The Lockdown Diaries (5)
An open thread, in which to share links and bicker.
I’ll set the ball rolling with a clarification of note; some feline curiosity; an augmented cat; via Julia, some contemporary scenes; and via Damian, a wondrous feat involving carrier bags.
Oh, and as some of you may be shopping from home a little more than usual, please bear in mind that any Amazon UK shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.
It helps to keep this place here.
For those in need of further diversion, the Reheated series is there to be poked at.
I move in mysterious ways.
Much like the Lord, except that he gives us manna in the desert while you give us suspicious sausages and hump fat.
In all the jobs I saw and did, in almost all of the jobs for the working classes, I found little that wasn’t stultifying and degrading to any normal human intelligence.
Theodore Dalrymple has written of encounters with individuals who thought very highly of themselves and who affected to find everything and everyone they encountered to be wearyingly dull and boring.
I’ll just leave this here. In case.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation “investigates the root causes of social problems”. LOL
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation “investigates the root causes of social problems”. LOL
It’s like some grim comedy. And the obvious inference – the everyday fact that anyone could observe in a matter of minutes – isn’t ignored by accident. It isn’t some remarkably convenient oversight. It’s carefully ignored – both by our urban studies lecturer and by the authors of the report he cites, whose coyness and evasion are almost funny. Presumably, these contortions are rehearsed to the point of habit, such that they become a mental reflex, an instinctive taboo, and are performed on grounds that any acknowledgement of the glaringly obvious would be inegalitarian.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation “investigates the root causes of social problems”. LOL
The root assumption, implied throughout the article but never stated clearly, is that all conceivable categories of people are inclined to drop litter, habitually, at exactly the same rate, and that therefore variations in littering levels from one neighbourhood to another must be explained by other, structural issues. And this conceit is continually undermined by what little actual data the cited report contains – say, regarding which kinds of neighbourhoods require cleaning, and re-cleaning, much more than others.
The nearest we get to an acknowledgement of reality is very brief indeed and very quickly shied away from. And so, we learn that the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.” That’s it. The question that you’d think would be so obvious it would be among the first to be considered is reduced to a mere afterthought, seemingly an irrelevance. Presumably, we’re expected to believe that the selfish, scummy people who routinely drop their garbage in the street are somehow, in ways never quite specified, acting against their will.
David, it’s not that at all. It’s rather that since gravity was discovered by a dead white European male and hence is part of white devil science, then the trash dropped by people with browner skin isn’t subject to the same laws, and just magically levitates in the air. So obviously, the trash found on the ground in their neighborhoods can’t have come from them.
[…] trash dropped by people with browner skin isn’t subject to the same laws […]
So they can throw lightning but they can’t throw their trash into a receptacle.