Friday Ephemera (742)
Because you chose the Hades Funeral Service. || All-terrain bed. || Hey, it’s a job. || Somewhat bigger than expected. || Slimline solution. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || Down on the farm. (h/t, Mark) || Minimal effort detected. || Close enough. || Ladies, look away now. || Ladies, look away now 2. || Answers on a postcard, please. || The unspanked pass the time. || The progressive retail experience, parts 589 and 590. (h/t, Julia) || The progressive dining experience, part 38. || But his “intention has always been to promote understanding,” obviously. || The path to manhood. || Scrambled maps. || Gameplay. || “What’s wrong with it?” || The thrill of women’s basketball. || Rufus and Harriet. || An excess of flexibility. || She found where he was storing his trauma. || And finally, first-timers find out.
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Most of them weren’t debating because they know they would lose. It was more like trolling mixed with a struggle session.
But the Democrat Party finds them very useful.
Well, I found myself wondering whether some of the participants would have behaved differently if, say, they’d known that their parents were watching them. There seemed to be a shortage of conscientiousness.
The preferred tactic – or the impulse – seemed to be to behave badly, rudely – sometimes immediately, as a default – and to create a situation in which someone who would rather address specifics, actual arguments – and not just be rude or dismissive in return – has to sit there and take it. At no point during Pseudo-Bro’s filibuster, for instance, was there any expectation of a reply. None was permitted.
So far as I can see, the objective was merely to bully. To express hostility.
I don’t speak Spanish, so without dubbed imports all that will remain outside my experience.
Which is one of the reasons I favor treating such people with maximum intolerance.
Hey, be thankful you didn’t find out by way of George sitting on you.
How about collars of obedience?
Mob action which humiliates and silences opponents is winning.
Which is why these leftists must be treated with extreme intolerance.
Is she one of those feminists who claims to feel safer around bears than men?
I hope these are felony charges.
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
–George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Halloween for the HOA.
It’s not a toomah! Or maybe it is…in addition to the one inside his skull.
There’s always something funny here. But sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between satire and reality.
Casus Belli.
Casus Belli
“Help us, Zombie Churchill. You’re our only hope!”
Shapiro: this style of “debate” has taken over college debate, where POC are allowed to bully, not address the debate topic, shout, etc. Because, you see, POC are not capable of anything but being “their true selves”. These wokies are just following the trend.
What should everyone else think POC really are, if that’s what POC offer as intellectual activity?
That would be the trend illustrated here:
Yes, it may sound like cartoonish jabbering, a racial caricature, but apparently they’re “hacking traditional college debate’s white privilege problem.”
The lies in current political ads are stunning. A local Dem is supporting expanding Medicare–what she means is including illegal aliens under medicare.
Lots of ads tout “supporting women’s right to choose” but not mentioning that they mean abortion up to time of birth.
Harris claims it is the Repub fault about immigration because they didn’t pass the bill last year–a bill that would have granted citizenship to all illegals.
Dems claim crime has fallen (2022 to 2023) but ignore that it is still way above 2019.
And so on.
More obvious at least.
Again, actors and actresses, especially many of the greater ones that we all know and love through the roles they played in movies, are pretty much empty shells of human beings. It’s why they can become someone else so convincingly. They are severely lacking in authentic thoughts or ideas. There’s no there there. They become someone else ether to escape some trauma or to try to please others.
… uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories …
From Trollope’s Barchester Towers, replace “preaching clergyman” by, well, you know…
An interesting thesis…
And they had the FBI’s backing by putting out false stats they quietly walked back later.
@pst314, who posted thusly:
That whole situation is a perfect metaphor for what the left has been doing since the end of WWII… Just substitute “jump in with polar bears for a swim” with “Release the mental patients”, “Don’t prosecute or imprison criminals”, “Open the borders”, “Turn society over to the mentally ill and sexually deranged”…
And, I will insist on pointing out, it’s working out about as well.
At some point, we absolutely need to stop listening to these idiots and put them back where they belong, in freshly-established mental institutions or being “sent to Coventry” by giving them their own area to run… Maybe a nice, isolated island somewhere. Baffin Island, maybe…?
Literally crying laughing at the skidmark that broke his own leg in prog retail experience 590.
Much as every economic report gets quietly revised later with numbers showing things are worse than claimed.
