Friday Ephemera (735)

I got to watch the sunrise. Saw an antelope and a gnu. 

One chap is timestamping every sighting in the live chat. Which, I suppose, is helpful. If a bit much. 

This chart is astonishing all and sundry on X.com,

Not sure why anyone would be surprised.

A thought.

[ Writes list, waits for someone to invent Phantom Zone technology. ]

People of average intelligence… do not usually understand how stupid stupid gets. 

A lively demonstration is helpfully provided.

The one above the bed. You’d have to watch it in a mirror. 

It would seem to present some… logistical challenges. 

But then the head of the bed appears to have been positioned right up against a fireplace. 

Just been emailed this.

As a cultured crowd, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.

Unless I know the ending ahead of time, I’m not watching.

So far as I can tell, the ending is a happy one. It’s just that you’ll be put through the emotional wringer to get there. 

Whatever he was going to do can’t have been as good.

Well, indeed. I’m assuming the, er, performance is called Phuckinell. Just not sure whether the dog and baffled wife are part of the act.

“Monogamy is never the answer.“

Hard pass. Seek help.

As noted before, pro-polyamory videos are invariably unconvincing, and very often resemble a round-the-houses cry for help.

Civilized down to incurably savage.

We’re encouraged to believe, based on nothing, that the typical violent criminal is just like thee and me, only maybe less good at mental arithmetic, and more downtrodden by something or other. But, to quote Geordi La Forge, it’s a long way down to the warp core.

And the failure to understand just how different the mindset is can, and does, result in hopelessly wrongheaded ‘progressive’ policies – say, with regard to crime and recidivism.

No, your “green” is my cyan. Jerks.

I did spend several seconds looking for a button marked teal.

Regarding dog disappearances and beatniks, how do we know the latter weren’t the culprits for who the hell knows what deranged purpose?

She does have that look about her.

The Guardian finds a crime it wants the police to do more about.

“Stealing a bike is a classic low-risk, high-reward crime. Imagine if other kinds of theft were treated with the same kind of indifference or acceptance by the victims.”

I was under the impression they were. 

I notice Mr Becket’s proposed solutions – “better lighting” – shy from any suggestion at all as to what might be done to the kinds of creatures who repeatedly steal bikes at knifepoint. 

In typical fashion, the solution is for someone else to fix your problem.

Throughout, there’s an air of contemptible self-emasculation. Again, a Guardian staple. So many of the readers and columnists seem to be studiously avoiding any suggestion of what might be construed as comeuppance. 

I long for the day when, after being robbed for the umpteenth time, one of them finally cracks and suggests kneeling on the perpetrator’s throat, shattering their pelvis with hammers, and dragging the twitching carcass into the sea.

Which, on reflection, would not be entirely without merit.

Not everyone has discovered this establishment.

They’re being denied pleasures they can scarcely begin to imagine. 

I saw something similar done with tennis balls. The question being are they green or are they yellow? Was that here?

I don’t believe so. We’ve had items on the making of tennis balls, and an item on a noted tennis player buying the world’s supply of donkey cheese.

But so far as I’m aware, we’ve not argued about the exact colour of tennis balls. 

[ Replaces with cheaper, nastier breakables from orphanage next door. ]

Bit rough on the orphans, what?

Don’t worry, they won’t be missed. It’s an orphanage for the blind.

and need to be readily available to service persons.

There is that.

Or overnight guests who need to make a hasty escape.

All of the aquas and teals can lean either green or blue, and they were calibrating your sensitivity to them.

I do like a dark, blue-leaning teal.

[ Admires own socks. ]

It’s possible your host is very slightly drunk. 

But in an agreeable kind of way. Not a “Leave him, Darren, he’s not worth it” way. 

Attending a public high school serving a very mixed school district was…educational:

That’s sort of the point I was hoping to make. Those mouthing progressive positions on crime and social disorder very often have limited personal exposure to the creatures they so ostentatiously excuse. They are unlikely to have grown up among them or to have had them living next door. And so, with little formative experience of the type, false assumptions accumulate.

This is perhaps worth repeating: 

It’s worth noting that the field of academic criminology, in which unrealism and excuses are pretty much the default, is notoriously left-tilted, here and overseas, with liberals and radical leftists outnumbering conservative colleagues by a ratio of around 30:1.

And it occurs to me that people in high-status professions, including legal professions, are more likely to have internalised high-status opinions, mouthed as a kind of social jewellery. According to which, the creatures treating us as mere prey – suckers from whom things can be taken – are the ones most deserving of our sympathy and indulgence.

Pretentious sympathy, of course. But still.

And so, we have competitively activist legal professionals, such as Mr Clive Stafford Smith, a man who believes that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” And who regards anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation as plebeian and unsophisticated, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of justice as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes.”

However, contra Mr Stafford Smith and his peers, the fact that I manage to walk down the street without sucker-punching random people for being the wrong race – or stealing a car and deliberately running down elderly cyclists, killing them, while laughing – is not down to my no longer living in a rough part of town.

From this, which has some fairly vivid examples.

[ Added: ]

See also the update to this.

The section, towards the end, about the vandalism of a garden – the casual, routine spite – seems somewhat relevant.