Thursday Ephemeraren’t

. . .and, obviously, a 3D-printed clitoris.
I just spent five minutes typing and then erasing various comments about the above.
Sigh
Instead, I bid you a good weekend.

puzzle book of note
I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.

a game about planets and potatoes,
I’m launching a probetato. Will report back.

a game about planets and potatoes,
That’s going to eat up the whole day, isn’t it?
Time machine.

Apologies for going off the normal Ephemeral track, but I thought this was too good an opportunity to pass up:

Tom Watson said that members of Momentum, the group that supports Jeremy Corbyn, were copying tactics from the 1980s ..
In a letter to Mr Corbyn, he included the text of what he claimed was a guide for taking control of local party meetings that he said was being shared by Momentum activists.
“First, make the meetings boring . . . This turns off the faint-hearted. Those with better things to do — attend to their family, careers or community groups,” the text says.
“Part two: make the event adversarial . . . This behaviour basically reduces the attendance of the remaining sensible types. Then the meeting [is] ours to control.”
The text went on to “the pièce de résistance”: a series of policy motions that would only take place once “troublesome moderates” had left the room.

From the Financial Times.
The Grauniad has a report on the same accusations, which includes this highly amusing and unintentional reference to diarrhoea:

The Socialist party’s leader, Peter Taaffe, a founder member of Militant who has continued to be involved since the 1980s, told the Guardian … “The lava of this revolution is still hot.”

“You’ll never forget your keys again”.

Are the Ainu people of Sakhalin conditioned by the patriarchy to wrap presents well? I doubt it.

Developing
I think I’ve just wrecked the solar system…

I’m slightly pink rather than white, the pink of the sky at the first light of dawn. I used to believe that the first light of dawn was beautiful – I now realize that it’s so ugly because it heralds another day of privilege for pinkies like myself at the expense of my POC humankindred. By POC I, of course, mean non-pink/cream or that faint orange shade of people who have very freckled faces. Henceforth, I’ll consider only shades of indubitable brown to be beautiful because brown represents honesty, truth and the courage to break the pinky-creamy-orangey chains of oppression visited upon POCs. I pray that Sherman’s Potato-Solar System Interaction will turn the dawn brown.

@Mr. X: It’s not every day, even in the Guardian, that you find a sentence in which every. single. metaphor. rings hollow or even backwards. A set of sentences so bad that each item deserves its own fisking:
we are as much sinew as we are symbol
Firstly, “we are symbol” sounds idiotic. Second, “sinew” is used in metaphor typically not to indicate the *being* of a person, rather their strength or structure. c.f. the Book of Job: “My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest. ” Kipling: “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew.” This is the worst imagery to mean a “racism in the blood” that can be imagined. This asinine and angry attempt at assonance achieves an “A” – no, sorry, I mean “F”.
Our whiteness is our skin color
Well, loosely speaking. We’ve been meaning to tell you about that – it’s more of a light tan to dark tan sort of thing. Which will make use of the color white awkward if you try to use it for anything past this point… oh dear.
also a torn sheet draping the dead
Are we trying to assign the color white to a sheet or describing a metaphorical pressing physical object of “whiteness” here? MAKE UP YOUR MIND. Also, since when have “torn sheets” (remarkably, unsullied white ones) been a thing for alleged excess force incidents? Leaving aside this sort of blase “whiteness kills” imputation and all attendant lies, exactly how is this specter of whiteness (I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do…) guilty recently of covering up *anything*? Last I checked, any fabrications were meet to advance a narrative, one with no restraint of any kind.
a flag of privilege that will not surrender
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. The trouble is, again we Can’t Make Up Our Precious Mind as to whether to use a “flag as symbol of an army” metaphor or whether to attempt coyness with the imagery of a white flag. I almost doubt that the irony is intentional simply because it’s constructed so very badly. How does one surrender with a white flag? Find a more white-erer flag?
a town called separateness
Okay, if the town is “seperateness”, does that mean the white people are inside or out? Is it the White People Pillow Fort or is it the White People Ironically Named Concentration Camp For Others? Which entity is segregating and ghettoizing which or hiding out from whom? I do realize the poors and the genderqueer siblings of color would like their chance to get into Castle Hate from which I ride to oppress them every day, and riding out is so tiring to do every day at a column of veteran Corsican shitlords that… wait, that’s a thing I just made up.
Our whiteness is that poisonous sky right before it rains
Saved the worst two metaphors for last, I see. THE CLOUDS ARE POISON HIDE YOUR WOMEN HIDE YOUR CHILDREN. Okay, but if we mean that this omnipresent whiteness is always looming and somehow teeming in poison, what constitutes rain? Horrible white people-ish wetness – oh, like this column then. The folkism of “don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raiing” exists precisely because piss and rain are different things. What disfunctional person hates rain this much? Rain as ominous, sure. Rain (other than acid rain) as corrosive evil, on the other hand…
the color of shame
Oh, absolutely. White in weddings? Absolutely indicates how shamed the bride is of her virginity. Use as a symbol of purity in the majority of religion? SHAME. Use in Asian cultures to indicate soberness and somber feelings toward death – HOW DARE YOU DIE SHAME SHAME SHAME. It’s why people turn red when they’ve had a severe shock and blush with a deathly pallor when confronted with something. Actually this is why black people are superior – their darkness indicates that they’ve never had to be ashamed of anything.
FFS a tenth grader would be flunked for writing this bad.

