Friday Ephemera (687)

Steve Sailor with his usual inconvenient statistics. 

That.

Well, regarding the games of chicken and swerve-master, imagine that you’re one of the drivers being targeted in this way, and being deliberately terrified by a moron, for shits and giggles, and Instagram status. And then, when a collision inevitably occurs, imagine having the aggressor berate you and vandalise your car, backed up by his posse of other strutting little shits.

And then imagine reading an article that, by careful omission and practised excuses, makes such incidents more likely, not less. 

What’s he trying to pass as – a mentalist creep?

Oh, come now, ladies. Surely he’s captured the very essence of womanhood…?

What?

Yikes! Have the ‘surgeons’ ever actually seen a real one?

Even by the tragicomic standards of the genre, it’s not exactly a triumph. Still, I’d imagine there’s only so much one can do with a flayed piece of forearm. 

No thanks, I’m good.

I’m just going to leave this here, for no reason whatsoever.

The unspeakable in full pursuit of the unachievable.

And so, we have wokeness, a weird social-status game, in which players must always make a fuss about disparities in outcome, as if this were scandalous and shocking, while never, ever mentioning obvious disparities in behaviour, and stupidity, and malice. 

And in order to play this status game, people who are expensively educated and supposedly very clever will happily become stupid and tie themselves in rhetorical knots:

It seems we’re supposed to believe – emphatically and indignantly – that Mr Perry and Mr Olatunji Oboi Reed, our candidates for victimhood, are being induced to break the law and to drive in ways that are dangerous to others, including repeatedly running red lights, because of “fewer pedestrians and more vacant lots.” Cyclists and dog walkers are also invoked as possible factors, along with the claim that a black person may have to drive to the nearest grocery store, a feat rarely undertaken by people of pallor, obviously.

And all of this is presented as if the gentlemen’s behaviour, their choices, could only have external causes. Other variables apparently being unworthy of consideration. And so, Mr Reed, an “activist for racial equity,” expects city officials to “eliminate any racial… disparities in camera ticketing,” while avoiding any mention of behaviour and personal responsibility. “The root cause of traffic violence in our society that is disproportionately impacting Black and brown people is structural racism,” says he.

As a result, the default narrative, the woke conceit, is just a little odd. Namely, if black people are being injured or killed as a result of reckless driving, often by other black people, this is “traffic violence” and “structural racism.” But attempts to enforce the law and reduce the number of such incidents are also “structural racism” and must therefore be done away with.

For instance.

*bangs head on desk*

Well, quite. And the resulting contradictions – and the determination to avoid acknowledging obvious variables – can offer no hope of a solution or any significant improvement. Instead, we get the habitual displacement of responsibility and lots of pretentious hand-wringing.

As I said in the linked thread,

It seems to me that if you were malevolent and wanted to undermine a racial minority, to degrade both long-term life chances and moral character, then attempting to exempt that minority from normal expectations of behaviour, and lawfulness, would be a good way to do it. And yet we see it repeatedly and with ever more elaborate convolution.

And if members of a Designated Victim Group dare to suggest that actually they aren’t being oppressed, then Those Who Claim To Speak On Their Behalf can get remarkably peevish.

It reminded me of a report cited approvingly by Peter Matthews in the Guardian, on the supposed phenomenon of litter inequality and the need to “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness,” and which avoided any acknowledgement whatsoever of behaviour, of how the litter actually gets there. 

It’s quite the mental dance. 

Form an orderly line.

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[ Fiddles with wpDiscuz settings. ]

The fish are biting.

Must you laugh quite so loudly, madam?