His Creative Temperament
A Raleigh, North Carolina, chef who rose to prominence after attempting to have a white woman “cancelled” for “culturally appropriating” Japanese cuisine is now facing charges of domestic violence. Eric Rivera, who waged a digital war against an Aussie sushi restauranteur he labelled a “coloniser,” has been arrested for misdemeanour domestic violence, assault on a female, and assault by strangulation.
Setting aside the small matter of, er, assault and strangulation, readers may wish to ponder the notion, advanced by Mr Rivera and his numerous supporters, that white people, especially white people with blonde hair, shouldn’t be allowed to serve Japanese food.
At which point, I suppose I should mention this:
it was learned that [Rivera] was preparing Japanese food as a Puerto Rican man at his Japanese-inspired bar.
A shocking twist, I know. I do hope you were sitting down.
When not harassing people for having the wrong colour skin, and when not strangling women, Mr Rivera spends quite a lot of time blocking those who dare to quote his own social media statements.
From prior thread: crime can be prevented by cops building better community relations? Funny, myself and everyone I know, who have collectively zero arrests, also have zero encounters with police, positive or otherwise. Seems perhaps the opposite of what is claimed.
The internal-consumption message is that our society is complex and getting even more complex, that you can’t just coast along in the work or relationship market with yesterday’s skills, that you need intellectual skills from never-ending schooling, and meta-intellectual skills because intellectual skills go out of date, and emotional skills to deal with the effects on your ego or relationships of a lifetime of finding that what worked yesterday doesn’t work today.
The message is also that immigrants from the most dysfunctional places on earth can learn that entire range of skills just as well as white people can, or at least that the children of those immigrants can. And also, that white people, though they’re expected to learn all those complex skills and meta-skills, are incapable of making sushi or tacos, or don’t have the right to make sushi or tacos.
As for the Japanese, they’re a high-IQ nation who do their own stuff with discipline and precision, and who, being respectful of other cultures, apply the same discipline and precision to what they import from those cultures. The result being something beautiful and precise but also unmistakenly Japanese. The Puerto Ricans should take some lessons from the Japanese about how to import the best of foreign cultures, rather than the Japanese taking lessons in resentment from Puerto Ricans.
So I finally finished GoT and the last three episodes were worse than I thought they’d be; but as bad as episode 4 and 5 were, episode 6 was about as horrible as an episode could be. It felt like they were sending up the their own material.
I thought the cast was going to break character and start laughing at any minute. Oh wait, they did when Sam, out of nowhere, proposes a democratically elected king and universal suffrage. I really wanted Steve Martin as Theodoric of York to step amongst the “leaders” propounding upon the great history and superiority of democracy and then to pull his trademark “Nah.” And some of the dramatic changes in the characters were a little off the charts. So Bran Stark is rally the Padme Amidala of GoT. He couldn’t have been any more emotionless and wooden.
And when it was all over and the characters started asking each other what their plans were, I half expected Arya Stark to say, “I’m Arya Stark, I killed the Night King and I’m going to Disneyland.” I don’t blame her for leaving though. I mean the misfits and losers were the only ones left and they were going to run the show. I thought they might start playing Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit (The GoT Version) during their first meeting as Bran left to play virtual reality games.
I know I’m late to the party, but I had to get that out of my system. /rant
In case you were wondering where all the coasters went.
Another angry leftist wife-beater. Is someone keeping count?
Oh, many did. At some length and volume.
I still rather like this and its umpteen subsequent variations:
I mean, it’s not entirely unfair.
Loud woke piety, like loud Marxoid chest-puffing, does tend to function as a flashing red light. Unless, of course, the symbolic “violence” of “cultural appropriation” actually is much, much worse than mere assault and attempted strangulation.
Answers on a postcard, please.
C-L-U-S-T-E-R-B
Oh look! It fits!
“Feels extremely fascist.”
Much tutting. You mustn’t notice things.
I think James Lileks said that when your world is a round hole, your mind becomes a lathe that shaves everything down to fit it.
I think it’s the fact that those doing the tutting – the ones who claim that even acknowledging a fairly obvious aspect of reality is “extremely fascist in outlook and intention” – probably imagine themselves as The Good Guys. When it seems every bit as possible that the tutting they indulge in, the mannered avoidance, is why many social problems persist and are likely to get worse.
