Big Ambitions
For those who missed it in the comments:
While fat activism has disrupted many dominant discourses that causally contribute to negative judgments about fat bodies, it has not yet penetrated the realm of competitive bodybuilding.
Savour that sentence. Let it roll around your mind.
According to its author, Richard Baldwin, fat bodybuilding should be a thing that exists. Specifically, “a fat-inclusive politicised performance… embedded within bodybuilding,” in which the “assumptions” and standards of the sport would be “destabilised,” with the result that “everyone” can be “taken seriously,” regardless of their girth and athleticism. Competitors, we’re told, would “showcase fat through poses… that display fat in a body-positive way,” while wearing whatever commodious garments are deemed to enhance the, um, aesthetics of their gyrations. And hey, showcasing fat is what sport’s all about.
It takes time to make a fat body. It takes even more time to make a politicised fat body. This is precisely the message fat bodybuilding should convey: the fat body is a body built by time and work and deserves to be respected.
These are the dizzy heights of Fat Studies scholarship.
Unlike Mr Baldwin, I make no claim to being “dedicated to fighting oppression and promoting social justice,” but actually, it occurs to me that a fat body, by which the author seems to mean an ostentatiously obese one, is quite easy to arrive at, as it generally involves the abandonment of self-denial, succumbing to temptation by default, and a tendency to shun any avoidable exertion. Basically, torpidity and a lack of care. A point somewhat underlined by the unremarkable fact that the number of fat people exceeds by orders of magnitude the number of bodybuilders.
Via Darleen.
“pencil porn”
From an early age my artsy, stationery shop manager grandfather gave me pens, pencils, markers, etc. to the point where I’m now a writing utensil afficianado (and eventually became a draftsman).
But I don’t think I’ll be Googling pencil porn because it’s probably not what I’d hope it’d be.
😄
Do they sell Prismacolor pencils over there, Piper Paul? Used to be such wonderful pencils; now, like so many things, they’re Chinese crap.
I’m more of a technical pencil guy (Rotring, Pentel) and fairly colourblind so I stick to easily discernible shades. And my blogging thong collection looks atrocious since my fashion coordination is bad as a result of my disability.
. . . each Tarot card has a different scene on it. The meaning of the scene is different if the card falls upside down. So round cards (invented by a couple of American feminists, incidentally) sort of defeat the purpose of card reading!
Major Poker: Playing poker with a tarot deck.
Hmmm. David?
Where do you want the casino set up?
And are the henchlesbians up to ferrying the free drinks to the gaming tables?
. . . each Tarot card . . . is different if the card falls upside down. So round cards . . .
So there is placing a card.
And then there are reversed cards, because they’re upside down.
Soooo . . . what is the meaning for a round card that winds up sideways?
Just when you think academic scams can’t go any lower, behold this flimflam
That’s not quite right—plenty of the 78 cards can give you not-so-good news when upright. In no particular order: a 5 from any of the 4 suits; the one time I ever had the 7 of Cups fall upright was for a person lapsing into mental illness; the 8 of Cups can be a bad-news one; the Seven, Nine and Ten of Wands; in the Major Trumps the Tower, the Devil(obviously) and The Moon are almost always bad news when upright, and the High Priestess almost as often. (She is actually intended to represent the maybe-mythical Pope Joan, and in most languages is called The Female Pope; in Spanish, or instance, she’s the Papisa.). Then we have the Two, Five, Seven, Nine, and Ten of Swords, all of which are bad news upright, as is the Eight of Swords unless you have a kinky client, for whom it may be good news.
Whew. Maybe we should just stick with blackjack.
That Seven of Cups incident was what caused me to give up a reasonably lucrative part-time job on a 900 line. I knew instinctively that I was tapping into problems too big for me to try to help solve.
There is a game called Tarocco that’s been played with Tarot cards for centuries (not the same session, or the same deck). Maybe we can add a few tarocco tables if blackjack revenue slumps.
@Darleen
In other words, she’s a flasher.
When a round card ends up sideways, the Oracle is telling you you should have bought a normal deck of cards.
As long as we’re roaming the carnival, has anyone tried the Chinese fortune-telling system, I Ching? I had the book out of the library, and it’s fairly simple, but I couldn’t get answers that made any sense. Maybe it works better in Chinese.
