The Year Reheated
In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.
The year began with a lesson in pronouns and pretending, or dishonesty-on-demand, courtesy of the suddenly ungendered Laurie Penny – now, it seems, a they, depending on who’s nearby and how fashionable they are. And so, we pondered animal pronouns, clown pronouns and pronouns that can change randomly, depending on whim, several times a day. Such is the hamster-wheel world of competitive self-definition.
We also flicked through the pages of The Atlantic, where senior editor Honor Jones, a woman oppressed by comfort and fidelity, shared a somewhat bewildering account of her divorce from a loving and faithful husband. Chief among her reasons were a desire to “be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy,” a feat no married woman can apparently hope to achieve, and a dislike of crumbs – a recurring topic, mentioned seven times.
And we witnessed the denouncing of racist traffic cameras. Which is to say, devices that record which demographics speed and run red lights, and endanger lives, much more often than others. Writing in ProPublica, Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez conjured a remarkable series of excuses for repeat offenders, who were presented as oppressed, as “activists for racial equity,” and all but heroic, despite some committing 11 offences in a single year. Humdrum notions of personal responsibility were of course avoided, leaving readers to suppose that the only conceivable explanation for the lawbreakers’ behaviour, and consequent fines, was “structural racism.”
In February, we were treated to cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja, whose artistic immensity has enthralled us before, and regarding whom, the Los Angeles Times gushed, “Kierkegaard comes to mind, as do Sartre and Dostoevsky.”
We also witnessed the mental unspooling of San Francisco school board members, among whom mismanagement and conspiracy theories are elevated to an art form, and for whom two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad is sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee is a perfectly normal use of one’s time.
And via The Independent, we heard of the latest moral crisis and cause of deep mental “trauma” – namely, aircraft seatbelts and insufficiently commodious plus-size bath towels.
March brought us the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white, along with an implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.
Pale devilry cropped up again, as educator and activist Maia Niguel Hoskin, writing in Forbes, told us that when a black millionaire celebrity publicly slaps another black millionaire celebrity, this is all the fault of white people and “white supremacist culture.” You see, for an educator and activist, the way to be “anti-racist” is to erase any agency, and any expectation of self-possession, from people with brown skin.
We also witnessed a display of intersectional ruggedness, thanks to Ailish Breen, a being with pronouns, and her troupe of ostentatiously “queer hikers,” who regard a simple walk in the countryside as both “quite political” and a basis for complaint, and for whom the very air is yet another a form of oppression. Among the troupe’s many grievances was the phrase “conquering the outdoors,” a term whose weight bears down on their delicate souls. That the expression refers to overcoming one’s own limitations or imagined limitations – which among the less pretentious is generally regarded as a good thing – somehow escaped their notice.
In April, we pondered more diverse identities, and the media’s euphemistic convolutions when covering said beings and their activities. Say, when publicly using a wheelie bin as a sex toy.
We also noted several educators whose paycheque and woke status depend on propagating failure and resentment among the young and impressionable. As when Dr Asao Inoue, of the University of Washington, Tacoma, dismissed students’ proficiency in English as “selfish” and “immature,” a surrender to “white supremacy.” For Dr Inoue and his peers, a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon.
And we were captivated by the parenting skills of Mr Jay Deitcher, a social worker and therapist. Writing in Today, Mr Deitcher informed us that his “mind spiralled into darkness” whenever his two-year-old son exhibited even rudimentary signs of being male. A toddler’s coverall with pictures of footballs on it, given as a present, resulted in much weeping and was promptly hidden away so as “never to be found.” Other causes of mental spiralling included a fondness for songs about tractors. At which point we were left to consider the prospects of a father-son relationship premised on a dogmatic, near-hysterical disdain for maleness, for “anything deemed masculine.” A category that includes “playing football,” “cleaning a car,” or any kind of “manual labour.”
Pronouns cropped up again, not for the last time, in May, when Kelsey Smoot, “a cultural and gender theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet,” boasted that her friendships – sorry, them’s friendships – are based on an ultimatum. Namely, that anyone in her orbit must perceive what they are told to perceive, rather than the physical reality staring back at them. Ms Smoot, who is not-at-all unhinged, also boasted of keeping count of even accidental “misgenderings,” which enables her to excommunicate any friends or acquaintances who fail to hallucinate. Ms Smoot, we learned, expects “concerted effort” from those who wish to partake of her personal magnificence. Her fascinating self.