No Zombie Churchill at Stoaty Weasel, oddly enough.
It’s amazing to me that he was still willing to set foot in the UK after the persecution he has suffered at their hands. Everyone in the UK government should be ashamed.
He’s the hero of the show, right?
Has it been mentioned yet that Post Vaginoplasty Dilation Process is a pretty good name for a prog band?
“It’s quite a strenuous thing to put your body through three times a day.”
Porn stars everywhere yawn. “Hold my lube.”
Too many syllables. What would it eventually get shortened to? Vaginoplasty? Dilation Process?
Too many syllables. What would it eventually get shortened to? Vaginoplasty? Dilation Process?
“PVDP,” Greg Lake, of ELP explained. Toad the Wet Sprocket somehow copes with their long name. I think people just say “Toad.” So, maybe “Post.” When they’re analyzing the songs they can talk about the “Post Process.”
Heh. That’s just me at work. Sometimes amongst my “conservative” co-workers. Granted, never quite that extreme but ooooh, watching that I could almost feel his pain.
I worked with a guy with a similar problem. I used to say even his belly had a belly. Similar mindset but not quite that extreme.
@WTP,
And, they say that social contagion isn’t real. Not that long ago, people would have never had the balls to do something like that in broad daylight in Seattle.
Now? LOL…
The social commons includes the Overton window for what’s acceptable in terms of public behavior, and that’s shifted way, way over to the left.
What we ain’t seeing, yet, is the shift the other way, when someone decides that the answer to “fat man with stick beating on police car” is “shooting fat man with stick dead”.
Which is merely the obverse side of the coin.
Welcome signs for David.
This seems accurate.
I think that was about a famous portrait of Winston Churchill, stolen in Dec 2021/Jan 2022 and recovered earlier this year.
Oct 26: Chicago mayor says Durk is on “a journey toward transformation.”
Words fail.
The shopping cart as a litmus test of character:
If they don’t include ‘compost’ they certainly do.
It’s a symbiote trying to escape its idiot Trill host.
It’s not a toomah!
The biggest damn ventral hernia I have ever seen,
I think that was about a famous portrait of Winston Churchill, stolen in Dec 2021/Jan 2022 and recovered earlier this year.
Well, yes. The Fairmont Chateau Laurier is in Ottawa, Canada. Given how we’ve been treating Sir John A. I suspect Zombie Churchill would be given the Cpl. Cirillo treatment in short order.
Maybe screaming at random toddlers would help.
“When It Comes to Children, I Think You’re All Wrong”
Well, yes. Blather about “critical thinking” is likely to be useless and misleading, even perverse, if there’s not much knowledge to work with. The design-a-new-car analogy is, I think, apt.
I’ve certainly had conversations with young adults who very much regarded themselves as critical thinkers, or something along those lines, but who simply didn’t know any number of very basic and pertinent things. Consequently, their political attitudes – and their departures from reality – were pretty much what you’d imagine.
That video is insane…
Remind me again who the racists are supposed to be.
Behold ye the fruits of an expensive education.
Well, indeed. Apparently, in the progressive mind, applauding inanity – based solely on the race of the person mouthing it – somehow isn’t condescending. And so, minority students are encouraged to mouth profanities, randomly shout ‘racist!’, overrun time limits, ignore the chosen topic entirely, and generally flap their arms about, because doing so is every bit as good as being able to structure a rational argument.
Life skills, baby.
Oh, and if in doubt, just invoke your “nigga authenticity.” Because bonus points. This is the standard deemed good enough. For black students. And naturally, the Atlantic swoons with approval.
The degree to which modern progressivism is premised on a kind of weird racial neuroticism is hard to overstate.
Re screaming at toddlers:
A rather physically attractive young woman to boot. Danger Will Robinson.
I noticed that blather even back in the 60’s: “Teaching kids mere facts is obsolete. Kids don’t need to know lots of facts, because they can look stuff up. All they need is library skills and how to think.” That lunacy got quite a boost with the advent of the internet.
The criminal shame is that I heard that garbage from ed school graduates.
Because “progressives” prefer blacks who are incapable of speaking clearly or reasoning at all. The proper role of blacks is to be angry thugs.
Neuroticism? More like a psychosis.
The deputy chief repeatedly declined to comment on rumors that the gunman targeted the initial victim because he is Jewish.
