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Veteran comic actor and director John Cleese DPA/PA Images

John Cleese versus the Irish language Don't mention the 'bh' war

Cleese said that Irish names look like deliberate attempts to mislead innocent people but this is not the case, writes Darach Ó Séaghdha.

IN THE MODERN WORLD, we tend to assign more value to skills and innate qualities that are profitable than we do to refined capacities of appreciation. Being handsome or being able to kick a ball very far in the direction of your choosing are more highly prized than having a great nose for cheeses, a keen ear for operas or an extremely perceptive palate for wines.

The exception to this rule is humour – being regarded as having a sense of humour is seen as far more important than being funny.

While funny people certainly are enjoyed, comedians are in more of a hurry to change jobs than any other kind of entertainer: guitarists and ballerinas who become famous aren’t constantly planning on using their platform to become TV presenters or a children’s authors. They just want to play more guitar or dance more ballet.

Being funny is grand, but having a sense of humour is expected of everyone from plate-dropping waiters to the Taoiseach.

Once the scales of social expectation tip to where the expectation of a listener to laugh at a joke exceeds the expectation of a joker to tell a very good one, we get the OBOYR (only buzzin’ off yeh, relax) problem: where any obnoxious comment can be excused through the loophole that the teller was actually trying to be funny and the listener lacked the refined comic palate to truly appreciate it.

This problem came to the fore this week when veteran comic actor John Cleese attempted to make light of the spelling conventions of the Irish language.

Taking to Twitter to complain about a “hatchet piece” about him by Giles Coren in the Sunday Times, he made a remark about an “unearned sense of superiority”, a comment which prompted a tweeter from Dublin to ask Cleese what he had said about Irish names before.

Apparently lacking the self-awareness to realise that this rhetorical question was a dig at what he’d just said, Cleese replied that Irish names “look like deliberate attempts to mislead innocent people”. 

This started to generate a bit of animated discussion, but things really kicked off when he subsequently asked, in reply to a woman explaining how a h in Irish changes the consonant before it, “if an Irish bh is a v sound, why don’t you write it with a v?”

The answer to the bh/v question is that Irish is a bit like Latin, which Cleese studied at public school. Slight changes are made to the spellings of verbs in different tenses and to nouns depending on where they sit in a sentence (the nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative cases).

(Can’t see the tweet? Click here

Rather than being an attempt to mislead anyone, adding a h (a séimhiú) to bosca (a box) when it is in the genitive case (an bhosca) is a way of showing a reader that these are in fact, the same word. This is especially useful if mo bhean (my wife) is inside mo veain (my van). 

However, Cleese is not interested in learning Irish. As a multilingual Cambridge graduate, he has certainly been exposed to the idea that different languages have different spelling and pronunciation conventions – key scenes in Life of Brian and A Fish Called Wanda hinge on it.

If he was sincerely curious, he could have pursued the matter offline. But he was being a very naughty boy, confident in the knowledge that no matter how unfunny he was, the burden of humour would fall on those who didn’t enjoy his joke.

There is comic potential in cultural differences and comedians on both sides of the Irish Sea have had fun with how Irish names appear strange to English monoglots. However, the world has changed since Lee Mack’s routine on the subject, and the three years since Brexit (which non-resident Cleese has been openly in favour of) have cast a hard light on how little British people know or care about Ireland.

There’s no shortage of examples of this – threats of starvation, returning to the border arrangements of the Troubles and not knowing that unionists don’t vote for nationalists as are only three cases selected from actual government MPs. 

It is in this context that hundreds of Irish people took to Twitter to offer Cleese some constructive criticism. Unlike his original comment, many of these replies were very, very funny.

Hopefully, we will read them and learn something; nobody is saying that he can’t make a joke, we’ll just need it to be much, much, wittier next time.

Darach’s new book Craic Baby is the follow-up to his acclaimed Motherfoclóir and is out now under the Head of Zeus imprint.

He runs @theirishfor Twitter account and the @motherfocloir podcast.

