Elsewhere (173)
Douglas Murray on the loudly throbbing brain of Mr Paul Mason:
Mason writes, “In Gaza, in August 2014, I spent ten days in a community being systematically destroyed by drone strikes, shelling and sniper fire.” Nothing about Hamas rocket-fire or any context about a long-running war. Instead he describes this apparently naked aggression as an example of “how ruthlessly the elite will react” to defend modern capitalism. But why would anyone bomb Gaza to do that? As well as holding many of the other worst views in the world, are Hamas also in possession of a particularly devastating critique of late capitalism?
Mr Mason’s adventures in radical thought have previously entertained us.
Thomas Sowell on the politics of self-congratulation:
T.S. Eliot once said, “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” This suggests that one way to find out if those who claim to be trying to help the less fortunate are for real is to see if they are satisfied to simply advocate a given policy, and see it through to being imposed – without also testing empirically whether the policy is accomplishing what it set out to do. The first two steps are enough to let advocates feel important and righteous. Whether you really care about what happens to the supposed beneficiaries of the policy is indicated by whether you bother to check out the empirical evidence afterwards.
And George Will on the Planned Parenthood horror show:
In partial-birth abortion, a near-term baby is pulled by the legs almost out of the birth canal, until the base of the skull is exposed so the abortionist can suck out its contents. During Senate debates on this procedure, three Democrats were asked: Suppose a baby’s head slips out of the birth canal — the baby is born — before the abortionist can kill it. Does the baby then have a right to live? Two of the Democrats refused to answer. The third said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
Two more.
Tim Worstall spots one of the possible causes of Jeremy Corbyn’s economic idiocy:
Glenn Reynolds on politics versus progress:
And a much fuller version of Thomas Sowell’s argument – with a great deal of supporting evidence – can be found in his book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which I strongly recommend.
“The third said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital.”
I truly do not know how to begin to respond to this.
Outrage doesn’t adequately convey my feelings.
These people make laws over us???
The chances of a baby making it out of that ‘hospital’ are fairly slim, given that the hospital is dedicated to killing it.
Here is the bias of the media – had a Republican made as asinine remark as this about another policy, it would be national news.
“He blames the Greek crisis on neoliberalism and capitalism as a whole, while seeming oddly unbothered by Greek corruption or the faulty construction of the EU and eurozone as causal factors. This is much like reporting a drink-driving accident but blaming the crash on the invention of automobiles.”
Ha ha, yes.
Polly on “persuasion” and socialist dreams:
Like many Labour people, free to dream I’d go further than Corbyn: I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit, make the Queen be Elizabeth the Last, abolish faith schools, private schools and inheritance, tax millionaires at 70%: add your wishlist here. I don’t know how far you can go – but you have to win power to get anywhere at all. Once in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further than you dare tread in opposition.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/04/jeremy-corbyn-gamble-labour-future-yvette-cooper-best-chance
Misogyny Book Club. Feminists sitting around discussing how …Fairy tales, are still trying to keep little girls passive and subordinate:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11780916/The-Bible-teaches-our-children-to-hate-women-before-they-can-think.html
I know. I denounce myself. Two hours in the maximum fun chamber should suffice.
Once in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further than you dare tread in opposition.
I’m never quite sure if Polly is sufficiently self-aware to register just how sinister she sounds.
“I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit…”
Is she really *still* getting confused about the difference between debt and deficit?
Yet from Marx to Mason, the most striking thing about this seam of literature is that it always underestimates its opponents while overestimating its own increasingly byzantine theories
Lefties are always shouty about the deficiencies of capitalism- but when you ask them to point out a society which has embraced socialism and still managed to function they go awfully quiet.
From an antipodean distance, we are learning about this Corbyn bloke with increasing fascination and horror. I googled “Jeremy ” and he only came fourth, with the mighty Clarkson (rightly) at the top and a couple of blokes I’d never heard of in between. His Wikipedia article makes him sound like some hellish cross between Tony Benn without the wisdom and Michael Foot without the charisma.
I think that almost everyone I’ve ever heard of named Kim, from Kardashian to Jong-Un would be more electable than that. Is it true that Tory supporters are queueing up to join Labour to vote for him, get him elected as Parliamentary leader, and thereby ensure at least a decade of Conservative power?
@ACTOldFart
Yes.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/07/why-i-was-right-to-vote-for-jeremy-corbyn/
“Lefties are always shouty about the deficiencies of capitalism- but when you ask them to point out a society which has embraced socialism and still managed to function they go awfully quiet.”
