Some items from the archives:
Crotch Funk As Art.
Come, fellow aesthetes. Let us visit the Vienna International Dance Festival.
Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by fellow Belgian Jan Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat.
You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.
Militant nudists wave things. Or, “Mommy, what’s a cock ring?”
The denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s protest claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.
For many, if not most, of the activists, this isn’t even about an enjoyment of being naked per se. It’s about confronting other people with unsolicited nakedness. That’s the enjoyment – it’s a juvenile kink. Being nude in private or among consenting nudists in dedicated bars, clubs, spas, on nature trails, at specialist beaches, etc. – of which San Francisco has plenty – doesn’t give the activists enough of a thrill. Because the people there are willing… Hence the demand to display their genitals in front of random passers-by, including children. An audience is required in order to feel transgressive and it’s pretty obvious that’s what matters. They want to be naked near you.
Flatter, Mythologize, Rinse, Repeat.
Because, admit it, you miss Laurie Penny.
By all means take a moment to realign your mind with the notion of Ms Penny as a “cyborg” writer and in some way marginalised – “marked as other” – and struggling against the pressures of not being heard. Except of course when she’s on TV, or Five Live, or Radio 4, or when airing her various and bewildering concerns in the pages of the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent.
Vibeslayer.
A song is pondered.
Still, one has to marvel at how the default progressive line is not only tin-eared and wrong, but actually an
inversion of the songwriters’ intent. The song isn’t about ignoring or overriding the woman’s preferences, or indeed
drugging her – but quite the opposite. Throughout the song, they’re both thinking of ways to delay her departure. Half a drink, another cigarette. And despite the woman running through the list of obstacles to her passion, and saying that she “
ought to say no,” because social convention expects her to forego her own preferences, the song concludes with the woman deciding that she’s “gonna
say” that she tried to go home but was thwarted by the blizzard.
The two of them then agree, in unison and in harmony, that the weather outside really is terrible.
Just Surrender To The Will Of Clever People.
Attention, parents. Reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage.”
Readers may wish to ponder the oddness of the idea that caring, functional parents, parents who make sacrifices for their children, have something to atone and apologise for. That, having done the best they can for their children and having given them opportunities, they have sinned against “social justice.”
Artists For Gaia.
Our betters sail north at taxpayer expense. Gas is released courageously.
Such was the level of inspiration, some of the assembled artists began to work their creative magic immediately: “Tracy Rowledge constructed three series of ‘automated’ physical drawings, mapping the movement of the boat during the expedition.” For readers of a technical inclination, these ‘automated’ drawings involved
suspending a felt-tip pen from the underside of a chair, resulting in random scribble on numerous sheets of paper positioned underneath.
This feat was “REALLY exciting,” we learn, as it “explored movement, time, place and permanence.” The radical innovation also freed the artist to leave the dangling pen and do something more interesting. According to her two brief blog entries, the sum total of her commentary, Ms Rowledge spent much of this liberated time struggling with Greenlandic place names and making sure her fellow passengers knew how “overwhelmed” she was.
Consider this an open thread.
Goodness. Buttons. I wonder what they do.
Did they ‘just want to pee’?
Well, quite. There is a familiar dynamic.
And re-reading the quote from one of the activists’ defenders, I’d forgotten just how brazen the inversion of reality can be. Such that, if you’re walking to the local shops and you’d rather not have your children exposed to sad old queens flapping their genitalia at you, then you’re “selfish,” “childish,” and a “control freak.” The sad old queens who impose themselves on random passers-by, including small children, somehow aren’t selfish, childish, or controlling, of course.
As projection goes, quite the feat.
Shame they came back.
Were you not awed by their towering achievements?
Behold!
Worst fap ever.
Also ker-ching!
Ew. As I said in the original thread,
What wonders they have wrought.
Bless you, sir. May your bread always fit in the toaster.
Though Brown had an issue with guacamole, Barren stressed that the shooting was the result of poor decision-making and an inability to control emotions.
A professed “inability to control emotions” or to restrain sociopathic inclinations – resulting in casual shootings over guacamole portions – doesn’t strike me as a mitigating factor. It sounds more like a restatement of just how incorrigible and dangerous the creature is.
Indeed. The left seems to oscillate between “born that way” excuses and “society’s fault” excuses, but in the end it’s all dishonest excuses on behalf of chaos and societal destruction.