We also explored the minefield of modern progressive manners, thanks to the practised neuroses of New York Times contributor Ms Raksha Vasudevan, for whom the word “white” is a go-to pejorative, and who tells us she lives on “Arapaho and Cheyenne land,” i.e., in Denver.
We heard one parent’s account of the psychological abuse of her 12-year-old daughter, who had been told, in class, that the routine insecurities of puberty were in fact evidence that she must be transgender. We thereby entered a world of activist educators for whom a “safe space” is one in which middle-school children are ideologically groomed by unqualified misfits, conspiratorially, in secret, and while actively avoiding parents’ knowledge or consent. A subterfuge we’ve encountered more than once.
And we cast a widened eye over the middle-school libraries in Loudoun County, Virginia, where woke librarians don’t find anything inapt about 11-year-olds learning about the general awesomeness of prostitution. Because “high-end escorts” can “pull in half a million dollars a year.” Librarian Stefany Guido suggested that “some students” – again, 11-year-olds – could be considered “sex workers,” which, in her mind, is just like being an architect. Though it seems to me that an 11-year-old “sex worker” would be an abused child, a child being trafficked. Not, I think, an ideal aspiration for the pre-pubescent.
The mixed messages of campus life cropped up in June, when students at Adelphi University were told they must “not discriminate” against registered sex offenders, as if this were information of no utility whatsoever, while simultaneously being urged to report and denounce “dating violence,” “lack of consent,” and “incapacitated sexual contact.”
Elsewhere in academia, at Norway’s Oslo Metropolitan University, we met Dr Martin Moen, an activist for trans rights, and whose rather convoluted apologia for child molestation gave new meaning to the words contrived and transparently dishonest.
The radical ruminations of dysmorphic men continued in Washington, where a panel of activists and self-styled educators engaged in a taxpayer-funded mission to enlighten lesser beings. Mr Ganesha Gold Buffalo, a trans activist and prostitute, told us that his expertise, a term I use loosely, is rooted in the “sounds of my ancestors screaming from outside my window, coming from the ground, coming from the earth.” His mind, we learned, “was decolonised” in nearby woods by howling “nature spirits.” Needless to say, a great many pronouns were stipulated – among them, she, her, and goddess. Other terms of address included cyborg, unicorn, and Wakanda.
Oh, and via charts and number-crunching, we learned of the quite significant correlation of blue hair dye and serious mental health problems.
Woke theatre criticism and its complications were topics in July, as two Toronto Star reviewers, Aisling Murphy and Karen Fricker, applauded each other, and thereby themselves, for seeing an indigenous play and submitting to strict conditions on what they may subsequently write about it. Indigenous theatre, we discovered, requires approval that is both pre-emptive and unanimous, and its writers, actors and directors must be exempt from unflattering feedback, i.e., reviews of a kind that paying customers might have found useful, had they been available. Untroubled by irony, the critics, or rather non-critics, then bemoaned the ongoing, quite rapid decline of their profession and of the wider newsprint media.
Cultivated incompetence was also championed by the Oregon Health Authority, on grounds that “urgency is a white supremacist value.” Whereas, in matters of health, tardiness and lack of forethought are apparently aspirational, a woke ideal.
We also noted the scrupulously intersectional priorities of Canadian women’s shelters, where a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, was deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him. Setting aside the man’s threats to use his collection of knives on female residents, one can’t help thinking that a man who demands access to a women-only space, and to be perceived as a woman like any other, and who then goes out of his way to show, repeatedly and unequivocally, that he is not in fact what he claims… well, this probably tells us something. The words that come to mind being submissively pretend and psychological bullying.
In August, we were treated to some scholarship from the world of “queer studies” – in particular, the research of Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Mr Andersson wanted us to know, at length and in some detail, just how often and how vigorously he masturbated to shota, a Japanese genre of erotic comics featuring young boys. That this paedophilic self-pleasuring – sorry, “ethnographic fieldwork” – had been approved by Mr Andersson’s supervisors doubtless speaks to the lofty standards that prevail among practitioners of “queer studies,” and in academia’s Clown Quarter more generally.
We also turned for mental betterment to Scientific American, where Camilo Garzón and science historian Rebecca Charbonneau fretted about space exploration and signalled their sensitivities with an enormous list of things that they consider problematic. A list that includes the remote locations of telescopes, the concepts of civilisation and intelligence, and the “colonial” violation of hypothetical microbes, whose autonomy and wellbeing would apparently be desecrated by human curiosity. We were also told, repeatedly, albeit unpersuasively, that those who can construct orbital telescopes and land robots on distant planets should defer in matters of science to those who can’t.