This is the one argument that always comes to me when I imagine talking to people who are self-professed Socialists. After 150-odd years, it should’ve worked somewhere in the world, surely?
Marxism to me is analogous to the idea of (for instance) an ancient alchemist who left as his legacy a recipe for turning base metals into gold. But every time scientists have tried to replicate it over many previous decades, it results in a huge laboratory explosion and terrible loss of life. And yet new groups of scientists persist in trying, because they believe it has to work THIS time.
Back to the question to the self-professed Socialist. If they manage to identify a society somewhere in the world that have done it successfully, the next question to them would be: “So why don’t you go and live there then?”
Captain Nemo – I am grateful to you, sir.
Some of our best loved books are warping the minds of our children about women and the way they ‘deserve’ to be treated, argues Jo Fidgen
Jo Fidgen.
a friend told me that she’d been reading fairy tales to her two year old, and had been appalled to realise what messages they send. The girls in them are rewarded for being passive, long suffering and, most of all, for being beautiful.
While boys are encouraged to trespass and murder giants.
That conversation prompted the Misogyny Book Club, going out on Radio 4 this week. I started to wonder what other books that are widely read and loved say about women, and whether they may have helped make hatred or contempt of women part of our culture; part of ‘the air that we breathe’, as one contributor to the series puts it.
Our culture hates women so much they get their own radio show to discuss
paranoid conspiracy theoriesfeminist literary criticism. At the public’s expense.The Patriarchy is the most inept system of hegemonic oppression ever.
A group of readers, led by me, examined attitudes to sexuality in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; psychoanalysed the mother figure in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; debated what Fifty Shades of Grey says about the state of misogyny after several waves of feminism.
People make fun of E.L. James for her bad writing. But Ms James is simply providing a service in the free market that her customers choose to buy: mucky stories about kinky billionaires.
It may not be great literature, or even good literature, but she’s at least producing something that many people find value in.
What about Pseud’s Corner’s cultural suckerfish, like Jo Fidgen? Can she say the same?
But we started with the Bible, and the figure of Eve. Whether or not you believe she was the first woman, there’s no getting away from her. Her name has become shorthand for duplicitous, malleable, irresponsible Woman.
And what?
Many have said that Eve’s real sin was to be curious. Curious to know things she shouldn’t. Curious to experience good and evil. Curious about sex.
No. Eve’s sin was disobedience. So was Adam’s, since he also ate the apple.
This “the Bible hates women” thing is embarrassingly juvenile stuff that would shame a Sunday school teenager, since the Bible is full of both men and women who are good, bad or just flawed.
Mary, Veronica, Esther, Delilah, Sarah, Pilate, Lot, Job, Zacchaeus, Judas…
Peter is described by Jesus as the rock on which the Church is built. But he also denied his Lord three times in his hour of need.
Does the Bible hate men?
And this brings us right back to fairy stories, which are usually presented as morality tales. Take Bluebeard, which has more than a little in common with Fifty Shades of Grey, being about a young woman who gets together with an older man who has a secret room full of dark secrets. In the fairy tale, Bluebeard’s young wife is left alone in the house with a set of keys. She is told not to use one of the keys, but she wants to know what’s inside and disobeys the order. Inside are the bodies of Bluebeard’s previous, murdered wives. He tries to kill her for her disobedience, but she escapes.
And the moral of the tale is? Well it’s not that men who kill their wives are bad. It’s not even: try to get to know a bit about your husband before you marry him.
No. The moral as written by master of the genre, Charles Perrault, is: ‘Curiosity with its many charms can stir up serious regrets, thousands of examples turn up everyday, women give in but it’s a fleeting pleasure. Once satisfied it ceases to be and always it proves very costly.’
In other words, women’s curiosity will be met with punishment.
Eh?
In the story of Bluebeard, Bluebeard ends up dead and his wife inherits all his money and lives happily ever after.
So how was she punished?
Surely the moral of the tale is: when you murder your old wives, dispose of the evidence? Or at least, don’t leave town and give your new wife a key to your murder room?
Or maybe: don’t go murdering folk and expect a happy ending?
As for curiosity, yes, a lot of stories include feminine inquisitiveness, because women tend to be that way. It’s not a sexist conspiracy (muahaha!) any more than recurring literary examples of male bravado gone awry.
Curiosity sparked this series, and I expect it will get some attention in the Twittersphere. Internet trolls, like fairy tales, are still trying to keep little girls passive and subordinate. I look forward to the backlash.
Everybody, give Jo Fidgen attention!
