While I take a short break, here’s an attempt to distract you with some items from the archives:

The Importance Of Plumbing.

A tale of tax, utopia, and human faeces.

Peer-Reviewed, You Say.

On self-other paradigms and situated bodies.

Have You Tried Storing Them Upright?

On crime, incarceration and dubious conclusions.

Footwear Enthusiast.

Cross-dressing bedlamite attacks women, steals their shoes.

For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

From the pages of Vogue, where upscale ladies probe the issues of the day:

Specifically,

That’s the issues of their day, of course, not necessarily yours.

The author of the above, Ms Chanté Joseph, formerly of the Guardian and a stipulator of pronouns, has a theory to share.

“Quite culturally loser-ish.” I’m guessing the intended readership may be the kinds of ladies whose days are driven by endless niche anxieties regarding in-group status. Of “social benefits” and seeming, as if that were the primary function of an intimate relationship or a lifelong pairing. 

Writer and activist. Because one can’t just be a writer. Also, norminess. And dear Lord, we can’t have that.

If you say so, madam.

Ah, the innate loveliness of women. The tender, caring sex.

But remember, it’s totally not about image. Just the embarrassment of an Instagram feed cluttered with obsolete boyfriends. Like unfashionable shoes.

One more time:

I would guess that these are not routine anxieties for regulars of this parish.

Behold, the social blemish of norminess. Or possibly conservative.

Again, the loveliness of women. And then there’s the implication that one might tailor one’s romantic life to the preferences of random strangers on the internet. Dating, or not dating, for likes.

Readers will, I suspect, have registered that these agonies seem to bedevil those who inhabit a world of activists, influencers, and self-styled content creators, and in which one has to be mindful of any shifts in the script. Because those other bitches are always watching.

Don’t look at me. I have no idea. Apparently, women are being “forced to re-evaluate our blind allegiance to heterosexuality.”

We seem to have veered off a cliff. In a cloud of old gender-studies lecture notes.

Never. Not once, you hear.

At which point, readers may be left wondering – among other things – whether the above is an elaborate attempt to rationalise sour grapes, a matter of loudly dismissing that which isn’t easily had. Of, as they say, cope.

Possibly on account of being the kind of women whose world is one of influencers and activists, of Instagram narcissism, and whose preoccupations include denouncing heteronormativity while needlessly stipulating one’s pronouns. The kind of women who fret about whether having a husband or partner, someone to love and be loved by, looks “culturally loser-ish,” or unfashionably “Republican.”

Not the most obvious enticement for a man with other options.

Update, via the comments:

The piece quoted above would seem to fit a genre of article, typically appearing in progressive publications, in which unendearing women try to conjure some elaborate social or political explanation for why they’re so often found unendearing.

It’s also an article in which almost every other assumption is alien to me.

I’m still trying to imagine being the kind of person who frets about whether coupledom or singledom is the more fashionable “flex.” The kind of person who stresses about how an intimate relationship will seem – say, to strangers on the internet – and whether that relationship denotes norminess and therefore being insufficiently radical. Whether it will look too conservative, too “Republican.”

It strikes me as quite bonkers. A weird and impractical set of priorities. And should it need saying, a recipe for misery.

At last, a camera for your toilet bowl. || And lo, her chakras were aligned. || Can cleaning your car increase its value? || I have questions regarding the décor. || On elephants’ toenails. || On self-knowledge and its absence. || At last, a miracle breakthrough. || The British in Benidorm, 1983. || Meanwhile, in the world of art. || And in musical theatre news. || A brief history of the sewing machine. || The man who walked on his head, 1904. (h/t, Neatorama) || Sign language translation gloves. || She’s swag and awesome, you hear? || Today’s word is inadvisable. || The story of the THX Deep Note. || She’s squeezing out the patriarchy with her pelvic floor exercises. || He caused a crash, stole the attending ambulance, then crashed that too. || He has cute little girl feet. || Some unfortunate flaccidity.

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Lifted from the comments, Mr Burkett ponders crime and its apologists:

A thread ensues.

Regarding the consequent conflictedness and anxiety, all that progressive wrongness, these three posts include some fairly vivid illustrations of the phenomenon.

Among which, a claim that more theatre for schoolchildren would somehow deter the kinds of creatures who repeatedly and gleefully sucker-punch elderly ladies for being the wrong race, and a chap who insists that women should allow themselves to be mugged at bus stops lest their mugger, out on probation, come to harm.

Oh, and the belief, expressed tearfully and at length by a Guardian columnist, that when you find your home being burgled in the middle of the night, the real victims, the people deserving of sympathy and indulgence, are the ones breaking into your home while brandishing carving knives and then driving off with your valuables in your car.

In the examples featured in the posts above, the perpetrator is typically black and the apologist white. This recurring racial hang-up is often made explicit – as when the activist and lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, mentioned here, dismissed objections to being burgled as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes,” while telling Guardian readers that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

Mr Stafford Smith went on to chide and insult the victims of burglary, and the law-abiding generally, while offering implausible excuses for those who break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again with ever greater boldness. And none of these claims were challenged, at all, in the Guardian‘s fawning interview. Apparently, among many progressives, such contrivance is not only congenial, but terribly high-status.

Perversity as piety.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

The great political divide – Guardian-style:

Yes, an “always Labour” politics teacher clashes with a GP who votes “Labour every general election.” No crockery was thrown, you’ll be astounded to hear. To spare you the unbearable suspense, both dislike Mr Trump. That’s pretty much it. Both ordered cocktails and had “a really positive experience” chatting to the other. Or, in effect, to themselves.

Really getting to the bottom of things.

Previously in the world of vastly different people with vastly different views:

The Guardian series Dining Across The Divide, in which supposedly contrasting characters thrash out their differences, should any materialise at some point, is credited to Zoe Williams, whose mouthings have proved so inadvertently entertaining to regulars of this parish.