘killer heels’, and treating me to an anecdote about how she copes
We live in thoroughly PC times, when tweeting rotten things about a black footballer can land you in jail and opposing gay marriage can see you branded a bigot. But there are still two groups of people it’s OK to hate: chavs and toffs. The tracksuit-wearing poor and the tweed-covered rich. The blinged-up yoof who
The last politically correct form of prejudice is against football’s working-class supporters There is a brilliant irony to the campaign to ‘kick racism out of football’: its backers — the commentators and FA suits driving this petit-bourgeois push to clean up footie — think in a similar way and use very similar lingo to the
Athens The manner in which George Papandreou was ousted has shocked Greeks. ‘It’s a foreign invasion, a takeover, only without tanks’, says Calchas, an angry young man whom I find marching around Syntagma Square in front of the Greek parliament, with 100 or so others, all clutching rolled-up red flags. Other marchers mutter about ‘neo-colonialism’.
CNN recently referred to Birmingham as ‘the unlikely birthplace of heavy metal’. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition entitled Home of Metal (until 25 September). All the gnarly-mouthed, guitar-thrashing kings of metal hail from the Black Country: Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Napalm Death. Walsall boy Noddy Holder, lead singer of semi-metal
Something queer has happened to Amy Winehouse in the six weeks since her death: she has been turned from an anti-rehab rebel into the poster girl for rehab. The tragic Camden songstress was famous for singing ‘They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no’. Yet now her demise is
If you were sexually abused by a Catholic priest nearly 50 years ago, and that priest was now dying or dead, would it not be wise to keep it to yourself? This awkward question invaded my mind as I watched last week’s BBC1 documentary Abused: Breaking the Silence. It featured mature, respectable and successful men
As someone who was born ‘the other side of the tracks’, I really wanted to like Owen Jones’s book, which sets out to expose how in recent years the working classes have become ‘objects of fear and ridicule’. It’s true; they have. The problem is, however, that he implores us to pity them rather than
If you had to think of one city on earth where the rulers should not try to impose a standard of ‘good behaviour’, it would surely be New York. Who in their right mind would seek to sanitise this concrete jungle, to sedate the city that never sleeps, to demand conformism and obedience from the
Colonel Gaddafi and his mad bald son are not the only has-been regime desperately clinging to power. In Britain, too, a gaggle of once-powerful but now isolated authoritarians is doing everything it can to continue dominating people’s lives. These unelected know-it-alls exerted an extraordinary and baleful influence over public life during the 13 years of