As if observations that sound insufficiently flattering, or in some way inegalitarian, couldn’t – and mustn’t – ever be true.
And the above, the tutting reflex, does tend to result in all kinds of weird convolution. For instance, academics loudly bemoaning litter inequality, while carefully avoiding any reference at all to how the litter gets there in the first place.
As if it just appears, mysteriously, and evenly, like overnight snow.
Loud woke piety, like loud Marxoid chest-puffing, does tend to function as a flashing red light.
Yes, contrition is quite beyond them. It involves introspection and self-awareness to realize that all men are imperfectly formed. The chest-puffing Marxist sees himself as new Soviet man, cut from whole cloth. He rages at his victims for they expose to him the lie about himself.
“…tacitly proceeding from position that disorder and dysfunction are evenly distributed throughout the population“
Who are you going to believe, your woke betters, or your lying eyes?
Is this normal behaviour with any other sort of surgical procedure?
Let’s check in later when the necrosis sets in.
Glasgow hasn’t changed much.
‘They’re just out looking for love.’
The cadaverine stench is what keeps a relationship going, you know.
Is this normal behaviour with any other sort of surgical procedure?
Is there some significance to keeping the balls separate from one another? Whatever happened to “what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”
As if dementia wasn’t a horrible enough disease, here’s a reminder that in the future, it can always get far, far worse….
They want to police culture but they don’t understand how it works.
Yes, that. It’s a ludicrous, philistine conceit. And as above, it’s always applied in a glaringly selective, hypocritical way.
As I’ve said before, the dogmatic scolds who bang on about “cultural appropriation” rarely display much understanding of culture or how it comes about. Perhaps they imagine that the world would be richer and more pious without Akira Kurosawa’s vivid reworkings of Shakespeare, or his ‘appropriation’ of American band music of the 30s and 40s, and without Kurosawa’s own films inspiring Sergio Leone and George Lucas, etc. The riffs and copying, the to-and-fro, are to a very large extent what culture is.
Of course, they may just be lying, po-faced wankers who get off on scolding people.
and
Possibly relevant: Heat Maps of Highest Moral Allocation:
I ran across that somewhere on Twitter, but tracked down the source.
Not a bickering link but I shared this gift link on my social media and figured I would put this here. It made me think that I need to start laying end of life plans and while I am not ready for a DNR now, within the next 10 to 15 years I will be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/well/patients-dnr-orders-ignored.html?unlocked_article_code=1.GE4.tUiF.XCAtB0bhJ3pu&smid=url-share
As for the Japanese, they’re a high-IQ nation who do their own stuff with discipline and precision,
We are building a chicken fighting force of extraordinary magnitude, you have our gratitude.
Meanwhile back in the US&A, if this film doesn’t win every Oscar, there is no justice in the world.
You can’t fix a problem if you can’t even say what’s causing it.
Well, quite. Which is why the agonising over litter inequality is so neatly illustrative of the evasion. An evasion well practised, almost to the point of reflex.
It’s as if the leftists in question – Dr Matthews, our Urban Studies lecturer, and the authors of the report he cites – had only ever perceived human behaviour via ancient stone carvings, or at a great distance. Say, through telescopes on some distant planet.
And so, they demand “fairer outcomes in street cleanliness,” despite the enormous existing efforts – five-fold favouritism – to do precisely that, and while carefully avoiding the single most obvious cause of the problem. The result of which is a supposedly serious report on the subject, in which the words drop and littering simply don’t appear, at all. Thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.
It’s comical, practically surreal.
It should be legal to use nightsticks on such vermin:
Isn’t that how Scotland got there in the first place?
Anyplace else that would be called stacking the deck, but another thing that never happens happened in Australia.
The astronauts aren’t really stuck in space, if they would just stop dragging their feet completing their NASA DEI training the diverse and empowered girlbosses would get them down.
She says she feels “shame,” which she should, I suppose. Just not for the stated reasons. I doubt it will ever occur to her that her own theatre of racial neuroticism is, to some of us, psychologically weird and morally disgusting.