Reheated
Great googly moogly, that was a deep dive into the dark ages, I had thankfully forgotten about Puppetry of the Penis™ and Annie Sprinkle.
The criticism (“it’s rape!!”) of the snowing song is really rich coming from people who also want to allow men in women’s bathrooms and shelters and who claim Nov 7 did not involve actual rape.
casual shootings over guacamole portions
Except it wasn’t. Reading through the description and watching the video, there was a steady escalation on both sides and it was a store employee that engaged in the first act of hands-on violence.
There were multiple points in the encounter where de-escalation was the better option, and the gun didn’t come out until after Brown had already been assaulted and the fight had escalated to a five-on-one brawl.
I’m not saying he’s some kind of innocent in this; taking the reports and video at face value he’s a swaggering thug and an asshole. But he didn’t initiate the violence. If he gets a good lawyer this is going to be another McDonalds hot coffee case.
The woman purportedly burned by McDonald’s hot coffee didn’t shoot the server.
Genuinely, I’d actually completely forgotten about her.
[ Peers into whisky glass ]
Wait … How long have I been here?
Never mind, pour me another one.
The road from being a “doomed youth” screaming in other people’s faces from the margins of economic justice to living in LA while working as a screenwriter must surely be a long and winding one.
Set that to music and could be a theme tune to the 21st century.
I think you’re being generous. Calling staff bitches – over the size of a portion of dip – and then barging behind the counter to help yourself to food sounds to me a lot like a provocation. And again, the fact that a thug professes an “inability to control emotions” and will therefore most likely continue to behave in the way he does, over and over again, doesn’t strike me as a basis for mitigation.
“Ms Johnson” is Rachel Johnson, sister of Boris.
“Boris” is Boris Johnson, foppish blatherer and the most unlikely man to have been both former Mayor of London and Prime Minister.
And the “shiny glamazon”? That would be Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter or fraudster and newspaper tycoon, Robert.
Sometimes I find it deeply depressing living in a country whose fate is ruled by decades old feuds and/or love affairs started in Oxford and Cambridge college common rooms and carried over into the BBC, Fleet Street, Parliament.
In fact, it’s kind of disgusting.
That the progressive commentators didn’t register that the “what’s in this drink?” line is a joke, a period riff, and an inversion of what they’ve assumed, is, perhaps, one thing. I suppose we mustn’t expect too much from professional journalists and “leaders in journalism” who are studying at Harvard. Say, the ability to use a search engine. But when the progressive songwriters suddenly lose their most basic musical faculties, and become unable to deduce things from lyrics, arrangement, and intonation, in order to parrot the progressive line… well, that’s something else.
Try sitting here, matey.
“Mirrors the exerience.” LOL.
Well, there is a parallel:
Gazans murder Jews, and then scream “apartheid!” when Jews kill them.
Blacks commit violent crimes, and then scream “racism!” when they get shot.
Aggression, even.
I have noticed a steady increase in intolerance of the use of violence to stop aggressive criminals. This trend must be reversed.
They complain about this every year and every year I can’t believe they’ve actually listened to the song.
There is a remarkable, rather dogmatic tin-earedness. And so, we end up with supposedly skilled musicians, musicians supposedly familiar with the song and its history, disdaining it as “aggressive” and complaining that “You never get to figure out if she gets home.” At which point, somewhere, Mr and Mrs Loesser must be rolling their eyes.
And likewise, we end up with a chorus of progressive journalists telling us, uniformly and quite emphatically, that the song is an ode to “date rape,” “an example of outdated rape culture,” that it’s about “not listening to women,” and is premised on “ignoring women’s sexual agency.” While referring to a song, co-written by a woman, that is pretty much all about women’s sexual agency and listening carefully to sexual signals.
And which is precisely why the song was once considered somewhat risqué.
From the link:
Zero recognition of the reality of courting and flirtation behavior, behavior which preceded civilization and which can be found in many species.
Remember all those 70’s feminists who demanded that men get explicit permission in every step of any sort of erotic encounter? “May I touch your shoulder?” etc.
Feminazis: Marxists, lesbians, and psychotics.
Coming from a state where a bomb-disposal robot was used to blow up a gunman, I can’t say I’ve seen much of that intolerance.
Zero recognition of the reality of courting and flirtation behavior, behavior which preceded civilization and which can be found in many species.
