For newcomers, some items from the archives:
Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well.
The thrill of atomised dairy products.
Here, let me bring you artistic sustenance, with some “performance documentation” from Manhattan’s Grace Exhibition Space. The mighty talent featured in the following video is artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose work teeters on the edge of profundity, as will doubtless become clear, via juddering and convulsion, and the strategic deployment of twenty-five pounds of powdered cheese.
New Niche Indignation.
On transgender dinner parties, where competitive upset is the sweetest dish.
Readers are invited to ponder the prospect of a dinner party at which, in order to be polite and suitably affirming, you’re obliged to insinuate that the host is rapist material. And to do it convincingly. Rather than, say, compliment the cooking or the décor.
Sudden-Onset Womanhood.
On gender-bending Bond and other modern wonders.
We’re also told, “A gendered spin on the character can open up more potential for exploring Bond’s individuality.” And this exploration of the character’s individuality will apparently be achieved by erasing a rather fundamental aspect of the character – his maleness – and replacing him with an entirely different person of a different sex.
Readers are invited to ponder whether similar transitions might enrich the character of, say, Miss Marple, who, via similar logic, could be depicted as male, and as always having been male. Thereby exploring her individuality.
Answers on a postcard, please.
The recent, sex-swapped iteration of Doctor Who is invoked as a “positive example” on this front, as if Jodie Whittaker’s brief, unloved manifestation had been a rip-roaring success – despite the terrible writing and wildly unpopular retconning, both loudly derided by fans, and despite the subsequent, rapid death-spiral of viewing figures. Because boring and alienating much of your audience, and shrinking it dramatically, is a political triumph. A breath of “new life.”
Big City Dreams.
On London’s struggling artists. Terms I use loosely.
At which point, readers may suspect that the imperative is not so much being creative, but being creative
in London, a notoriously expensive city, but in which one can draw attention to the fact that one lives and works in London, a notoriously expensive city. Thereby glowing with a kind of location status.
Readers may also note the article’s, shall we say, coyness regarding the art on offer – all that cruelly underfunded creativity. None of which is displayed to sway readers of the Observer. The nearest we get is a photo of Ms Kwan standing next to a creation that we cannot actually see, and a photo of Grayson Perry in a hideous frock.
Our Betters Stroke Their Pets.
The hounds of love.
Other questions generated by means of Queer Theorising include, “Do I think I’m having sex with my dogs when they kiss my face?” Apparently, for Dr Kathy Rudy, a Professor of Women’s Studies, being licked by a dog is difficult to distinguish from kissing grandma on the cheek or being lost in a full-on erotic fever. And thus, we’re told, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”
For those craving more, The Year Reheated is a pretty good place to start.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Make it make sense.
It has to be said, the logic – again, a term I use loosely – is not overwhelming. And applying the same fashionable assumptions to other characters, female characters, does rather reveal the absurdity of the claims. Which may explain why the targets of such transformations are oddly selective.
Which is to say, the goal is not, as claimed, an exploration of individuality, in which no interest in shown, but rather a subversion of masculinity, a subversion of something popular. Because… Well, just because.
And which in turn is to say, these people are liars.
As noted in the original thread, the Screen Rant article – and others like it – seem driven more by a fashionable and pretentious disdain of All Things White And Male than by any obvious benefit to cinema, or storytelling, or indeed to womankind. Including, of course, all those women, who, when asked, expressed an emphatic dislike of the idea of a weepy and emasculated Bond, let alone the prospect of him being replaced by a novelty female copy.
It turns out that women, the demographic in whose name such changes are being entertained, don’t want a sensitive and emasculated Bond either.
That’s not why people go to see a James Bond film.
If you “misgender” him, he won’t be happy; but if you ask him what his pronouns are, he’s still unhappy.
The New York Times has the sadz.
“Unapologetically masculine?” That implies somehow it would all be better if Trump and Hegseth could just be kinder about things,
Related to my comment above, my new favorite response to most offended types.
Note the mendacious term equitable. But if people have been hired and promoted based on characteristics other than competence, at the expense of more competent people, and at the expense of the function that the organisation is supposed to serve, then intimations of fairness are entirely misplaced, indeed perverse.
Well, quite. I managed to disconcert someone recently by saying I don’t much care about The Thing You’re Supposed To Care About This Week. It was like I’d belched in church or something.
Oh, and reminder that some ‘trans’ people very much oppose putting mentally ill men in women’s prisons.
Newborn cars.
Christopher Snowdon on activists hating practical solutions.
