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.
[ Slides bottle of Dibbler’s Elixir down the bar. ]
In less than 4 hours Scotland’s new “hate crime” law goes into effect, outlawing anything less than praise of all “sexual orientations”. I suppose that many of my comments here will go into their Thought Crime database, so I might as well add one more: Scottish politicians really screwed the pooch on this one.
Are you respecting Avery’s pronouns?
He’s very proud, you see.
Being “a whole woman” and all.
Having to respond to a text is violence, and other utter horsecrap from the “Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle” struggle session at Rutgers, which used to be a respectable school.
As the “Trans” Day of Visibility wanes, I can’t believe we have to wait till November for “Trans” Awareness Month. The LSTNKVD+# folx will be nigh invisible till then.
(duplicate – deleted)
From that same account, bystanders applaud.
I’ll assign him some pronouns: deranged/barking/moonbat.
[ Eyes unopened bottle. ]
You know it’s good for you ’cause it’s got herbs.
And alcohol. Lots of alcohol.
The world’s greatest Wikipedia edit.
Jeremy Clarkson finds something about America to praise.
But what do sharks have against the UK?
Mike is still whistling past the graveyard here but I sense the whistle slowing down as he realizes the things he has had to ignore, or pretend to ignore, are having real, serious consequences.
It’s not just some great misunderstanding. There has been a conscious effort by the people who present themselves as unbiased observers of the news, of society, of the culture in general to destroy Western civilization. They were burned very, very badly by the collapse of communism. The popular travel writer Bill Bryson even caught me a tad off guard when he lamented this. When the 2008 financial crisis hit within the lifetime of these goons, they saw the opportunity to drive the wedge hard. To prove that they were right all along. These people have huge egos that were not going to pass quietly. Not while their leadership was still capable of ginning up another great emotional surge. Stupid, stupid conservatives…”conservatives” got pulled in just like with the Great Depression and let the left define reality, the collective illusion, the culture and push the Overton Window hard left. While Mike may be right in asking “But are we really?”, what matters is the illusion, the mass psychosis not just with all this tranny stuff and the TDS, etc. but the culture much more broadly. That’s the only “reality” that matters.
Trans Day of Visibility: 117 year old Portland church destroyed in arson attack
Why let the jets have all the fun?
Trans Day of Visibility: COS shooter, Denver shooter, Aberdeen shooter, Nashville shooter, Philadelphia shooter, Perry shooter.
“critical thinking”–by this the Left means “be critical of anything traditional, no matter if it seems to work” the “thinking” is just an add on word.
The delusion that all humans are equally capable is simply a figleaf to cover envy by people who cannot build, create, innovate, or do art. In fields in which output can be quantified, the range of output is staggering. For example, in academia (where they all think they are smart) and counting only the sciences in schools where publication is part of the job, lifetime output of profs ranges from 0 to 200+ publications. When I met I.J. Good, the mathematician/statistician/chess master when he was about 60, he had over 1000 publications.
IIRC, :Unix was mostly written by 2 guys whereas Microsoft had 1000 people trying to update Internet Explorer and could not succeed.
How to show “critical thinkers” the respect they deserve.
Pre-emptive detention looks better and better.
[ Glances at clock. ]
Scottish Parlament…sheep…Scottish judiciary…sheep…Scottish police…sheep…Scottish intelligentsia…sheep…Scottish voters…sheep…
Have to lengthen the cycle. 15 minutes should do.
I have a black friend, a plumber, who I admire greatly. He has no use for race grifters or separatists. I am always aware that I am way way smarter than he is so I have to not use my stories and jokes that would be over his head. But we are great friends. He was telling me about as a kid in chicago he was told not to cross some street because blacks had to stay in their neighborhood. He said, “can you believe it?” we laughed.
In an Oliver Sacks book he talked about a young many so disabled that he could not function but when he sang in the choir he seemed to rise above his disability, to join in community and devotion.
I guess I’m not up on modern culture. When I read the sexual orientation “greysexual”, I think it’s somebody who has the hots for old people.