Is there any wonder that the birth rate is declining? Meanwhile, these same unstable idiots promote the thruple and quadruple lifestyle. Oh well, more people to whine to I guess.
Consider how retail personnel are at risk of prosecution if they deal properly with shoplifters and aggressive jerks.
Neo-Puritans are prissy barbarians.
Not so much in Texas. Generally the ‘hands-off’ approach is mandated by fearful corporate management from elsewhere.
Professorial, indeed, genteel, covetousness.
Well, Texas is kind of special.
I think that fear is somewhat justified: If you punch an shoplifter who has not yet punched you, you could be arrested for assault, or sued. (Instead of getting the praise you deserve.)
“An introduction to limitarianism, and why there should be an upper limit on how much money people can accumulate.”
How about an upper limit on how much leftism people can espouse?
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it…
Professorial, indeed, genteel, covetousness.
And ignorance. Demonstrates no understanding of the difference between money and wealth. Reminds me of character on SCTV played by Eugene Levy on a fictional show call “Money Talks.” Hilarious, but no longer parody.
It’s seventeen chuffing years of emotional wear and tear.
[ Reaches for pills, liquor, opium. ]
Regarding Baby, It’s Cold Outside, I hate that I have to point out every year that in the movie Neptune’s Daughter which made the song prominent, it’s performed twice. In the reprise, the sex roles are reversed, with Red Skelton not wanting to stay, and Betty Garrett informing him it’s cold outside.
The people trying to deplatform the song aren’t well-meaning people concerned about sexual violence; they’re nasty control freaks who don’t like that people are enjoying themselves in ways they don’t approve of. If they really cared about tolerance, they’d tolerate us by leaving us the hell alone.
Apologies if you interpreted my previous comment as suggesting I hate having to point it out to you David; I meant having to point it out to the bansturbators and how such people are truly vile.
As you so often point out on this blog much better than I can, the woke are not well-meaning, but bullies who abuse the language of “tolerance” to get their bullying on.
That’s how I automatically interpreted it.
Heh. Oh, I got that, don’t worry.
Idiocracy: Sheila Jackson Lee: The Moon is made mostly of gases…
Perhaps “the power of the Moon” is what prevents Guam from tipping over.
Woman pilot has a meltdown on…United Airlines flight. Doesn’t surprise me…much. What really surprises me is that apparently only two dozen people got off the flight. Why would you risk that? And what about the rest of the crew? The pilot herself doesn’t concern me much. She arrived out of uniform. Why she wasn’t immediately replaced, I do not understand. How could se have done her preflight walk through and checklist procedures if she didn’t even take time to put on her “cute little uniform”? Also curious what her possible military experience might be.
Which gives me an excuse to dig out this rather notable Guardian correction:
As others have noted, they never were great with numbers.
Which is why they’re called the Grauniad.
As an example of bewildering wrongness, it’s up there with these clowns and their misremembering of the 70s sitcom The Good Life.
I don’t believe it is ignorance so much as deliberate muddying of the issue in order to try to hide the puerile jealousy of those who earn more and the desire for power over them. This bit:
She spends oodles of time opining on how much better it would be for “society” to have all the wealth the rich “don’t NEED” and it going to give other people more opportunities to succeed. Yet she deliberately leaves the impression that an “investment account” is “just a number” … something akin to Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool of gold coins rather than money that is out there fueling all manner of enterprises.
She discounts freedom of choice of people picking/choosing what things to fund. I’m sure she’d love to be on the People’s Counsel directing all that filthy lucre into her own choices.
It’s seventeen chuffing years of emotional wear and tear.
No, no, it is emotional labor if you want to keep up with current jargon.
SEVENTEEN CHUFFING YEARS.
.
Should have known it was them.
Can’t say I’m feeling chuffed.
The major chains are fearful of lawyers and a court system that no longer concerns itself with justice.
Hope you brought enough for everyone.
Stephen Maturin asked me to mention that you can make laudanum with whatever flavor liquor you most enjoy. Peppermint schnapps, even.
.
One of the ‘special’ parts of Texas we don’t like to mention.
I we’d better take away David’s bottle and give him a soft drink and headache tablets.
Pay no attention to the fact that I covet what’s in that bottle.
