Not Like Us

I mean, here is the formula for getting laid, or not:
1) Nice person / attractive = laid
2) Nice person / unattractive = laid
3) Unpleasant person / unattractive = laid
4) Unpleasant person / unattractive = not laid
So I’m not sure whether feminists don’t get laid because they are (usually) unpleasant and (usually) unattractive; or they are unpleasant and unattractive and hence not getting laid and end up as feminists in the same way that useless people in an office end up in HR.

3) Unpleasant person / unattractive = laid
4) Unpleasant person / unattractive = not laid
Yes, that about covers it.

Tim Newman – “If it’s sex we’e talking about, I’m not sure how things could get any bleaker for women who, lacking a warm personality and good looks, choose to shun men at an age where even for ordinary women this is often the only time they’ll be getting any.”
Bum cancer.

WTP – “Yet what is irony but God being sarcastic?”
10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

WTP – Beers sounds great! But I’ve been on the wagon for a while.
I used to have a glorious career as a high functioning alcoholic before my wife told me she was pregnant. It was quite a surprise but I always knew I didn’t want to be like my Dad so after a celebratory half bottle of 21 year old single malt I decided it was time to retire my Oliver Reed hat and store it in my discarded hat drawer along with my deerstalker and the one with fake plastic bird poo that says “DAMN SEAGULLS”.
The first couple of weeks of sobriety were terrible, like being locked in a vegan feminist convention with guest appearances by a swarm of africanised killer bees. I was an advanced enough drinker that I hadn’t suffered a hangover in years so naturally they all came along at once like the ghosts of drunken revels past. And they were not happy, funtimes ghosts who just wanted to see Whoopi Goldberg feel up the wife like Patrick Swayze in ‘Ghost’.
I was bundled up in my pyjamas taking cold and flu remedies for the aches and pains and watching a Harry Potter marathon. Getting sober made me emotional like a teenage girl invited on to the stage and given a pony during a One Direction concert and I lost it and blubbed when poor little Draco’s schemes were foiled by those upstart mudbloods.
I tried Alcoholics Anonymous for a while but they were a bit cliquey and did not appreciate my attempts at lightening the mood by suggesting we do shots. They’ve heard that one before apparently. Also the 12 steps thing was a problem – I have trouble remembering 10 commandments (something about honouring your neighbour’s oxen?) so 12 is at least two steps too many. And they want you to read a big book. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any zombies or spaceships in it, so I didn’t.
In the end I decided that hanging around a bunch of alcoholics was probably going to drive me back to drink so I settled on a 1 step plan of my own devising – don’t drink.
It’s worked out well so far but, by God, being sober is tedious.

Suey Park continues to astonish with the depth of thought only a 23yr-old activist could muster:

A lot of white America and so-called liberal people of color, along with conservatives, ask, “Do I understand context?” And that’s part of wanting to completely humanize the oppressor. To see the white man as always reasonable, always pure, always deliberate, always complex and always innocent. And to see the woman of color as literal. Both my intent behind the [#CancelColbert] hashtag and in my [unintelligible] distance, is always about forcing an apology on me for not understanding their context when, in reality, they misunderstood us when they made us a punch line again. So it’s always this logic of how can we understand whiteness better, and that’s never been my politics. I’ve always been about occupying the margins and strengthening the margins and what that means is that, for a long time, whiteness has also occupied the margins. Like, people of color get in circles with no white people in the room and we see that whiteness still operates. So I think it’s kind of a shock for America that whiteness has dominant society already, it also seeps into the margins. What happens the one time when the margins seep into the whiteness and we encroach on their space? It’s like the sky is falling.

It always sounds like she’s going to make a coherent point but then the non-sequitur festival kicks in. I heard lectures like that in college. Lecture-like lectures, they were.
Oh, here’s a phrase that makes some sense: “no one is ready to flip the switch to make the white person the subject of the archetype.” Meaning that there are no Typical White People in American comedy the way there is a Typical Asian, Typical Latino, etc.
Fair enough. Now let’s go to China, Japan, Korea and look at their comedy. Do they use “typical Americans” while Asians play the everyman roles? Why yes, I believe they do. Do “typical Americans” figure in Latino comedy, African jokes? Yup and yup. Or if they don’t, they should.
And yet

I don’t play by appeasement politics, it is not about getting my oppressors to humanize me. And in that sense I reject the respectability politics, I reject being tone-policed, I think we need to do away with this idea that these structures are … that the prisons can undergo reform and somehow do less violence as a structure. But any example like that.… I don’t want any ally who is going to use my emotional labor with no guarantee of aiding my liberation.

