Friday Ephemera (681)

Morning, all.

He’s afraid? How the hell does he think actual women feel about him?

If you scroll down for the longer clip, you’ll see that he regards “white cis women” as “the enemy” because they deceive, you see. Which he, of course, doesn’t. (Why brown-skinned women should be exempt is not made clear.) And that’s before we get to the other chap, the one who intimates that he will punish “defiance” from any women who don’t participate in his fantasy.

So, ladies. Surrender your bathrooms and rejoice. 

Do battery powered unicycles exist?

I’ve seen electric unicycles, but that doesn’t appear to be one. Which makes the flames and billowing smoke all the more puzzling.

She loved Big Brother.

Quite. Another telling moment is the description, about 15 minutes in, of the invitation to write a dissenting view in the student paper, provided it didn’t actually, you know, dissent. And so a polite, factual piece was “edited,” repeatedly, and subject to ludicrous, question-begging conditions, until little of substance remained. And even this small, neutered deviation from orthodoxy was then retracted and deleted within minutes of publication.

As Matt Walsh puts it, “In order to have the conversation, you have to agree with them.”

But this is what will happen when your piety departs so wildly from reality. The more you lie, publicly, the more compromised and dishonest you become, the less you can tolerate anything approaching honesty. Even airing polite concerns becomes a kind of heresy. Everyone must pretend, and be made to pretend. Which rather mirrors the phenomenon being discussed. Or, as it turns out, not discussed.

It used to be the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

OH GOD. Husband has followed them. I’ve lost contact.

Heh.

Madness spreads.

Well, the pretensions and dishonesties multiply, and more is staked on them, until any concession to realistic debate, and to some common, observable reality, becomes intolerably perilous – all but impossible without risking a loss of face and in-group status. Hence the passion, I suppose.

And the people who play this neurotic game – the ones who pretend to welcome debate and then ensure no debate of any substance can actually happen, and will in fact be punished – their behaviour is somewhat disturbing. I mean, what else would the pretenders be willing to pretend? And what else would they be so careful not to notice? What precise level of farce, unrealism and dishonesty would be too much?

It did not go entirely to plan.

That guy… is severely mentally ill.

Because you won’t affirm his delusions, repeatedly, on demand, his tears are apparently your fault.

As people note in the replies, genuine distress doesn’t usually make people whip out their phones and film themselves and then share the results with random strangers on the internet, while waiting for likes.

And it has to be said, attempting emotional blackmail – a common behaviour among the dysmorphic – is not the kind of thing a decent person would do. Instead, it calls to mind the behaviour of an abuser. Someone for whom emotional manipulation, which is to say bullying, is a go-to solution.

For those curious, before and after:

How do elephants get into the middle of the room?

[ Rummages under bar, a bin liner rustles. A complimentary peanut rolls along bar. ]