Bright Lights, Big City
Lifted from the comments, it turns out that Transport For London is advertising assisted suicide. They seem to be giving it quite a push:
Westminster Death Tunnel sponsored by @dignityindying pic.twitter.com/fW0mbtqVRc
— Fleur Elizabeth (@fleurmeston) November 25, 2024
Very on-brand, I’d say. Almost too on-the-nose. I mean, if London’s buses and tube network were suddenly to be plastered with huge posters saying END IT ALL NOW, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO, it wouldn’t be entirely inexplicable, or entirely dissonant with the customer experience.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Transport For London has a staff training centre, complete with fake station and platform, and “suicide pits,” where employees learn how to manage what are euphemistically referred to as “passengers taken unwell” or “disruptions to the tube service.” Events that occur on average once or twice a week.
In 2019, staff “intervened” in the self-destructive thoughts of 426 customers deemed “visibly in distress,” “up from 252 in the previous year.”
As EmC quips darkly in reply,
Update, via the comments:
The adverts for assisted suicide are now being partially covered, by persons unknown, with posters for a Samaritans helpline.
Consider this an open thread.
My Name is Academe, and I’m a Failure.
Barack Obama is talking about how to “rebuild a conversation” between people with different backgrounds and opinions. All this after he incessantly used his presidency to tear apart our society, particularly on racial lines.
Comment ensues:
More strong words:
Mr Wright exaggerates*, but he makes a very good point: Obama and his ilk incited racial hatred because it served their leftist purposes. He wants to find out how Americans can once again talk to each other? He can start by fucking off to somewhere else.
* Well, what he says may be entirely accurate with regard to his circle of friends, but it was not true that there were no racists and bigots to be found.
The eternal question: Are leftists human beings? The evidence suggests not.
This might be a clue to what’s behind all those “assisted suicide” advertisements.
NHS, the envy of the world.
Re: The assisted suicide posters in Lndon’s Underground.
The Lotus Eaters suggested that their target audience is MPs, since Parliament apparently has a vote on assisted suicide in the near future.
Regarding the highly-strung young lady mentioned here, Ms Hit-And-Run-Then-Meltdown-When-Caught, this:
Apparently, it’s “anti-social” to note vividly antisocial behaviour, or patterns thereof. Even when you’re the victim of that behaviour, presumably.
Progressives make excuses for shitty behaviour then pat themselves on the back. The victim of the shitty behaviour doesn’t count.
Well, declaring sympathy for the lawbreaker, the person who fled the scene, while – like the lawbreaker – showing zero interest in the person impacted and left behind, strikes me as somewhat perverse. Yet this is presented as a progressive position, the mark of a Good Person.
Granted, there’s a certain fascination in watching Miss Meltdown’s obnoxious, infantile, and utterly selfish behaviour; but contra JunLper, I’m struggling to feel much sympathy for a hit-and-run driver who gets hysterical in a way that seems practised – and angry, and vividly resentful – when caught and held accountable.
Perhaps I’m “anti-social” too.
JunLper, by the way, is a “transsexual journalist” who thinks oestrogen is making him curvy and alluring, and an enthusiast of communism. He claims, “rightwingers NEED to be able to harass people to exist online.”
[ Compiles tomorrow’s Ephemera. ]
[ Sees a reason to rise early again tomorrow ]
I must say, I do enjoy reading the comments here and equally enjoyable is imagining what you all actually look like. Please, no pictures – I would hate to have my fantasies destroyed . . . or worse, confirmed.
I could be out there, in the garden, feeding the squirrels. But no, here I am, toiling, slaving away.
I have never understood this. What idiot expects politicians to keep their promises? What fool expects the government to take care of them when they are old and powerless?
My pre-Boomer parents are probably the last cadre that will receive US Social Security benefits. Having grown up in the Depression they also have other savings squirreled away.
There are huge numbers of Baby Boomers who do not have sufficient retirement savings.,,, Perhaps this is another factor in the hysteria over Trump and his reforms – even though he has not said anything about Social Security.
The swimsuit round starts at 2:30 prompt.
Or merely placed money down for the t-shirt.
I have, in fact, known people who assumed that Social Security would always be there and who acted accordingly. They could have saved more, foregoing various luxuries such as frequent travel and recreational drugs. Two common curiosities: (1) They tended to passionately object to any assertion that Social Security was less than perfectly reliable. (2) They strongly favored taxing others’ retirement savings.
