I expect to be busy for a few days. However, being a gracious host, I’ll leave you with some items from the archives:
Marking Their Territory.
Two radical identity groups struggle for toilet dominion.
Naturally, the first task was to give the toilets a makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti, thereby communicating the life-enhancing qualities of prostitution: “Less abolitionism, more whoring,” and “less TERFs, more sex.” Needless to say, the conflict has escalated… With the facilities now being used by rival tribes, all gorged on intersectional compassion – and with so much graffiti to be written and responded to indignantly – students are reporting queues and “lengthy wait times.”
You’re Reading The Comments, Right?
When wokeness is ascendant and apparently quite stupefying.
Pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in
Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.
Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.
No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction, “These playing fields… are never theoretically far from plantation fields.” Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million.
The D-Words.
On supposedly racist traffic cameras.
Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.
No Relation.
“Diverse identities” and euphemistic convolutions.
I can understand the reluctance to appear indelicate or to cause needless offence; and in some situations, there may be scope for polite fudging. But pretending-as-default, or worse, pretending-as-law, can lead to unhappy farce and a kind of collective derangement. And the media presenting the reader with an obvious distortion of reality, and seemingly an expectation that we should all pretend too, is also rather offensive.
Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well.
I bring you art. And atomised dairy products.
The mighty talent featured in the following video is artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose work teeters on the edge of profundity, as will doubtless become clear, via juddering and convulsion, and the strategic deployment of 25 pounds of powdered cheese. Come, sup ye at the teats of creativity.
Consider this an open thread.
Goodness. Buttons. I wonder what they do.
Good on that. Awkward kidding aside, the procession was a rather interesting thing to see. Especially in the terrible, racist, horrible, did I say racist?, small town American south. There’s a significant Hispanic community in this small town. 84% white, 12% Hispanic county of 30,000 or so people. Most instances that I recall hearing about or seeing these sort of processions were in Hispanic or Italian communities. It was kinda cool. Like a trip back in time. Sorta.
Larcenous cow.
Or should that be Larson-ous cow?
“Whoosh bottle”
The “whoosh” was the sound of the page disappearing from existence
That.
There’s also the not insignificant detail that it adds to a sense of alienation. The feeling that one is living in a society that is coming unhinged.
It was the combustion of an alcohol-air mixture in a 5-gallon carboy. An internet search returned a number of hits.
Smart rat.
I might suggest that you misspelled “spandex and lycra encased bicycle enthusiast who sails down the back roads with at least 20 vehicles behind, while whizzing by at … 14 MPH”
Jordan Peterson is a revanchist? The heritability of intelligence is scientific racism?
I’m curious: Just when did the New Yorker become an outlet for crackpot and far-left lies? Their army of fact-checkers were supposed to make them a paragon of reliability. Full article here. (The earliest crap article I recall seeing was Paul Brodeur’s 1989 Currents of Death, which blamed cancer on AC power lines, a book which relied on anecdote rather than science.)
LOL. As a matter of fact, I toyed with “Marxist vegan crossfit cyclist” but went instead for maximum brevity.
Former CEO and founder of Planet Fitness has changed his Twitter bio.
Sounds… horrible. The very idea of people being so closeted w/in their group that they are inable to comprehend the views of “others”, and their effects on the world at large…
*hey, look – another Triumph Car Owner’s club get together!!!! I wonder if she’ll start today?*
I know nothing about Triumph cars and their owners, but here in the States we have Chevy fans vs. Ford fans and Bears fans vs. Packers and Vikings fans. 🙂
wait, what? When did we in Texas secede?
*contemplates a screed on Hotchkiss rear ends. Or overdrives. Or SU carbs…*
The heritability of IQ is hardly a “contention,” let alone one that can honestly be “dismissed” by anyone even remotely familiar with the field. Or indeed, anyone with eyes. Regarding adults, there’s some debate about the exact percentage of nature over nurture – considerably more than half or much more than half – but not a lot else. It’s curious how progressives are so often dismissive of the areas of cognitive research that are by far the most exhaustively established, confirmed countless times, and demonstrated all but daily.
I’ve sometimes found it darkly funny that many deniers of the glaringly obvious are those who are most likely to see the thing that they deny every working day – say, teachers.
That. Dear God, that.
It occurs to me that if I became aware that I was needlessly delaying dozens of people in a really aggravating way and for long stretches of time, I would, I like to think, be embarrassed and apologetic.
That joke went right past me.
Not really. It’s either dismiss it or acknowledge they aren’t nearly as smart as they pretend to be.
More important: They don’t want to abandon their ideology.
The degree that it is accurately measured with the tools available and especially how those tools are implemented is open for debate but the idea that intelligence, or the capacity for greater intelligence, has a strong genetic aspect should be rather clear. Should be. I had two (idiot) college roommates/friends who would argue nature vs. nurture. One was “100% it’s nature!” and the other guy “100% nurture”. It was endlessly stupid.