September brought us more boutique identities, thanks to activist, author and illustrator Maia Kobabe – pronouns eir and ey – whose pornographic cartoons for middle-school children had not been universally well-received by parents. These parental concerns were, however, dismissed as merely “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and non-binary voices.” There being no other possible reason to object to eleven-year-old children being exposed to “vagina slime,” fellatio, and “strap-on hotness,” or the joys of masturbating while driving. All of which met with enthusiastic approval from TIME magazine’s Madeleine Carlisle.
Theatrical complications also came via Canada’s interim Green Party leader, a dysmorphic woman who expects everyone else to refer to her as “he” and “they,” but also sometimes “she,” and who was rendered distraught by an on-screen caption with pronouns that didn’t correspond with her preferences at that particular moment.
We also marvelled at the intricacies of progressive club-going and intersectional dancing, all of which has to be carefully organised and ruthlessly policed. Lest the wrong colour people gyrate near each other.
And identitarian struggles thrilled us once again, with news from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where two rival student tribes – lesbians and the transgendered – were fighting for territorial possession of a ladies’ washroom. Thus unfolded a tale of nerve-shredding trauma and fearless self-involvement, as the toilets in question were given an extensive makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti. Indeed, with so much graffiti to be scrawled on walls, and then responded to indignantly with additional scrawling, students were soon reporting queues and “lengthy wait times.”
The assumptions and psychology of the Activist-Wanker Caste were poked at in October, as vandalism and traffic obstruction hit British headlines on an all-but-daily basis, and with emergency vehicles being paralysed by the woke and well-heeled. The general public was not, it has to be said, overly sympathetic to this antisocial roleplay. However, and rather conveniently, the combination of practised self-involvement and feeling powerful at others’ expense turns out to be its own reward. For a certain kind of person.
In the pages of Scary Mommy, where wokeness and woo routinely coincide, Ms Annie Midori Atherton enthused about the merits of paranormal parenting – specifically, witchcraft. Several “real witches” were consulted for their wisdom, with their “magical knowledge” including the need to “harness the power of crystals,” and checking one’s jewellery for ancestral “emanations.”
And we also parsed some contrived racial grievance in the pages of the Globe and Mail, whose readers were led to believe that expectations of workplace professionalism are terribly racist, and that brown-skinned employees must be allowed to “bring their whole selves to work.” A wholeness of self that includes behaving in ways likely to be “interpreted as violent or aggressive.” A dislike of being bullied by the emotionally incontinent is, we were told, merely evidence of “deep, inherent bias and deeply inherent systemic racism.”
Those still getting up to speed with the notion of preferred pronouns were doubtless thrilled, in November, by the arrival of preferred adjectives, whereby the self-esteem of the psychologically marginal can be maintained, albeit shakily.
The sociopathic mouthings of Sophie Lewis also widened eyes, with Ms Lewis, a feminist “theorist” at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, keen to “abolish the family.” By which she means, all families, including yours. This mission of familial disintegration would, we were assured, and despite all evidence to the contrary, only have positive, indeed utopian, outcomes. When not wishing for the destruction of other people’s family bonds, Ms Lewis passes the time by championing abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence,” a corrective killing of the “violent” foetus.
And we also met Duke University’s Kathy Rudy, a lecturer in Women’s Studies and self-styled “queer theorist,” who told us, “I know I love my dogs with all my heart, but I can’t figure out if that love is sexually motivated.” Readers who have been licked by a dog and somehow not found the experience particularly erotic were told that, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”
The year drew to a close with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, among whose members “decolonisation” and railing against “white supremacy” are very much in fashion, and “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Expectations of evidence, however, are both old-hat and oppressive, on grounds that “scepticism is violence.”
Similar noises echoed at Montreal’s Concordia University, where even light is being “decolonised” – by people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy. Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. “Feminist theory” and “critical race theory” will of course be brought to bear, as these things are “part of physics in a holistic sense.”
And at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, assorted luminaries of the Canadian media expressed their bewilderment at why their line of work doesn’t inspire the expected deference among the general public. The word hate was deployed frequently, with little regard for meaning, and panellists insisted that being a journalist on Twitter, where readers can tweet mockery and corrections in close to real time, is indistinguishable from surviving in an active warzone. Other mortal hazards included pejorative use of the word woke – one of many things that can induce “anxiety, depression and post-traumatic distress.” Possible explanations for the public’s failure to hold their betters in high regard remained oddly untouched, however. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasted that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And who did so confident that she would not be challenged by any of her peers, or by any of the would-be journalists gathered in the audience.