Wikipedia update of note.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JennaFryer/status/763195195177443328/photo/2

a town called separateness
Is that anywhere near a town called malice?

Stay with it, the ending is good.
That sentence is rife with possibilities for response. (BTW, finished it about an hour ago.)

A new twist in “rape” culture.

250 words you can spell with a calculator.
http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/250-words-you-can-spell-with-a-calculator

Meanwhile, in campus capers:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/11/historic-paintings-moved-to-controlled-campus-rooms-after-university-finds-them-harmful.html

“250 words you can spell with a calculator”
That reminded me of the Boob Poop Machine (AKA the answer to the question, “What would a 12 year-old boy do with a 3D printer?”). Trust me, don’t do a Google (or any other) image search for ‘boob poop’. I had to, because I couldn’t recall where the video was.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:306139

And generally, yes, that is exactly what’s happened.
Link for above, from Nik. The whole screed is a laughable justification of not being able to form a stable relationship.

The word, and sentiment, missing from Ms. Dreadful’s screed is “commitment “.
Little useful gets done IRL without it.

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen a film studio attack its customers the way that Sony did in response to the film’s horrendous trailer and stillborn debut. Not to mention the Hillary endorsement by the movie’s stars…”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/241165/

That damn game had me creating a spreadsheet to keep recalculating the best Watt per Power Cost, and how long it would take to get it so I could use my timer and walk away, I think I went mad when I was calculating the upgrades as well. Got to the end though.

The old slapfight video from SF State (IIRC) over the issue of a white guy’s cornrows induced comments to the effect that cornrows have been found on ancient Greek statuary of young men.
So whose culture is it, then?

…cornrows have been found on ancient Greek statuary…
It is common knowledge among the SJWs that everything the white-devil has allegedly made, used, or developed has been stolen from the blacks, or the blacks, Esquimaux, and the Islamic types, but from only their wxymyn.
Sordid, I say! Sordid!
You got that right, I remember clearly all the counseling Kanye West and all the other black guys the Kardashians have dated and/or been married to have gone through because of the discomfort they feel – it is so bad, they are never seen with them.

Potatos. The end. Hmm.
For some reason, this reminds me of the aftermath of draining Earth’s oceans onto the surface of Mars, the whole “Netherlands Interplanetary Empire” thing.. (xkcd What If? http://what-if.xkcd.com/ )
Or maybe it’s just my brain, spinning out of control in David’s absence. Hey, that’s the ticket! From now on, I’m gonna blame all my problems on David!
John D: Did you ever get in to the booze? Are you boozing secretly without inviting your friends?

At first I thought Miss Dreadful had fallen out of bed and, landing on her keyboard, had haphazardly knocked out another piece of incoherent gibberish for filing to her editor.
And generally, yes, that is exactly what’s happened.
This article is almost word-for-word the same as the explanation my pal “Angela” gave me when defending her own polyamorous past: if I didn’t know better I’d swear blind the two were the same person.
What is interesting is Penny’s talking about the non-sexual parts of it: buying birthday presents, text messaging, conversations, etc. I say interesting because Angela was keen to highlight this as well, but her example was about going to concerts and festivals together. However, I pointed out the obvious: “But you can go to a concert with somebody else when in a normal relationship, you don’t need polyamory for that.” And she replied with: “Yes, but you can have sex with them afterwards.” In other words, it is all about sex.
When I told my editor that I wanted to write about polyamory, she adjusted her monocle, puffed on her pipe and said, “In my day, young lady, we just called it shagging around.”
Well, quite.
Unsurprisingly, Angela is 32 and hasn’t been in a functioning, loving, monogamous relationship since she was about 20 when she decided to split with her perfectly normal boyfriend and get into polyamory (probably after reading shit like Penny’s article). Of course she managed to snag herself a US green card in the process of being passed around between various middle-aged men and a handful of women, but her attempts at finding the serious, monogamous, loving relationship she claims she now wants don’t seem to be bearing much fruit. I can’t think why.