Yeah. Everyone who lives in America is one of the most privileged people in human history, even after factoring in “microaggressions,” so instead of helping the less-fortunate get to our level of prosperity and liberty, let’s fret over typology in our entertainment, on account of it being tantamount to prison violence.
Well done. World’s a MUCH better place now that you’re here.

. . . . kitty came through her catflap dragging her fishing rod with her teeth. She dropped it at my feet and said “Miaow! Miaow! Miaow!”, which is cat talk for “play with me!”.
Well, sometimes.
(Both the box with the fleece and under the dresser are totally unsuitable locations for my kittens, and they must go to a new location I like that they cannot escape from!!!): “Meau!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEStsLJZhzo

Along the same lines, here is what happened when a Dr. Janice Fiamengo was invited to talk on “Rape Culture” at the University of Ottawa.
Note the jeering, blowing of horns and shouting at various stages, ie: whenever Dr Fiamengo or the chap introducing her try to say anything. Incredibly childish behaviour – to such an extent that it is in itself is a bit depressing, quite apart from the controlling behaviour
The talk had to be called off.

Of what use is the campus security? Skipped ahead to around the 27 minute mark and it’s embarrassing how wimpy the appeal was to pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease let the lady speak. Why bother calling security in the first place if they have no authority to remove disruptive individuals from the room? It made the situation worse by undermining even any implied legitimacy of the planned presentation.
Found this presentation by Dr. Fiamengo amusing however
http://doctoronlinechat.com/dr-janice-fiamengo-at-u-of-t-whats-wrong-with-womens-studies-57/

Henry, Geoff & WTP,
Same thing for disrupted lectures and intimidation.
I suppose you have to bear in mind that this kind of behaviour is regarded as a credential by many students on the left, as something to be proud of, as practically self-validating. As something that elevates them within their own immediate peer group. They’re achieving their own in-group status, their imagined radical chic, by imposing on others – people about whom they simply don’t care or for whom they show outright contempt. The disruption, repairs and clearing up are always at someone else’s expense. One might call it parasitic. And the scope for, and pretext for, intimidation, thuggery and exerting power over others is hardly coincidental.
To list every recent and vivid example of this phenomenon would take forever, but a couple should illustrate the mindset. In March 2009, the writer Don Feder tried to engage students at the University of Massachusetts in a discussion of free speech versus so-called “hate speech.” Within 20 seconds, Feder had been shouted down, called a racist and assailed with epithets about his daughter. Despite his repeated calls for civility, Feder wasn’t allowed to speak for longer than three minutes without deafening interruption or further personal abuse – from people who want to show the world just how much they care.
The following month at UNC Chapel Hill, retired congressman Tom Tancredo tried to begin a discussion on the subject of illegal immigration. Students refused to let him speak for more than a few seconds. Collective hissing gave way to banging on the walls and windows, and chants of “No hate speech!” The university’s geography professor Altha Cravey – whose interests include “critical thinking,” “gender, race and class,” and “progressive social change” – saw fit to add her own voice to the chanting, thus signalling her approval of the students’ escalating vehemence.
Suitably encouraged and determined to express their disapproval of what might at some point be said, protesting students began to physically harass Tancredo, holding a banner up against his face, preventing him from speaking at all, while others chanted, “Yes, racists, we will fight, we know where you sleep at night!” (The grounds for calling Tancredo racist were not made clear, though the term was chanted continually, as if repeating the accusation were morally sufficient. One student filmed the growing disruption with a phone camera, only to be obstructed by an indignant young woman who warned him, “You don’t take pictures of racists.”)
Tancredo tried to calm the situation by offering to address the protestors’ complaints at the end of his lecture and asking them to respect other students who’d come to listen and debate. At which point protestors shattered a window, spraying shards of glass into the classroom and onto two nearby students. Fearing further escalation, campus police escorted Tancredo from the room, then, hastily, from campus. He was in effect chased away, like someone who’d blundered into a street gang’s territory.
Interviewed by the Raleigh News and Observer, graduate student Tyler Oakley, the protest organiser, said he was pleased with the disruption and its outcome: “He was not able to practice his hate speech.” This was immediately followed by a defence of the protestors’ censorious thuggery: “You have to respect the right of people to assemble and collectively speak.” You see, the “collective speech” of dogmatic and arrogant leftists, our would-be overlords, trumps that of anyone else.
The historical and psychological precedents for such behaviour somehow escaped our fearless warriors for “social justice.” Like so much else, these details were obscured by a cloud of self-congratulation. And this isn’t anomalous; it’s the standard pattern.

Dicentra – there’s more than one turquoise?
Hal – only French cats say ‘Meau’.

Dicentra – there’s more than one turquoise?
I’m a girl person. We recognize at LEAST two dozen shades ‘twixt green and blue. I just didn’t want to add too many boards because it makes the drop-down menu unwieldy.