Elsewhere (201)

You sure know how to start the week!
Hm. It occurs to me that this week’s selection is a tad grim, big bottom hiding apart. I am, though, in a good mood.
[ Beams enthusiastically. ]

Please tell me I’m not the only person who hates John Lennon’s grizzly dirge Imagine?
That song has probably done more damage than Gramsci, served up as it is by vacuous, smug imbeciles at school assemblies as some sort of vehicle of spiritual wisdom.

It may only be a story but….
John was apparently showing a mate round his NY apartment and the mate was shocked at the amount of ‘conspicuous wealth’ as evidenced by fur coats etc.
The question was, ‘but, but what about what you said in Imagine’
To which our hero replied (in a broad liverpudlian accent ‘It’s only a fu**ing song for f**ks sake’
And I am a Beatles fan!

Hullo David,
The original Nick Cohen article on Venezuela is pretty good. You can’t make pearls without grit though, and this speck of dust caught my eye:
A generation of American conservatives is being disgraced right now for their failure to stand up to Donald Trump – whose paranoia and mendacity, incidentally, imitates the Latin American caudillos in the Peronist and Chavista mould.
I’ve been following Mr Trump’s fantastically coiffed adventures for some time now, and I have to say, and excuse my language, bah wizzums!
Trump Derangement Syndrome is a fully fledged Thing on both sides of the Atlantic now – I was at a public sector jamboree in Edinburgh recently and between the brain-meltingly dull presentations on “inclusion” some of the tax-guzzling worthies were fiercely virtue-signalling their disdain for all things Trump.
Which is pretty remarkable. I doubt David Cameron’s name is ever mentioned at equivalent shindigs in the US.
So Nick Cohen’s strange decision to invoke the name of Trump in an article that has nothing to do with the US presidential election, pretty models, golf courses, or improbably leonine hair suggests that he too has caught Trump Fever.
Symptoms include saying things that are 180 degrees askew of reality. For example, the supposed “failure” of “conservatives” to “stand up” to the Trumpmonster.
They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns to brand him a sexistracisthitlerbully. They used every arcane party rule to deny him delegates. They even tried parachuting in poor Mitt Romney, who is basically an animatronic version of a respectable American conservative. Nothing worked.
What else could they do? Hire the A-Team?
Trump’s inevitable rise to power has nothing to do with “conservatives” not doing enough to tone-police conservatism, quite the contrary. Trump is what happens when millions of conservative-leaning voters finally get sick of their useless political leaders selling out their interests at every opportunity.
“Vote for us, so we can do the same things the Left will do, only with a bit more free market boilerplate!” does not a sustainable political movement create.
Mr Cameron, who is currently trying to sell us the vision that Britain outside the EU will be a cross between Mad Max and Children of the Stones, might want to take notes.

“Benefits cap is forcing me to work” says “mother of eight”…
I can’t recall if it’s that interview or another in which Single Mother of Eight™ uses her numerous unsupportable offspring as a shield from criticism, a kind of emotional blackmail, implying that critics would have her brood starve or have them deprived of her motherly attention while she ventures out to work, or that they just popped out of her, all eight of them, during a particularly vigorous fit of coughing. There doesn’t seem to be much reflection on exactly how many incredibly stupid and antisocial decisions have to be made, and made repeatedly, in order to be in a situation where you can do that. And do it seemingly with no shame.

RE: “tight pants”.
Meh. Young girls tend to dress like sluts too often nowadays, and the boys dress like homeless thugs. I say bring back school uniforms, or at least strict, and strictly *enforced* dress codes. And yes, make them sexually distinct. Long skirts for the girls, pants for the boy. The experiment with androgyny and pubescent good judgement is a failure. Hell, sexually segregated schools, or at least *classes*, would also be a good idea. Hormone monsters need as few distractions as possible when trying to learn state capitals and SOHCAHTOA.
As for the fat girls getting bullied, well, if they’re too stupid to adjust their sartorial choices (and there are plenty of options short of burkas, despite the implication of the linked article) then my sympathy is limited. The world is a harsh place, and it will rarely adjust itself to accommodate the individual. Either lose the excess weight, learn to dress flatteringly, or get used to being mocked.

Dr Cromarty, you’re not the only person who loathes that John Lennon dirge. I do too. The following line really irks me; “Imagine no possessions”. Well John, millions of very poor people all around the globe don’t have to “imagine” it, because it’s their reality. And I’m not too sure that those people, whose fondest wish is to have a few meagre possessions, and who, incidentally, generally live under regimes you support[ed], will take kindly to being told by a man with millions of pounds in the bank, houses on several continents and a brace of Rolls-Royce motorcars in the garage, that that is how they should live.