The section on Net Zero and other environmental lunacies, around 14 minutes in, has some bearing on recent rumblings here.
That tag reminded me of this little story.
Psychosis-level LARPing.
which begins:
Of course, most of Reddit is insane, not just the transgender subreddits.
Well, it’s a bit weird, the idea that you’re going to explore a character’s personality by erasing key aspects of it and fundamentally changing him into someone else entirely – and the opposite sex. Because – unsaid but by obvious implication – you don’t actually like the character.
Because he’s too masculine, or too white, or whatever other grievances are in play due to some personal inadequacy on the part of the woke critic.
I have, in fact, known many LARPers who really really wanted to live in their fantasy worlds, and a few who behaved as if they really were their LARPing personas.
[ Strokes amulet, struts about in Cloak of Levitation. ]
A “disabled queer Chicanix educator [sic]” who is reported to have been married to a convicted child molester and who, despite what seem to be qualifications these days, was fired from the Seattle public schools has thoughts.
They are, of course, what one would expect.
Androgynous. Right.
In 16 years they’ll get learner’s permits.
Going by results, activists only favour ‘solutions’ that give more power & authority to government & remove agency from the governed.
Why is it unsurprising an ‘educator’ reads 1984 as a caution about ‘fascism’ (assuming she didn’t just skim the Cliff’s Notes)?
However.
Heh. Not least his allegedly “androgynous voice.” Something tells me that self-awareness isn’t his strong suit.
Feel the progress!
Heh. That would be an interesting discussion for another thread. Just as one of the ladies here said about math and when/where women excel the other day. A lot depends upon where one draws the line. That article itself reexamined the data, tweeked/added variables until a certain perception, if not conclusion, was seen.
However.
From what I can tell, the literature on this question is rather limited and the evidence is not very conclusive.
Too many unexplained variables and confounders.
Puzzle solutions are dependent on shape and color – what is the degree of color deficiency among the men?
What is meant by “men”? Actual men who do many things and have manly interests or the type that can’t do anything not on a phone screen?
That gets us to the puzzles, are they gender neutral or gender coded? If the latter, what is the background of the men if they are female coded? How would a bunch of horticulturists of either sex do compared with a bunch of machinists of either sex if the puzzle was a picture of the innards of a pocket watch.
I think I can parlay this into a gender studies doctorate.
I think the Spam-No-Mor (Ausf. G)™ is hung up on the word that looks like six but has an e instead of i.
You’re saying it’s woke in other words.
[ Returns from shopping expedition, pokes at spam filter, mutters. ]
[ Fondles purchases. ]
Testing, testing: Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.
No hangup. Must be something else. Could “Muldoon” be a naughty word in, say, Hungarian?
It’s his polyester slacks.
[ Puts down rubber matting. ]
“This is the dominant way of thinking in academia… It is the supreme achievement of academics… ever,” says he.
Thaddeus Russell, quoted above, “teaches history and philosophy at Willamette University.” He was, he says, “raised by pot-smoking, nudist, socialist revolutionaries.”
What are the odds?
Why, it’s almost as if there were some other variable that’s not being considered.
It’s a form of devshirme – the Ottoman practice of taking young boys from conquered Christian areas and enslaving them as dancers, prostitutes, and soldiers. The humiliation, the subjugation, the irreversible corruption of something you hold dear is the point.
These people hate you, hate your values, and want to destroy everything you love. That’s why they don’t just “make their own stories”. That’s not the goal. They want to destroy yours.
“Asylum seeker”. Canada isn’t the right asylum, but I digress.
He decamped to the Yukon Territory where he will no doubt blend right in as,
Yeah, that is all it takes in Canada.
Stringent border control.
Is this the Bubble and Squeak of David’s blog?
That could really only work if you reimagined Bond as one of the Bond girls — a sultry siren who may or may not be working for the bad guy and whose inscrutable machinations add to the complexity of her character.
Or would they make Bond a dashing lesbian who goes ahead and beds the Exotic Women just as Bond would?
sigh
There’s an in-universe level at which The Doctor regenerating as a women would be OK, and they might-could have pulled it off, but they always err by casting pedestrian actresses in weighty roles. The female Doctor needed to be exotic, unusual, mysterious. Tilda Swinton or something.
Plus the writing needed to be of Tenth Doctor quality instead whatever they had been cranking through the mill. But that’s what all the gender- and race-swapping nonsense has been about: mediocre scripts, mediocre actors, titanic self-flattery and virtue-signaling. What a waste!
Freudian slip?
