Friday Ephemera

The olden days: We had enough sweaters.

Florida Woman links the devil, 5G, Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, “the pedophiles” and the deep state.
—Surely she could have also fit in kumquats, tribbles,
custard recipes, and Lampchop—the puppet—, but apparently she ran out of time.
—I tend to ignore videos, so much faster to skim through text, but yes, when checking this one for the details, she does hit every item.

Is it possible that just about anything could be a band name ?
(e.g. “Is It Possible”, “That”, “Just About Anything”, “Could Be”, “A” and “Band Name”)

Sshh. I think I hear something in the woods.
Plot twist!

Morning, all.
Style tip: You just can’t be fashionable without some neurotically pretentious self-flagellation.
The woke rewards of nakedly racist spite. One might almost call it privilege.
And for those who missed it yesterday, via Connor: Who knew sociopathy involved so much whining?

always respect the media.
They’re activists not journalists.

Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8461387/Dont-throw-away.html
Health Secretary Matt Hancock threatens to CLOSE beaches and re-lockdown local areas after ‘major incident’ is declared in Bournemouth, thousands of Liverpool fans celebrate title win and police come under attack from revellers for second night
Decisive words on the part of the Minister and police.
I wonder why the crowds felt they were under no real moral obligation not to congregate
I wonder why the “revellers” felt no fears about chasing the police away.
And I wonder why, in this case, the Minister and police even criticised the crowds and, in Dorset at least, tried to disperse them?
It’s a mystery- no doubt about it

Good merging. 🙂
A year or so ago, the ‘Half and I were driving through the grounds of Chatsworth House when the entire deer population, numbering four or five hundred, decided to amble, in single file, from one side of the park to the other, which entailed crossing the road right in front of us. It was quite a sight and it wasn’t obvious what had prompted this mass relocation. I think it was one of the better traffic hold-ups I’ve been in.
Not, I grant you, as unnerving as a migration of hefty bison, but still.

“We were skipping maybe two meals a day”
The choice of photo isn’t helping to elicit great sympathy, I fear. I say this as someone who, despite being svelte and gazelle-like, also eats two meals a day. As opposed to six, or whatever number would be considered ideal by the ladies in question.

Remember, loyal citizens, always respect the media.
” I was radicalised by reality your Honor.”

[ Nibbles on corner of a chicken salad sandwich. ]

Media meets an uncomfortable truth
“We’re going to have to leave it there…”

Of course the way to dissipate any remaining bad blood [over historical racism, sexism, etc] would be to visibly and consistently strive to appoint people to positions based on their merit, confident that in the course of time people of ability will rise to the positions which they deserve. But what would be the most divisive way in which to go about trying to address such inequalities? Well, that would be to very visibly and obviously create and institute a mirror version of the old system: to attempt to carve out special privileges for people who look like those who suffered discrimination in the past, and to treat with a special disdain and contempt the people who look like they might have once benefited from discrimination…
Cambridge University has carved out a racism-allowance for Gopal where she can act in a manner in which others would not. She is literally privileged… Like all really successful twenty-first-century privilege-wielders, Gopal knows how to play the game. You pretend that you are in a position of weakness and vulnerability, when you are actually in a position of power. You present yourself as a victim as soon as people call you out as an aggressor. And you pretend to be the offended party after going out of your way to cause maximum offence yourself.

Douglas Murray on the malevolent goblin Priyamvada Gopal.

It really is a cause for despair. Adam Boulton, say what you will about him – and God knows I do, isn’t a stupid man but he’s able to completely ignore reality.
A psychotherapist–Jordan Peterson, I think–once said in an interview that it can be much more difficult to help highly intelligent and educated people because they can cleverly find reasons to justify and excuse everything that they say and do.

You just can’t be fashionable…
Thomas Sowell has a particularly apt comment on the same thread.

The woke rewards…
And I thought I made it clear when I said that requires a trigger warning. I lost a perfectly good part of my breakfast clicking that link.

You just can’t be fashionable without some neurotically pretentious self-flagellation.
See this response:
https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelmantzmd/status/1276372779265167360
See also: the dhimmi mentality.
See also: the unstable backgrounds of so many (usually female) Westerners who are successfully groomed into converting to Islam.
See also this psychopath:
https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/larry-ray-sarah-lawrence-students.html

You can, in an advanced society, ignore reality for quite some time but it will eventually bite you on the arse.
As Adam Smith said: ” There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

The Red Guard is holding sway, Jonathan Chait spends a lot of words exposing them here
https://web.archive.org/web/20200625015531/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-racism-racism-progressive-progressphiles-david-shor.html
in a group of ostensible data analysts…and yet ends the reporting of the beheadings and struggles sessions thusly

It would be inaccurate to take the overall tenor of this discussion as representative of the views of progressive data analysts in the group. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true. Seeing one of their peers fired from his job and then banished from their professional network after being accused of racism, and then other members similarly accused merely for questioning the fairness of this response, surely dissuaded many people who disagreed from speaking up.
“Reasonable people are not commenting, and the reasonable people are afraid for their jobs,” one member told me, adding that several peers had sent private messages objecting to Shor’s mistreatment that they felt afraid to share with the list.
Elite institutions like “Progressphiles” deserve credit for attempting to grapple with the crisis of institutional racism, a task many institutions have not even bothered to undertake. Simple color blindness is not enough to make women and people of color feel welcome and fully equal in spaces in which few of them have been admitted. These institutions need to develop norms of conduct that allow underrepresented groups to feel truly equal while accounting for human complexity and permitting people to express themselves in natural language rather than academic jargon.
The protocols they are using now do not work. Liberals must find better ones.

Really? REALLY??

I’ve gotten a bit short with friends who’ve trotted out the “400 years of privilege/slavery” nonsense.
Choosing to be steeped in tribal grievance – which very often means pretentious, vicarious grievance, invoking strangers long dead – is not a healthy way to live. It doesn’t seem likely to result in a happy life. Or a personality that isn’t repellent and insufferable.

ARGH … WTH??? The preview version did NOT look like that!!
Here’s the original link
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-racism-racism-progressive-progressphiles-david-shor.html
if you can’t read it, go to web.archive.org, plug it in and read the article.
SHEESH

Really? REALLY??
Havel’s greengrocers:
https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html?fbclid=IwAR1_2x1jgiiJ0XZv_CbwmcFkhbM2uloAzpZEwcp94Jex4D54IITGhBxK6Co

Here you go … cha-ching … let this help catch up on my bartab.
Bless you, madam. May hot weather result in no more ironing than usual.

Sowell on Marx.
Thanks for that, David. A very informative essay.