@jabrwok
The sex segregated schools issue is interesting depending upon whether or not you believe any of the recent studies regarding outcomes based on sex segregated schools. Personally I’ve got to the point where I only believe the calendar, and I’m not quite sure it’s not putting me on every now and then.
Apparently boys do better in mixed schools and girls do better when segregated. My fifteen year-old is in an all boys school and doing very well so I’m not sure I believe those ‘studies’. According to him the other boys are very competitive (boys? competitive? who’d’ve thunk it?) about marks and try to edge each other out for the top spot.
However, after a week-long school exchange in France where he attended classes with fifteen year-old French girls his view is definitely bending towards mixed schooling. And as soon as he can come up with the fees we’ll consider letting him go to one.

He is a prophet of the coming Idiocracy.
On the subject of dependency and gratitude, this, also by Dalrymple, and written in the wake of the 2011 riots, may be worth revisiting:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor – quite likely – any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognise this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

Via here.

Future historians, and pyschologists, may well come to eventually understand why poor people of our time(s) got so fat and then thought it was a good to wear clothes that show the fat off, topped* by objections that no one should comment on how they look. For now, we contemporaries merely stare and wonder.
*I nearly said “muffin-topped” but that would be unfair. Naughty me.

“…as soon as he can come up with the fees we’ll consider letting him go to one.”
So at home, at least, he is getting good lessons.

So Nick Cohen’s strange decision to invoke the name of Trump in an article that has nothing to do with the US presidential election, pretty models, golf courses, or improbably leonine hair suggests that he too has caught Trump Fever.
It’s the Guardian, so probably the only way he could get it past the censors was by sticking in a completely otiose reference to The Donald.
And, to be fair, he does give Seumas Milne and Oliver Stone a right good kicking.
Milne, Corbyn, Abbott, Owen Jones and co.; their collective silence over the tragedy in Venezuela speaks volumes.

Re: Imagine
The point at which I wanted to physically maim people because of this shitty song, was when one loser dragged a piano into the middle of Paris after the Bataclan attack and trotted it out.
Yeah, the way to defeat an aggressive political ideology is to sing wishful thinking songs.. FFS.
The ISIS monkeys having witnessed this fuckwhittery, must have been thinking that Europe is just theirs for the taking…

If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll give the spam filter a good shake.

“you’ll be censored by Facebook”
No doubt shadowbanning is already in use.

From the Nick Cohen article:
‘Sex tourists need to believe that the women they buy are not like the women at home, who reject them as ugly and dull. These girls just want to have fun. Radical tourists need to believe foreigners do not want the rights they themselves take for granted at home. As they ask others to act out their “anti-imperialist” fantasies, they manage the unique and uniquely degrading feat of combining the delusions of the client, the neediness of the prostitute and the lies of the pimp’.
That’s being directed at Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, George Galloway, Ken Loach, Richard Burgon, and a cast of several score.
Talk about burning your bridges.

The typical responses from left-wing commenters on Venezuela are…
1. That’t not really socialism.
2. They had the wrong people in charge.
3. Foreign nations and private businesses derailed the revolution.
4. The capitalist press is exaggerating the problems.
Anything but face the idea that free markets and free enterprize are essential to the creation of a humane and affluent society.

Sipping the Albino Squirrel: Nathan Heller talks to the snowflakes of intersectionality so you don’t have to. Alternate title: Interview With An Emotional Vampire.

Britain outside the EU will be a cross between Mad Max and Children of the Stones,
Where can I sign up for this, Steve?

The Guardian has ran a whole series of reports lately that have been highly critical of Maduro and his regime. Most interesting is this one from Nick Cohen.
Mark Weisbrot, a long-time Guardian contributor and head cheer-leader for Chavez and Maduro, wasn’t mentioned by name in Cohen’s article. I wonder, though, if The Guardian now regrets running columns like this.

Keeping up to date . . .

Re “Stick in the Mud”…I actually saw such an exhibit at the MOMA in NYC back in … I believe the early 90’s. But the cartoon has it slightly wrong. There were almost as many twigs as mud and they weren’t set on the ground like a sculpture but hung on the wall like a painting. Obviously I’m a dumb-ass ignoramus who doesn’t know the right words for such things, but I did see them. And yet they failed to “enlighten” me.

But, but, but Tom!
Fifteen year old French girls.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for your boy, you know (unless your name is e.g. Polanski).
Have a heart.

Tom: re the comment on the Austrian election, I just heard it reported that van der Bellen had won. Do you suppose this means that zombie’s speculation about stealing the mail-in votes came true?

You just know that if Herr van der Bellen had been right of centre there would have been unkind jokes regarding his name (Bellen in German is “bark”, as in what a dog does.)