Tom Foster – numbers are hard.
David – she’s like a wafflier version of Rosa Klebb.
Social Justice Fairy Tales, summarised:
Peter Pan – a group of socially excluded at-risk youths torment a disabled small business owner.
Pinocchio – a wooden puppet who identifies as a “real boy” suffers from transphobia.
The Princess and the Pea – rich people are spoilt bastards.
There is some debate here whether socialism has ever proved to make workable society. It has, in lost of places. In all the places where the leaders profess they love the people and have large, ruthless armies to point guns at the peasants, socialism works. As a system it works very well for Kim’s lot in North Korea and pretty sure that the top honchos in Venezuela don’t go without toilet paper much.
Steve2 – don’t forget Captain Hook was an Old Etonian, which introduces a class war aspect to Peter Pan.
@Steve 2
What’s amazing about these feminist “the Bible hates women” types is they fail to acknowledge that the first witnesses to the fact of the Resurrection were women. Considering the social mores of the time, that is remarkable. Not to mention the portion of Proverbs devoted to praising wives who run a tight ship and take care of the business aspects of a home. The moral of course, being, “Husbands can make money, but the wife should control the checkbook.”
As far as Planned Parenthood is concerned, recall they have consistently opposed laws requiring children born alive after a botched abortion receive life-saving medical care. We now know why. These children are “off the books.” There is neither a birth nor death certificate issued for them. They do not officially exist. Therefore, they are the perfect subjects for butcher and experimentation.
The Patriarchy is the most inept system of hegemonic oppression ever.
God knows, we’re trying.
So if an Israeli shell hits a Palestinian maternity ward full of hundreds of babies that have not left the hospital it’s all good?
When I strike this drum–the vibrations will tickle you–at first . . .
You monster!
Or, as we like to say in my neck of the woods. . .”Another Saturday night!”
Also, one more time:
I suspect that chap may be experiencing conflicted feelings.
We need a whole new reality show called “Shoot Our Leaders And Start Over”.
I think the time for this is now.
Just sayin’ …. we have allowed the current mob to fester for far too long. We are losing what’s left of our freedoms at a dizzying pace.
“Long have liberals vowed to make higher education more affordable by offering ever more generous loan subsidies, and long have conservatives and libertarians argued that federal aid merely gives colleges license to drive up the price. A study by the New York Federal Reserve offers some new evidence that the latter group is correct.”
http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/03/study-yes-student-loans-are-making-colle
F Patriarchy Guy is saying,
‘Give me your number and we can get together later for coffee to discuss the oppression of your womanhood’
And George Will on the Planned Parenthood horror show:
Errrr, really? Along with other easy Google searching.
From the first link;
Glenn Reynolds on politics versus progress:
Why is economic progress so much harder today than it once was? And why are so many politicians coming out against innovative new services such as Uber or Airbnb? The answer, I think, is simple: Those new services offer insufficient opportunities for graft.
Only for the totally unimaginative . . . Uber and Airbnb are companies that can provide graft—errr—make political donations just like any other company.
In parallel news in the last couple of days, a friend reported casually driving along a street and encountering an Uber driver who was about a hair short of drag racing, and who ricocheted off my friend’s front bumper. A rather telling description was of the Uber driver finally laboriously giving up the insurance and contact information once the cop at the scene insisted sufficiently . . .
We need a whole new reality show called “Shoot Our Leaders And Start Over”.
I think the time for this is now.
Um, come the revolution?
I read that the Cuban and US embassies have reopened in Cuba and the US . . .
So much for the successes—and dangers—of those oh so glorious left wing claims of leadership . . .
Errrr, really?
The term “horror show” refers to the recorded discussions that prompted the furore and some of the procedures that apparently take place. The descriptions of the selective “crushing” of foetuses, for instance, or the little bodies and severed baby heads being referred to as “line items,” while casually eating and sipping wine.
[ Edited. ]
Planned Parenthood Cancer Screenings.
“Once in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further than you dare tread in opposition.”
In other words, we live in an elective oligarchy, and once you’ve duped the rubes into voting you in you can do whatever the hell you like, and there isn’t a damned thing they can do about it for five years. At which point you act all nice and friendly, maybe hike the potato ration a bit, and hope they’ve forgotten about all the shit you pulled five years ago. Got it.
Meanwhile, in the evil, uncaring, free market, when Tesco take Ribena off the shelves, the next day all the Ribena fans go to Asda.
