Unreliable Narrators
Via the comments, some elaboration on an Ephemera item from Friday, specifically, this feat of contrivance:
Tiktoker blames capitalism for looters and suggests we should have compassion for these criminals instead of law enforcement dealing with them pic.twitter.com/xh89bARkpE
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 13, 2025
To which, Darleen replied,
Looters target evacuation areas. Between the time owners have packed up the kids, pets, and important documents, and when the fire trucks arrive (can be hours or days), looters feel free to liberate all manner of household or store contents.
Dicentra added, not unreasonably,
The kinds of people who enthuse about looting and rioting, and who seem to find it ideologically arousing – often progressive women – are not generally in the realm of coherent argument. Or indeed, good faith. Hence the disregard for the obvious factors mentioned by Darleen. For those like the wide-eyed creature seen above, I don’t think reality plays much part in what’s happening in their heads and then spilling out of their mouths. It’s much more about their own psychology, their own need to be perverse.
See, for instance, this. In which, Vice columnist Rachel Miller, a terminally woke young woman, attempts an indignant defence of looting and feral predation. Via which the allegedly downtrodden will be liberated and empowered, thanks to the destruction of their own local pharmacies, convenience stores, and other amenities.
And who concludes, with obvious self-satisfaction, that those who would rather not have their livelihoods destroyed and their neighbourhoods reduced to a rubble-strewn warzone – including quite a few black people – are “kinda (or definitely) racist.” Because “anti-looting discourse” is a function of “white supremacy.”
Ms Miller’s rush to denounce “respectability politics” – i.e., expectations of moral reciprocation and a general aversion to inflicting on others, arbitrarily, the kind of violation one would not care to receive – is, I’d say, a clue.
It’s not politics, it’s pathology.
One might, for instance, wonder how Ms Miller would feel were she the female Amazon driver seen being swarmed and assaulted here:
Having been assaulted and robbed, and left sprawled in the road, as if she were nothing of consequence, would she be overwhelmed with optimism and other warm feelings?
Answers on a postcard, please.
White progressive women really are the worst of society.
Upon watching it again, I’ve come to a conclusion: The woman is hardcore Marxist to begin with, and she opportunistically uses the looting as a pretext to bash capitalism.
She asserts that the looters aren’t motivated by greed but by desperation, and then observes that Elon and his ilk can commit wage theft when they want to appropriate stuff that’s not theirs.
How does that work? Poor people loot because they don’t have enough, but people who have more than enough also unjustly appropriate stuff. When does the transformation occur? At what income level do you stop stealing for a righteous cause and start stealing for an unrighteous one?
Because people across all income levels commit theft — it’s just that looters are scary because they’re on the streets, whereas an identity thief might not even be in the country and is hidden behind a keyboard.
No, she doesn’t care whether the looters are greedy or desperate. She’s just happy she can use them to illustrate her Cause.
🎯
They’re not our best and brightest hope. They’re reliably, directionally wrong, on any number of issues.
And hence the acronym, A.W.F.U.L. Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.
Another A.W.F.U.L., on the same subject.
Note how Professor Dávila’s outpourings are oddly non-reciprocal and difficult to distinguish from sociopathy.
Speaking of sociopathy, I found a YouTube channel called The Behavior Panel, four blokes with training in spotting sociopaths and interrogating criminals and terrorists and the like.
Here they are dedicating two episodes to analyzing that kid I posted not too long ago, whose parents found a head and hands in his room, and he up and confessed with zero natural affect.
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b_g31OT39U
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDuNC6Z0wjg
Yes, they conclude he’s a psychopath, and one of the most textbook cases they’ve ever seen.
Speaking of sociopathy, I found a YouTube channel called The Behavior Panel
One of my favored channels. Their episode regarding Prince Andrew’s disasterous BBC interview is comedy gold. A British friend and I still use the phrase “just an ordinary shooting weekend” with the stress on the last syllable of “weekend” to crack each other up.
No, she doesn’t care whether the looters are greedy or desperate. She’s just happy she can use them to illustrate her Cause.
Joining her kinder, gentler sister who believes so much in the nobility of the poor that she remains blind to any meanness. That sort of person is mostly found as a foot soldier or volunteer to NGO charities, never knowing or wanting to believe their superiors are just in it for the money.
That. Again, that.
Can’t believe I’m here at the weekend, toiling away, again. I should be out… fishing, or golfing, or scuba diving or something.
