News for Youse: Right wing Greek MP beats woman on live TV, and other forms of austerity

Back in the good old days, fascists would form a gang and then attack you in a dark alley with an axe—like Makis “the Axe” Voridis and his friends used to do before he became Greece’s Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, and Networks.

But in our brave new world of perpetual crisis, the beatdowns have gone public. Here’s a video showing Greek MP Ilias Kasidiaris landing three blows to the head of a woman, namely communist party member Liana Kanelli—on live television.

Kasidiaris, who was “responding” to allegations that he was involved in an armed robbery in 2007, is a member of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which took seven percent of the vote in May’s parliamentary elections. After storming out of the studio like a giant six-year old, police issued a warrant for his arrest.

We expect to see more of this kind of thing, as the age of extremism rumbles on and the thugs on the ground attack the body while the generals in suits administer a more lasting kind of violence. Which brings us to AIG CEO Robert Benmosche, who sat in his seaside villa in Dubrovnik over the weekend and declared to “governments worldwide” that “Retirement ages will have to move to 70, 80 years old…”—a statement that presumably prompted a chorus of earnest head-nodding among our own, homegrown extremists.

Personally, I’d rather take the three punches to the head if it was somebody like Dean Del Mastro who was doing the punching, at least based on the embarrassing baby-spazz the Conservative MP for Peterborough throws at the 1:24 mark of this beloved old chestnut:

Del Mastro, of course, was debating in the much-loved clip whether or not sex could be considered a “science”. In his defence, sex actually does fall into the category of speculative fiction if you’ve never had it. Perhaps a little more relevantly, Del Mastro is the pointsman in the HarperCons defence against the thousands of complaints of fraud being investigated by Elections Canada—including his own questionable finances in 2008.

Del Mastro might have more success if he focused less on trying to cover up his party’s illegitimate “majority” and more on his pathological loathing of human biology, especially since the newest apocalypse is a sexual one. According to the World Health Organization, gonorrhea has mutated into a treatment-resistant superbug, and is spreading alarmingly quickly.

Along with the itching, the blindness, and the lies you have to tell your wife, gonorrhea can result in infertility, indicating once again—as we’ve asserted here before at News for Youse—that Children of Men is an impressively prophetic piece of cinema.

Especially if it’s mingled, in this case, with a smidgen of David Cronenberg’s venereal zombie masterpiece, Shivers. Oh, did I mention Cronenberg? Cause here’s the Straight’s brand new interview with him. And Robert Pattinson, who, keeping on theme, recently confirmed that he’s been “doing it” with his boyfriend, Kristen Stewart.