(Oh, and yes: Pol still doesn’t appear to know what a deficit is. Unless she’s seriously advocating a retroactive confiscation of wealth to eliminate it for one year then going back to racking up the debt again as if nothing had happened. It’s always hard to tell with Lefties.)
Owen Jones is at it again.
https://twitter.com/twlldun/status/628508917698535424
But…But… Jeremy wears a worker’s cap! I seen it m’self!
Can’t remember where it’s from:
“You can see it in their eyes as they sit and work the wheels and levers of government – there really IS such a thing as a free lunch.”
“In parallel news in the last couple of days, a friend reported casually driving along a street and encountering an Uber driver who was about a hair short of drag racing, and who ricocheted off my friend’s front bumper.”
Uh huh. And we all know that licensed cab drivers never drive in an unsafe manner. Some magic property of the government-issued taxi medallion prevents it from happening.
Heh.
Can’t remember where it’s from:
“You can see it in their eyes as they sit and work the wheels . . .
Well, what does Goog have to say?
Oh.
Some guy named Mojo has been quoting that since sometime in 2008 . . .
“I’m never quite sure if Polly is sufficiently self-aware to register just how sinister she sounds.”
She imagines that she sounds moral and ‘progressive’. Inside most leftists there is a repressed, angry, violent, authoritarian revolutionary trying to get out. Polly is no exception.
I love a good line.
Oh, btw: You Don’t Own That
Of course, the Spanish government wouldn’t view the painting as a confiscatable resource while it’s in country, oh no…
Uh huh. And we all know that licensed cab drivers never drive in an unsafe manner. Some magic property of the government-issued taxi medallion prevents it from happening.
Some magic property of the government-issued taxi medallion prevents —the driver’s refusal to present ID after a traffic accident— from happening.
Or else the magic medallion and the really identifiable car get taken away from the driver.
As opposed to Uber and Lyft or anything else of the sort, which are just Some Car . . .
She imagines that she sounds moral and ‘progressive’. Inside most leftists there is a repressed, angry, violent, authoritarian revolutionary trying to get out. Polly is no exception.
. . . . there is repression going on there?!?!?!
She imagines that she sounds moral and ‘progressive’. Inside most leftists there is a repressed, angry, violent, authoritarian revolutionary trying to get out. Polly is no exception.
Well judging from that, ‘vote Yvette get Socialism’ article it looks more as if she’s trying to rein in her natural revolutionary self and tether it firmly to a Fabian donkey. Like some Sally Army soldier who’d rather like to stay in the pub, sink a few, have a tinkle on the Joanna and a bit of a knees up but reluctantly drags herself away idly tapping at her tambourine as she goes. Actually I doubt if she really has a revolutionary bone in her body, sure she would like to be in a position to order the rest of us about but not if involves any real effort or risk of failure, let alone any wanton abandonment to the wild Marxist cowboy who’s just blown into town and is looking to paint the place red.
Many have said that Eve’s real sin was to be curious. Curious to know things she shouldn’t. Curious to experience good and evil. Curious about sex.
You can learn a lot about the theology of a denomination by how it interprets the Adam & Eve story.
In my church’s interpretation, Eve was deceived by the serpent who told one lie and one truth: Ye shall not die (lie) but shall be as gods, knowing good and evil (truth, as evidenced by Gen 3:22).
Being innocent and unacquainted with evil, Eve didn’t know what a lie even was, but acquiring a trait of the gods — knowing the difference between good and evil — sounded like a good thing. So she went for it.
I was also taught that prior to the Fall, Adam & Eve were not sexual beings (naked and not ashamed) and so the forbidden fruit wasn’t sex. In fact, they were incapable of reproducing at all, meaning that God had given them mutually contradictory commandments: “be fruitful and multiply” and “don’t eat off that tree.”
They could have lived forever in that sterile but lovely paradise, remaining ignorant about goodness (because they knew no evil), never knowing the sweet because they never knew the bitter, never understanding life because they didn’t know death. The rest of the human race would never have been brought into being, either, because in that state they could not reproduce.
OR they could bring death into the world and with it fruitfulness, learning, growth, wisdom, mistakes, sins, repentance, second chances, and all the cosmic complimentarities on which our understanding and maturity depend.
MEANING THAT EVE DID THE RIGHT THING, even if she wasn’t fully clear about it at that point. Later, she says, “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.”
So Ms. Jo Fidgen can get stuffed. I was taught that Eve was the hero of the story, having resolved the stalemate in the right way and having the perspicacity to recognize it after she had her eyes opened.