Meh. If you went fishing , you would just find yourself back in a forum similar to this one only you would be debating whether that’s a redfish, bluefish, whiting, weakfish or sea trout. All positions stated with extreme 100% confidence. Ask me how I know…
Huh? And here I thought people looted because they were hungry? What? They won’t run INTO a Salvation Army for a free meal … but they’ll run INTO a fire? They won’t run INTO a food bank … but they’ll run INTO a fire?
Communists are such deep thinkers …
And pssst … the fires are extinguished where they’re looting. They’re running INTO the ashes.
What I realised over the past decade, marriage, working with senior women, looking at educated progressive women…is that women communicate more, and express or display empathy and compassion.
They are not necessarily better at communicating, or higher in genuine empathy or compassion.
And this is not just with regards to men, where the utter lack of empathy is striking and almost taken for granted.
Women, especially the ones most loud about feminism and their own victimhood, have nothing but contempt towards less fortunate members of their own gender.
What’s the phrase again? “The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.” Or something similar.
I did go fishing once, years ago. Or rather, I sat on the riverbank while a friend fished.
It was not what I’d call a thrilling day out.
These are not serious adults.
Well it is called fishing, not catching. It does have other advantages…tho those other advantages decrease proportionally to the number of other people involved
If fishing is thrilling something is wrong.
I could almost feel sorry for her staffers being dragooned into that.
Almost.
And again, the message seems to be “We are unable to co-ordinate our moves, or even our limbs.”
Which doesn’t exactly leave one swollen with confidence.
[ Sounds of scuba gear being dragged up from cellar. ]
Lady, Just go pet your cats. Looters are criminals and should be treated as such. No sob stories, just jail them. Looters destroy families. They are scum.
Absolute gold if you ever found this arrogant woman annoying.
The woman is hardcore Marxist to begin with, and she opportunistically uses the looting as a pretext to bash capitalism.
The grand irony is that such behaviours are considered acceptable and are encouraged while capitalism exists but are quickly punished under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Apparently one has a duty to fellow comrades but nothing but disdain is owed to fellow citizens.
Women: it is startling how many girls the murderers get. Women write letters to them in prison. The NYC assassin was deluged in mail and $.
Looters: it is a simple-minded lazy trick to ascribe benign motives to looters. I have known too many cases of DEI hires who just had no interest in doing a job once given one. If they followed the advice of Amy Wax, any young black person could have a job and a multiple of the income they have currently. A blogger I read had a landscaping business in San Fran. Whenever he encountered a homeless person he gave his business card and said “just show up, I have work always”. Of 100 cards given out, not a single one showed up.
[ Watches Grand Tour episode Jaaaaaaaags, awaits delivery of curry. ]
Not a new phenomenon, regrettably.
Don’t see why you’d need scuba gear for that.
[ Squeak of Neoprene. ]
JD Vance needs to speed up opening the baby camps…
[Mark Twain has entered the chat]
Love the horses but it’s still pig swill.
Status update: I AM FULL OF CURRY.
How much flatbread?
Kulcha naan and paratha. To go with the chicken tikka korma, the chicken Jalfrezi, and the Jaipuri chicken. And the vegetable rice. And the dahi raita. And the poppadoms.
So, more than was strictly necessary.
[ Fingers packet of chewy caramel Tim Tams. ]
I remember when it first started to occur to me that the sugar-and-spice thing might be a big con in the aggregate. I was reading a story about some nasty, ugly drug kingpin in South America, I forget which one, but the number of women he had around him, then thinking that his henchmen weren’t just in it for the money, on down the line, the number of women who tolerated such evil scum was rather disproportionate to the number of such men. Then thinking about the number of assholes that I knew IRL who did not seem to have trouble attracting hot babes. Now of course these are not all one-to-one relationships, nor even one-to-many but given biology and human nature, the number of women in this world who have little fundamental concern about evil is way disproportionate to the narrative we are steeped in.
Who is she, and what were the circumstances? It is great, even not knowing
Women and murderers more: There is a book: Yanomamö: The Fierce People by Chagnon where he documents a tribe in South America. He found that murder of rivals was common and that the more men someone had killed, the more wives he had. Throughout history, local rulers/warlords who usually came to power by violence typically had multiple wives and poor shlubs one or none. It does indeed call into question the cultural belief we have that women are the keepers of morality, as WTP suggested. Also the sexual morality-keeping by women can be viewed as having a sour eye about the younger sexier competition.
All shall become clear.
Ah – thank you. She looked vaguely familiar, but being out of range of UK transmission, I couldn’t place her
Alpha male. When a society is chaotic and lawless, a woman goes for the strong horse who can offer resources and protection for her offspring.
A woman who matches up with a less-violent male as a matter of principle, is setting herself up to widowhood and single motherhood.
