Reheated (97)
For newcomers, some items from the archives:
Your Standards Are Holding You Back.
Dating platform for Brooklyn’s hipster socialists is not entirely successful.
Ms Isser’s indignation at the thought of socialist women being romantically shunned, even by fellow socialists, was aired in December in a Twitter howling session, during which extensive use was made of exclamation marks. After much exasperated rumbling, Ms Isser concluded that the fault must lie solely with men, and that “straight men are shallow and sexist even when they’re socialists.” Thereby proving that, contrary to legend, ladies of the left are in no way high-maintenance or difficult to please.
“Our politics reflect who we are!!!!!” said she, loudly. Which is rather the problem, I think.
The Put-Upon And Marginalised Finally Get A Word In.
Come, let us peek at the Culture pages of the Guardian.
“Queer stories are so seldom told in museums,” says Jennie Grady, who has worked on the exhibition.
Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.
So seldom. So terribly seldom.
Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.
Yes, But Where Are My Novelty Breasts?
Convicted paedophile demands pampering, women’s undies.
Depending, one assumes, on whether Mr Sonia claims to be a man or a woman on any given day.
Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.
Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist.
It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth…
The supposedly corrective fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to. Those doing the fretting then set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they have travelled to see, and with which they may feel some affinity, may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness. By liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
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Truth hurts.
Well, the romantic bait on offer seemed largely to consist of people invoking their catalogue of mental health problems, boasting of how they enjoy being mean to white men, and endless neurotic complaining, all of which seemed intended to deflect attention from the participants’ own appalling personalities.
As I said at the time:
Hence the match-making success rate, approximately zero. And the project’s inevitable, yet remarkably swift, collapse.
Bloody hell. Reheated Ninety-Seven.
[ Applies moisturiser. ]
I like the idea of “dating socialists is a sign of desperation”. But a very dangerous compromise: I knew a few middle-of-the-road, mostly apolitical men who clearly “settled” for such women and who were slowly corrupted by them into accepting various stupid and pernicious leftist doctrines. Fortunately they never had children.
If only we could get them all in that room. And then lock the door.
Regarding the platform mentioned above, I don’t recall seeing anyone expressing an interest in having children. The super-woke seekers of amour seemed much too busy telling each other about their contempt for white men, and their own appetites for polyamory, open relationships, and being “nonmonog.”
Good morning.
[ Looks out the window. Perceives balmy weather and clear skies. ]
Time for a long vigorous walk plus a little upper body strength training.
[ Writes list, plans trip to supermarket. ]
Hey, I exercise in my own way.
[ Folds carrier bags in a vigorous fashion. ]
At least they’ve still got mirrors.
[ Returns. Anticipates eggs, corned beef, and coffee. ]
[ Returns. Stashes wine in dishwasher. Acts casual. ]
[ Resists temptation to pilfer wine. ]
So if not them, then who is?
A revealing clue presents itself:
Helpfully Halper has a Wikipedia entry:
An exclusive part of New York whose ‘Notable residents’ include Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, George Gershwin, William Randolph Hearst, Babe Ruth and Thomas Sowell.
Private, Ivy League Preparatory school, current tuition fees over $60,000 a year.
Private liberal arts college founded in the 1830s.
“fourth-generation socialist” my aching ass.
[ Slides bowl of ostensibly toenail-free peanuts to Nikw211. ]
From just across the state line…
https://www.iwf.org/female-athlete-stories/payton-mcnabb/
[ Starts compiling Friday’s Ephemera. ]
From Your Standards Are Holding You Back: “Libertarian socialist (28, she/her) seeks similar (27-35, he/him)“
How distressingly heteronormative of her!
Libertarian socialist: noun, a dope-smoking fascist.
That went suspiciously smoothly.
Drag queens (for either sex)?
TBF, as many current politicians, actors, “educators”, and the like prove, you don’t have to be broke ass to be a
communistsocialist, and as the upper west side is the home of the socialist Petri dish that is Columbia, being a fourth generation socialist from that neck of the woods is pretty much the norm.Still processing the idea that fourth-generation socialist is intended as a credential of some kind, a seductive boast.
And not, say, “I am incapable of learning from errors.”
Revolutionaries and “capitalism”: if you give your kid $5 to buy lemonade to open a lemonade stand in front of the house, the $5 is “capital” and they are capitalists. It is of course actually a free market system. Even in a communist country a factory requires capital to be built, it just comes from the gov. This animosity toward our economic system, which has made millions rich and hundreds of millions comfortable is so strange. There are so many opportunities to make money. I know lots of people who have started their own business, which would be illegal under communism. Most of these “radicals” come from comfortable or even wealthy families. They are ungrateful and lazy and crazy.