Come see the violence inherent in Leftism.
I bet Sam Coppinger doesn’t like leaving his car in certain parts of town though.
Heh. But of course.
[ Slides bowl of ostensibly toenail-free peanuts to sk60. ]
You do have to wonder how these people reconcile their pronouncements with how they actually live, every day, and with the world in general.
NASA: the astronauts stuck in space is what happens when you stop insisting on quality, performance, and precision. It is lucky they don’t starve up there.
Should that happen, at least we can be fairly confident that they denounced their own “whiteness” beforehand.
And isn’t that what matters?
Ever seen classic, original Iron Chef? The Iron Chefs themselves included masters of French, Italian and Chinese cooking, and competitors also specializing in cooking of foreign cuisines. Generally, ethnic Japanese, of course. As if any of them, or most Japanese generally, would object to the worldwide spread of their own cuisine, among chefs of every ethnicity.
Yet, to Leftists, the people of Japan are just one more sock puppet for their own racial obsessions.
I guess all that is obvious.
What is only a little less obvious is that this style of Woke-ness seems like a poor camouflage for vicious personalities. Just an excuse for more viciousness, really.
Seeing that in its fullness is pretty much the theme of this blog.
It has cropped up from, er, time to time.
The Donner Party In Space™, Cannibal Astronauts in Orbit™, NASA Nachos™, Orbital Edible™ – still working on the title – I’m pitching that, American International, Golan-Globus, or Troma is sure to pick it up.
… at least we can be fairly confident that they denounced their own “whiteness” beforehand.
Astronaut Sunita Williams is Indian.
“Astronauts Stranded in Space; Women and POC Hardest Hit”. NY Times, probably.
You do have to wonder how these people reconcile their pronouncements with how they actually live, every day, and with the world in general
A friend of mine has a brother who is a junior associate assistant adjunct professor-in-waiting[1] of linguistics who is fond of tut-tutting the notion that there is any such thing as “correct” grammar because Language Does Not Work Like That, and AAVE/Ebonics/ghetto pidgin is just as valid English as Received Pronunciation.
He gets quite pissy when I point out that his daughter speaks impeccable English, which means at home he knows damn well that there’s a difference and what it means for her life prospects.
[1] Or whatever they call it when they’re never going to give you tenure
Absolutely. And yet in some quarters the pretence is near ubiquitous. For instance,
And,
I go on to use the term race-hustling parasites, which doesn’t seem unfair.
They see themselves as benevolent dictators, high-minded (“It was the best butter, you know.”), looking out for and ensuring the well-being of the less fortunate . . . whether the wretched little ingrates want it or not.
Should Japanese people with blond hair be allowed to make sushi?
Seems an extreme way to avoid DEI training but understandable.
SpaceX is delivering supplies, not Boeing.
Ghetto english: an unspoken premise here is that POC are incapable of speaking correctly. That is straight up racism. There are charter and religious schools that manage to teach blacks to speak properly, but the teacher’s union would eliminate them if they could.
In general, many wokies live their life according to Amy Wax’s advice (finish school, marry, save your money, don’t do crime) and yet want to excuse criminality in others. Again, straight up racist. The longest filibuster ever in Congress was Democrats trying to prevent the Civil Rights Act from passing.
The various liberalish families I know well are uniformly extremely demanding of their children when it comes to English and old-style academic proficiency.
With one glaring exception. These young now-adults don’t know any history.
[ Morbidly curious, looks at Typepad’s X feed. ]
The platform was unusable for days on end in February, May, June, July and August.
And I see everything’s on fire yet again.
[ Remembers October and November 2022, eye twitches. ]
Thomas Sowell and others have noted ‘ghetto English’ is dialect originating in the poorer, more isolated parts of England. There’s nothing intrinsic to the dialect about place of residence or melanin content.
Cold compresses and brandy.
[ Slides gin and tonic down the bar. ]
“Lingering issues.”
“Oh God, not again.“
Mr Burkett, here.
I believe the dysfunctional “honor” culture came from there, too.
How about 8x8x8 padded cells?
A certain Monty Python sketch comes to mind. (Cue NASA and Boeing flaks saying there is no problem.)