No doubt other denominations can provide less “misogynistic” interpretations of Eve’s behavior.
Except for Muslims, that is. They see Eve as in league with Shaitan to seduce Upright, Godly Males from the path of Allah. Which is why women have to submit utterly to male control if they ever hope to see paradise.
Along with other easy Google searching.
That’s suspect right there: Google weights the results according to the “truthiness” thereof.
The sources that FactCheck.org uses are:
Planned Parenthood. Annual Report 2008-2009.
Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood Services. Fact Sheet. Mar 2011.
“CNN Newsroom.” Transcript. CNN. 8 Apr 2011.
Guttmacher Institute. State Funding of Abortion Under Medicaid. Policy Brief. 1 Apr 2011.
DeBonis, Mike. “D.C. abortion funding: the facts.” The Washington Post. 11 Apr 2011.
Huh.
Just like that 100% literacy rate figure we get from Cuba.
I came across this absolute corker from our favourite Laurie Penny today – apologies if this has already been mentioned and I’ve missed it:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/plutocrats-playground-city-its-good-know-theres-still-commune-call-home
There’s a flash of self-deprecating humour at first:
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a filthy commune-dwelling leftist and spend my evenings plotting to bring down the nuclear family and destroy the legitimacy of the state whilst eating lentil and arguing about whose turn it is to wash up.
Could this at last be a recognition of the ludicrosity of the modern Left…?
Apparently not. For she then gets all serious on us and starts proclaiming the virtues of her fellow squatters:
There are ten of us here in the warehouse, plus friends, partners and a rotating cast of waifs and strays. We’re a mixed bunch, from different nationalities, backgrounds, gender identities and sexual preferences – we even have token straight, white, monogamous man, and we love him very much even though we don’t quite understand his lifestyle and experiences.
Oh, those wacky straight people with their controversial lifestyle choices.
The best is yet to come, however:
We do not have a house manifesto, as such. Instead, there’s a chart in the box-sized kitchen upstairs, just above the kettle, slightly wrinkled with steam. It’s a list of names, and beside that list is written, very simply, what pronouns residents and regular visitors prefer to use – he, she, they, ze, xe – and how they take their tea. The Tea And Pronouns chart made me aware of my own prejudices in a new way.
^ The virtue just gushes forth, don’t it? Thank bog she’s leaving the US and headed back your way.
“I live with nine other people in the gutted remains of a music storage warehouse in Brent. None of us are from the area, and many of us aren’t even from the country, but we are conclusively failing at the whole gentrification thing, given that most of us earn significantly less than our neighbours, none of whom would want to live in the warehouse given the perennially harrowing state of the plumbing. “
A little insight into PP’s 3% figure:
As I suspected, they’re counting procedures, not weighting each procedure by its magnitude.
If you ever look at an itemized list for billing an insurance company (in the U.S.), every jot and tittle is a line item with a separate billing code: consult, venipuncture, 3 samples drawn (three procedure”), medication counseling (here’s how many pills to take), 2 Rx written, then time afterwards for the medical transcriptionist to interpret what the doctor scrawled and convert it into legible typeface.
Also, PP does NOT do mammograms. Ever. They only provide manual breast exams and refer women to get mammograms. Clinics that provide the same services except for abortion outnumber PP 10:1.
American Lefties would think European abortion laws beyond the pale, anti-wimminz etc.
If they knew about them.
Mason’s Classic Sentence: “Though currently maligned, hipsters are crucial signifiers of a successful city economy.”
Right you are, sport.
“It’s a list of names, and beside that list is written, very simply, what pronouns residents and regular visitors prefer to use – he, she, they, ze, xe”
Oh god. The “I’m so special I need my own special pronoun” movement has made it over the moat. They think they’re so egalitarian, but they behave like they think they’re kings and popes.
Thornavis, I think you are being far too gentle on the ghastly Polly. Sure, she’ll hitch a ride on the Fabian donkey; but, as with so many Labour supporters, her political attitudes contain a sinister and vicious seam of revolutionary fantasy. Unpack this quote from her article to see the tyranny she would approve of if circumstances allowed:
“Like many Labour people, free to dream I’d go further than Corbyn: I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit, make the Queen be Elizabeth the Last, abolish faith schools, private schools and inheritance, tax millionaires at 70%: add your wishlist here.”
“Like many Labour people, free to dream I’d go further than Corbyn: I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit, make the Queen be Elizabeth the Last, abolish faith schools, private schools and inheritance, tax millionaires at 70%: add your wishlist here.”
What about second properties or investments in foreign assets?