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    Mute MrJohne
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:43 AM

    this is something to keep an eye on…there is a number of videos surfacing about clashes happening along the border this year.

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    Mute Sean Bradley
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    Jun 16th 2020, 12:22 PM

    @MrJohne: Ya and Trump getting cosy with India, watch this space.

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    Mute Mary Fitzsimons
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    Jun 16th 2020, 1:08 PM

    @MrJohne: this ‘disputed area’ is home to Ladakhis, and going by china’s record with Tibetans , i can assure you they would rather Ladakh be part of India than China

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    Mute Warren Mcdermott
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    Jun 16th 2020, 1:31 PM

    @MrJohne: this is going on alot longer than a year these 2 hav been at each other for awhile and it’s starting to kick off,this was a conflict was that tipped as been a major one if and when it kicked off

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    Mute Crispy Brown
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:03 PM

    @Sean Bradley: Mentioning Trump in every article is getting boring now.

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    Mute Wendy He
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:47 PM

    @Mary Fitzsimons: Doubt it. Have you been paying attention to the pandemic in India these days?

    I feel truly sorry for the common Indian people.

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    Mute Tricia G
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:48 AM

    So China has finally decided to push into the disputed territory….well they’ve been leading up to this for a while. They’re TRYING to trigger a fight because they want that land.

    And they’re probably hoping India will back down. So this all has the hallmarks of a seriously scary conflict between two nuclear powers.

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    Mute Andre le Flohic
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    Jun 16th 2020, 1:56 PM

    @Tricia G: they want to arrive to the sea. Be it through India or Pakistan

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    Mute Wreck Tangle
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    Jun 16th 2020, 2:43 PM

    @Tricia G:

    Bit of a moot point. Why else would a country trigger a fight at a border?

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    Mute Derek Durkin
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    Jun 16th 2020, 10:54 PM

    @Tricia G: China definitely has designs on being the world’s only Superpower and it’s coming if we continue on this trajectory. It’s purchase of assets around the globe is mind blowing. Their ideology is also very prevalent today, in many guises.

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:16 PM

    @Tricia G: I’d say keep an eye on India because they are clearly trying to encroach the north. Conflicts/firing with Pakistan in April, with Nepal last week and now with China? What’s got into them?

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    Mute Brian Ó Dálaigh
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:51 PM

    @Seriousnojoke: The issue with Pakistan is a direct result of a failure to properly delineate a border between the two countries at their separation and independence. The issues with Nepal (who have been receiving military and economic support from China) and China itself are very much tied into Chinese expansionism. China claims vast swathes of India, (historically, though no longer officially) all of Nepal, Bhutan, northern areas of Myanmar and Vietnam, parts of Tajikistan (which it occupies), parts of Kyrgyzstan, parts of Kazakhstan, (historically, but not officially) all of Mongolia and large chunks of Russia as well as maritime territories disputed with Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines on which it is currently constructing military bases. But, yeah, India is the problem…

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 17th 2020, 1:05 AM

    @Brian Ó Dálaigh: Thanks for the history class on ancient China. Will you do one for the Roman Empire or the British Empire? Why should anyone trust for example the UK to expand into their old colonies with any intentions other than influencing and exploiting them for resources and cheap labour?

    By the way, India wasn’t a country in history as it is today. It was a bunch of small kingdoms with different religions and cults scattered all over the place until the Brits came along and combined them for the likes of opium plantations and illegal trades.

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    Mute Brian Ó Dálaigh
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    Jun 17th 2020, 1:57 AM

    @Seriousnojoke: Ancient China? Huh, I never knew the Chinese Communist Party was ancient history, as I am speaking of current Chinese geopolitical claims (those unofficial claims I mentioned are still official ROC (Taiwan) claims, too). Those artificial islands off the shore of the Philippines? Ming Dynasty maybe? You’d know better than me, I guess. And, seeing as we’re talking about modern geopolitics, I’m not sure why you’re bringing up Ancient India. I’m also not really sure why speaking of Ancient China (which I wasn’t) is bad but speaking of Ancient India (which you were) is good for the debate. Likewise, I’m not sure of the relevance of British antics during the days of their empire and modern Chinese occupations of, say, Tajikistan. It almost sounds like you’re trying to deflect.

