These fine ladies are out of your league. || Unfortunate alignments. (h/t, Damian) || The cat ladders of Switzerland. || On the upside, at least it wasn’t cancer. || Our woke world, a snapshot. || Physiotherapy is ableist and oppressive. || Apollo 11. (h/t, Things) || The hazards of inattentive grocery shopping. (h/t, Obnoxio) || Shadow of a volcano. || Amazon review of note. || Teaching a neural network to drive a car. || Dawn chorus. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Sweet dreams. || Marital duels of the thirteenth century. || One of many. || Lively scenes. || Parenting shortfall. || She’s passionate about recycling. || Apparently, the word honk is no longer permitted on Facebook. || And finally, a notable courtship ritual.

I’m sensing it may be time for an open thread, in which to share links and bicker. While you mull, here’s a lesson in persistence and redoubling your efforts. Oh, and some totally harmless party balloons.

If the cravings are too much, you can always poke through the reheated series and greatest hits.

I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.

In the video linked above, feminist “theorist” Sophie Lewis informs us that the foetus, a nascent human being, is “violent,” does violence to “gestators,” and that abortion is a corrective killing, an “unmaking,” a means of “going on strike against gestational work.” “We need to move away from… arguments around when human life begins,” says she.

So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.

Ms Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. When not arguing for the destruction of the unborn, and the “abolition” of the family – which is to be replaced by comradeliness, apparently – she “participates in the Out Of The Woods anti-capitalist ecological writing collective.”

Update, via the comments:

In this laughably pretentious review of Ms Lewis’ laughably pretentious book, we learn that the author wishes us to embrace the disintegration of the family – our families, all families – “until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all.” As if the “best available care” would somehow be an obvious result of family disintegration, despite decades of real-world evidence to the contrary. Supposedly, we would learn to love the “plural womb,” “radical disinheritance,” and “a world beyond propertarian kinship and work alienation.” The children we have will no longer be ours, it seems, and this will apparently make us happy. It’s a “queer, communist, speculative future.” A narcissist’s experiment. And we are to be the guinea pigs.

Via Mr Muldoon. Somewhat related.

In case you missed it in the comments:

The Secret Life of Pets 2… effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews

Woke reviewer Carlos Aguilar watches an animated film intended for children and gets terribly upset.

It occurs to me that when the reviewer of a children’s cartoon is whining at length about a lack of discernibly gay pet-owning couples and the oppressive “heteronormativity” of a character choosing to get married and have a child – an act that is “conservative” and therefore bad, apparently – then the problem isn’t the film.

In the comments, Liz adds,

Reproduction is ‘conservative’. Normality is a ‘trope’. Sounds like someone’s been severely educated…

Such that Mr Aguilar, a 30-year-old man, is seeking validation of his own niche sexual politics in a children’s cartoon about talking dogs.

Due to events beyond my influence, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with some niche entertainment; a pet shop promotion of note; an excess of ears; a lady who wants some fries; and a lady who wants a kebab.

Oh, and a plot twist.

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Weepy And Hysterical.

A philosophy lecturer, a specialist in “critical whiteness studies,” apologises, at length, for his own heterosexuality.

Professor Yancy goes on to denounce, on behalf of all men, “our sexually objectifying gazes… our pornographic imaginations.” Our “dominant phallic economy.” Indeed, he continues, “we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity.” You see, being aroused by women, while not quite rape in itself, is nonetheless, as it were, rape-adjacent, and constitutes “a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity.” One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of woke philosophy lecturers.

The Perils Of Jogging.

Zoe Williams warns Guardian readers that exercise “makes you rightwing.”

According to Zoe, if you visit a gym, or cycle, or merely take the occasional brisk walk with a dog in tow – or presumably have any kind of goals, however modest, and then achieve them – you’ll become boastful, consumed with “self-love” and wicked delusions of “self-sufficiency,” a gateway to the greatest sin of all: not being leftwing. Because leftwing people, like Zoe, are free of vanity and unblemished by urges to signal superiority of one kind or another. Say, by telling us, quite often, that they’re not at all rightwing.

Still, it’s strange just how readily Zoe leaps from ‘people can be a bit tedious when banging on about their enthusiasms’ – the word blogging comes to mind – to ‘regular jogging will make you vote Conservative because feelings of achievement and capability are politically corrupting’. Presumably, leftist piety is arrived at via indolence, whining and half-arsed flummery. Though it’s not, perhaps, as strange as declaring one’s own piety and compassion – as opposed to all those dreadful rightwing people – while sneering at a cancer charity because its most direct beneficiaries are men.

How To Impress Your Boss, An Intersectional Guide. 

Self-described “educator” Sophia Stephens says that minority employees shouldn’t have to be reliable or competent.

While scanning the New York Times, Ben Sixsmith notes the odd parental priorities of author and journalist Jancee Dunn:

The article in question, titled My Marriage Has A Third Wheel: Our Child – and which helpfully includes a photo of the couple’s apparently problematic nine-year-old – can be found here. In it, we learn that the author “would never have dreamed of sharing anything remotely personal with my parents,” but “wanted a different kind of relationship with our daughter.” And hence happily directing a media spotlight onto said youngster while waiting for applause.  

Jancee Dunn is the author of How Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids, her account of an attempt to “salvage” a “faltering marriage.”

And yes, the family does live in Brooklyn. And no, they don’t share a surname. And yes, the adults have availed themselves of professional counselling services.

Also, open thread.