When American fundamentalists want to peek into the future, they close their eyes, open a Bible, blindly put a finger on it, then read whatever verse they landed on. I’ve seen fundamentalists get good results with this system, but it never worked for me. I ask something like “Should I take this job I’m offered or keep the old one?” and I’d invariably get a verse like “Thou shalt make the ark sixty cubits long, forty cubits high, and forty cubits wide” or “John begat George, and George begat Paul, and Paul begat Ringo…”. etc. just had no luck at all with it.
In other words, she’s a flasher.
Not just that, but she gets to keep a diary for seven years and turns it in as an academic paper while receiving taxpayer money.
The mind, it boggles.
. . . or “John begat George, and George begat Paul, and Paul begat Ringo…”. etc . . .
That’s what I never understood about a recent pope and the very, very clear inspiration and guidance offered by his predecessor.
Everyone could see that the obvious successor to Pope John-Paul was clearly going to be Pope George-and-Ringo . . .
One of my many bizarre hobbies is divination systems from various cultures.
The thing about Tarot is that there’s no standard symbology, although there are two large families of imagery that many decks fall into (Rider-Waite and Crowley). Many decks have different symbology systems, or their own unique symbol sets (I’m a big fan of the Rohrig Tarot). Many decks don’t even have the standard suits, or 78 cards. So the fact that round cards can’t be reversed doesn’t really invalidate their use as divination tools; the point of divination has always been that the diviner’s own occult talent is what affects the card draws, and their skill at interpreting the drawn cards is informed by but not determined by the images themselves. The orientation of a card is simply an additional piece of information the diviner has to work with and isn’t strictly necessary; there are fortune-tellers who use regular old Bicycle card decks.
The I Ching is a fun little system. It has the benefit of not needing any special equipment, although memorizing the trigrams takes a bit of work. Like just about all of these draw-random-text-fragments-from-a-corpus-recombine-and-interpret systems, though, it’s all about the Forer effect.
she gets to keep a diary for seven years and turns it in as an academic paper while receiving taxpayer money
Reading New Real Peer Review has convinced me that “autoethnography” is code for “I conned the university into paying me for blogging.”
but actually, it occurs to me that a fat body, by which the author seems to mean an ostentatiously obese one, is quite easy to arrive at, as it generally involves the abandonment of self-denial, succumbing to temptation by default, and a tendency to shun any avoidable exertion. Basically, torpidity and a lack of care.
You’d never make it as a postmodern academic, David.
You’d never make it as a postmodern academic, David.
I suspect my Clown Quarter career would be lively and short, and would involve a mysterious, and quite devastating, electrical fire.
Re the paper above, I suppose there’s the crumb of a barely interesting idea, in that maybe there’s a glib comparison to be made between the indecently obese and heavyweight competitors who’ve enlarged themselves to the proportions of the proverbial brick shithouse. Both are unusual, and somewhat bizarre, compared to the rest of us. But bodybuilders must exert enormous discipline, acquiring mass, ‘bulking’, and then ‘shredding’ to resemble some cartoonish ideal. Whatever its merits, it doesn’t look easy. However, there’s no analogue, no discipline or self-denial, in simply being fat. Quite the opposite.
I’m waiting for someone to ask how you stumbled across this development.
Earlier, you wrote:
Because showcasing fat is what sport’s all about.
So I immediately thought of sumo and figured somebody had to have made porn involving it. Rule 34 and all.
So I immediately thought of sumo and figured somebody had to have made porn involving it.
[ Points to the Stool of Shame. ]
Sort of related: Via Ace’s sidebar, Jordan Peterson discusses how intersectionality is the fatal flaw of identity politics and the current state of Leftism.
Can’t believe this hasn’t been quoted yet in the thread:
“Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.” (Steven Wright)
To be fair, the author of the bodybuilding piece is simply ahead of his times.
I am increasingly disturbed how prescient some aspects of 2000AD seem…
“Cough. Cough.”
Heh. 🙂
I am increasingly disturbed how prescient some aspects of 2000AD seem
Demolition Man tried to lampoon PC, ‘elf-n-safety culture and ended up being a devastatingly accurate prediction of the future.
Well, Taco Bell hasn’t won the restaurant wars yet, so there’s still hope.
[ Points to the Stool of Shame. ]
No refunds; credit note only.
No refunds; credit note only.
By the way, the Stool of Shame isn’t the kind you sit on. It’s the other kind of stool. It comes with an elastic band and is worn as a hat.
What?