A liberal, a fascist, and a nationalist walk into a pub...

... and it ends in an inevitable and tedious argument. For some reason no one has yet managed to create a joke which starts that way; so perhaps mine should be the first. Unfortunately for myself, however, it was a reality: I was the liberal, there was a UK Independence Party Parliamentarian, and there was - alas - a complete racist. Just to add some sense to the occasion I will briefly describe how the following events came out.

Having been invited to a pub quiz I was only to eager to get my drink on. We selected a pub pretty close to us, in a quiet, cobbled, slice of suburbia. It was cute. Bloody expensive, mind. Having supped verily from the font of alcohol, I found myself in a surreal, and alarming, tête-à-tête with a couple of locals. To my front was a man who had been singing Sea Shanties only minutes earlier (some weird Morris Dancing thing), to my front-left was my fascist, and to my full-left was a housemate of mine; and an equally minded gentleman. In fact, it was his red-faced presence which first attracted me to the group. I only went over to enquire why he looked positively furious: as it turned out, he had been trying to argue against both of them simultaneously and, obviously, was having a bit of a hard time keeping his emotions in check. Now, I should just add that my friend is well-read in German politics, and history; so when later the quote "what we're seeing in Germany at the moment, and how they're behaving towards Europe, is exactly what we saw during the formation of the Nazis", crops up - you might understand why he was quite so angry about it. Ignoring the fact that it trivialises a humanitarian abortion, obviously.

Yes, so when I joined the conversation I was greeted with the immortal line "where are you from?", to which I replied "Brighton" (a liberal, gay, free-city), and in return I received a scoff and "yeah, you can tell." That fantastic slice of homophobia set the tone quite nicely for the rest of the conversation. Unfortunately, because I was quite so tiddly, I can't put down everything that happened verbatim, but I will do my best to remember the gist of what was being said - and probably improve my arguments in the meantime.

"How old are you?"
"20."
"So you think you have the age to know about these things?"
"Yes, I think I do. I don't think that age is at all linked with ability to recognise right from wrong."
"I disagree: you weren't alive during X, Y, Z, like I was."
"That's kind of irrelevant. You don't need to have been alive during something to know about it, or to understand it. Your position on Europe, however: I live in Europe - and so by your logic I am fully entitled to an opinion on it. Your position is hypocritical: you purport to be a party ensuring civil liberties and freedoms, and yet are exclusionist and want us to be sovereign."
"We should be a sovereign state. We know what we need, Europe doesn't."
"But what about the economic benefits?"
"We can cope."

-------------- (to indicate that I forget a lot of what happened in the interim.)

"I'm sorry, but we should be stepping up our nuclear arsenal."
"Under what faulty logic does ensuring freedom correlate with stepping up nuclear weaponry? We already have enough firepower in the world to destroy each other a-thousand times over."
"No, we don't."
"No, we only have enough to destroy a few countries by ourselves."
Fascist: "We should use them on *insert any middle-eastern country here*."
"No, we fucking shouldn't. I'm sorry, that's insane. How am I meant to feel safer if everyone in the world used the same policy as you would have us use?"
"They're all building them, we should have them to."
"No, we should step down our programme: two separate deterrent agents don't ensure peace, they cancel each other out. That's stalemate. No one will be using nuclear weaponry because the consequences for themselves would be so insane."
"We need them."
"OK."

--------------- (A long time later).

"England is for English people. We should throw everyone else out."
Exeunt.

I couldn't tolerate that, and so had to leave the pub. Admittedly it was already 2-hours after chucking-out time anyway, but that's beside the point. The landlord followed me (he had joined the conversation some time previously) and apologised repeatedly, saying that they don't "normally get the kind of cunt" in their pub. I said I understood, and we had a debate about multiculturalism; and whilst he was a supporter of UK:IP, he wanted democratic inclusion in Europe. He was a reasonable fellow. Suffice it to say, I didn't blame him, and said that it wouldn't put me off coming back - in fact, it would encourage me to. Good bloke.

Anyway, the point of my story is this: I was too drunk to point out the most ridiculous flaws and fallacies within the Nationalist's ideas. That job, however, would have been pointless for me. Towards the end of the conversation, our fascist got more and more racist, bigoted, homophobic - just all of the horrible things a person can be - and the Nationalist had to continually state that "[this guy] is nothing to do with what we stand for."

If you have to say that aloud, you've got problems.

-------------------------

It's the second political debate tonight (not to be confused with the made-up 'Prime Ministerial Debates', as scheduled by my University's free paper), and I'm going to be glued to my seat I expect. It's on foreign policy, and thus Nick Clegg (Lib Dem) is going to get roasted. He's going to get raped, because no one in this piddly little country seems to understand that he's not profligately pro-immigration: he wants controlled multiculturalism. He's not proscribing opening our doors: Labour have already done that. If people could remember that he'd do fine, but they see him as a leftist moron. Which he's not.

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Title/_/Miss+Me

Buy that. If you buy one track this month it should be that. There's nothing more Summery than something that makes you bop as much as that does. I don't care that the lyrics are shocking and that it's pathetic, it's so fucking happy. Tip: needs to be incrediloud.

Do it. Be happy.

Smile: it'll soon be over.