Bond: as he is, Bond is already an interesting character. In a movie a few years ago he got shot by MoneyPenny on a bridge and fell into the river–and disappeared for 6 months. In the next few films he was facing aging and losing his touch just as the agency was aging and losing its touch. The entire premise does not work with a female character because women don’t act like reckless men do. There have indeed been interesting female spies IRL, but they were not like Bond.
In the new Capt America movie, the premise is again faulty. Cap had almost superhuman abilities because of the Nazis ray thingy. The new guy does not. He also had super human patriotism. The new guy is unexplained in that dept.
In the original Star Wars, the young jedi is naive and has to be taught with difficulty. In the remake, the Rey character just manifests strong jedi powers with no tutoring or context.
They keep just body-swapping without understanding the characters.
All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.
As Di has brought up actors, Idris Elba is not a deep thinker.
I’m not sure I would call that innovative, if a grown adult wants to cut a steak with a butter knife, that has always been an option.
Perhaps a mandatory licence for the butter knives just like the one he wants you to have for the katana your grandfather brought back from fighting the Japanese in Burma will finally solve the problem.
High time too, I still have PTSD from all the deaths and mutilations I witnessed as we played mumblety-peg in grade school. Not as lethal as Jigger-Ma-Hoop, but still…
Beep beep!
WTF? Someone bent on murder is going to look at a knife and say “Oh! Someone ground off the point! Oh well, never mind.”
I hate to say it, but it is amazing in a very black way all the different objects of convenience that have been used in very stabby ways. This conceit about “let’s just get rid of the weapons” and that solves assaults/murders is so monstrously thick I wanna break things.
That, and no one has ever been killed or seriously injured by slashing said no hussar ever.
So we confiscate all grinding stones. That will put an end to ghost pointy-knives. You’re just not thinking these things thru, Darleen.
If a 10yr-old girl is suddenly freaking out, refusing to go to school, and cutting herself in the girls’ toilet, SHE’S PROBABLY BEING SEXUALLY ABUSED AT SCHOOL.
🚩 RED EFFING FLAG! 🚩
It seems they won’t be happy ’til they ban fire.
Coulda saved LA.
Seen at Instapundit:
It’s a Daily Mail article, and I tried to read it, because I couldn’t figure out how a bacterial disease (salmonella) spread by fecal contamination of comestibles by poor hygienic and/or food preparation practices could be caused by climate change, and specifically hit Britain, as opposed to anywhere else on the planet. I admit I didn’t make it through the idiotic article. There was mention of BBQing and people picnicking/grilling outdoors due to the boiling climate and food sitting outside too long? But that’s not where salmonella comes from – the contamination happens during the prep, before the dish goes outside. There were lots of colorful images of bacteria, and a detailed infographic on the greenhouse effect, but it seemed to be trying too hard to appear scientific. It was more like those Weekly World News stories about yet another Batboy sighting.
Sheesh – try to edit your comment (containing only ONE link) more than once and it gets thrown into moderation as spam.
Duly noted.
…it gets thrown into moderation as spam.
The Spam-No-Mor (Ausf. G)™ is a fickle biotch.
I want answers! Did you order the Code-Onsies?
You want answers!?
I want the truth!
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
Knives: more people are killed by bare hands (including hands with blunt objects) than by rifles. Handguns still #1 of course. My friend was messed up by some thugs and has never looked the same.
I saw RFK jr speak at some environmental conf 20+ yrs ago and he was as radical green as you can get…but, he supported Trump so i forgive him. Don’t trust him, but forgive him.
Helen Joyce, earlier this year, explaining how trans BS has ruined so many things, also provides some things we can do to help get rid of it (22:00), including these key phrases:
“But it’s not fair.”
“They’re too young.”
I’ve seen a few security cam videos of UK knife attacks, and in every case the attacker slashed and hacked.
Sensationalism seems to be a big part of their business model. On the one hand that gives us B.S. stories about climate disaster, but on the other hand it gives us stories about “problematic” Muslims which the “respectable” press prefers to ignore.
Meat cleavers for everyone!
A follow up to this story from the other day…
“Dank is the epitome of confidence…”
I’m not at all sure “confidence” is the right word, YMMV. (Typical “rap” language warning)
I wonder if all this is just a publicity stunt.
Meat cleavers for everyone!
Banned! See also: flint.
“If you “misgender” him, he won’t be happy; but if you ask him what his pronouns are, he’s still unhappy.”
WOPR figured this all out for us in 1983…
Farnsworth M Muldoon: ‘… if a grown adult wants to cut a steak with a butter knife, that has always been an option.’
Sure, just order fillet steak!