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Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (767)

May 9, 2025 75 Comments

A compendium of near misses. || The thrill of automation. || Taken: The Musical. || Snugger than thou. || Augmented-reality surgery. || The machine uprising, day 10. || Bigger than yours. || How to scare children. || I have a question for the ladies. || Modern slutting woes. || You want one and you know it. || A lot can happen in two weeks. || The airport passenger you’ve always wanted. || A trip to the shops. || He has an all-pink apartment. || The progressive retail experience, parts 628 and 629. || “Don’t expect passing to get rid of your dysphoria.” Related. || You’re threatened by her creativity. || Rather overshadowing the task at hand. || A situation had arisen. || Trans wing of Antifa showing their inner loveliness. || The fangs are the icing on the nightmare cake. || An unorthodox fight scene.

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Written by: David
Classic Sentences Free-For-All

And Everything Shall Be Made, Badly, Out Of Wool And Bamboo

May 8, 2025 51 Comments

I paraphrase, of course:

In his 2017 book Prosperity Without Growth, Tim Jackson, an ecological economist at the University of Surrey, called on advanced countries to shift their economies towards local services, such as nursing and teaching, and the development of more rewarding and less resource intensive professions like handicrafts.

I’ll give you a moment to process that one.

“People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff,” Jackson wrote. “Another world is possible.” Yet proposals to abandon economic growth have also been met with scepticism.

Why, yes, I am reading the Guardian. Why do you ask?

Via Mr Worstall.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Politics The Thrill Of Endless Noise

Aversions

May 6, 2025 99 Comments

A thread of possible interest:

This is followed by a non-trivial observation:

On this latter point, should an example prove helpful, readers may wish to revisit the unconvincing contrivance of Guardian columnist Zoe Williams – specifically, her scolding of those who’d prefer not to have sociopathic neighbours – say, the kinds of creatures who blast out loud music in the small hours, and who, for entertainment, hurl pets from upstairs windows.

An aversion Ms Williams denounced as a “demonisation of the poor,” a project of “extinction,” in which those who’d rather not have their ornaments rattled by another all-night next-door rave, are “trying to shunt people out of society for not being rich enough.”

According to Zoe, those who’d prefer not to be assailed by thunderous basslines at 4am, or to have their evenings enlivened by small, terrified animals falling from the sky, are merely being cruel, “dehumanising,” and needlessly judgemental. For Zoe, the problem with ‘problem families’ is simply that they’re poor, and nothing whatsoever to do with how they choose to abuse their equally poor neighbours.

In the world of our Guardian columnist, we – by which she means you – should be “unstigmatising,” which is to say, non-judgemental. Passive and accepting, on an indefinite basis. A process via which empathy, or feigned empathy, is shifted from the working-class victim of crime and antisocial behaviour to the working-class perpetrator of crime and antisocial behaviour, on grounds that the thug or criminal is in some way being oppressed and, unlike their neighbours, being made to misbehave.

Needless to say, this prompted some lengthy speculation as to how Ms Williams might react, should she wake one morning to find a family of violent morons moving in next door to her:

Presumably Ms Williams’ own neighbours have little in common with, say, the delightful Stuart Murgatroyd, a father of twelve who has never worked and boasts an extensive criminal record, not least for robbing the elderly in graveyards, and whose attempt to challenge an Anti Social Behaviour Order was cut short at the very last minute due to him being arrested for assaulting the mother of his children, herself a convicted getaway driver, on the steps of the courthouse.

And,

Imagine, if you will, a reality TV show of perhaps a dozen episodes, in which, having been banished from their current council-house digs, the Murgatroyds move in next door to our Guardian columnist and champion of the downtrodden – albeit, until now, from a safe distance. Would we be treated to heart-warming chats across the garden fence, and exchanged cups of sugar, while the families’ respective children – Zoe’s are named Thurston and Harper – have jolly times together?

As a real-world test of Zoe’s scrupulously progressive worldview, her professed concern for the common man, it would, I think, make for instructive viewing.

Update, via the comments:

Connor adds,

It’s always hypocrisy. None of it is real.

Well, the idea that Zoe, who lives far removed from rough council estates, would herself behave in the same way she demands that others do is quite laughable. It’s so transparently unconvincing, so absurd, that you have to wonder how these obvious dishonesties can go unchallenged in her world. Unless, of course, everyone in her world is pretending much the same things.

As I said here, with suitably vivid examples:

Guardian columnists, and progressives in general, don’t seem particularly interested in the functional working class. Their greatest enthusiasm, and their most ambitious contrivance, seems reserved for the feckless and dysfunctional, the pathologically selfish, the incorrigibly criminal. That’s when we get displays of what amounts to a perverse art form.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that there’s little in-group status to be had in pretending to care about functional people of modest means. Instead, they pretend to care about more exotic demographics. And so, among progressives, we get pretentious compassion for unrepentant and habitual thieves, habitual burglars, habitually criminal drivers. Oh, and dog thieves and armed muggers, obviously.

It seems to me this is the level it typically works on. So, again, pretending.

And let’s not forget Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer ostensibly offended by “urban inequalities,” and who wants to ensure that more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.” Writing in the Guardian, Dr Matthews agonised over litter inequality and the fact that rougher neighbourhoods tend to be strewn with wrappers, cans, and food-smeared detritus. And so, we had lots of fretting about inequalities in litter density, while the question of how the litter gets there remained, rather oddly, of zero interest. With the words drop and littering pointedly not appearing.

Presumably for fear that these practical details might have inegalitarian implications.

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Written by: David
Anthropology ASMR Free-For-All

Did You Feel A Tingle?

May 5, 2025 39 Comments

For enthusiasts of ASMR videos:

I’m not really into AMSR, but these gorgeous gals make it enjoyable.

If this 𝕩 thing doesn’t work out for me, maybe I’ll jump on this train. pic.twitter.com/ecuAL9wfqF

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) May 5, 2025

Previously: Dear, sweet Chloe wants you to relax.

No refunds. Credit note only.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Anthropology The Thrill of Décor

Significant, You Say

May 3, 2025 76 Comments

A man named Silvia, a self-described “multi-talented and eclectic trans artist,” struggles with convention:

At which point, readers may wonder whether the struggle is with something more fundamental – say, adulthood, of which the potential for lifelong commitment – something serious – something much like marriage – is generally considered a feature.

Silvia, we’re told, by Silvia, is “trying her hand in everything from film and video production to interior decoration.” As one might imagine, intersections abound, along with feats of the aesthetic:

Do note the eclecticism, the “air and movement.”

Update, via the comments:

Mr Muldoon notes Sylvia’s dissatisfaction with non-married coupling terms, and offers, among others, main squeeze, easy/steady rider, and paramour.

If something less colourful seems in order, might I suggest my Temporary, my Conditional. My For Now.

Oh, and sH2 adds,

His bio reads “chic cult underground art girlfag.” How serious do we think he’s capable of being?

Answers on a postcard, please.

And so, we have a grown man who dismisses marriage as beneath him, as something “for the conditioned masses,” while bemoaning the inadequacy of common terms for his preferred, supposedly more daring, alternative. As if the connotations of “girlfriend / boyfriend” – connotations of adolescence and immaturity – were somehow random or unjustly imposed.

Says Silvia,

I don’t like the idea of marriage at all.

It’s not made clear which aspects of marriage so offend our enormously radical interior decorator. But if it’s the lifelong monogamous commitment thing, with all of the advantages and obligations that typically go with it – the bourgeois grown-upness, as it were – then I can’t help wondering on what basis he would object to connotations of immaturity and unseriousness.

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Written by: David
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  • Friday Ephemera (767)
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.