Friday Ephemera (716)

Looks like GTA.

In a band as a stroppy teen, I rented a rehearsal room in an unglamorous, partly disused building – the doorways of which, we belatedly discovered, were used as a rain shelter and windbreak by local prostitutes. When we were heading home after an evening of cacophonous din-making, I got into the habit of saying “Evening, ladies” and being generally polite. Not least because they often outnumbered us. 

That needs some Enya music overlay.

Heh.

Dawkins wants steak without anyone raising cows.

He has been, shall we say, overtaken by events. Though the events in question were the very opposite of unforeseeable. Except, perhaps, to those who regard themselves as terribly, terribly clever. 

“I’m a very special, non-binary, trans person…”

I suppose one response would be to say, “No, you’re either incorrigibly pretentious or you’re mentally ill, possibly both. And your attempt to make me play The Pronoun Game, to exert power over me, will be recognised for what it is.”

One more time:

Demanding that others lie – and ignore or contradict the evidence right in front of them, daily – is, in short, rude. An act of hostility… The Pronoun Game, so much in fashion, is very often an attempt to bully others, to exert power, by making them say things, publicly and repeatedly, that they don’t for a minute believe to be true.

Or, “How dare you assume I’d be willing to pretend, to defer to your absurdity, and to lie on demand. You nasty little shit.”

Something along those lines.

Cleverness is often used not to seek wisdom but to justify opinions and policies arrived at for reasons that have nothing to do with evidence and reason,

Absolutely. There’s also the issue of social status, which plays a huge part in the opinions of many people, certainly among those who regard themselves as progressive. A disdain for Christianity was, and is, seen as high-status. A concern for assimilation and a loss of cultural common ground is seen as low-status. And Professor Dawkins was never likely to be troubled by a quite rapid transformation of his own home environment by a demographic influx from more primitive parts of the world. 

We’ve been here before, of course.

“Oh no! Anyway…”

New season of Clarkson’s Farm starts on the 3rd.

More of that “I’m entitled so I’ll just go behind the counter and take food”

The problem is, I think, that the relatively painless options, the better decisions to be made, are behind us and long expired. Once you abandon a sane and selective door policy, shit creek beckons. 

In other news, Calvin and Hobbes deemed dated, problematic.

I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like Calvin & Hobbes.

When you’re bitching in print that Calvin’s mom is, well, a mom, or complaining about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, then some reflection on one’s career – and life choices more generally – seems in order.

As Ben Sixsmith says in the linked post,

When you write such a lazy and opportunistic piece, you’re also conditioning readers to expect that sort of prose. You’re conditioning them to expect the kind of regurgitated pablum that a text generator could produce on demand. You’re contributing to your own redundancy, Lukas, and to the redundancy of what we love to do… If you want an image of a future we should try to avoid, imagine a text generator producing mirthless moralistic listicles — forever.

As I’ve said before, regarding io9, the more insufferably woke it’s become, the more generic and unwritten it feels. By which I mean, where there were once lengthy articles on very niche pop-culture subjects, often written with an affectionate expertise, it’s now all but impossible to differentiate one contributor from another. It doesn’t read as if anyone in particular wrote it. It’s flavourless. It might as well be generated by an algorithm. 

[ Wipes cherry gelato off chin. ]

Don’t judge me.