This is wonderfully appropriate to the Katherine Timpf piece
a ban on wearing tight pants in its schools because apparently “bigger girls” are getting bullied for the way that they look when they wear them
This sort of reasoning gives me an uncomfortable feeling.
Imagine being someone who is so stupid that they can to twist logic into knots like that. They could basically justify anything that occurred to them. And that is largely the point.
Just to spell things out in tedious detail: as we know, no one is forcing large ladies to make style choices that don’t suit them (or to stop eating pizzas)
In a way, they are being removed from responsibility from their choices. There is also a considerable element of envy (of more svelte women) involved. Add in the customary mix of entitlement of victim groups and people from 200 years in the future might be able to understand the weirdness of our times..

“Fifteen year old French girls.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for your boy…”
Fred the Fourth
I probably should have been more clear that the fifteen year-old females he’d be interacting with would be Irish as we live in Dublin. Only he could decide if they lived up to French girls.
..of course, the correct response for Tom’s son, assuming some desperation there, is one of those Europe On Two Pounds A Day deals.
Fred the Fourth
He’s both frugal and imaginative so if he really wanted to do it I’m certain he’d find a way.
…re the comment on the Austrian election, I just heard it reported that van der Bellen had won. Do you suppose this means that zombie’s speculation about stealing the mail-in votes came true?
Fred the Fourth
I honestly don’t know what to think. At this stage of my life I’m so jaded I don’t trust anyone anymore. The recent Ben Rhodes\Obama Foreign Policy scandal shows the media is simply not an objective observer, at least for anyone with any remaining doubts. I don’t want to get fitted for a tinfoil hat just yet but let’s say the result of that election smells funny and I’m not entirely certain it was on the up and up. I should also make it quite clear that I wasn’t pulling for Herr Hofer. I’ve not researched either candidate’s positions but a quick perusal indicates neither of them was an ideal choice.
Please tell me I’m not the only person who hates John Lennon’s grizzly dirge Imagine?
Dr Cromarty
To jump on the bandwagon with everyone else, no, you’re not alone. In fact, I’m sure you could fill Wembley and quite few other stadia with people who loathe that depressing, nihilistic, dreck.

raisin tray
🙂

Re: the Lennon thing. I saw a 1968 interview with him and Victor Spinetti (who was doing a stage play adaptation of his books), and the interviewer asked Lennon what a “Brummerstriver” was (a term used in one of his poems). And Lennon answered that a Brummerstriver was a downtrodden worker who had to go to a job he doesn’t like, every day, such a s steel works. Warming to his subject, he then enthused that people didn’t *have* to go and do things they didn’t want to do, that they didn’t *have* to work at the local steel works.
I then watched a 1969 documentary called “Man Of The Decade”, which was basically a camera crew following him and Yoko going about the place. And there he was, in the back of his Rolls Royce, which was crafted from British steel that all those Brummerstrivers didn’t *have* to forge. He was chauffeured by a driver that didn’t really *have* to drive a car for a living. (Imagine: pulling up on the side of the M!, and the chauffeur saying “You’re right John, sod this job, I’m off. Bye bye”).
And we were treated to footage of John magnanimously giving free LPs to visiting journalists that the record plant workers didn’t *have* to pack and stack. And john and Yoko checking into a hotel a night time where the night clerk didn’t really *have* to work there to check them in. And then being given breakfast in bed the next morning by room service staff that isn’t really *have* to bother serving them. And on and on.
I’m a big Beatles fan, but over the years I’ve grown more lukewarm to Lennon”s views and politics. And a lot of the issues that he championed turned out to be wrong (e.g.: Hanratty, Michael X).

“At this stage of my life I’m so jaded I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
Progressives’ Mission Accomplished?

This discussion of John Lennon’s, shall we say, economic idiocy combined with industrial-strength hypocrisy reminds me of a comment a hedge fund manager once made at a free-market conference I attended, along the lines of “I don’t care what the monkey thinks as he turns the crank of the organ.”
Something to keep in mind as we partake of the arts. I’m sure pretty much every opera singer (ok, so I enjoy opera. Sue me) has political opinions that are diametrically opposed to mine. I still like to hear them sing, though.
Of course there is the fact that a large part of the population puts way too much store in the opinions of performing monkeys that just happen to have a skill that has allowed them to become famous. Don’t know if we can fix that. Probably not.

I suspect ordinary people are either oblivious to artist’s views or else like them despite their views.
I don’t think very many people pay attention to lyrics. Especially anything outside of the chorus. It both amuses and disturbs me how virtually every Forth of July the PA systems at picnics and fireworks shows are blasting Springsteen’s Born in the USA (marginal) or The Guess Who’s American Woman (flat out anti-American).