Ten Times, You Say
Not entirely unrelated to ongoing events:
Mr Politano, by the way, is a “He/him. Bi/pan.” Just in case it wasn’t clear that he’s better than you.
The subject of social trust – specifically, its erosion – has, of course, been mentioned here before.
Update, via the comments:
From the subsequent rumblings:
It does rather call to mind numerous polyamory ‘cope’ videos, in which clearly neurotic and unhappy people try to convince themselves that they’re totally cool with their chosen lifestyle miseries. Often while on the verge on tears.
If you want to wake up every morning and repeat into the mirror that you don’t actually mind that there are strangers fucking your girlfriend, then that’s your own private business. But the world exists independently of your framing of it.
Pretending not to see the obvious implications of, say, this phenomenon here, and variations thereof, or this lively, uplifting scene, is, I suppose, a skill of sorts. But I wouldn’t say that such pretensions are a basis for applause.
Update 2:
And speaking of practised unrealism:
As Steve E adds, drily,
The idea that there may be very real physical constraints on some favoured policy – that reality may not comply with half-baked theory – seems entirely alien to Mr Snow. An attitude not uncommon among his progressive peers, and which may help explain the lively events currently underway in several British cities.
Mr Snow, since you ask, is married to the philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor, daughter of the sixth Duke of Westminster, one of the country’s richest landowners, with an estimated fortune north of £7 billion. Needless to say, Mr Snow does not live in, or anywhere near, the kinds of “diverse” neighbourhoods now being trashed and terrorised by competing tribes.
Tribes that apparently shouldn’t exist.
Also open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Away with your new-fangled radiation.
Liberals I haven’t heard from in years are showing up in my social media feed, asserting that inflation is caused by greedy corporations, not by government policies.
If you want a brief and somewhat grim overview of the current liveliness, Konstantin Kisin has some thoughts.
The only thing most leftists seem able to learn is the latest slogan.
Perhaps a nicotine lozenge would suffice?
‘Equality’ seems have been subjected to criminal abuse.
@PiperPaul: That Night Nurse looks like she charges $500 to $1000 per “house call”.
These unexpected appearances fall into amusingly predicable categories: praise for Kamela, cat lady pride, hatred of Trump and all conservatives, mental health cope, and fattening dessert recipes.
I have heard that this is the origin of the expression “blow smoke up someone’s ass”.
The Venn Diagram must look like it was done with a Spirograph®.
Heh. Conservatives…”conservatives” are demanding that the Fed lower interest rates…so…as I say, everyone’s an idiot. Economics is a Rorschach test.
asserting that inflation is caused by greedy corporations
Wreckers, they’re everywhere.
I’m just going to leave this here:
On the subject of “combustible as granite” relationships across divides, an interesting documentary interviewing the former football teammates of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, whose upbringing could be a Disney film of successful integration: ragamuffin child of a mixed marriage, growing up in an enlightened 1960’s housing development with a mixture of Catholics and Protestants, his youth football team so non-discriminatory that two of his teammates also grew up to be convicted of terrorism offenses – for the other side.
The enlightened mixed community tipped into yet another ethnic enclave because of the arrival of refugees, who despite what we’re told turned out to be carriers of Hate and Division. And the childhood friendships were irrelevant in the grand scheme of things – boys who were more interested in football than in politics just grew up to find that politics was interested in them and they had to take sides.
How about ear candling? Aura reading?
What? No cupping? No blood-letting?
Also purging. But I’m running out of spectacular quackery.
TIL he’s a 27-Club member.
Sigh…I’ve tried and tried and tried to tell people these things. You only get one Great Civilization in a lifetime. If you break it, it’s not like Mummy and Daddy can take you to the Civilization Store to purchase a new one. Ah, but the UK is way over there and I sit way over here…Of course it’s happening here as well. It appears my influence in general has been somewhat limited. Hmmm…
Interesting article, and mostly fair-minded. But what’s missing from the article and the comments after it are any mention of riots that can’t be blamed on far-right, of which there were many in the UK, preceding and unrelated to the attack on the children and the dance class. Wasn’t it Leeds that was up in flames? Or Harehill? It was presented in the media as cultural liveliness, or mostly peaceful protesting, or any of the other nice euphemisms for when the participants are magically brown, black, of the correct religion, or the cause is of the correct nature. Then police will sit by and watch things burn, over in the UK, here in the US.