Having absolutely no experience in this area for the record, I would imagine making a run-of-the-mill person disappear is a bit easier than doing the same for someone with any power or who is in the public eye. Saying that, I am often surprised that it doesn’t happen. I can only assume the person who would want to see it done has responsibilities he feels it would be unconscionable to shirk were he to be caught and locked up.
One objection: The poster said she was a Kamala voter without offering an evidence to back that up. It seems very likely but I’d prefer that assumptions not be presented as solid facts.
I’m OK with the lot of them offing themselves along with their staffs and the civil service retinues.
My profile pic is indeed me, although I think that pic is from 2016.
Once more from the top, “We are the caring and compassionate ones”.
A playlist to accompany your Thanksgiving culinary labors.
Timeless: Dirty Harry vs. DEI
He does have a point.
One and two.
That reminds me of the apartment landlord who got a water bill for tens of thousands of dollars because some immigrant tenants left the tub running 24/7. Central American immigrants who had never before encountered indoor plumbing.
No surprise that Somali immigrants would be grossly ignorant, but American-born blacks? Disgraceful and inexcusable.
Well since you asked…
(Midjourney doesn’t know what T-squares or bagpipes look like, apparently)
Gotta say, the cape is a nice touch. Classy.
[ Fetches bigger, more elaborate cape. And wind machine. ]
What struck me was the media’s eager framing of the issue as one of minority victimhood and a basis for some “community-wide,” and presumably taxpayer-funded, “effort.” It seems to me that any unfortunate neighbours would be unlikely to regard the continual noise – or the bewildering ignorance, lack of agency, and outright selfishness – as evidence of victimhood, but more probably the opposite.
I was also reminded of a late 80s documentary I saw some years ago about the tenants of a run-down and disreputable council estate. One I’ve actually driven past once or twice, and about whose occupants I heard legends as a teenager. The film was, inevitably, made by middle-class leftists (art degrees, boarding school) and was clearly intended as some kind of indictment of 1980s Thatcherism. As if Mrs Thatcher and her policies were somehow the cause of behaviour that predated them.
What struck me at the time – and went entirely unacknowledged by the documentary makers – was the infantilism of many of the tenants – their lack of agency, of initiative. They seemed entirely absorbed by the state, as if it were some all-powerful but utterly negligent parent, and were consequently reduced to a kind of childish passivity.
This mindset was apparent throughout the documentary, yet somehow never remarked upon or challenged, even gently. The residents were clearly being steered towards externalising the cause of their woes, but the mindset on display seemed beyond the scope of any political policy.
One detail that lingers in the memory was that, among the residents, there was no expectation whatsoever that even a simple, routine task – replacing the washer in a leaking tap, for instance – might be undertaken by the tenants themselves, or by a friend or family member. Instead, they waited for the council to “send someone.”
For months.
To whom this may concern…or not…based on my social media observations, it appears that a signal has been sent that failure to gush about the new Wicked movie may cost one their Gay Card. Just passing this along…
[ Orders laminating machine, starts business making counterfeit Gay Cards. ]
£20 a pop. I’ll leave them on the bar.
[ Surreptitiously takes blurry photo of card. Buys sheets of aging, yellow laminate. ]
£5. And that’s cutting my own throat.
Dude, the Hodge Twins are issuing these for (I think) $20 a pop.
From the looks of her she’s been led around the ring a few times. 4H project gone awry.
Didn’t see this ditty on the list.
Can’t help but think of goats kept in the halls of Petra.
Biology lesson.
For some reason, the ostentatious fingernails add to the… er, not poignancy. Farce.
Also this.
And because you demanded it, a turkey made of houmous.
Easy at the back. Don’t all rush at once.
Apparently Ted’s profile pic is him. Is David’s?
Agency: This was something I learned in 7th grade or earlier. Something common to white middle class US culture–if you can do it yourself, do it. My neighbors do a lot of their own home maintenance. I’ve painted my own house and done electric and plumbing. This spills over into work life. Taking initiative.
Just an observation that every time a banker or phone store person or whoever has screwed up my stuff, it has been a DEI hire.
And remember, we’re talking about replacing a battery. Or even calling the landlord and asking him to replace the damn thing.
No worries.
After cops arrested Simmons [for the robbery], he allegedly told investigators the assault was only supposed to be “an ass whooping.”
The old knockout game that never happens?
To be clear, I quite like houmous, especially red pepper houmous. Say, with cheese and some on-the-vine cherry tomatoes. But I don’t think I’d rush to devour it by the bucket.
A playlist to accompany your Thanksgiving culinary labors.
You had me with Django Rheinhardt
Speaking of turkeys, no, this isn’t normal, just not the way they think.
A Thanksgiving reminder.