Some medieval illuminated manuscripts of note:
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/illuminated/manuscript/discover

[ Checks liquor cabinet for fingerprints. Reviews security camera footage. Summons henchlesbians. ]

…replaced with arrangements that are likely to be …anxiously competitive…
That’s the thing. For the very hip Left, all human interactions are zero-sum. My satisfaction necessarily deprives someone else of same. Consequently, everyone carries around a mental book of accounts keeping a running total of emotional debits and credits trying to stay completely balanced. It never works, because everyone overestimates the value of his contributions and minimizes others’ contributions. Any non-business relationship whether marriage or friendship is doomed to failure if it is predicated on that sort of thinking.

That’s the thing.
Laurie really wants us to believe that her ostentatious rejection of monogamy and conventional coupling is “revolutionary” and “threatening” to the “social order.” She tells us this several times (and in every other piece in which she mentions the subject). The idea of shocking or upsetting others seems important to her, as if it were intrinsically a good thing, irrespective of the particulars. And yet the few real life examples I’ve known of, and heard of, merely seemed fraught and sub-optimal. Despite the protestations of radicalism, it strikes me as adolescent, impractical, somewhat squalid, and likely to lead to insecurity and unhappiness, to missed opportunities. If anything, it sounds like a rationalised fall-back position. It isn’t so much shocking as hackneyed and sad.

Also this line from Penny:
So I consider it my duty to her and the rest of the unenlightened to explain what’s different about how the kids are doing it these days.
For sure there appear to be a few very young women doing it – Angela and Penny both being about 20. But I’m not sure how many young men are. Angela’s partners at age 20 were a man of 40, another man of about 35, and a woman in her 30s. I’m about as open-minded as they come, but I couldn’t help thinking there is some exploitation going on here which is doing some serious damage.

Ephemeraaaarrgghh.
NSFW unless you work in a psychiatric research center. Man has spent around £46,000 to get his ‘perfect’ face and bum.
I realize “perfect” is subjective, but his name and hat says it all.

doesn’t make you look like Angelina Jolie
For the life of me, I’ve never understood the attraction of Angelina Jolie. When she was all the rage I was dumbfounded. Not saying I would kick her out of bed for eating crackers…though not saying I wouldn’t either. I think that was the beginning of my Truman Show suspicions.

I’ve never understood the appeal of the “permanent duckface” (collagen lip injections).
Great, now you are fish-shaming.

…they are able to live out their “liberationist” dreams, …only because of the safety net provided by those institutions which constitute civilization.
Quite so. They are parasitic: they live out their bizarre fantasies while drawing on the accumulated social and ethical capital of the civilisation they wish to destroy.

Who wanted to build a wall first? And why is this not mentioned in the MSM?
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/opinions/border-battler-hillary-build-u-s-mexico-fence-article-1.594388

#FeministAMovie.

For the life of me, I’ve never understood the attraction of Angelina Jolie.
Oh gawd, don’t get me started on her. The sole purpose of casting her in anything is so that the audience swoons at her supposed beauty. Only the problem is if you think, as I do, she looks more weird than beautiful you’re left wondering how the hell she passed an audition. I avoid stuff she’s in because I know she can’t act for toffee, and I don’t even like looking at her. I always thought Brad Pitt needed his head seeing to when he dumped Jennifer Aniston for her.

Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.
Hillary proposed a “smart wall” back in 06.
It’s totes different, see?

Tim Newman (and others), you may find that Vaknin resonates with some of what you experienced.

Micro,
it’s practically evergreen bollocks
Iowahawk has a theory of where it comes from:
I call this “Physics Envy.” Humanities look at prestige fields like Physics and see incomprehensible symbols and jargon. Then, like a Cargo cult, they invent their own incomprehensible jargon and expect the prestige to follow.