You can burn buildings, loot shops, rampage and destroy for Gaza or BLM. You can say whatever you want about white people, or Christians, and now, Jews. No hate crime, no jail time, no fines. Do whatever you want: break as many laws, destroy as much property – public or private, burn as many churches as you want; as long as it is for an approved cause or you belong to a protected group there will be no negative consequences for your actions from the law or the government.
I vaguely recall a quack promising to delivery homeopathic cures over the internet. That was back in the 90’s, I think. Granted, zero molecules per Ethernet packet is achievable.
But the guy who allowed Javascript into the HTML 5 spec walks free. Two-tier policing, folks.
If only those Pakistani gangs were raping police and government officials. Right? It would change their attitude and they would deserve it to boot.
Hey, can’t anybody else think of examples of spectacular quackery?
I’d hold their coats.
I used duct tape to remove a skin tab from my leg. But that actually worked. Maybe toss some duct tape in a blender with some of that lanolin, or whatever? Maybe add some ear wax, too? Hey, best I can do on short notice.
It’s around midnight in the UK. Time to hold a shamanic healing drum circle outside David’s bedroom window?
Are you trying to kill him?
Yes. With laughter.
Maybe also a Dionysian circle of wine drinking.
Heh. Laudanum, not lanolin. Obviously. Stupid spellcheck. Hope I didn’t kill him. Though in my defense that should have been obvious. He’s not a baseball glove, after all.
This is why I see more and more talk online about vigilantism.
Pursuant to the observation that Leftists only know slogans is this exploration of coercive control (a feature of sociopathy and/or narcissism) as depicted in a Hulu documentary called Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence.
I haven’t seen the doc but I did read a 2019 write-up about the situation at The Cut.
And then this interview between Deb Fillman and Josh Slocum that discusses the psychology at work in the cult.
Near the end of the interview they explain how the brainwashing has taken place at a systemic level and why people don’t seem to be in contact with reality anymore.
It is, I think, a decent summary of where we are, and why. The unhappy truths aren’t exactly hard to fathom. Evidence is abundant. And yet much of our media, and much of the political class, shares the kind of glib pieties mouthed by Mr Snow and Mr Politano. Pieties that actively inhibit any attempt to address the fundamental discontent. The fundamental mistake.
As I said recently,
And pretending it isn’t happening has been very much in fashion.
“Hush, woman. Not watched season two yet.”
Better hurry, you’ve only got TWO YEARS before season 3!
David:
Um, for a simple cold I suspect not much utility. However, if you suspect Long Covid, or an issue with Covid vaccine after-effects nicotine lozenges play a substantial role in the treatment protocol offered for same in a sort of video seminar I recently watched. Of course, in the interests of full disclosure a different presenter on the panel did tender a lengthy (and somewhat unnerving) disquisition on the benefits (and methods of) of urotherapy, which is just exactly what the name implies. So YMMV.
Now for a complex ague my signature remedy involves a significant quantity (say, a pint or so) of hot rum mixed with lemon juice and coarse sugar. After knocking back several helpings you may not actually feel any better, but you also won’t care much.
Until the next day, of course, but then these are troubled times, and if tomorrow in fact never comes, well, you’re well positioned, yes?
This wins the internet. Thank you for finding this, Dicentra.
He was just teaching a 12 year old “the art of love” and it is the fault of capitalism.
A totally rational person sings us a song.
What to do with unrepentant, unreformable predators. What to do, what to do.
He will stand on his statement until his death. It seems advisable to help him recline. Permanently.
a 2019 write-up about the situation
The thing that jumped out at me immediately is that none of the victims involved had anything like strong father figures growing up and all of them had some form of mental health issue before they encountered their Svengali. Frankly none of them seemed to have been qualified to be living on their own in New York City in the first place.
I saw rather a lot of this when I returned to university in 2004. Off-hand I can recall about half a dozen students I met who had serious mental health problems, severe family dysfunction, or both; all of whom ended up flunking out or withdrawing because they were unable to handle living on their own away from home.
(Deleted. Wrong thread.)