That, I think, is a bit more universal (cf. the Balkans, the Middle East).
Yes, but Thomas Sowell did say that redneck “honor” culture came from those poorer, more isolated parts of England.
Easier to protest against those who called out the problem than protest against those who are the problem.
Safer too.
What people want is for violent criminals to go away without them having to deal with them, or even acknowledge violent criminals or the crimes they commit exist.
Because the mere existence of crime and criminals forces them to acknowledge that reality proves their entire external worldview wrong.
And THAT’S an existential threat.
We do seem to be witnessing a lot of what looks like displacement activity. Bizarrely inapt pissing-about that’s both ostentatious and absurd, and engaged in so as to avoid, or at least defer, addressing the actual issue at hand, the root threat or discontent. A way to persist in being unrealistic.
And so, for instance, we get woke women in Finland sharing their please-don’t-rape-me dance moves. While they and their peers champion indiscriminate immigration on an unprecedented scale.
See also Bay Area commuters and their magic cardboard.
I mean, if it wasn’t actually happening, it might even be funny. In a sort of black comedy way.
It is funny. It is also appalling. You could say it’s non-binary.
Solingen murders…
gotta love the Minister who said ” not likely to learn much from this incident because h e wasn’t under observation. We can’t monitor everyone. ”
– The suspect had a deportation order. Too much trouble to track those guys, I guess.
– The history of East Germany suggests that German government can monitor everyone. Or does that scheme only work on ethnic Germans?
The history of East Germany suggests that German government can monitor everyone. Or does that scheme only work on ethnic Germans?
Tbf, there were punishments and rewards for compliance/non-compliance. Our undesirables live a mostly consequence free life.
As was mentioned in another thread, 2% of the population commits almost all of the serious crime. Our society knows who they are, they just don’t want to lock them up. So instead of 2% living in jail, all of us do.
Caveats: The Stasi were able to compromise/coerce a large fraction of the population, so that everyone had neighbors informing on them. In contrast, it’s impossible to get more than a tiny fraction of Muslims to inform on other Muslims.
Furthermore, East German dissidents were peaceful people, while about 20 percent of immigrant Muslims are terror supporters or sympathizers–and the great majority want to eventually subject the entire West to Sharia
lawtyranny. Surveillance of peaceful dissidents does not require the same level of scrutiny as monitoring of potential terror supporters.Finally, there are far fewer intelligence police today than in East Germany, I’m confident.
Retired Colonel Robert Mastrion, quoted in The Few and the Proud: Marine Corps Drill Instructors in Their Own Words, by Larry Smith:
I have no idea where I originally ran across that quote. Was it here?
In this case, I think the aggressor is likely a psychopath who wanted to take out a competitor in the nastiest way possible. That he was doing exactly what he monstered her for is inherent to the disorder — Cluster Bs invariably accuse you of what they’re doing.
So reliable is this trait that any time a Cluster B makes an accusation, poke around in their life and you’ll find them doing exactly that.
As an aside, I noticed that you changed your avi away from the giant metallic bug eyes.
And yet, when I pasted the link to this article in Twitter, I still got the bug-eyes.
I changed the site icon, which, as I understand it, should have put an end to the bug eyes. Unless the bug eyes are being cached somewhere and take a while to flush out. It’s possible there’s some other sub-menu setting I need to poke at, but we’re teetering on the very precipice of my technical expertise.
Contrary to rumour, and all appearance, I’m not hugely brilliant at everything.
[ Continues pulling at wires randomly. ]
Cut the red wire with a swift, smooth motion.
But first, throw the knife switch into the off position and ground the green wire.
And in burning-money news:
$4.1 million, since you ask.
ISN’T THERE A SINGLE ADULT THERE WHO KNOWS HOW TO SAY NO?
sigh
Forgetting how to say no – or indeed, No, Now Fuck Right Off And Then Some – does seem to be a recurring feature of our gloriously progressive age.
I hope there’s a preference cascade in our future, where en masse people find the courage to say NO to these Cluster B nightmares.
Robby Starbuck has been having success pressuring conservative-coded businesses into dropping ESG and DEI bollocks. The speed with which some have shed it might suggest they didn’t really like the apparatus and were glad for an excuse to shed it.
