Time To Fire Up The Blessing Generator
Because, yes, it’s time to remind patrons that this rickety barge, on whose seating your arses rest, is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, 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.
For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and over 130,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year-summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.
If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.
As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.
Now share ye links and bicker.
Ping! You deserve a treat David, here spoil yourself.
Theft of note.
Let’s see how people like watching games between teams based on their melanin level
Outside of hockey, would much change?
I am living in an alternate universe – it is the only possible explanation.
https://www.vogue.com/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-gala-2021
Love expressed via the medium of PayPal.
Ping!
Bless you, madam. May your laundry hamper fill gradually and predictably, not in huge, seemingly random surges.
Love expressed via the medium of PayPal.
Bless you, sir. Should you be bought a swanky new device for your anniversary, may the set-up process be swift and effortless, or better yet, done almost entirely by the giver of said gift.
I am living in an alternate universe – it is the only possible explanation.
Imagine the level of narcissism and neuroticism in that room.
felicity: I am living in an alternate universe – it is the only possible explanation.
That is fucking hilarious. Not in a good way.
Window detected.
Behaving in class is “white supremacy,” apparently.
You see, paying attention and not being disruptive, so that things might actually be learned, is “passive” and a product of “white culture.” And expecting basic standards of behaviour – say, respecting other pupils who are trying to hear what’s being said – is “the definition of white supremacy.” And therefore bad, obviously.
He’s an educator, you know, a high-school teacher. A bringer of wisdom.
Him: OK y’all, PBIS is white supremacy with a hug.
Students: OK, teach.
[ Half the students get up and walk out of the room. ]
Him: Wait, y’all! Hey, wai-
[ One student slaps him hard across the face, knocking him to the ground, while two others rip down his pride flag from the wall and set light to it while laughing ]
Coda
Police are called to quell the disturbance and investigate assault and battery claims.
Very much related, this clown here.
Police are called to quell the disturbance and investigate assault and battery claims.
Parents are often reluctant – emotionally reluctant – to acknowledge the scale of the dysfunction, its pervasiveness, and the dogmatic perversity of many of those entrusted to teach their children. And yet evidence abounds and these things are declared. With a self-satisfied grin, no less.
Vogue this https://mobile.twitter.com/neontaster/status/1437566132647510020
Vogue this
Are y’all insultin’ tha Jesus Chicken?
{narrows eyes, quietly picks up shotgun . . .}
Window detected.
Mock if you will but when the internet goes down whoever owns that will still be able to tweet via pigeons.
Mock if you will but when the internet goes down whoever owns that will still be able to tweet via pigeons.
It’s the ratio of frame to glazing. A bold aesthetic choice.
It’s the ratio of frame to glazing.
You are missing the point, it is only for signalling when a tweet is sent.
Vogue this…
Again mockery. That dress was made by an immigrant.
From Toronto.
Again mockery.
Apparently, Ms Occasional Cortex imagines that her wardrobe solution will “kick open the doors at the Met.” Because declaring one’s own imagined radicalism – via the medium of gown-wearing – is so terribly brave, you see. As if she hadn’t been invited with a free ticket, saving her a tidy sum, and as if the place wasn’t filled with other status-fixated types, and as if her pretensions somehow aren’t the pretensions very much in fashion.
I mean, if the witless bint had turned up in a frock bearing some other, rather different slogan – a country without borders is doomed, say – then she might have had the crumb of a point. But no. No status points there.
Are y’all insultin’ tha Jesus Chicken?
Apropos.
Mock if you will but when the internet goes down whoever owns that will still be able to tweet via pigeons.
…which reminds us that the maximum length of a Tweet derives from the carrying capacity of a WWI era pigeon. Would I lie?
…as if her pretensions somehow aren’t the pretensions very much in fashion.
…as if her pretensions somehow aren’t the pretensions very much in fashion.
Part 2, QED.
Not entirely unrelated.
…as if her pretensions somehow aren’t the pretensions very much in fashion.
Part 3.
Part 4.
But, but, Chiquita Khrushchev is so brave breaking down the fourth wall with her blue collar sisters.
Right on, can you dig it?
Part 2, QED.
Remember when feminists pretended to regard all rape as evil?