Bourgeois Oxfordshire socialist commune rediscovers capitalism, landlordism, and border control from a first principles approach (via Samizdata’s Perry de Havilland)
(I don’t know if this is real or satiric, but recall that Bernie Sanders was kicked out of a commune for being a useless layabout.)
I want to live in a world where David struggles to find enough examples of lunacy to fill a weekly blog post.
Band name.
Oh come on. It was right there.
Band name.
First single, Achy Breaky Ass.
Pardon me but why would I have any interest in being fair to a socialist? They should be ‘broke ass’ – past time to ‘re-distribute’ their wealth.
Not at all. The comfortable are less likely to put up with being driven like cattle.
Socialism is Dark Triad traits masquerading as compassion. Evil with a smiley face. Of course we should not “be fair” to socialists.
I agree with Mr. Dalrymple.
“We have suspended this account because the X platform is no longer consistent with our values as an NHS emergency service.”
—the NHS’s North East Ambulance Service which clearly longs for Big Brother.
A “scientist and science educator” has a hissy fit about science.
We have suspended this account because the X platform is no longer consistent with our values…
Which tells you all you need to know about their values.
Not sure if that processes. My rights are my rights, whether I respect them or not. They are inherent to my existence as a (kinda) rational human being. They are no more a basis for my behavior than my left thumb is. I mean, I suppose that is what he’s saying there in an indirect way?
BTW, Tony Blair’s a c***. But I suppose you already knew that.
Femininity in the 21st Century.
“The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left Of It
“It is a mistake to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom
An attitude characterised by gratefulness and having obligations towards others has been replaced – with awful consequences – by an awareness of “rights” and a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. This leads to resentment as the rights become violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.
― Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice
“The decline of civilised behaviour – self-restraint, modesty, humility … ruins social and personal life.”
― Theodore Dalrymple
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, & inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for & died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born”
― Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative
It’s not just trust based on confidence that strangers will obey the laws; it’s also trust that strangers will do what is right where there is no law to mandate their behavior. I have known plenty of people who, without breaking the law, showed themselves to be untrustworthy and who I therefore shunned.
Cartoon seen long ago:
Professor A: “From now on, we are defined not by our politics but by our sexuality.”
Professor B: “But my politics is my sexuality.”
Femininity in the 21st Century.
I’m not sure how many times I need to say this. We stopped being a serious country a long time ago–right around when Turdeau (sic) the second became Prime Minister. It used to be when something crazy was being “featured” on socials it was Florida-man or California-man or Seattle-man. Now It’s Canada-man e v e r y s i n g l e t i m e!
The morons who think they’re “queering” the art world are doing it entirely wrong.
To “queer” something, according to the theorists, is to invert mainstream and marginal, to upend current hierarchies, to drag the Overton Window violently to places that it hasn’t been before (in recent memory). It doesn’t mean talking about sexual minorities in every context.
So that would mean contemplating a Constable and declaring the aesthetic ugly while praising Brutalism as enlightened and rapturous.
Which, they’ve been pulling that garbage for 100 years.
Yawn.
Among the reminders to drink water during warm weather, the X feed of the North East Ambulance Service features a remarkable number of “diversity” and “equity” incantations, and many, many photographs and videos from Pride events, in which staff march about and have their faces painted with glitter, the relevance of which escapes me. (A casual browser might conclude that the primary function of the North East Ambulance Service is in fact to attend Pride events and to then tell everyone about what a jolly time they had.)
So far as I can see, their posts typically attract zero comments, so I’m not sure what has upset them and prompted their huffy withdrawal. I did find a couple of recent posts, around the time of their public pouting, to which the public had replied, generally with comments about the service’s ideological capture by activists and a corresponding failure to meet response-time targets. Some suggestions that employees should just do the job – rather than spend many, many hours on displays of fashionable activism – were a little salty, but hardly a solid basis for institutional fainting.
Maybe Word Came Down that nobody is allowed to participate on the Electric Rocket Man’s Scary Platform.
It’s a bit of a head-scratcher, assuming the North East Ambulance Service are being honest, that is. Yes, they’ve been mocked, on two recent posts, sometimes in earthy language; but from what I can see, most of that is in response to their own posturing and huffiness.
Unless, of course, they object to the suggestion that all of their political signalling and glitter-play at Pride events, which seems to take up an awful lot of their time, has impaired their focus and resulted in a marked decline in effectiveness. With some ambulances taking over an hour to arrive.
A causal relationship that seems entirely plausible.
That. Like the police, they’re a joke now and they deserve ‘salty’ language.