But the need for an excuse. I seem to spend an awful lot of time marvelling at how other people’s minds work.
Careful who you welcome.
It’s such an utterly bizarre pretence – as if there were no parts of town that you’d be unhappy to leave your car in, and no people who are sketchier than anyone else.
And the pretence is equally bizarre in its implications. I.e., that someone who, for instance, chooses to mug an elderly woman while she visits the grave of her late husband, and the people who engage in carjacking, burglary, and recreational looting, are somehow, implausibly, just like you. As if any of the people here, reading this, and any of the people you care about, would be equally likely to do the same.
As if those who indulge in such activities, and who do so repeatedly, had no attributes of note, no profound personal shortcomings.
As encouraging as recent news and his hard work is, I cannot help but be concerned that conservatives, their very nature being…conservative, are yet again spiking the football on the 40 yard line. The Overton Window has shifted hard, very hard to the left with this crap. Apologies without significant firings and public shaming still leaves that window much further to the left than when this idiocy started. I do not believe that conservatives have the will to keep pushing and finish the job.
No. I mean yeah, there’s a few of us. But it gets rather exhausting having to be the only one in the room all the bloody time. Especially when other “conservatives” shake their heads at your persistence and/or unwillingness to get-with-the-program.
Heh. I thought that was some manifestation quirk of being one of the few (I think) who views this site mostly on iPad/Chrome. I kinda liked the bug (owl) eyes better. Now what I see, well on this platform anyway, is a black background with “N, blog” visible. Not that it matters to me but for a minute there I thought you might have been some other David given your taste for aesthetics.
Still fiddling, largely in ignorance.
Oh, and this week’s Ephemera has been scheduled.
Obligatory reference.
Perhaps David is going for a more “professional” (i.e., bland) look. 😉
One objective advantage of the bug eyes icon is that the browser tabs stand out.
Again, careful who you welcome.
If you’d said ‘intelligent’ I’d agree.
As for ‘intelligence’ police, there are likely many many more than when East Germany was a thing – they’re just not called that anymore.
One objective advantage of the bug eyes icon is that the browser tabs stand out.
I agree, but given the current state of monitoring by the Metropolitan Internet Listening Flying Squad, it may now be illegal to have a distinctive browser icon. They probably have to be registered with and approved by the Ministry of Digital Non-Offensiveness.
Lawlessness now extends to gov not just thugs. The Supreme Court ruled that Jack Smith was appointed illegally and yet here he is filing another indictment. It ruled that student loan forgiveness was illegal, yet Biden continues to do it as a “delay” in making payments. The French gov lost the election and then did monkey business to deny the loss and not give up power. There was essentially a coup to install Kamala.
New trend detected.
Yes, well, the bouncers have all been made redundant & the door’s off the hinges.
The British courts really don’t take criminality seriously.
IIRC, it was a district judge that ruled he was appointed illegally. The Supreme Court ruled Trump had broader immunity than Smith allowed for in the earlier indictments.
Mark Steyn touched on governmental lawlessness.
One of the consequences of massive, indiscriminate immigration is that it radically alters the general mood of those on whom this demographic transformation is being imposed. One might, for instance, aspire to the role of gracious host, as it were, of making newcomers feel welcome. But this ideal presupposes an immigration policy that is limited and selective, and in which newcomers have good reason to feel lucky – and grateful.
The graciousness of the locals, the ideal, depends on the notion that the host country is regarded as something special, a desirable thing, something worthy of respect.
But massive, indiscriminate immigration undermines that ideal. If seemingly anyone can walk in and demand goodies, any ill-mannered flotsam of the world, and if they can do so with no discernible sense of gratitude, or any expectation of such, and with no apparent regard for the norms and values of the host society, as if they were unimportant, then the indigenous population may feel they have little reason to be gracious. Indeed, being gracious may be something of a struggle.
I realise that even the idea that the locals might dare to think in such terms – of being the gracious host – is, for some, anathema, a basis for tutting and scolding. But the sense that the value of one’s society – one’s home – is being pissed away, sold off cheap, is not a promising basis for coexistence.
And yet here we are.