Friday Ephemera

Historical medical practices. Hours of fun reading to look forward to!

If anyone speaks Bovine, please tell the cow she’s welcome to drop by the Pogonippery. We gets TONS of junk mail.

Pulled from the comments in a prior thread, but worth wider exposure: The Revolt Against the Masses.
Pull Quote:
Collins: How do you view the liberal response to Trump’s election? You wrote in The Revolt that, ‘Liberalism is sufficiently adaptable, that even in failure, self-satisfaction trumps self-evaluation’. That sounds to me like a pretty good description of the past year. Liberals have struggled to come to terms with Trump, and to take responsibility for their losses – not just the presidency, but in both houses of Congress and in state governments.
Siegel: Liberalism has taken on a religious aspect. It’s a belief system, and not a system that represents political interests. Liberalism is seen as a source of grace, in religious terms. It is hard to talk to people, when you are effectively suggesting they are not among the blessed (or, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, the ‘anointed’), that they are in fact mistaken. Trump is wrong about many things, but you can argue with Trumpism. But it is very hard to argue with contemporary liberalism, especially in its West Coast incarnation.
Definitely read the whole thing.

I want a cow to eat my mail.

Quality selection this week, Mr T!
The future is now.
I actually became quite emotional watching the Falcon Heavy. The landing – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0-pfzKbh2k – is quite possibly the coolest thing ever. I don’t normally approve of USian whooping and excitability but in this case it is quite justified. Even Lord Paget might have whooped a little.

they were batshit weird at the time. Chiefly because they looked like they belonged in the early ‘80s.
It does look like a coke-fuelled session from i-D magazine. Is that still a thing?

“A young boy who was really set on getting a stuffed toy from a claw-style vending machine at a Florida restaurant ended up getting stuck inside it on Wednesday, according to officials.”
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/02/08/florida-boy-gets-trapped-inside-arcade-claw-machine.html

This was inevitable.

Dog and pony show.

Pony and dog show.

Also:

Think on, gentlemen
Prior art? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP67hxpaR-g

Ruprecht! Do you want the genital cuff?

.

Any more exercising of begging the question and someone is going to seriously hurt themselves.
And each inch given ensures the next one will be, and the one after that.

“The future is now”. Is the first link supposed to bring up a video? The comments on the thread suggest that. I just get a jpg.

I had forgotten about this whackjob Nancy McClernan, who seems to have heard Orwell’s phrase about “smelly little orthodoxy-sniffers” and decided that it would be her calling in life, seeing as how she was cruelly denied by timing and geography from being an actual commissar. But apparently she’s still around, somehow having avoided choking on her own bile, still keeping dossiers on political enemies and denouncing thoughtcrime. Has she ever been a subject here?

“Ann Coulter and Laurie Penny debate ‘fake news'”

Something unholy has taken over when comedy produces more enthusiastic applause than involuntary laughter.
Continually reinforcing ‘progressive’ conceits, whereby the assumptions and the target are essentially predetermined, does rather diminish the element of surprise, which you’d think would be a big part of what makes a thing funny. And so a great deal of comedy becomes something else and serves a different function. Sometimes, this is quite explicit. For those who notice these things, it’s not unlike the “fake news” debate, above, or the Peterson/Newman “interview,” in that it throws into relief a kind of dishonesty, a kind of pretending.

You’re not kidding.
And so a woman widely and rightly regarded as a serial fabulist, to whom evidence and logic are strange and alien concepts, and whose own interviewees have repeatedly complained about her dishonesty and fabrication, is chosen to argue for the integrity and decency of the mainstream media. By the mainstream media.
It’s positively surreal.

This has to be a minority interest.

…it’s hard to know where to start.
I’d go with the chyron that calls Miss Penny a journalist.

Well, you gotta look at it from their perspective. Who’s gonna stop them?
Even viewing it charitably, you have to wonder – do Kirsty Wark and her production team not know of Laurie’s reputation as a fantasist and liar, another Johann Hari, and not know how that makes the ‘debate’ especially ludicrous, or do they simply not care? Either option would seem to undermine their own pretensions of rigour and integrity.
In entirely unrelated news, Newsnight’s audience has practically halved in the last ten years.

Who’s gonna stop them?
… do Kirsty Wark and her production team not know of Laurie’s reputation as a fantasist and liar … or do they simply not care?
I think this may help answer both questions*:

“Nice to see you!”

Wark says as she warmly greets Penny (who is ironically quite literally sitting in a glass house) in a 2014 BBC documentary before Wark proceeds to to frown and gurn with intense gravity and concern over Laurie’s cookie-cutter squeaking about how difficult it is to be Laurie Penny online.
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder whether the BBC Newsnight editorial team have been looking on with jealousy at the Cathy Newman – Jordan Peterson interview and its now 6.4 million views and were asking themselves, “Where can we get some of that Newman-Peterson debate controversy action?” when they hit upon the wheeze of putting Penny and Coulter together.
Naturally, they fucked it up: first, by having Wark as a moderator; second, by not having them in the same room; and third, as with all BBC Newsnight videos, including its ‘Viewsnight’ strand, by inexplicably disabling the comments.
*I very nearly wrote “kill two birds with one stone”, but no doubt that particular turn of phrase would later be used as proof of online misogyny requiring a security specialist to investigate.

Remember Yvette Felarca?
Well, she’s engaging in a huge distraction by now accusing the police of “colluding with Nazis”.
What her lawyers filed is full of sh*t, of course. But not only is The Guardian article so slanted one would need rope and a harness to stay on the surface, it feeds into articles like this splashed with a full-out neo-Nazi picture that any casual reader would assume is from the rally BUT is really from 2010.
Unfreakinreal

…accusing the police of “colluding with Nazis”.
I remember reading about this: the commies attacked people with knives and got their arses kicked. It was hilarious.

The problem isn’t Felarca; she’s a symptom.
Yep. They do it because they can.

The Weak Must Fear the Strong:

And look, when people cannot trust their media…
FULL STOP… people should never ‘trust’ their media at first glance.
When, not if.
I see “when people cannot trust their media” as a declarative statement, the emphasis being on when, as in since. Whether people should trust media is the argument, especially poseur media “journalists” like Penny, peddling that projected image for all it’s worth over on what I suspect she hopes is the perceived home turf of the BBC. Coulter is the filthy outsider, the outrage, the attacker – maybe the American-speaking Yankee – and therefore automatically subject to the derision that naturally follows.
Penny manages to issue a truth there but then in the interview exposes herself. For no reason she clearly libels Coulter in an utterly transparent, rhetorical ploy, one I took as lying sensationalism simply because the whole of it was and is unsupportable bullshit and playing to the cameras. It’s the execrable Penny way. It’s deranged and conscienceless.
But yeah, when people don’t trust “their” media – I distrust Penny absolutely and unequivocally – they find alternatives. Like truth.