Yes, our betters at large. These, then, are the heights to which we must aspire.
Heavens, buttons. I wonder what they do.
…and now for something completely different, Japanese Spiderman, featuring cameos by Japanese Wonder Woman and Japanese Clint Eastwood.
I have to say, I didn’t see that coming.
Also, Spider-Man’s lumpy face.
Back to bike lanes, this time in London.
And the rider, after being killed, went private, so the video isn’t there any more.
Living in San Fran Sicko, she may never before have encountered pushback when she voiced her foolish and deranged opinions.
Not entirely inconceivable.
Or the women might be characterized as “morally confused” or as just plain pervs: In one of yesterday’s Instapundit threads, discussing the rampant promiscuity of sixties rock bands, some commenters noted that there were some mothers who were complicit in the sexual exploitation of their daughters.
Point taken, OK…
But don’t take my nit-picking too seriously. It’s all for our enjoyment.
And I forgot to mention “paranoid grey-haired hippie commies”.
The Neurotic Childish Woman™ is very in right now.
Change My Mind: The majority of San Francisco voters are neurotic and childish, or even psychotic.
Fag hags
Do fag hags usually outgrow their obsession? I used to know a few teenaged fag hags when I was young, and sometimes wondered if they eventually got their lives together. (Maybe they were afraid of sex and therefore found gay men safe objects of attraction.) They weren’t bad girls, after all, just, well, confused.
…and now for something completely different, Japanese Spiderman, featuring cameos by Japanese Wonder Woman and Japanese Clint Eastwood.
I’ll take that as a caution that even if I were to live in Japan for twenty years I might still not understand.
Back to bike lanes, this time in London.
Ten million pounds per mile, to build a useless bicycle lane. Costs are similar or worse in America.
But don’t take my nit-picking too seriously.
Like Clarkson, when you’re right, you’re right.
[ Fiddles with wpDiscuz settings. ]
Bike lanes: In Paradise, a small mountain town in Cali, they put in so many bike lanes that when there was a huge forest fire it impeded evacuation. The fantasy of “everyone just ride bikes! Save the environment!” is for sure coming from people without kids or even jobs, and I say this as someone who rode to school/work until age 30.
Having been saved by an ambulance, they can park anywhere they want as far as I am concerned.
Like Clarkson, when you’re right, you’re right.
[ Looks in mirror. ]
I am always a model of courtesy and good manners. I am always a model of courtesy and good manners. I am always….
[ Fiddles with wpDiscuz settings. ]
Hey! My avatar is back to normal! [ Raises a cheer. ]
Without being entirely sure how, I have apparently fixed the problem. My brilliance knows no bounds.
Is this David saying Happy New Year?
Nobody expects El Kabong.
Doesn’t need to be a majority, any…dare I say…critical mass of such people becomes infectious such that all good people agree.
K…this avatar thing… I see mine, David’s, Darleen’s, Nate Whilk’s, John’s, Catskill Ted’s, a few others. I do not see one for pst at all. Though I suppose I don’t know what I’m missing.
Though I mostly view on Chrome or Brave on iPad. Which raises numerous other odd issues I haven’t bothered about much. Though the “link to last comment” thing would help considerably. Understand it might be awkward and is a non-issue for the laptop/pc users.
K…this avatar thing… I see mine, David’s, Darleen’s, Nate Whilk’s, John’s, Catskill Ted’s, a few others. I do not see one for pst at all.
I, like Farnsworth and ccscientist, have never logged in and created a personal avatar. Therefore we have the default avatar, a highly stylized white-on-grey silhouette of a e person’s head and shoulders.
If you look at the floating maroon comment bubble, bottom left, it will now indicate whether there are new, unread comments, with a small number appearing beside the button – without you having to refresh the page. If you click on the number, it will take you to the unread comment(s).
Strap him to the front of the ambulance & use him as a bumper when pushing aside obstructions.
I say ‘will’ – perhaps ‘should’ is a better word. It works fine on my laptop, using Microsoft Edge, and on my phone’s Samsung browser. But it doesn’t appear on my tablet’s browser and I have no idea why.
it will now indicate whether there are new, unread comments,
Cool! That will reduce page refreshes, which will reduce server load, which will reduce your costs.
These must be Canadian ducks.
These resembles a scene from a spooky Japanese animated movie.
it will now indicate whether there are new, unread comments,
It’s been 20 minutes since I posted a comment from my PC, and the count has not yet updated in my phone.
