Elsewhere (266)

And so we arrive at the contradiction of feminists who denounce “toxic masculinity” as both all-pervasive and a fundamental evil, at least among white people, while simultaneously endorsing fatherlessness and family instability, i.e., the most obvious causes of the behaviour they claim to dislike.
That.

http://www.skepticat.org/2018/03/truth-is-the-new-hate-speech/ It’s all kicking off in the skeptic community regarding trans and transphobia.

David, can you check the spam filter?

To radical feminists, toxic is not one of many forms of masculinity. It is the definition of it.

Actors tend to be socialists of the most childish sort, but they’re engaged in a very individualistic and cut-throat profession. If you can build a personal brand then you can command a higher salary, because it is assumed that that will put more bums on seats. If there are more parts being offered to you as a result of your past success, your agent can presumably sell you at a higher rate.
If actresses could be honest with themselves, they don’t want equal pay and they certainly don’t want to be paid by the work they put in on the project. They want equality of opportunity – the chance to be given enough meaty parts (fnarr fnarr) to build the kind of CV actors can. That is precisely what Foy got, and there’s a lot more excitement over her career than Matt Smith’s at the moment.

…while simultaneously endorsing fatherlessness and family instability, i.e., the most obvious causes of the behaviour they claim to dislike.
As you note, the shifting goalposts among the likes of Laurie Penny is a wonder to behold. The single mother household is the pinnacle of social evolution brought forward by wise matriarchs. But less than ideal outcomes resulting therefrom are the fault of “toxic” males, who aren’t involved by definition. Not to mention that those children who grow up in loving, stable, two parent households are deemed “privileged” because their lives tend to be better off than those from single parent homes, thereby necessitating the destruction of marriage and family. How these people continue to command a place in the public square is beyond my comprehension.

“If you can build a personal brand then you can command a higher salary, because it is assumed that that will put more bums on seats.”
– It may be called a “meritocracy”; and I note with wry disillusionment both how meritocracies are so successful at bringing the cream to the top, and how anathema they’ve been for the past many decades to every stripe of leftie from kindergarten (“Oh we MUST not award badges of merit, they make those who don’t get one, feel so bad…”) on through today’s entire SJW movement.
The which, does anybody else find it ironic referring to SJW’s as a ‘movement’?

the shifting goalposts among the likes of Laurie Penny is a wonder to behold.
See also this. Note that when confronted with statements of the obvious, say, regarding coupling and poverty, Laurie and her groupies start telling each other how “angry” they are. Which makes me wonder if they do in fact realise, albeit dimly, just how ruinous their own advice is to the people they pretend to care about.
The irony being that if Laurie’s own parents had lived by her professed values – abandoning stable coupledom, monogamy, mortgages, etc – it’s unlikely that she would now have a media career and be in a position to air those supposed values, at least as a public figure. As I said at the time,

Of course Laurie has the considerable advantage of being raised, comfortably, in a stable family by two middle-class parents with the terribly bourgeois values she now claims to hold in contempt. If instead she’d been raised in keeping with her own professed standards – say, by a disaffected single parent with multiple transient partners and no lifelong commitment – I somehow doubt she’d have been able to spend time at Wadham College finding herself politically and playing “riot girl.” In effect, and like so many of her type, our leftist guru is coasting on the legacy of values that served her well but which she claims to despise and urges others to reject.

But hey, that’s who she is. And so far as I can tell, it’s who most of her peers are.

Amy Wax… whose rather mundane observations about the correlation between bourgeois values and success were deemed deeply offensive by the Laurie Pennys of the world.
Speaking of which, Heather Mac Donald on modern taboos:

The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion. The academic-achievement gap, the behavioural differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society.