A few years ago two Jews were murdered in that neighborhood by a black man who walked up behind them and shot them in the head.
After I cleaned off the mouse urine (don’t want to get leptospirosis) from the Quality Street™ coconut eclair – the first coconut candy I have had made with coconut husk fiber instead of meat, BTW – I was so taken that I ordered a tin from Amazon.
US prime shoppers will be glad to know that if you order today they will arrive by Halloween so that you can share your
sufferingenjoyment with the neighbors.This has been a Public Service Announcement from The Muldoon Institute and Plantations™.
Carry on.
PST314:
Variable.
Here in Israel you need a 5 shekel coin to unchain a cart that some goodie-two-shoes returned to The System.
Also there are often shortages of carts at peak times.
Also Israelis are just getting used to humongous parking lots.
Also Israelis have a stubborn streak of chutzpah when told to do something like this.
OTOH people are normal, fair, and friendly…. and there is no equivalent to The Progressive Retail Experience… I pity the fool who tries anything like that here.
Despite what you see on the news, Israel is a high trust, traditional civil society, albeit more brusque and Mediterranean than some other cultures.
Consequently there is subculture of Free Range shopping carts defiantly skirting The System. New arrivals take a neighborly interest in people loading their vehicles after shopping, and sometimes the 5 shekel piece is exchanged directly and never makes it into the little slot on the cart – the satisfaction of gaming The System.
So at least in Israel shopping carts don’t indicate anything.
A close cousin to this shining exemplar of multi-culturalism:
No worries though – ‘the accused maintained that he had not attacked from behind and had only stabbed once. And that the knife attack was due to an “inspiration.”‘
Facts and the media: one of my friends, an otherwise lovely guy, an engineer, seems to get his info totally from MSNBC because he quotes them directly. We were all sitting around and he asked how grocery prices could have gone up so much. My other friend, a dentist, tried to explain inflation as caused by printing money, supply and demand. He didn’t get it. I gave the example of Spain bringing over so much silver it wrecked their economy instead of making them all rich. Didn’t get it. Seemed inclined to believe stores were just jacking up prices, as if you could get all the different grocery chains to collude on that.
It is in fact necessary to know facts before you can apply critical thinking. Worse, the teachers who try to teach critical thinking are unable to do it themselves. They actively misunderstand it.
Worse worse: if you depend on Google, you will be spoon-fed left-wing versions of “facts”.
You see an example with the many people who depend on GPS for all their navigating and cannot read a map or navigate without GPS. It makes you dumber.
The barrel scrapings of academia.
You have to wonder why? What benefit is there to society?
Ever get the feeling we’re living in a society of idiot savants?
That’s divine inspiration. From the Koran, naturally.
That really is a great name. Company slogan, “We can do better than a handbasket!”
And there have been several examples of the utter trust in things like Google maps for directions that have left people stranded or dead. Recently in my area when there was roadwork on the freeway, way too many people immediately took Google’s “alternative route” not realizing it was a narrow, barely-two-lane road up the side of a mountain with lots of twists and turns. Panic ensued.
I have to admit, I miss my Thomas Bros. maps. Loved those things.
Worse, the teachers who try to teach critical thinking are unable to do it themselves.
The teaching profession has purposefully conflated critical theory with critical thinking. So things are actually going to plan.
[…] neutralized the gunman and then switched to life-saving mode […]
Legally obligated. Which reminds me of someone’s comment years ago about seeing young hood rats in motorized wheelchairs: They’d been paralyzed in gunfights with other rats or with the police, and by law were entitled to lifelong medical support.
As I was saying…
David, I suggest you display a black band of mourning at the top of your blog.
Oh wait, you already do.
If I recall correctly, there will be some seriously fascinated women showing up shortly.
Police have released this security cam photo.
Progressive Retail #590.
I smiled and I’m not sorry.
Not sure which is more dangerous: Chicago streets or African airlines.
So true, so true, if only our school district had had this advantage, as it was, it was so backwards we had to learn to read using discarded tampon boxes at night by candlelight.
Chicago streets or African airlines.
Chicago streets, a crocodile in a duffel is a one off, and though there are plenty of crashes worldwide due to poor weight and balance calculations or cargo shifting, only a fool would bet against someone being shot on any given day in Chicago.
The solution to this is mass deportation preceded by mass violence.