The count updated when I posted the above comment.
Catch-and-release, the liberal way.
Still no updated counter after 90 minutes: Here on my PC it displays the correct “230” above the maroon icon, while on my phone it displays the outdated “229”.
When a so-called “Woke” member actually wakes up from the nightmare.
Thank God she loves her children more than the cult.
Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Mr Andersson wanted us to know, at length and in some detail, just how often and how vigorously he masturbated to shota, a Japanese genre of erotic comics featuring young boys…
Elsewhere in academia, at Norway’s Oslo Metropolitan University, we met Dr Martin Moen, an activist for trans rights, and whose rather convoluted apologia for child molestation gave new meaning to the words contrived and transparently dishonest.
How do they get to publish this stuff without any pushback? These people really are living in a bubble.
I’m not sure I can add much more to what’s in the posts and subsequent threads. As Ben Sixsmith noted, Mr Andersson’s unsavoury outpourings were read and accepted by other academics as if these preoccupations were serious scholarship, a path to human betterment. Only when brought to the attention of a wider audience was any pushback discernible – and any airing of the obvious concerns. At which point, several academic peers rushed, via Twitter, to Mr Andersson’s defence.
But then, there’s been quite a bit of nonce-as-oppressed-minority sentiment in academia’s Clown Quarter and clown-adjacent areas – Allyn Walker, Miranda Galbreath, Ole Martin Moen, etc. – along with the conceit that in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children, we must stop being judgemental of the adults who wish to molest them.
And in academia’s Clown Quarter, contrived edginess is currency, a path to status. And so, we arrive at Dr Moen’s bizarrely feeble argument, linked above, in which basic terms are misused, glaringly, and in which any reference to the adult-child power dynamic – somewhat central to the issue – is carefully avoided. And all of which rather casts doubt on the motives in play.
In other news, I see that Typepad was down again just before Christmas. Because being unusable three weeks out of the year just wasn’t enough, obviously.
“Oh God, not again.”
Relying on ‘green energy’ to power their servers?
Despite the headache of moving, I’m quite glad I did.
How do they get to publish this stuff without any pushback? These people really are living in a bubble.
By slowly taking over academia, hiring only like-minded ideologues/lunatics and firing/punishing those who disagree with them.
Remember the Science Wars of the 1990’s, in which leftist professors (some outright fabulists and others simply crackpots) attacked the sciences using all sorts of bizarre claims? Various non-crazy professors fought back, publishing detailed critiques of garbage papers and garbage “scholars”. But the left did not abandon any of their bizarre claims and just kept on writing more lies and indoctrinating more students. They were able to get away with this because they occupied enough positions that they were immune to any sort of academic discipline. (Never mind that they shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.) Other fields were also being corrupted at the same time: For just one example, see Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa, a solid takedown of the bullshit Afrocentric claim that the Greeks stole their philosophy from the Egyptians and that the Egyptians were black.
True headline.
When drinking coffee this morning, I had no idea my day would include… that.
When drinking coffee this morning, I had no idea my day would include… that.
There was a time when I would not have believed that such a headline would ever appear in a mainstream newspaper.
Egyptians were so black……that Cleopatra was greek. Yeah, they got it backwards. Even before Alexander the Great, there was a huge influence of greeks on egypt.
Academia: there should be room for some crackpots because you never know who will discover new stuff. After all, the discoverer of plate tectonics was vilified. BUT the Africa claims are simply without foundation. Critical theory is gibberish. The new rulers in anthropology are against any sort of research that does not align with progressive thought. Better be careful how you interpret those ruins. And now medicine is falling in line, to the great risk to all of us. The brit NHS I believe now mandates pap smears for trans women who do not even have a cervix to test. Clown show. Some medical societies want to ban “mother” which is literally what someone is who gives birth.
There are countries where, with these alternate lyrics, it’s still a love song.
Probably in Oregon, too, from some of the news stories I’ve seen.
True headline
Only us British could make #wankingwalrus go viral.
Only us British could make #wankingwalrus go viral.
Band name.
There have always been sick people out there, but until recently there was no internet to enable them to broadcast their…thoughts.
As they say in the military, she has really screwed the pooch.
Let’s start implementing some obvious solutions.
Nothing says “trans”women are women like having total facial reconstructions actually to look like a woman.
Nothing says “trans”women are women like having total facial reconstructions actually to look like a woman.
No amount of surgery will get rid of the crazy eyes.