Remember when feminists pretended to regard all rape as evil?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I am not at all sure what is happening here.
I saw a picture of the gown Ms Occasional Cortex wore: I was going to say that I saw it but to do that I would have had to be both very rich and very much in America. Neither are true.
However I did read the gown’s message* as ‘Tax Rich,’ and for a while pondered on who that Rich was. The late Richie Benaud sprang to mind but he was as far as I know never called Rich, but there must be others. So, any clues, chaps and chapesses?
*I believe Marshall McLuhan created the slogan, “The medium is the message.” What then am I to make about a slogan in slash-like blood red on a wedding gown?
AOC: Everyone look at meeeeeee!
Everyone: [ looks ]
AOC: [ Smug Grin ]
She’s gonna be president someday, isn’t she?
I think Tax Rich was married to Peg the Patriarchy. They divorced after their son became a vicar and their daughter came out as straight.
Behaving in class is “white supremacy,” apparently.
Historically, yes. There was a dominant culture that was confident about the rightness of imposing its own standards in its own country, and may even have immodestly believed its own standards to be objectively good. The school system, putting considerable heat under the melting pot, taught diverse immigrants how to behave like the founding Anglo protestants – don’t spend the schoolbook money on liquor, impose a domestic discipline for the kid to turn up washed and fed and well-rested every morning, don’t speak out of turn, respect the teacher, sustain the effort over the years until the kid is literate and credentialed and socially mobile.
I didn’t enjoy sitting still in a classroom, and neither did most of my white classmates. It was just one more thing that grown-ups made us do, like brushing our teeth and writing thank-you notes. Most of us could be made to understand that when there are 30 kids crammed into a room there’s no such thing as a quiet chat – every disruption ripples and multiplies. And the teachers appreciated that we couldn’t keep it up for very long, so they let us out every couple of hours to whoop and holler in the fresh air.
Despite the impression given by films where Robin Williams plays an inspiring teacher, the chances are that when students are climbing on desks, it’s not because they’re engaged in “active learning”.
Anyway, most learning at that age is conventional and passive. You just memorize the stupid French conjugations and then you know them for ever, it’s futile trying to make it interesting and inspiring while you’re grinding through it – it’s a matter of discipline and time preference and being able to imagine yourself being able to speak to a French girl without stumbling over your words. And certainly, all of those capabilities are part of white culture, handed down by white parents to white children. Cultures that have a problem sitting still in a classroom (and he’s not talking about the Chinese, is he?) should be allowed their own schools that they can run as they see fit (though that was segregation, and that was a bad thing), but why should white and Asian kids have to put up with classroom shenanigans from a group that, according to its own advocates, is incapable of sitting still and being quiet?
To the limited extent that students have the prerequisites and mindset for independent or active learning, it requires an undistracted brain and being able to hear yourself think. We’ve been propagandized that active learning looks like an Apple ad where a racially mixed group enthuses around an electronic whiteboard. But often it looks like a pre-1970s English grammar school or an academic high school along central/eastern European lines – disciplined, chalk-and-talk, monocultural (or at least a consensus about the culture that’s worth teaching) and close to monoracial.
I am not at all sure what is happening here.
The guy on the right is going to have a very nasty headache – or would have if he has a head left.
Our elites meet and greet – I never paid any attention before to the Met Gala thing Chiquita Khrushchev was at, but marone, poke around this hot mess.
Do click through the pictures and watch a couple videos, you’ll never find a greater hive of bad taste and insipidness, at least till next year.
The woke are all about colorful ethnic cultures. They think it is charming that in Africa people still live in grass huts–ignoring the toll disease takes in such villages, that at night it is totally dark, and that such charming villagers flee to the city first chance they get.
It is fine if you want a culture where people don’t show up for work, fight (with fists) with co-workers or customers, and can’t read, but don’t expect the financial rewards that come from being civilized. Also it is unjust to impose that on white and asian (and middle eastern) students.
However I did read the gown’s message* as ‘Tax Rich,’
“Tax the Rich.” “Eat the Rich.” “Kill the Rich.” So many synonyms for “Envy.”
that at night it is totally dark
In his travelogue Zanzibar to Timbuktu, Theodore Dalrymple described African towns which were wonderful to visit in the daytime but deadly dangerous at night when, in the pitch-dark streets, robbers would waylay and murder the unwary for what little they possessed.
deadly dangerous at night when, in the pitch-dark streets, robbers would waylay and murder the unwary for what little they possessed.