You have a bottle of cough syrup. The normal dosage is one tablespoon. After using the syrup for some time, the bottle is half empty.
Imagine that you fill the bottle back up with water. Now, you need to take two tablespoons to get the full effect, because the actual medicine has been diluted down by the water.
Same with currency: when they print money, it has a dilution effect on the buying power of the dollar.
OH, THE HUMANITY
I usually am not brave enough to step into left world. But I found myself in a thread responding to Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden.
It amazes me that people can have such heightened emotional responses to the the imagined wickedness and cruelty of the conservatives. It’s like they cannot discern the difference between Heinrich Himmler and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Here’s the link for anyone wishing to partake in the gnashing of teeth.
https://x.com/MsWrite07/status/1850661940429046021?t=41ttNErCW_GLKxfqvFacSQ&s=19
You know what really gets onto my skin? How the left, who run academia and upper echelon corporate suites, are so proud of their discernment. They are so delighted with their ability tease out the clever nuances in every form of book and media and utterance.
But then they revert to these cartoonish stereotypes, and show themselves utterly incapable of any nuance at all. Everything is Hitler. Everything is evil. Everything is cruel.
I wonder if they work themselves into these fevers, or if the in their off hours, they are able to understand that conservatives are not sacrificing virgins to Satan in the woods.
Smallish Bees, OMG, did you see the ratio, though? That woman probably never knew what hit her, the Trump Train was going so fast.
157 replies to 1.9K likes? The ratio goes the other way, methinks.
You may be right. But hitting “like” is easy. The replies disarticulated her. It tells me that we aren’t just keeping quiet like we used to. I am on X a lot–and the progressives don’t infiltrate the conservative conversations.
The Left’s problem, more than anything else, is that they have awakened a sleeping beast and are now aghast to observe said beast shambling their way, using their means and tactics.
They’re not going to like it, when the oppositional equivalent of Antifa starts showing up.
The whole thing reminds me of that response to bombing cities in Europe… “Did Mr. Hitler imagine that German cities would go unbombed, after Rotterdam, Warsaw, and London…?”
Related comment from Eric S Raymond:
And one of his commenters replies:
Which reminds me of apologists for islamo-fascism complaining about Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah. Those apologists never demand that Something Be Done about endless wars and terrorism directed at Jews, but scream “genocide!” when Israel bombs military targets concealed in apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques. Nor do they remember what it was necessary to do to genocidal Germany and Japan in WWII.
Related: In the latest issue of City Journal (Autumn 2024), Theodore Dalrymple notes the contrast between the left’s approach to crime vs. the recent anti-immigrant riots. The former is always subject to “nuanced” interpretation and the perpetrators are to be “understood” with “compassion”, while the latter are Hitlerites who must be punished severely to prevent future incidents. I’d copy-paste a passage from his column (“Oh, to be in England: Britain’s Long, Hot Summer”) but it’s not yet online.
And what did they get for doing so? Again, the mockery and being called tea-baggers with the sexual implications of that. While I wasn’t specifically a fan, I’m more of a SEA Party person (Spent Enough Already), I did challenge some of the mockery. Especially the tea-bagger (guffaw, guffaw) crap. “Oh, I bet you’re fun at parties.”
Ambitious mediocrities who think their opinions have substance and can’t brook any contradiction. Their supposed ability to discern nuance is little more than parroting the vapouring of others
https://archive.is/ti2pj
“An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics.” – Protein Wisdom, 2005.
@pst 314,
In reply to your various posts referencing the general and entirely unexpected return of chickens to their roost, dogs to their vomit, and criminals to the scene of their crimes… I fear I must chime in and say that I’ve been pointing that rather painfully obvious thing out for years.
Most of the idjit class, the so-called “intelligentsia” types that have taken over all aspects of public life these last few generations, are the ones I’d call “front row” personalities: They’re the kids who found the atmosphere of the heated hothouses we turned our schools into congenial, and who set themselves apart as “the smart ones”.
Connect that fact with what I’ve said about gamification and simulation fidelity, and you have the beginnings of an understanding of how we got where we are, where Republicans are not really Republicans, and Democrats aren’t Democrats either. We’re living under a regime of “head girls” and “front-row boys”, the kids who took to the varied and sundry artificialities of our schooling system like ducks to water, and now we are reaping the harvest of dysfunction stemming from that.