It’s not until men build actual civilization that women can start selecting for moral men instead of brutal ones.
And this. Yet more and more we see women turning against civilization. In many ways.
Full of curry while wearing a SCUBA suit. You won’t believe what happened next!!!
yes, but ironically, the greatest risk to her and her child’s life is now her boyfriend.
also does not explain why women do this in a nominally civilized country
Posted without comment.
English breakfast gets a B-.
Bez-men-ov.
Woman accidentally reverse engineers the foundational axiom of gender relations in every civilization that ever existed prior to 100 years ago.
[ Fingers packet of chewy caramel Tim Tams. ]
Alas, those are no good for doing Tim Tam Slams, dark chocolate the best.
That’s *almost” it. They need to be perverse because they desperately want to know that someone cares about them enough to help them set limits.
Every single person I’ve met who exhibits this behavior (in my 55 years on this Earth) has come from a less-than-ideal family situation. Parents who care too little. Parents who interfered too much. Every. Last. One.
Now we know…to stop our good host bursting at the seams
If looters want free stuff we can put them in prison. Free housing, free food, free medical care, free dental care, free heating…
Of the avowed Marxists I’ve encountered, the full-on revolutionary leftists, almost all of them seemed to have issues of some kind. Something not explicable in terms of their own arguments.
And you do have to marvel at how self-styled progressives – the people who loudly announce their own supposed compassion and altruism – are so often defined by making weirdly contrived excuses for pathological selfishness.
Say, the kind of pathological selfishness seen above and throughout the Progressive Retail series. Excuses for sociopathic behaviour are a staple of progressive posturing, appearing all but weekly, and with increasing moral convolution and outright perversity.
This should not pass unremarked.
And again, given the contrivance required – the routine departures from reality and consecutive thinking – it seems fair to suppose that the motivation is less a matter of reality, of things out there, and more a matter of psychology. Of some internal trouble.
And meanwhile your token diversity Indian subscriber is off to have a nice meaty Sunday roast at a proper old British pub.
Nightmare, all this cultural appropriation. Or whatever it is.
Dicentra: “…that kid I posted not too long ago, whose parents found a head and hands in his room…“
Say what?! Human head and hands..?
What you notice also, typical of Marxists, is that they are rather indifferent about the “poor” people they supposedly care about.
Because the issue is not just that people at all income levels commit theft.
The issue is people at all income levels are also victims of theft, probably more so when poor.
The poor are also less able to recover from the financial impact of theft or the consequences of high crime (like store closures), less able to just move away somewhere m
They don’t care about the poor. It’s just a pretence.
“So, more than was strictly necessary. “
Always overorder, because curry is one of those things that’s even better reheated the next day!
Not something you forget once you’ve seen it.
Absolutely accurate, this. I didn’t find it funny at all.
[ Muffled chuckling. ]
Engagement-bait post on X asks for examples when you don’t realize at first that this actor here is the same actor over there.
Two exemplary ones:
Gary Oldman
Johnny Depp
Jenette Goldstein was one that surprised me when it first clicked. And which reminds me of one of the ripostes from Aliens:
Still good.
Unspanked on aisle four.
And in “pan-species desire” news.
Engagement-bait post on X asks for examples when you don’t realize at first that this actor here is the same actor over there.
Too easy to play in the UK where I am convinced they have about 40 actors and everyone switches shows during the rotation in theatrical volleyball. Just finshed the two seasons of “Blue Lights” on britBox and now wondering where Happy will go next after his reincarnation from Seamie in “Hope Street.”
*sigh* I wish they had continued with “Annika” past two seasons . . .
Somewhat related: my Husband enjoys watching old TV series on Tubi. We are watching “NYPD Blues” and I have to say, I don’t think Rick Schroder was appreciated enough for his portrayal of Det. Danny Sorenson. But watching old series, it is fun to see characters walk into an episode and you’re thinking, “Oh, look, it’s so-and-so before they got known for this-and-that . . .”
Spanking would be insufficient, unless it leaves them bleeding and crippled.
The authors deserve a little attention from animal welfare authorities.
I just watched this movie the other evening.
As tomorrow is going to be traumatic for many, Time™ offers some helpful advice, as only they can.
Okay.
They encourage neuroticism, then offer supposed cures.
A favorite tactic of the left.
Pelt them with kidneys.
Save a couple for that wanker employee telling people to go round rather than do his job.
Johnny Depp and Val Kilmer catch me by surprise. Also Gary Sinise. I used to mix up Robert DiNero and Al Pacino.