I think you’re being generous
No, I’m thinking in terms of how this is going to play out in court. I watched the entire surveillance video rather than rely on the newspaper account.
Contrary to what people think, there’s no “fightin’ words” exception to initiation of force laws and the video makes two things clear: Brown is packing up his food order, not robbing the place; and the store employee is the one who threw the first punch.
As I said, there are a number of points where either Brown or the store employees should have de-escalated. And this whole incident is reflective of a deeply dysfunctional shame culture where the only acceptable response to “disrespect” is a bench-clearing brawl
Like the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit, the details aren’t what you’ve been told and the result isn’t going to be what you’re expecting.
That’s a point of contention.
Should have known it was them.
.
Esther Williams & Ricardo Montalban
Betty Garrett & Red Skelton
SEVENTEEN CHUFFING YEARS
Just like cicadas, I suspect a plot.
If this blog starts making a buzzing sound, run like hell.
Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck‘s 15-year-old, formerly Seraphina Rose, made their first official appearance under a new name, Fin, at a memorial service for Jennifer’s father last weekend.
Wearing a black pantsuit and buzz-cut hairstyle, Fin introduced themselves by their new name before reading a bible verse to the congregation at Christ Church United Methodist in Charleston, West Virginia on Saturday.
Fin has been pictured with their new short cropped hair as early as February this year, but the funeral was the first time the top actors’ kid introduced themselves in public with a new name.
Nothing like using Grand Dad’s funeral to come out as trans.
Nothing like using Grand Dad’s funeral to come out as trans.
So she basically did the meme…
Here’s a clue:
This is pure social contagion plus with celebrity kids trying to step out of the shadow of their parents. I mean, what are the odds of every other celebrity off-spring ‘suddenly discovering’ they’re not just a normie girl or boy?
Rather than everyone celebrating the passing of grand-dad, this girl will be paid attention to getting “we’re so proud of you” and “you’re so stunning and brave” applause.
What’s sad is that these indulged children will, by the fact they live their lives in public, will find themselves trapped in the identity. They are unequipped to face the backlash detransistioners get.
As bad as celebrity culture is, it’s probably worse for the celebrities. So very few of them seem happy. They put on a big show about being a big deal and projecting their image as being happy. But the drugs, hyperpromescuity, alcohol, etc. belie much of that. It’s doubly bad if they’re actors. Many actors are good at what they do because they have no real sense of self. Those that do spend so much of their lives pretending to be someone else, especially the method actor types, that that’s got to eat away at them to some degree. And God help the children.
I suspect that as soon as it’s no longer fashionable to transition, a lot of sheepish kids are going to return to their sexes without any backlash at all.
“Taken the lion’s share,” for instance, is a rather question-begging term, suggesting that the person who gets rich – richer than our professor – just randomly stumbled upon some pre-existing fortune and then fenced it off for themselves.
And as so often, there’s little thought given to the enormously overbearing state apparatus that would be required to enforce such covetous fantasies. And so, we’re told that, “It’s… a bad idea to allow people to have that much power,” i.e., the power of being wealthy, but our professor wants the power to do great harm to others and to confiscate whatever she deems too much. I.e., more power than those she regards as being too powerful. And, one assumes, the power to prevent her victims fleeing her Great Plan.
Oh, and she’s not keen on you little people taking an occasional flight to visit relatives or to go on that holiday you’ve been saving up for.
New instructions.
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
And as so often, there’s little thought given to the enormously overbearing state apparatus that would be required to enforce such covetous fantasies.
History has shown such an apparatus isn’t needed for very long. Once all private wealth is confiscated, there is little incentive or ability to create new wealth…and viola, everybody is poor.
Banning ‘gendered language’ isn’t neutral. It’s just mental.
Well, quite. The word that comes to mind is contrivance.
It reminded me of Ms Silpa Kovvali, a Salon columnist, who insists “gender-neutral language should be the norm, not the exception,” and for whom needless and compulsory ambiguity is the new clarity:
According to Ms Kovvali, who is of course Harvard-educated, transgender people and the terminally pretentious are to be accommodated in every linguistic way possible, with a flourishing of neologisms and mannered grammar to be imposed upon everyone. But the rest of us aren’t supposed to mind having our preferences erased, even though almost all of us are contentedly male or female and may be quite attached to the customary pronouns and honorifics.