Related.

pfffft
[ Wipes bar. Slides bowl of trail mix slightly to the left. ]

Of course Laurie has the considerable advantage of being raised, comfortably, in a stable family by two middle-class parents…
And yet she turned out badly anyway, proving while such an upbringing is valuable it is not a guarantee of success. 🙂

Speaking of Laurie Penny, some lucky few will get to see her talk to fellow lunatic Rose McGowan for a mere £8. I do hope there’s a video.
In other Laurie news:
Right now I’m rocking a neon blue buzz cut.
I believe I covered this in my novel:

The piercings should also have served as a warning, same as dyeing her hair bright colours. If someone feels the need to seek attention like that, there are deeper issues at play.

Yeah, I think I got that right, don’t you?

I do hope there’s a video.

McGowan is a film-maker, thought leader and agent of change… a millennial icon, fearless activist, and unstoppable force for change who is determined to… dismantle the concept of fame, shine a light on a multibillion-dollar business built on systemic misogyny, and empower people everywhere to wake up and be BRAVE.

I wonder. Is there any level of flattery or self-congratulation that would be… embarrassing?

all too often the fare consists of the aforementioned I Hate You, Dad in toto
I left the con scene over fifteen years ago because it was exactly that, and as far as I can tell had always been that. While I used to think it was merely pathetic, between Ed Kramer, the recent revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley, and the various things I saw but didn’t quite grasp the implications of at the time, I’ve since come to the conclusion that the con side of fandom badly needs the Carthage treatment.
Is there any level of flattery or self-congratulation that would be… embarrassing?
I think Laurie in conversation with Rose McGowan will be interesting. If I’m right about this, it’s going to be a conversation between someone who was actually sexually traumatized and forced to keep silent about it, and a poseur adopting the trappings of victimhood for social status signalling. The differences between their demeanour should prove illuminating.

I wonder. Is there any level of flattery or self-congratulation that would be… embarrassing?
I doubt it. Me, I’m hoping McGowan has another massive rant at a deranged, heckling tranny and Laurie gets embroiled in the resulting brouhaha. I see she’s already getting shit on Twitter for not being woke enough to recognise McGowan’s anti-trans past.

McGowan is …
She sounds like a bit of a cocoa-shunter to me.

I just pray Laurie will remember to bring tissues.

Sorry, I’m just shallow.

Sorry, I’m just shallow.
My eyes! My eyes!! GAHHHH!
I know, no refunds, credit note only.
I may have to re-think my lunch break blog reading habits 😛

This has to be an extremely devious marketing plan:
Or maybe Guinness has a mole high up in Heineken’s organization.

Ben Shapiro on broken families.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgTnbq8JvSk

That.
And it’s not just her own background, and what it made possible, that reveals the lie.
As noted before, Laurie’s self-imagined role as a wordsmith revolutionary would be much harder to sustain without a great many other people cultivating those same despised bourgeois values and keeping things ticking over. A fact that Laurie counts on, despite her pretence. In effect, we, the bourgeois rubes whose values she disdains, are her safety net. The fact that few of us are credulous enough to follow her advice is what allows her to mouth it in relative comfort and security, knowing that the destruction of capitalism, marriage and the family unit (and all that would go with it), which she claims to want, won’t happen just yet.

only the most broken psychotics left standing
I’m not sure how you’d tell the difference, frankly.
It’s been my experience that the most overwhelmingly strident atheists are the ones who haven’t been anywhere near a practicing Christian in decades, and do not seem to be particularly ensconced in their own private version of A Handmaid’s Tale. It’s as if the more ethereal the bogeyman, the more terrified they are of it.
Boy, that sounds familiar.

(so late in the thread it seems off-topic now, but I couldn’t resist)

I’ve noticed that actresses complaining about the pay gap appear blissfully ignorant about how much younger they are (5-10 years seems to be a good estimate) than their male co-stars. I don’t know about you but to me it would be a privilege to start earning at 19 instead of 29. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an “introducing” credit for an actor, like the one Cameron Diaz got for The Mask. Many of these actresses are also models, which can be a highly paid profession, one mostly barred to men, so it would be interesting to compare total income (modeling + acting) between the complaining actresses and similarly aged actors.

