Elsewhere (170)

SE Smith in the ‘Guardian’ on why tech isn’t the bad guy, it’s capitalism: “We’re constantly enmeshed in our devices because we have to be. Most of us work in professions with an unreasonable expectation of employees, believing that we should be available at all times to perform all labour. That’s been facilitated by tech, which makes it easier to contact people, but tech shouldn’t shoulder all the blame. It’s capitalism that took advantage of this opportunity to work it, turning it into something that could be used to control employees and keep them constantly within arm’s reach. “
Note that Royal ‘We’. SE Smith’s high powered job, always in demand? “SE Smith is a writer who lives and works in northern California, covering social justice issues.”

Aaaaaaaaahhhh!
JFC!!! Warn a guy before ya do something like that, Dave!
Oh chit…you can just rock me to sleep tonight…I am never going to a party again…

“Girl, don’t you know that shit’ll rob you of ambition?”
“Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV.”
— Jackie Brown

My interests lie primarily in the area of social justice and I am especially interested in gender, class, race, disability rights, and the intersections thereof. I also love pop culture critique, analysis, and criticism, particularly with reference to pop culture depictions of gender and disability.

The process as described is clearly backwards. More likely someone went in search of some deep book learnin’ to make themselves feel less trivial for being suckered by the intrigues of reality television.
She is a looker though, so there is that at least.

I also love pop culture critique, analysis, and criticism, particularly with reference to pop culture depictions of gender and disability
Just what the world needs- a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of “Ironside”.

I also love pop culture critique, analysis, and criticism,
It’s odd how “pop culture critique” has become an imagined qualification, something intended to impress and signify status. As if it were both incredibly rare and terribly difficult, and not just the least demanding avenue for mediocre students.

Ironside contains way too much common sense for the likes of her, Lancastrian. When he’s confined to a wheelchair, he refuses to play the victim, and finds a police job he can do. When he catches Mark Sanger about to commit a crime, instead of running him in, he puts him to work. Because he needs an assistant, and Mark clearly needs a work ethic. I remember thinking the last time I saw a rerun that it was all faintly Randian.
There was one episode where a father tries to understand his hippie kids by joining the Haight-Ashbury crowd and dropping out (the show was set in San Francisco, remember). Things do not go well for his wife, and in the end Ironside delivers a lecture on how he, as a father, ought to be setting an example of responsibility because his kids’ carefree lifestyle depends on him, as does his wife.
Smith wouldn’t like it at all.

Peter Falk had a glass eye. Colombo probably didn’t; I imagine monocularism would be a bar to joining the American police, as it would impair marksmanship. So just as Falk played a detective, his glass eye was playing a real one…

Tom – So just as Falk played a detective, his glass eye was playing a real one
Well, it wasn’t terribly convincing.
Just like Gil Gerard as a sort of Lidl’s Han Solo wasn’t convincing when he sucked in his beer gut.

David – So the White Man stole the Black Man and Red Indian’s BBQ. Infamy!
As European Americans acclimated themselves to the custom of forsaking utensils and even plates to eat more like enslaved Africans and Native Americans – from spareribs to corn on the cob – they used their hands in an unprecedented break with Old World formalities.
Yes, I can imagine that caused quite a stir in the 18th century colonial country clubs. Those pioneers, farmers, and indentured servants must’ve been used to only eating cordon bleu dining off the finest Wedgewood china.
Thanks, Fat Albert!

“… Gil Gerard as a sort of Lidl’s Han Solo…”
*snorts Pepsi out of nose*

Essential Conversational Gambits for Parties
(or 7 Things To Say To Liberal-Leftists To Challenge Their Pieties)
1. Do you not wish that there was one dominant culture in Britain, so we all knew where we were?
2. Surely, high levels of taxation and regulation diminish self-reliance and discourage job-creation,while massive increases in public expenditure bring few improvements in services.
3. Countries with substantial private sector contributions to healthcare have superior health provision to the UK with its state monopoly.
4. Prison works and represents excellent value for money.
5. If it is occurring, there is not much that we can do about global warming.
6. Even feminist fashionistas dress to please men, though they refuse to acknowledge it.
7. Islamic migration into the UK should be severely curtailed until there is clear evidence that the Muslims already here are integrating into British society.
All these gambits challenge dominant ideas, but s e smith would probably not appreciate that.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

College students are remarkably good at finding ways to live cheap.
It’s wishful thinking to suggest that they wouldn’t just keep on living that cheaply if you told them they could do it as long as they wanted with no effort required. (Even collecting unemployment benefits requires work to fill out all the forms and go to the right offices at the right times; and despite the best efforts of our intellectual superiors, those from a middle-class upbringing still have some qualms about straight-up lying to claim disability benefits.)

6. Even feminist fashionistas dress to please men, though they refuse to acknowledge it.
Women dress to impress other women, not men.
In the case of hardcore feminist types, then it is dressing to show that they are not sucked in by the patriarchy to other wimin.
Men, generally, prefer women with as few clothes as possible. They really, really do not care if they are wearing this season’s colour.

You ignore the masochists amongst us.

Torquil Macneil was like Minnow mark I.
As I said at the time, it was like trying to shovel air into a balloon. Though I suppose the dynamic is interesting. For instance, our pointing out obvious practical problems with a Marxoid theory was slyly construed as “cheering” at the woes of the poor and endorsing “slavery”. Hard to know where to start.
Remember, we were poking at a theory being championed by people, including students with joke degrees, who said they want to see work “abolished” or made “optional” (at least for them), and who just don’t want to support themselves, like all those stupid people do, because adult life is scary and hurts their feelings. And so we arrived at a scenario in which self-styled “artists,” “activists” and “anti-capitalists” expected to live in comfort, indefinitely, for decades, all at someone else’s expense. While other, less radical people would have to work harder and longer, and pay even more tax and themselves do without, so that these Marxoid clowns – our self-imagined betters – could be spared the normal consequences of their chosen lifestyle.
Slavery, indeed.

Is it me or is Greece a country run by retards who are voted in by bigger retards?

Roger Kimball on Greece:

In a rational world, people would notice the regularity of this process — install socialism, ruin the economy (among many other things) — and they would conclude that socialism was a bad idea. That’s in a rational world. In this world, we have the New York Times, which just yesterday had at least three handwringing articles about the situation in Greece… My favourite… by the Times’s resident economic Dadaist, Mr Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.
What do all these pieces have in common — apart, that is, from that insufferable tone of unearned moral superiority that comes with publication in the Times? Yes, that’s right; they all grandly recommend that someone else fork over the truckloads of cash that Greece wants. Everyone knows Margaret Thatcher’s quip about socialism: sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Sooner or later, and it is looking more and more like it might be sooner, the Germans are going to run out of money to pay for the Greeks’ lavish pension plans and retirement schemes.
But all is not lost. The sums Greece wants are quite large, it is true, but every little bit can make a difference. And, as Mr Krugman & Co. would be the first to insist, this a moral imperative… So here’s my modest proposal. When the markets open today, the New York Times should shift their entire pension portfolio into Greek bonds, beginning with whatever holdings Messrs. Cohen, Krugman, and members of the editorial board may have. It may be an adventurous investment, but, hey, were talking about medicines and imported food on the supermarket shelves in Athens. What an edifying spectacle: rancid lefties at a once-important paper put their money — their own money, for once — where their loud mouths are.

Heh.

s.e.smith = Rusty Trawler.