The “educated idjit” class is why you can’t wedge a knife in between the various parties in politics. They’re all the same people, basically; operating for the benefit of their own kind, telling the rest of us that they’re our partisans, in our corners. Reality? They’re only ever in their own corner, for their own kind, which ain’t “the rest of us” at all.
Note how nothing is really done for actual constituents, and how these sorts just make decisions for their own benefit, not the people who voted them into office. Note how you suddenly have local elected officials acting as though they were appointed by distant Imperial agencies, not listening to the needs or desires of their local people. For all intents and purposes, local government is dead, insofar as it might provide actual local input; the almighty blob controls all through its self-selected ohsoveryproperandcorrect minions that it churns out like so many crappy little Oreo cookies in its intellectual fallacy factories.
What’s to be done about this? Well, I really have no idea, but it cannot go on. What the hell do you do when an entire segment of your society, one that is key and essential to it, turns on the body politic and suddenly aggrandizes itself, ignoring its purpose and function, doing as it will?
Today, the educated idjit class is demonstrating the same sort of capricious viciousness that the old aristocracy did, back in the “bad old days”, and it shows everywhere. They’re discrediting themselves, utterly, and building up such a depth of contempt and hatred from the “common folk” that I suspect you’ll see something like the pogroms against the intelligentsia that Pol Pot raised and led against his own.
Sad thing is? When the time comes, I suspect they’re going to deserve everything they get. They’ve set themselves up as lords and masters, making believe they’re virtuous and correct in all they do. Reality? They’re overstepping their bounds, and are doing the very same things that the Puritans did during Cromwell’s time. I dare say they’ll go the same way, but without an America to run to? Then what? It’ll be the only thing to get rid of them, to use the noose and gibbet.
The deputy chief repeatedly declined to comment on rumors that the gunman targeted the initial victim because he is Jewish.
A few years ago two Jews were murdered in that neighborhood by a black man who walked up behind them and shot them in the head.
Update: The shooter’s name is Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi. No surprise.
The truth is though that what they are doing there isn’t really discernment. They haven’t teased out some hidden meaning in the text, akin to figuring out wtf the Voynich Manuscript is actually about.
Anyone with a good enough imagination can see whatever “meaning” or clever nuance they want in a text, and anyone trained to write obscurantist nonsense can make it seem like it was the result of their incredible discernment. But what they are actually doing is more akin to looking at a cloud, utterly devoid of meaning, and telling us that they can see a train, or a duck.
When they write about their analysis of a text, they’re really telling us about themselves. This should only be of interest to their therapist, like the result of a Rorschach test, not published in “academic” journals.
It’s a shame, because literary criticism built on honest textual analysis can be very enjoyable and enlightening.
It is, and I do enjoy it when done properly.
The problem started with the Death of the Author, which is essentially the idea that what you’re analysing isn’t a communication filled with intended meaning by the author, but is a random assortment of words and our job is to read whatever we want into it, based on our own psychoses.
The old “the text can mean anything” scam?
I have forgotten the details of the history of the Death of the Author theory, oh well.
However: It can be legitimate to discover meanings in a text which the author did not consciously put there, because:
But this must be done honestly and respectfully. And in order to be honest, such criticism must acknowledge the evidence against an interpretation (something that much current scholarship fails to do.)
I pretty much agree with the honesty and also showing the arguments against an interpretation. It’s not just that they don’t do it, but that it’s actively discouraged in academia because it “weakens your argument”. I had that feedback on a few essays before I got the message that the degree wasn’t about serious scholarship.
Unconscious, but not entirely unconnected from the author. I’ve written things that have probably revealed things about the way I think and my values, which I didn’t intend to put in there. But not all interpretations would be “equally valid”, as some claim with Death of the Author.
I think this is nice and part of the joy of reading, and some themes are universal across cultures, but at some point what you’re doing as a reader is essentially looking at a cloud and seeing a duck. That duck may make the reader feel happy, and that’s good, but it’s not much deeper than that.
Exactly!
In fact, a number of authors have written (or said in my presence) that they frequently solve “problems” in their writing by sleeping on them: While they are asleep their brains work on the problems at an unconscious level and the solution is revealed when they awake. Other writers talk about using other techniques to allow the unconscious to work, such as physical exercise and activities radically different from writing. This is also true of other professions.