Neon? She calls that neon blue? Bleh.
Damn, she can’t even get that right…

Haha. That.
To convey just how perverse and potentially ruinous Laurie’s lifestyle advice is, I’m going to have to quote myself – an indulgence, but bear with me:

Not too long ago, the endlessly entertaining Laurie Penny – who entertains us for reasons she doesn’t quite comprehend – pointed her readers to a breathless endorsement of the fatherless family. New Enquiry contributor Madeleine Schwartz dubbed this non-nuclear unit the “anti-family,” thus signalling its countercultural radicalism and general sexiness. We were told, based on nothing much, that “a couple cannot raise a child better than one [person] can.” Apparently, the “diffusion” of the family unit – which is to say, absent fathers, hardship and subsequent dependence on the state – “is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation.”
Ms Schwartz was careful to avoid actual data and striking correlations – say, between absent fathers and children’s educational failure, poverty, dependency and criminality – and so, for her, the “diffusion” of the family unit sounded very thrilling indeed, as woolly abstractions can. Buoyed by her own imagined radicalism, Ms Schwartz went on to claim, again based on nothing, that conventional family structures “isolate” people, rather than, say, introducing them to a potential support network of aunts, uncles, sisters-in-law, etc. You see, raising a child without a partner – and therefore without at least half of that familial support structure – isn’t isolating at all. Because somehow the “community” will fill in the gaps. Or more typically, the state and its bureaucracy, at other people’s expense. And gosh, how radical is that?

The original, with links, can be found here.
Variations of the above are a staple of Laurie’s feminist schtick. But imagine if someone without Laurie’s middle-class background, and the cushion it provides, were foolish enough to act out these woke lifestyle fantasies. Say, a young woman on a rough council estate. Do we think it would go well and be every bit as glamorous and “exciting” as Laurie and Ms Schwartz would have us believe?
And this isn’t just a case of idiots diminishing their own prospects, and the prospects of their children, and making their own lives more difficult and prone to failure and dependency. If done in sufficient numbers, as Laurie advocates, the fallout spreads and, in time, a tipping point is reached. For single mothers, the state typically becomes a kind of negligent husband, one who doesn’t love you, and cannot love you, but whose cheques can be cashed. As Mark Steyn noted, “A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society.”
Again, a tipping point.

AKA freeloading.
Well, yes. But it’s radical freeloading, apparently, so that makes it okay.

One can’t help but think that the “excitement” Ms. Schwartz and company feel is the same sort an arsonist experiences in watching a building burn to the ground.
Well, it does bear a striking resemblance to a kind of rationalised malice, in that if you wanted to ruin someone’s life while flattering yourself, what would you do differently? And people like Laurie and Ms Schwartz, our supposedly radical gurus, have little to gain from successful, functional people with a grip on their own lives. And they have no incentive to offer advice that would result in more functionality and success. They feed on failure and irresponsibility, and the resentment that follows.

the noodle-armed strangebeards which occupy her timeline.
Heh.

Over at Tim’s gaff, a tale of romance.

I think underneath the self-loathing daddy issues Laurie there is something resembling a pretty woman
The most unattractive thing about her by a mile is her attitude. If that changed, and she took a bath, she’d be fine.
I think it was in the comments under one of David’s (many) pieces on deranged feminists I first read that, while beauty is only skin deep, ugly cuts right to the bone. And as mate in RL said when were discussing how good looking a woman must be before you’d sleep with her: “personality goes a loooooooong way”.

“personality goes a loooooooong way”.
Many years ago during my college days, I recall an acquaintance whose bar-attention had been directed toward a physically attractive lady, returning to our group after a few moments and announcing, “I need some personality with my t*ts.”

I need some personality with my t*ts.
Any more of this locker room talk and we’ll be flicking each other with towels.
What?

See, e.g., photos of Penny posted above.
Indeed, hence the line I quoted from my book. Normal people don’t need to go around with blue hair, and those that do are signalling something. Okay there may be exceptions, but as the mafia bosses at the end of Casino say: “Why take a chance?”

