Best Of

From the NTA’s.

This is the great British Public for you.



Freddie Flintoff - Nearly Died
Rob Burrow - Died
Strictly Amy - Living with cancer
Molly Mae - Split up with her boyfriend

Which one wins the NTA… absolute bollocks #ntaawards


https://x.com/jord9393/status/1965884420617023623?s=61

An award show that is voted for by ITV viewers giving a number of awards to ITV programs and presenters - it's not a surprise.

Also Molly Mae's show was a lighter touch with a large audience than the other programs.

I’m having a day of ignorance the last 24 hours. I didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was save a vague sense he was someone American, I’d no idea what the NTA was until this post, and I’ve never heard of Mollie Mae.

Phew that is a relief. I'm not feeling so stupid now. All over my head. I didn't even have a vague sense re Charlie Kirk.

I hadn't heard of him either.

Yeah me neither. Seems like a thoroughly nasty piece of work but it should go without saying that his murder is a terrible thing.
After Sandy Hook though I decided not to allow myself to get too upset about US gun violence. It's like a drug addict who keeps relapsing and OD'ing. People who apparently have no desire to help themselves don't really deserve our sympathy.

Not a thoroughly nasty piece of work at all. A committed Christian (which I find bonkers but it takes all sorts) and articulated the views that are anti-fashionable and, no doubt (@Foxy?) biblically-based. I have heard him articulate support for Israel in terms of Jesus being Jewish and walking on water wherever it was but which is now modern-day Israel.

I have a lot of sympathy for saying committed religionists are weird, albeit, ironically, essentially human (and therefore scared which makes them turn to an unseen greater power), but not "thoroughly nasty".

Whether committed religionists are nice or nasty, and in what mixture, is a question of fact in every case. There are many traps for the unwary 'committed' believer - like the sort who end up backing 'Jesus, babies, guns, whites, English speaking, autocrats, kleptocrats'.

There is however a good deal to be said for 'uncommitted religionists'. The sort, of which there were quite a lot, who thought that the best way of loving and honouring God (whichever god she was) was to live a life according to principle and moral fundamentals, and to assume all power is service and that if god made and cared for all things then in our own tiny sphere of life we we could best honour and worship god by caring for others and doing no evil, and not leaving out the unlovable and the unloved to the best of our finite abilities.

This is by the way, a perfectly possible and sensible reading of what Jesus - and I suspect quite few other religious leaders - were on about. Significantly more likely than that Jesus was really on about the merits of gun ownership and white supremacy.

Yeah but you don't really need Jesus and the whole on the third day he was risen bit to live a "good" life.

Of course, that goes without saying. I didn't compose the last 2000 years of human and religious history. We are where we are.

A fully formed religion needs a bit more to get going than 'be nice'. In particular early Christianity resolved a couple of tricky issues such as the Jewish and pagan rather gloomy expectations of the afterlife, replacing them with hope; it promoted strongly the significance of very poor and oppressed humanity - ie most of it, in the great scheme of things, something Romans were not great at. Also the religion set up the idea, still immensely strong, of a jurisdiction on the basis of humble servanthood rather than Caesar like power.

Despite the epic fails of the last 2000 years, I still like all those things, and FWIW I think each of them ultimately derive from the thoughts of Jesus himself, who was a very remarkable person.