Friday Ephemera

[ Slides 2%-off drinks voucher to Joan. ]

Yeah, I think I’m going to remain standing:
https://twitter.com/MarDixon/status/1187676652450582529

Gentlemen, please inform yourself about your incoherent social construct.
As Patrick Brown has just pointed out, the paper is a hoax, albeit an all-too-plausible one.

they got me,
You’re not alone there. And the quoted assessment by the hoaxers seems spot-on. The primary criterion is the affirmation of deranged woke politics. Which is to say, ideological conformity. How one gets to the preferred – and predestined – conclusion, or whether one has gotten anywhere at all, is at best secondary. And often simply irrelevant.

Come bask in our two-hour poverty simulation.
Doris Lessing’s semi-autobiographical novel Landlocked has a funny passage about what made her progressive friends different from her non-progressive friends…

But of course these were ‘intelligent’ people; some of them even ‘educated’; even – though this was a word they used with an increasingly humorous grimness, ‘progressive’ people. Yet what had changed in the talk, since Martha had chafed at the talk at the women’s tea-parties in the avenues?
These women did not complain about their servants; they deplored, instead, that they had servants, wished that they could do without them, and often indeed, took decisions to give them up. And they did not complain about their husbands, but about ‘society’, which made marriage unsatisfactory.
They did not talk scandal in the sense of have you heard that so and so has left her husband? They discussed people’s characters, with all the dispassionate depth offered to them by their familiarity with ‘psychology’. Why anybody ever did anything was immediately obvious to these psychologically educated females, and people’s motives were an open book to them, their own included.

The primary criterion is the affirmation of deranged woke politics minds.

A hoax?
There is no joy in me now.
Publican, a double shot of hemlock, if you please.

Come bask in our two-hour poverty simulation.
Remember how Marie Antoinette played at being a shepherdess?
Nice, but not an issue.
Yes, there are hipsters who are queens, but absolutely no hipster is an actual, does actual getting things done, administrator, basically by definition.
—Pre-revolutionary France got trapped in that Title By Inheritance And Nothing Else thing, and didn’t figure out how to shake it before the guillotines arrived.
—The same of pre-revolutionary Russia and the handy Tokarev, for that matter . . . .

“Just a moment… Just a moment… I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit. It’s going to go 100% failure within 72 hours.”

Is there any higher medal in gymnastics than Olympic Gold?

Two 17-year-old boys accused of harassing four African-American middle schoolgirls — using racial slurs and urinating on one of the victims — are facing charges including bias intimidation and lewdness. [snip]
Police say the boys are of Indian descent.
While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin.

so I guess that means all the black rappers and all the black on black crime is merely blacks acting out whiteness, then.

The boys’ actions resemble those of people who feel empowered to act out their resentment against nonwhite people who are deemed out of place, confronting them with hostility or slurs or calling the police. The people patrolling what they see as their spaces are often — but not always — white. The Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson calls areas that are policed in this way, “the white space,”

Black gangbangers, acting white, protect their “white space” when confronting people they deem out of place “Where you from?” and beating or killing the person who gives the wrong answer.
Makes sense.

Makes sense.
As a worldview to cultivate, it’s not just wrong or even laughably wrong. It’s pernicious and deranging. Again, the conclusion – Bad Whitey, Corrupter Of All Things – is obligatory, predetermined; and the route to it, however twisty and contrived, is unimportant. Any contortion, any paper-thin pretext, will do.
And this fatuous twattery is apparently more than good enough for Princeton, where the author is employed.

For People With Periods,
“It doesn’t look human”
https://twitter.com/scottmorris39/status/1188409518704807936

Holy c**p!
Sorry for the profanity, but I just had to link to This interview with Philosopher Angelo Codevilla where a member of the American Elite media gets his clock cleaned:
So, when I express my sincere concern about transgender rights, you would presumably accuse me of manufacturing a new category of clients—and at the same time, a new class of bigots for me to self-righteously oppose.
You are not manufacturing a class, or rather you are exploiting that class’ weakness to turn that class into clients.
Most of all, what you are giving them—which really in a sense they crave more than anything else—is a sense of grievance against the rest of America. Grievance is the handle by which you push these pawns into your cultural wars.
via Second City Bureaucrat

…blaming the entire world would be too nakedly pathological to get away with.
They blame America – or Britain, France, Sweden – because it’s permitted even encouraged, by the Elite Class.

…where a member of the American Elite media gets his clock cleaned:
“American Elite” is an odd way to spell “smug, condescending, generally ignorant, bubble dwelling nitwit”, but it is shorter.

I was always struck by the marginal status of those other people you mention, Republicans. Clearly, they were not as bright as me and my friends were…As a graduate of two elite American universities…

As I said before, “elite” = Yugo.

(S) You call those contemptible people the “country party.”
(C) Precisely. Here, I’m borrowing an 18th-century British term.
(S) I thought it was a good term because it brings to mind country music.
(C) That too. Have you ever been to Branson, Missouri? Do you even know what it is?
(S) I gather it’s neither Aspen nor Hollywood.

Touche, Mr. Wilde, touche, (not that you haven’t just shown your provincialism).

(S) As a sometime student of intelligence work…There are now well more than a million Americans with some form of top secret or higher security clearance. Now I can accept that something is properly a secret if only five people know it, or if 40 people know it, or even 400 people. But there is no such thing as a secret that is shared by 1 million people…[later]…
(C)…Pollard was sentenced on the basis of a memorandum, which is yet secret.

First, our self proclaimed better and “sometimes student of intelligence” reveals he knows nothing about how clearances work or how classified information is shared. A guy with a TS isn’t privy to the same info as a guy with a TS/SCI, and among the TS/SCI the whole point of the “C” is that information is “compartmented” and not everyone with a TS/SCI has access to the same “compartments”. Second, seeing as how Pollard was sentenced in 1987 and a memo still secret, one would make the assumption that absent leakers and spies, the system generally works. But, hey, he is an elite.
One could spend a week dissecting everything in that article, I would give him props for publishing himself being beaten like a toy mouse in a room full of kittens, but you could bet the back 40 he thinks quite the opposite.

Oops… David Samuels, not “Daniel”.

Jonathan
Samuels was lauding Bezos and Washington Post ….and today we have THIS obit headline on the killing of Islamic terrorist leader al-Baghdadi
Abu Akbar al-Baghdadi, Austere Religious Scholar at Helm of Islamic State, dies at 48
Our betters in journalism….

… THIS obit headline…
Marone; and that as what they changed it to. I guess they are just tying to create the darkness their masthead says democracy dies in.

Is the interviewer Daniel Samuels playing devil’s advocate or does he actually believe what he’s saying?
I found myself wondering the same thing. We’re deep in Poe’s Law territory here.
Based on same later incidences of Trump Tourette’s, I think he’s sincere.

Terms and conditions apply.

Well … that face you make …

Life imitates art, a play in three acts.

that face you make…
We feel his pain.

“And in travel news.”

Guess where I was last week.