Suppose Guinness reshot the Heineken ad and showed the hearty dark beers sliding down the bar to dark skinned men while the last, pale yellow, light beer is caught by a noodle armed guy with a full hipster beard and wearing a faux lumberjack shirt.
Would that be racist?

Nkechi Amare Diallo is an obvious anagram of “Heck Milo I dare anal”
From the comments to David’s self-referential link at 14:39.
Don’t ask, “Why?” It doesn’t matter.

Tim Newman: Normal people don’t need to go around with blue hair, and those that do are signalling something.
It’s called aposematism. A warning signal.

Poor Laurie! Suffering to bring us her wisdom:
How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Abuse, Harassment and Trashing That Has Been My Daily Reality For The Past Nine Years: by me, a woman who writes words for a living.
I wonder if she’s tried being nicer?

Normal people don’t need to go around with blue hair, and those that do are signalling something.
I met an…impressively tattooed woman in her mid-30s at a social event a few weeks back, and she responded to an offhand comment I made about one of her pieces by blurting out “My mother says tattoos are for sailors and white trash.”
I assure you, my self-control was Herculean.

I wonder if she’s tried being nicer?
Laurie’s standard manoeuvre is to construe any mockery and contempt aimed at her, and at what she says and writes, as an attack on All Of Womanhood, and driven by “fear” of how radical and brave she is.
You have to wonder if it ever crosses Laurie’s mind that the ridicule and scorn might have something to do with her being an incorrigible fantasist and liar who regularly insults half the population, as if it were a credential, and says things like this, and things like these, and who then expects to be taken seriously as an intellectual powerhouse.
But somehow, I doubt it.

It’s called aposematism. A warning signal.
*cough*
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/couple-more-400-personalities-between-12259376

That “skeptics” and atheists align so closely with contemporary leftists ideologically is not an accident.
Well, you’ll find there there is no shortage of atheists among libertarians and even conservatives. But they are less likely to interpret their religious skepticism as a social one-up on everyone else. Hence, the lower level of conspicuous preening over the matter.

Right now I’m rocking a neon blue buzz cut.
She kind of looks like a lemur if a lemur had blue hair.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=large+eyed+rodents&client=firefox-b-ab&dcr=0&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=zZqX4bvnLPLMbM%253A%252CVtO0CrTAAZRWjM%252C_&usg=__3ZAlMD8OGZUu8gJlvaRu1uElsMM%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt3YeR7o_aAhUC94MKHenbD7kQ9QEIKzAB#imgrc=NDOP3P12XXoa4M:

cancelled following (false) fire alarms going off
That has long been a favorite tactic of the left, because nothing says “we care about free speech” than using dirty tricks to silence dissent.

Janice Fiamengo’s lecture on 24th March 2018 was cancelled following (false) fire alarms going off.
And the usual harassment and thuggery, which, for Mao-lings, is the sweetest plum, the reward for all their pretentious, utterly vacant piety:

Another thing that strikes me about these protesting hordes — apart from their proclivity to break the law with customary impunity — is the monumental ignorance they exhibit. The few protesters I have actually managed to talk to over the years have never read the works of the people they are shutting down… They are ignorant even of Herbert Marcuse whose theories they are aggressively putting into practice.

It’s sometimes hard to articulate the exact level of irony.

Because somehow the “community” will fill in the gaps.
Re Laurie and Ms Schwartz and their radical “diffusion” of the family unit, i.e., single motherhood and that supposedly feminist and empowering dependency on the state, here are some of those real-world consequences that they don’t like to talk about. There is, you’ll note, no mention of a father, as if even to raise the question would be terribly problematic and just not done.
But hey, radical and sexy.
Via Tim.

Julia Kristeva was communist secret agent, Bulgaria claims

Kristeva, 76, is the author of more than 30 books and worked alongside leading French intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes.
Also known as, “The Trinity of Bullshit.”

Looks like there’s no actual crime in Avon and Somerset.
Cringeworthy. And the people involved assume that this kind of theatre somehow improves the image of the police force. Truly, they will strike terror into the hearts of evildoers.

Bless!
‘Tis gone. What did I miss?