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 17th 2020, 2:02 AM

    @Brian Ó Dálaigh: Since you’re so unsure about everything maybe get a grip on yourself and read a bit more?

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    Mute Brian Ó Dálaigh
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    Jun 17th 2020, 4:01 AM

    @Seriousnojoke: You’re taking a situation in which there are two parties, applying all guilt to only one and absolving the other of any wrongdoings, blatantly ignoring the historical events leading to the situation and completely ignoring the geopolitical claims of one of the parties. You then launched into verbal diahorrea and ad hominems while at the same time pulling out strawman arguments and interjecting with completely irrelevant trivia. Perhaps you are the one who needs to get a grip and read some more.

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    Mute Carlin Ite
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:49 AM

    Two nuclear powers with tough guy image leaders one of which has a good relation with trump, what could go wrong.

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 16th 2020, 12:00 PM

    @Carlin Ite: Was thinking the same. The area has been in dispute for decades and right after Trump visited India the conflict escalated. Coincidence? I think not!

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    Mute PV Nevin
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    Jun 16th 2020, 12:17 PM

    @Seriousnojoke:
    Trump confers with Modi over explosive India-China border dispute
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/08/inch-j08.html

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    Mute Andre le Flohic
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    Jun 16th 2020, 2:00 PM

    @Carlin Ite: for decades India has over 40.000 soldiers in ladakh with planes and tanks and for decades now day I have day out they have stopped China. Ladakhi don’t want to become like tibetans : Chinese second class citizens

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:08 PM

    @PV Nevin: Thanks for sharing, that explains a lot. India recently became provocative in border fights with Pakistan, Nepal and now China. They are very likely to have got the encouragement from Washington since both governments have done a terrible job in the pandemic and badly need deflection and distraction.

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    Mute David Finn
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:57 AM

    Modi will inevitably back down in the end. India can’t countenance an armed conflict with China – only one winner there. Putin (India’s sometime ally) will not wish to get involved in this, and it would be very unwise to expect any support from Trump’s USA on this. Similar Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea – the building of artificial islands and the like – have been allowed to proceed more or less unchecked for years now despite sabre rattling by a number of countries including the Philippines, Japan, and Vietnam.

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    Mute TL55
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    Jun 16th 2020, 12:12 PM

    @David Finn: They haven’t backed down in the past and will probably be thinking “if we back down now what will the Chinese try next?”
    Some aggression for a while between both sides followed by joint pulling back is the most likely outcome.

    India is the one country in the world with sufficient manpower to match the Chinese so both will try to find away out without losing too much face.

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    Mute Sean Bradley
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    Jun 16th 2020, 12:29 PM

    @David Finn: No I think Trump doesn’t care for the Chinese government and he been speaking kindly of Modi, if it does escalate US army would side with India and help them, after the US elections of course.

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    Mute Bhardwaj44
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    Jun 16th 2020, 1:39 PM

    @David Finn: You are wrong on your assumption. Similar conflict started in Doklam in 2017 and chinese had to back down. We should wait and watch

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    Mute Bhardwaj44
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    Jun 16th 2020, 1:50 PM

    china ccp is trying to divert attention of its people form the crisis their country is going through. Problem withe their government seems they don’t let people know the truth.

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    Mute ed w
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    Jun 16th 2020, 12:23 PM

    now that’s something we can do without

    24
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    Mute Ivan Counihan
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    Jun 16th 2020, 8:51 PM

    Given that you have the Himalaya dividing the two of them a mass invasion is unlikely, but I’d like to see them try. Would be reminiscent of when they tried to invade North Vietnam in 1979. The Chinese called it a victory, but in fact they were beaten 3 to 1 by local hills people

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    Mute Handsome McWonderful
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:44 PM

    Call me old fashioned but give me fist fight over a full on nuclear apocalypse any day

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    Mute Jangles
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    Jun 17th 2020, 12:03 AM

    @Handsome McWonderful: Yea sure its widely reported that JFK gave Khrushchev a straightener around the back of the UN building in NYC to sort out the Cuban missile crisis.