“A nice young man wearing a pink tutu and nothing else made me an excellent cup of tea and, when I said admitted to being a radical feminist, excitedly showed me the house’s small library of gender theory, women’s liberation text and fair-trade pornography.”
I think that might be the most unintentionally funny sentence I’ve ever read.
@The Lancastrian Oik | August 05, 2015 at 09:49
What the Hell is “fair trade pornography”? Are their (ahem) props lovingly hand-crafted by dusky Amazonian maidens from organically-tapped rubber? Do they eschew the silicone products of foreign multinationals in favour of a more natural pulchritude? Do they try to have carbon-neutral orgasms?
I looked it up on Google and there at the top of the list (you could just about predict it) was a Guardian article by Zoe Williams. Is some vast conspiracy of practical jokers making all this stuff up?
Thanks for your research about PP, dicentra, now that 3% makes sense.
It makes one think how large part of the left is a slogan-machine (also numerical data is forged as slogan, here), whose brazen hollowness is simply revealed when explanatory questions are asked: “hot it works?”, “where this number come from, exactly?”, “how is your society supposed to run, actually?”. Of course, this is certainly true of most ideological enterprises, but the left seems to be really outstanding in this regard, both in terms of ‘quality’ (often rising to brain dazzlement) and perseverance. It’s not a case that political campaigning on the left is mainly a case of drumming unlikely chosen words in everybody’s head (“war on women” is a specially illuminating instance, imo).
Another large part of the left takes to quasi-religious levels the common phenomenon of sentimental credulity: give them any ideology-reassuring data, however unbelievable (for instance, “abortion makes up 3% of PP’s activity”), and they will immediately feeeel its accuracy.
“Take Bluebeard, which has more than a little in common with Fifty Shades of Grey, being about a young woman who gets together with an older man who has a secret room full of dark secrets.”
The dippy female in 50 Shades is 22, and the “older man” is 26. I know, I know, 4 HUGE LONG years apart. And “a secret room full of dark secrets”? As opposed to a secret room full of dark ferrets?
“I deny obvious objective reality. It’s what makes me special.”
I blame that damn T-shirt for this mindset: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
Take Bluebeard, . . . Please.
—Thank you Henny.
And do remember Bluebeard’s wine cellar—He had a wife in every port.
Wherein a Guardian writer suggests that listening to your boyfriend’s problems is “labour” that you should be compensated.
Stereotyping ideological opponents as joyless fanatics is often a bad idea but some of them don’t half make it difficult not to do.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/03/prof-who-accused-cop-profiling-flunks-dash-cam-test/
Police dash-cam video debunks professor’s racial profiling claims
Police dash-cam video debunks professor’s racial profiling claims
Somewhat related, a Fox News host recently suggested that young black males would be less likely to get shot or tazed if they “stopped resisting arrest.” I.e., if they stopped running, refusing to follow instructions, fighting the officers attempting to detain them, being generally belligerent and threatening, etc. Apparently, this unremarkable piece of advice is now considered beyond the pale. Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman insists that black males “shouldn’t have to” comply with lawful instructions from the police. Which sounds like exactly the kind of attitude that gets people hurt.
Don’t watch dat, watch dis…
She’s an Article 4 Free Inhabitant. Then the cop rapes her. But according to the laws and customs of 1781, is it really rape-rape? Either way, I’m guessing time travel is a real bitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k29WyfC1HKI
Madness…one step beyond…
Don’t watch dat, watch dis…
Wow. Stunning. I marvel at his patience. This kind of thing is why the reality show Cops is one of my guilty pleasures.
Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman insists that black males “shouldn’t have to” comply with lawful instructions from the police.
They can all hide out at his house.
They can all hide out at his house.
Heh. Now there’s your reality show. “Former academic and pretentious leftist finds himself sharing his home with two carjackers, a crack dealer and assorted thugs.” Oh come on. You know you’d watch.
She’s an Article 4 Free Inhabitant.
Article 4 of the Articles of Confederation, which were superseded by the Constitution in 1789. I found what they’re referring to (badly):
“Free inhabitant” = Not a slave.
It just means that Virginia can’t treat a Georgian differently than a New Yorker or than other Virginians. Reciprocity and stuff. It’s pretty clear.
“Former academic and pretentious leftist finds himself sharing his home with two carjackers, a crack dealer and assorted thugs.” Oh come on. You know you’d watch.
I’d FINANCE it.
Hey. Maybe we can get a kickstarter or gofundme going for just such a project. SEK so totally deserves it…