But arguing this in the human domain is doomed to failure. Too much complexity attached to humans. Put the concept in the domain of dogs and the “100% nurture” people become apoplectic when forced to face it. And it’s not just intelligence but also other life preferences like swimming or hunting or herding.
This stubborn refusal to grasp these things…while I understood it in my idiot college roommate/friends, I was rather stunned as I got out in the world and realized how many otherwise intelligent seeming “liberal” people believed it. And how quickly some of those “liberal” friends and “superiors”, so called, would dismiss the thought (and it’s not too much of an inference to say myself as well) as fascist was rather shocking at times. There seems to be a wall such that the concept of breeding cannot involving anything other than physical characteristics and any thinking beyond that is heresy. And now they are starting to eat away at the physical characteristics. The “identify as” thing is the early stages of that.
That’s the root of it.
It often seems the ideology is adopted to demonstrate a purported intellectual superiority and independence . . . just like everyone else they know.
Heh. And to further my rambling from yesterday regarding my renewed faith in Christ, I just learned that the owner of the cigar bar we chanced into is a native of that little town and…a pastor at his church. Very interesting…
For Easter…from yesterday. I really thought this was pretty cool.
Multiple reasons:
It would be like abandoning a religion.
Their sense of self and worth is intimately tied to their ideology.
The ideology gives them status and power.
The ideology is a profitable grift.
Here it is: The ultimate topic for Friday Ephemera.
Don’t forget to scroll down.
“That joke went right past me.”
My mistake. I took it as my not living in the states.
FWIW, I am a bit of a heretic as I have a very limited interest in sportsball, having never attended a high school football game in Texas…
*gasp*
“Ideology”?
You misspelled “theology”
“Overdrives…SU carbs”
Flashbacks. My first car was an MGB. But i did enjoy the looks on my friends faces when I’d casually mention that I had to top off the oil in my carbs.
Because their ideology is what keeps them employed, I’m guessing.
I hear that’s much more heretical than me never attending a high school ball game in the Midwest.
Hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, NGO drones, and DEI commisssars.
*doffs cap in salute *
Sadly, started out with a beetle. Rectified that by switching to an X/19…
Speaking of which, the put-upon and marginalized finally get a word in.
No Easter statement or proclamation but hey gotta pump up those pro-Hamas voters who celebrate Ramadan.
And in case you aren’t yet paying attention — “Dr” Jill wants absolutely no religious symbols or themes on those
Eastereggs rolling on the White House lawn.So would that be classified as a micro or macro aggression? Steve Urkel call your office.
The unequal distribution of cognitive wherewithal, and why that might be so, is one of those areas where progressives will resort to feats of rhetorical limbo dancing.
And it’s worth noting how such contortions are almost entirely confined to the agonising class. Average Joes and the lumpen proletariat don’t seem to have anything like the same hang-up on this point, or the same need to pretend:
And this bizarre supposition, entirely unmoored from observable reality, was to be the basis of the Labour Party’s educational platform.
“Dr” Jill wants absolutely no religious symbols or themes on those
Eastereggs rolling on the White House lawn.Speaking of Eggs and the Bidens, Joe searches for eggs in the most unusual places.
The whole ‘faithful Catholic’ schtick from this lot has worn thin.
Wait, aren’t these the same guys who pretty much demand the killing of Down Syndrome babies?
It’s like the “everyone should go to college” delusion, as if in the glorious future of Next Tuesday everyone will be a professor or a public intellectual or an artiste.
To quote myself shamelessly:
The tolerance of contradiction – and the willingness to disregard the readily observable – is quite a thing.
Imagine what they could accomplish if they applied their Massive Brains to something real and valuable.
Ooh. British Summertime starts tomorrow.
[ Writes note to self to remind self to change chuffing oven clock. ]
Speaking of “interchangable”, Boeing’s recent failures may have a lot to do with the mythology of the MBA and the delusion that smart people are interchangable: The company was built by engineers and flyers who understood airplanes and the critical, primary importance of meticulous design and manufacturing. The current top management are people without any such background, but with a strong interest in cutting costs.
What, one degree warmer? [ Ducks out the door ]
[ Pokes head back in door ]
Steam powered? 😉
Some Deep Thinkers are now saying Canada should legalize euthanasia (MAID) of the poor.
Heh. Not entirely unfair. I’ll allow that. Just this once.
Most of the time-keeping devices will change automatically, but the clocks on the oven and microwave don’t, and changing them requires more faffing than you’d think strictly necessary. (In my infinite wisdom, I long ago threw away the user guides, obviously. So each year, it’s an adventure in haphazard button-pushing.)
That is, the clock goes chuff, chuff, chuff?