Have At It, Me Hearties

The move to claim “niceness” as a specifically leftwing virtue has been horrifyingly successful, as the recent career of that turd Corbyn demonstrates.
Exactly. Quite how people have managed to persuade themselves that Corbyn is an avuncular peace-broker when even a cursory examination of his life’s work demonstrates that he is anything but, evades me.
Corbyn’s take on Venezuela- ““Venezuela is seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting the neoliberal policies of the world’s financial institutions.”
Further to the cow-slaughtering above, here is some of that there rejection of neo-liberalism, with knives, dancing and, erm, “seasoning”.

“Or the Americans.“
And yet here they are.

“niceness” as a specifically leftwing virtue
Something that occurred to me during the Pope’s recent visit to Ireland. It’s taken a long time, and a lot of horrific revelations, before we stopped assuming people who spoke for God automatically meant well. I think we need to learn the same thing about people who speak from the political left.

“Pac-Man resonates with the current neoliberal condition.”
Smells like bullshit.

Hi PST314,
They’re here for the money, not because they like what’s left of American society. Most people know that NAFTA drove down U.S. wages, but not that it did the same in Mexico, where wages were lower to begin with.

Local NewsTV is getting woke. They ran a “Breaking News Alert” announcing that some parts of the city have better houses, and people have higher incomes than other parts.
A great deal of very expensive time consuming research by doctoral sociology students will be needed to prove the hypothesis that systemic racism and white people are the root causes, mostly the latter. p <.01 Government solutions to follow.

It’s strange to watch this pathology spread:
The disturbing scenarios are those in which it’s not mere pretense. Or in which it’s evolved.
If you’ve convinced someone that they don’t have any hope beyond the immediate, that everything bad is their fault and nothing they ever do will remain, is it so strange that a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts would set in? More so when the captor “generously” lets you have an ice cream every other day and pats you on the head for being responsive.
If S&M and humiliation porn are proven to have an appeal to some psyches, why not try to engineer an environment in which their societal analogue is hard to escape? In which the self-denouncement and fatalistic expression of nihilism is in itself an emotional release, and actually results in attachment-through-submission? It’s not for nothing Winston is said to have *loved* Big Brother in the end. Get things off your back in the struggle session, release oxytocin in the moment of relief you’re not off to the block just yet and are still accepted, and the “love” becomes real.
Back on the gruadriam headlines beat, I think Jeremy’s just tetchy that now he’s tried it, the pate cat food doesn’t taste as much better than the chicken as the price would suggest.
Also, J.A. Micheline wrote a piece on the ongoing “ComicsGate” furor and ended up writing a Classic Sentence:
“Unless comics creators adopt a zero tolerance approach to racism and misogyny, this abuse of power by ‘fans’ will never end”
Why yes. Customers are abusing their power, you see, by requesting what they want.
As well, she hit with “friendly fire” one of the gatekeepers *against* independent creators due to a past sin while attempting to virtue signal. “RACIST!” So sorry, Mark Waid.

“Still – it was taken as a blasphemous idea that a woman take responsibility for anything related to sex or her own body.”
It’s a blasphemous idea to the “social justice” Left that anybody except “right wing” governments and straight white men should take responsibility for anything.
“It’s taken a long time, and a lot of horrific revelations, before we stopped assuming people who spoke for God automatically meant well.”
Well, there was that little affair in the 16th Century. There are plenty of us brought up into a long tradition of refusal to trust men who claim holiness.

They’re here for the money, not because they like what’s left of American society
Yes. And have you noticed that there are conservatives who say we should celebrate the arrival of vast numbers of immigrants who are only here for the money and who despise our culture?

Also, J.A. Micheline wrote a piece on the ongoing “ComicsGate” furor
Richard Meyer is possibly my new favorite person. Unfortunately, I think he’s probably right that comics can’t recover from this. The GamerGate crybabies were easily-triggered millenials; most comic book fans are 40-year old white guys who just aren’t going to put up with this tripe. They’re voting with their wallets and it shows.

Darleen, the Library Policeman would like a word with you…
😄

Despise your culture?
I accept that many immigrants don’t understand how all the moving parts of liberal democracy work, so assume changing *this* won’t affect *that*. As a result they make mistakes about how to get what the West has.
But Western culture, and specifically US, is far from despised by most people. That enrages a small and very noisy minority, but the bulk ignore them.
Arab rap singers, Chinese skateboarders, Mexican NFL fans, giggly Russian teenagers wearing Nike and Gap. The penetration of Western culture, mostly via movies and electronic gadgets, now reaches every point on the globe. There are local holdouts, but there’s no global competitors.
There is no fifth column of Hispanics secretly trying to undo America. They don’t hate you any more than previous waves of Italians or Irish did.
Yes, they also want to keep some of their culture. We respect when Jews or Ukranians do that. But if a Galvanic does it is somehow hate?
I’m not for open borders, but most immigrants respect where they live. Otherwise they’d have chosen somewhere else.

“There is no fifth column of Hispanics secretly trying to undo America. They don’t hate you any more than previous waves of Italians or Irish did.”
I must have missed the equivalent of La Raza in Italian and Gaelic.

La Raza’s very much a, er, minority. Most Mexicans on whom I’ve eavesdropped seem to just want to make their $ and go home.
Also, that Veritas outfit is misnamed. Nowadays, Federal employees can be and are fired. Veritas could have learned this with 5 minutes’ Googling, which is why I say they’re misnamed. I suspect that giggling fellow in the video is an actor.

Then he’s an idiot. He can indeed be fired. (Being an idiot, he probably won’t be fired, will instead end up running his agency, but he COULD be fired.)

Pogonip,
It was the nothing else that was the problem, not the economic thing.
Dad (and his brother, also a Marine) were of the WW2 / Korea generation. We had just dealt with the death of his nephew in a Marine training accident.
So the nothing else was a bitter pill.

Not at all. As a contractor I frequently dealt with an agency notorious for firing its employees. Few outsiders heard of it because if the Assistant Undersecretary Overseer of Diversity Administration gets fired, that’s news; the anonymous GS-5 who does the actual work, not so much.

You are confusing de jure with de facto.
I heartily agree. And I only work for county government.

*It reminds me of Network 7, which was The Future thirty years ago.**
**Holy #@%$in’ Hellfire. How did that happen?
Ah, the days of “Max Headroom” et al.
And whatever happened to Magenta Devine, the posh, statuesque Goth junkie?
Ah- “In 2006, Devine fronted an Office of Fair Trading campaign that urged consumers in the travel market to book with a member of ABTA”.
Sheesh.