I call this “Physics Envy.” Humanities look at prestige fields like Physics and see incomprehensible symbols and jargon. Then, like a Cargo cult, they invent their own incomprehensible jargon and expect the prestige to follow.
From one of my earliest posts, on the ludicrous “cyber-feminist” Dr Carolyn Guertin:

Space crops up quite a bit in Guertin’s dissertation, as do various mathematical, quantum mechanical and geometric terms, the bulk of which are misused in a series of strained and incoherent metaphors. In keeping with many purveyors of postmodern theorising, Guertin has been careful to appropriate fragments of scientific terminology that sound fashionable and exciting, and uses them with no apparent regard for their meaning or relevance. (Entanglement and Hilbert Space are mentioned casually, with no explanation, and for no discernible reason.) Consequently, it’s difficult to fathom the author’s supposed intention, or to determine exactly how far short of that objective her efforts have fallen. Instead, we’re presented with what amounts to a collage of grandiose jargon, habitual non sequitur and unrelated subject matter – including feminism, web browsing and space-time curvature – bolted together by little more than chutzpah.

And from the comments:

I’m picturing Dr Guertin as a metaphorical Bower Bird, pilfering feathers and colourful debris in order to seduce a mate with someone else’s plumage.

The extracts of her work are still quite eye-widening. As is the fact that she’s been employed by at least three supposedly serious institutions.

You’ve gotta love millennials.

Feminist wisdom.

…[A]publication for modern feminists runs so many articles on coping with personality disorders.
One is tempted to believe having some sort of psychiatric pathology is necessary to join the club.

From the comments on that love millennials video…

Reiden Lightman
Will power and tenacity only pay off so much. I kept trying and trying to put in resumes, and in the end, the job I am doing but not being paid for yet wasn’t earned. I got lucky. If anybody tells me I got my job from hard work, I will look them in the eye and say “that’s bullshit, I just got lucky.”

Putting aside whatever the actual amount of effort involved was, Mr. Lightman (heh… Lightman) did get off his butt and made some effort to get a job, yet he has been socialized to denegrate his own effort. This to me is much more worrisome than those who are much more easily discouraged. That our society, academics, culture, etc. is undermining success even in the minds of the successful, that’s some seriously bad juju right there.

Modern leftist thought equates success with some sort of moral failing. “Hard work” is nothing more than being born into the right set of “privileged” circumstances and “privilege” is moral issue, because it is “unearned.” Thus, all success is, by definition, unearned, i.e. “stolen.”
Or if not stolen, then somehow arbitrary – and therefore in need of correction by our self-imagined betters. In 2012, while professing his own “belief in social justice” and thrilling to the prospect of “shutting down private schools,” the Guardian’s George Monbiot disdained strangers that he regards as having “undeserved advantages,” by which he means their earnings. Even a person’s salary, and the choices that salary makes possible, are, we’re to believe, entirely unrelated to effort, skill, foresight and good choices.
Like many of his colleagues, Monbiot seems to assume that parents who can afford, say, private education exist as some discrete, unchanging and homogeneous “privileged” class, as if no sacrifice were ever involved, no effort, and no risk of failure. An assumption aired in – and inadvertently disproved by – a typically spiteful article by fellow Guardianista Zoe Williams. An article in which Ms Williams thought it righteous to gloat at middle-class parents whose means and circumstances had changed, leaving them no longer able to afford their child’s private education. An education not unlike Ms Williams’ own.

WTP and RS
Many achievements are down to hard work and to character; but, equally, many successful people play down the luck and privilege that often helped them to do so well.
When I argue with leftists obsessed with luck and privilege, I argue that hard work and development of character pay off, usually, all other things being equal, but I also explain that any radically egalitarian solution to lack of luck and privilege would be worse than the problem.

Words from my ten year old after a golf tournament:
“The more you practice, the more luck you have.”

@Farnsworth: The addition of “black woman” finger snaps and the like to a larger “sassiness” ouevre isn’t completely imaginary, but inasmuch as it’s appropriated by anybody from anything, I think what might be called the Queen Latifah Martial Form is largely a distillation from broader cultural forms… by Hollywood. The notably “sassy” gay drama type-infused Hollywood. Working documentary title: Whose Sassiness Is It Really?

Theo,
The problem is not luck or privilege, or as I prefer to call it “blessings.” The problem is what one does with it. I was blessed to have parents who instilled certain values in me which seem to have paid off over time. I hope my wife and I have instilled the same in our kids along with the various material things which we’ve been able to provide. Nonetheless, those things must be applied in real life. The only reason to feel guilty about luck or privilege is when those things are squandered. See, e.g. all the various feminist Tumblrinas who’ve attended posh, expensive liberal arts colleges on someone else’s dime only to spend their time (and grievance studies degrees) bitching about crappy their lives are because of “patriarchy” or whatnot.