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    Mute Handsome McWonderful
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    Jun 17th 2020, 8:56 AM

    @Jangles: All diplomatic disputes should be settled by straighteners. Barnier and Boris should go at it mano a mano, and sort out this Brexit mess once and for all.

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    Mute Kartz
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:42 PM

    20 dead on the Indian side and 43 dead or seriously injured on the Chinese side dead according to Indian media(quoting army intercepts). Attacked each other with iron rods & stones, but reportedly no shot was fired.

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    Mute Bhardwaj44
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    Jun 17th 2020, 9:37 AM

    Some people here look like ccp mouthpiece who want everyone to believe what they say however don’t allow anyone to question( not even their own people) it.
    CCP is more dangerous than corona virus

    10
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    Mute trebloc01
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:34 PM

    You mean the stop the riots in Hong Kong virus

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    Mute Brian Flavin
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    Jun 16th 2020, 10:50 PM

    WW3

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    Mute Fabio Dillon
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    Jun 17th 2020, 2:07 PM

    @Brian Flavin: already started in Syria years ago

    1
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    Mute Brian Flavin
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    Jun 17th 2020, 10:07 PM

    @Fabio Dillon: not bigger war

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:00 PM

    First with Pakistan, then Nepal, and now China?? India gotta cool his jets and back off from his northern neighbours.

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    Mute Kartz
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    Jun 17th 2020, 12:50 AM

    @Seriousnojoke: Your suggestion has been noted and binned.

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    Mute CryptoWilf
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    Jun 17th 2020, 1:53 AM

    @Seriousnojoke: Errrr, I’m hoping you’re aware of the amount of crazy expansionism in recent years that China has been pulling yeah? They’ve claimed territories belonging to Vietnam and the Philippines, this has all been in the quite recent past.

    I think China are starting to get a bit too confident in their own abilities, and may well find themselves waking up with a crowd around them.

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    Mute Adi
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    Jun 17th 2020, 2:19 AM

    @Seriousnojoke: Its the other way around. India has been a ‘big softie’ for years -tolerating incursions etc for YEARS without retaliating. They consistently turn the other cheek and their agressive neighbours consistantly exploit this. India does not want to go to war. What would happen here if inside our border foriegn troops started making camp and claiming the place as theirs?

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    Mute Adi
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    Jun 17th 2020, 2:25 AM

    @Seriousnojoke: Its the other way around. India has been a ‘big softie’ for years -tolerating incursions etc for YEARS without retaliating. They consistently turn the other cheek and their agressive neighbours consistantly exploit this. India does not want to go to war. What would happen here if inside our border foreign troops started making camp and claiming the place as theirs?

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    Mute Seriousnojoke
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    Jun 17th 2020, 11:02 AM

    @Adi: Indian army initiated unprovoked ceasefire violations in Kashmir against Pakistan TODAY. Tell me why they are acting so aggressive lately. Is it because Modi thinks he has Trump’s support?

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    Mute Bhardwaj44
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    Jun 17th 2020, 2:43 PM

    @Seriousnojoke: Indian Army got support of Modi who got support of people. Now a country has communist and Islamist power as their neighbors so you tell how to deal with them.

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    Mute John Moloney
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    Jun 16th 2020, 11:57 PM

    You know there’s trouble when the photos start to get burned

    5
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    Mute Tim Hamill
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    Jun 17th 2020, 9:17 AM

    @John Moloney: and fly swatters

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    Mute Vinylman_Teaboy
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    Jun 17th 2020, 1:33 PM

    Here we go

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    Mute Angry_Man41
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    Jun 18th 2020, 11:45 PM

    China should conform and not going around the place swaggering like a school yard bully

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