They seem to think that all positions at work are essentially sinecures, as if my ability to perform a particular task better than most people had jack-all to do with getting hired.
“Hey, she’s white,” said the universe, “let’s randomly give her a bunch of stuff so that non-whites can’t have it.”
I taught Spanish 101 as a TA at an Ivy. Spanish 101 has no prerequisites. Theoretically, anyone can come off the street and be in the same boat as everyone else.
The black students who came from the inner city still struggled with the basics of what it even meant to acquire a language. Their handwriting betrayed an absolute lack of teaching. (This was the 90s, when handwriting was still a thing.) And their abysmal performance on tests indicated not a lack of study but a lack of learning ability.
I felt really bad for them. They had a good attitude and were obviously the types of people you want in your society, but they were WAY in over their heads, to the point there was no path to catch up.
Imagine not knowing anything about organic chemistry and suddenly you’re in a third-year course. You would pick up on absolutely nothing, because you wouldn’t have the fundamental framework in place. Every word would be gibberish to you.
nota bene: I wouldn’t have qualified to be an undergrad at an Ivy, either.
It’s because the welfare of the black students isn’t the top concern: having a racially diverse freshman class is all they care about. The black students are just props in university administrators’ psychodramas, there to goose the numbers so that university presidents can preen before their peers.
Makes me mad. Those kids are being dished up a steaming heap of failure on a silver platter, when they could have done better in a less-prestigious school that was more their speed.
You think you hate college admins enough, but you don’t.
The git commits alone had to be pretty gnarly, and the merges/rebases would never end.
Regarding those bothersome heritable traits. A thread.
From the replies, exactly what I was saying earlier:
Also, the comments about many progressives believing, or acting as though they believed, that if some aspect of reality – say, regarding intelligence – is ideological uncongenial, or sounds a bit mean, then it can’t possibly be true.
And the comments about progressives expecting parents – normal people – to disregard the evidence of their own eyes, regarding their own children, in order to show woke fealty.
This is not parody.
From the BART link:
Expansive gender is n+1?
Oh, bugger! Sorreee…
[ Fixes shameful formatting. ]
The blockquote button is your friend. Stroke it. Tickle it. Make it purr.
We await the “I am being stabbed” cards. And the “The man next to me is masturbating” cards.
It has the makings of an unhappy board game.
See Price’s Law (or Lotka’s Law) which states that half the publications in an academic field come from the square root of the number of contributors. Something like that seems to also work in such non-academic fields as software engineering. If there are 4 professors of X (or engineers), 2 will produce half the output. If there are 100, 10 will produce half the output. And so on.
This jolly sight came to mind:
No, don’t thank me.
There is a tendency for software tends to start out with a coherent design/structure but to lose this over time as numerous people make fixes and enhancements while either unaware of the original design vision or unable to make the new features fit into that design. Short term expediency is a frequent sin. Eventually it becomes desirable to just do a complete rewrite. And then there is the problem of having to support quirks which a large user base has become accustomed to.
[ Looks askance at America’s ruling elite. ]
Maybe I shouldn’t cast too many stones at the Scots.
Especially since failure is very likely to so demoralize them that they will won’t try a less prestigious school but will just give up. And some of them become politically radicalized, persuaded that their failure was not due to a mismatch between their abilities and the school but rather was due to a racist conspiracy to keep blacks down.
Same goes for “social promotion” of unqualified students regardless of color: The Marxist religion of radical equality demands that countless children be sacrificed on the altar of the Blank Slate.
Ditto high school and grade school educationists.
We condemn as evil those pagan religions that practiced human sacrifice. We should condemn this modern religion on the same grounds and to the same degree.
The Queer and Fat Club has a membership issue.
The blockquote button is your friend. Stroke it. Tickle it. Make it purr.
Nice pussy
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own.
With bonus open thread.
Is that a euphemism for “men who use saline injections to enlarge their scrotums“?
Theirs are.
Can you cast too many stones at the Scots?
Cue Harry Roy & His Bat Club Boys.
Gotta save some stones for American liberals.