Laughing at this…
You must be over the target. 😀 They’re such f*cking clowns.
Let’s say, it didn’t make her argument sound any more convincing. If memory serves, Ms Kovvali was upset with me because I’d been insufficiently flattering and had quoted verbatim from her own LinkedIn profile. She did strike me as acutely status-conscious.
I think that may be the first time I’ve been called that.
A ‘bro’, I mean.
Whereupon you:
Having difficulty reconciling those two images. I mean, there don’t seem to be any “bros” on fainting couches in Renaissance and Neoclassical painting. “Radiant beings”, on the other hand, are not uncommon, from thunderous Jupiter to semi-divine Napoleon.
I think you meant “memorializing” or “solemnizing”. Haven’t had your coffee yet, have you?
Their pronouns are asshole/asshole/asshole.
New instructions
Fine, then I go all Buffalo Bill on them. “It will put my coffee in a cup, then it will place my pastry in the bag. I will thank it and hope it has as pleasant a day as it is.”
I shall try to be more party-loving and rowdy from now on.
I don’t recall the Buffalo Bill allusion.
It’s a bit pedantic to point out that by the simple meaning of ‘power’ that the ability to take power from a powerful person necessitates another person having greater power. But none of this is about reason and rationality. It’s about power. The problem is with letting these people have power over the rest of us. Reason and rational thinking are only useful tools within a powerful entity. Once two powerful entities come into conflict, reason and rational thought are abandoned. It’s all just propaganda at that point. People on the right don’t like to allow themselves to see this because, by their nature, people on the right have little desire to have power over others.
Silence of the Lambs. “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told”.
Presumably, Professor Robeyns imagines that hers will be The Good Kind Of Enormous And Intrusive Power, and that this enormous and intrusive power will never, ever be put to uses of which she might disapprove, or to which she might fall victim. And the rest of us would all be cheering bystanders and not at all worried – in her mind, at least.
And yet our professor’s “social justice” fantasy is premised on a sweeping and audacious coercion and its practical implications include other, appalling uses of that power. For instance, preventing her would-be victims from fleeing to somewhere saner and taking their wealth, and jobs, with them.
She’s an intellectual, you know.
That. Intellectuals seem to have a built-in attraction to Philosopher-King tyrannies.
They always start out by promising that their only targets are the “extremely wealthy”, but sooner or later it becomes obvious that everyone is a target–because why not? As has been pointed out innumerable times, there are no built-in limits to Progressive ambitions. None.
Case in point: Marxist professor Richard Wolff explains how, under socialism, you can attempt to get permission to acquire a PS5.
The NY real estate market is fixing to learn this the hard way.
It reminded me of the Guardian’s imperious sow Polly Toynbee and her endless, innumerate bitching about “the unjust rewards of the rich,” by which she means, “the 1.5% who earn over £100,000.” Week after week, devoid of imagination, she whines about “pigs” and “fat cats” who should be “ashamed” of their earnings. Earnings, which, it turned out, were barely equal to her own, and in some cases, slightly more modest.
A few years ago, she was demanding that all high-earners and public figures should be forced to publish their incomes, so that the bitter and resentful could fume and rumble. But when some pranksters unearthed details of Ms Toynbee’s own six-figure Guardian salary, plus appearance fees, royalties, and property portfolio, she was, shall we say, not amused.
Presumably, Dear Polly has somehow found a way not to see her own earnings as “unjust” or “extravagant,” or a basis for “disgust” and personal shame.
[ Updates list of retailers to avoid. ]
Like this?
Or this, metaphorically speaking?
Although that does tend to lead to this.
Can’t talk. Practising my fist bumps.
“What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were – poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth-even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.” ― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
I tend to think of David as more this kind of guy.
But how about this?
Banning gendered language: So if you want the waitress’ attention, instead of saying “excuse me miss” you should say “excuse me them”? arghhh what idiocy. There isn’t even a replacement word. I guess you can just say “hey you!” to get their attention. Maybe “hey dork”.
Redistribute: under a free enterprise system, you cannot get rich except by making others better off. Otherwise, they will not buy your product. Under state monopolies of course you can get rich while making others poor. Interestingly, except for doctors and lawyers, the typical millionaire owns a small business such as a plumbing supply store, drives an old car, and lives in a modest suburb. (according to a survey I saw).
[ Buys skateboard, motorbike. ]