That could be quoted directly from “At Day’s Close,” Ekirch’s book about night in Europe before electricity. See also pedestrians falling into sewage ditches and canals, often with fatal results.
They think it is charming that in Africa people still live in grass huts…
Readers may recall the Guardian’s George Monbiot claiming that we should be more like the peasants of Southern Ethiopia, who “smile more often” than we do and whose fields “crackle with laughter.” Yes, these noble, laughing peasants may live in homes constructed from leaves and packing cases, and they may have Stone Age sanitation and alarming child mortality, but at least they’re not being “isolated” by sinful material trappings, like dentistry, double glazing and TV remote controls. You see, “wealth causes misery” and is therefore bad for “us” – by which of course he means bad for you.
Mr Monbiot, lest we forget, was schooled at Stowe, an imposing boarding school in Buckinghamshire, where annual fees are a mere £36,000.
That could be quoted directly from “At Day’s Close,” Ekirch’s book about night in Europe before electricity.
Yes indeed.
By the way, should readers assume that Mr Monbiot is some laughable one-off, the archives have plenty more.
Edward Skidelsky, for instance, made similar noises, fretting at length about pre-washed salad, before telling Guardian readers that the state should “create conditions favourable to simpler, less acquisitive modes of living.” Pre-washed salad is bad for our souls or something, says this sociology lecturer, and so the state should make more of an effort to tell “us” how to live. Mr Skidelsky’s father, Robert Skidelsky – that’s Baron Skidelsky, of Tilton – went further, with eye-widening obliviousness.
And let’s not forget the New Economics Foundation, whose blueprint for utopia is similarly, um, bold.
“create conditions favourable to simpler, less acquisitive modes of living.”
What a nice-sounding way to say “jackbooted tyranny.”
What a nice-sounding way to say “jackbooted tyranny.”
The reliance on vagueness and euphemism – see Skidelsky senior, for instance – is quite a thing. As I said regarding the fantasies of architect Jacque Fresco:
As Steve 2 said at the time, “I blame Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
I got your new ringtone right here.
Warning: Autoplay.
Source: Just a list here. No autoplay.
I blame Star Trek
Or H.G. Wells and his chums…
What a nice-sounding way to say “jackbooted tyranny.”
It is the dream of ennobled savagery. We get to live like savages, they get to be the nobility. Their status as our enlightened and essential betters will, of course, retain for their uses whatever sinful indulgences of security, sanitation, and luxury that remain.
Chartered flights for me, bicycles and public transport for thee.
the witless bint
Although I do like Commie Spice, Chiquita Khrushchev and Occasional Cortex, I think “witless bint” is the gold medallist.
For my own part though, I am actually quite glad that AOC’s ‘people’ persuaded her to put on that Tax the Rich gown.
Not for what it says about her, or at least not so much, but what it says about every single other guest at the event and any sponsors it may have had.
Surely there can be no clearer or more obvious sign of their lack of probity, absence of sincerity, and total and utter contempt and disdain for everyone else?
It’s one thing for an elite to be indifferent to the population at large; it’s really quite another to advertise that indifference with the expectation that it will be viewed in a positive light.
As Steve 2 said at the time, “I blame Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Indeed.
In that comment thread David wrote: “Heh. Absolutely. Given that so many of the writers, producers and actors have stressed how we, the viewer, should desire their moneyless one-world scenario, it’s odd that those same writers, producers and actors never got round to explaining, even notionally, how it could possibly work.”
That reminds me of another impossible socialist utopia, Iain Banks’ Culture series. Fans seem to like it, but as best I can gather it relies on impossible technologies and sociological hand-waving. (But life is too short to waste time reading all those thousands of pages.)
The woke are all about colorful ethnic cultures.
Yes, it’s surprising how many seemingly “progressive” people appear to have a fetish for cultures which have remained largely stagnant and unchanged for several thousand years. Cultures in which there is a demonstrable lack of the very thing they claim to admire.
Or H.G. Wells and his chums…
And to think that Chesterton wrote those words over a century ago.