Watched an old rerun of M*A*S*H with Jack Soo as a guest star. Couldn’t place him though I was sure I knew some other character. Then flipped over to an episode of Barney Miller. Ahh…
Where are the sirens?
What is truly stunning is that as many as 21% of Americans think otherwise.
Just think what pain and misery could have been avoided, and what future pain and misery still could be avoided, if people with (supposedly) common sense would just speak up.
One for Daniel, I think.
Absolutely accurate, this. I didn’t find it funny at all.
Suffered through this earlier this week. Yes, not funny at all.
Re for Daniel:
Bowie I buy, Lynch kinda from what I’ve read but not a huge fan personally, Dylan as he matured, Nico probably, don’t know much about Morissey, but Byrne? David Byrne or someone else? Or did he have a baptism in Pat Boone’s pool that I didn’t hear about?*
*Perhaps because I have gotten nauseous regarding celebrity “news” starting many, many years ago.
Does everyone get a free “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt? C’mon…for 80 bucks, surely…
(fixed? link)
Flashback of note.
‘Children’s’ should be taken advisedly.
Das:
One of the more poignant characters in the progressive repertory theater is the silenced, emasculated father figure who has no option but to go along with the transitioning/queering of their house and children. Some are just as brainwashed as their wives, others break out in toothache smiles.
Yes, less than 5% of Teen Vogue‘s readership consisted of actual teenagers. Which raises a question I’ve asked before: What kind of adult searches out a magazine with lots of adolescent-level politics and sexualised content – how to masturbate, use sex toys, etc – and which is supposedly aimed at teenage girls?
Still, let’s not forget that a venture hailed by the Guardian as “serious journalism” and a “voice for the Resistance,” and described as “lucrative,” proved to be commercially disastrous, with its print edition folding less than two months later.
Yes, this is true.
[ Vaguely recalls something read many years ago ]
Some contend that the romanticization of women as compassionate and virtuous is a consequence of the myths [ lies ] concocted in the age of Courtly Love.
I like to joke that there are only twelve actors in Canada. This is most noticeable in low-budget genre TV, which was filmed here for decades for economic reasons. The format is one or two American actors parachuted in to anchor the show, and the same dozen or so jobbers to fill out the cast. Like Teryl Rothery.
Twelve O’Clock High is great for this, although you have to be d’un certain age to recognize most of them.
Yes, although I don’t think “art” is exactly required. Captain Marvel and The CW’s Supergirl were not exactly…art, yet they both do a stunning job of revealing just how shallow the “oppressed women” narrative actually is.
I think there’s a different dynamic at play: most of these writers simply aren’t smart enough, or have enough self-awareness, to realize how people who aren’t deep in their own brand of self-deception see their work. They’re so used to the artifice, to lying to themselves, that the crimestop kicks in when they try. But they have to write something, so they write what they’re most familiar with. And then you get heroic, powerful young women whose biggest enemy is…older, more successful women. Who are deep in the throes of regret for the choices they had to make to become successful.
The mills of the gods don’t always grind slowly.
Speaking of lunatics… (somewhat NSFW, though)
Dog vs. security cam
For quite some time I’d thought the Aussies had more sense than the rest of the Anglosphere. It seems I was mistaken.
Same here. Pity. The crown was there for the taking. Hopefully it has returned to its rightful place. Though Argentina and Italy deserve props for keeping it going outside the Anglosphere.
Fatal flaw: Venn diagram omits girlfriends.
I have a theory: men and women each have their own flaws. One flaw of women is to pretend weakness to get what they want from men. Not all women do this but I have seen plenty who do. It was when women became the majority in universities that we started getting safe spaces, coloring books, trigger warnings, fainting at the sound of anything contrary, and claims that words are violence. This fake “harm” dovetails nicely with Marxist theory of oppression. Thus the two became wedded in the woke world. Women not only needed to be liberated, they were an oppressed class (like serfs) who would be oppressed forever even when 60% of college students and governors and mayors.
Why are photos reversed in so many twitter posts?
If that’s what it appears to be, both the cat and the dog have acquired a theory of mind about the camera.
Do they interpret the lens as an eye, and furthermore as an eye that can reveal their illicit deeds? Is the cat actually a tattle-tale about the dog’s behavior? I know dogs are capable of feeling bad when they’re caught doing bad things, but why would a cat care about rules applying to the dog?
Would the cat ever shift the camera so it could eat something forbidden? And if so, would the dog rat out the cat?
To defeat the image-scanning bots looking for copyright violations. People used to upload mirrored videos to YouTube for the same reason, but YouTube now scans for that.
Alternate take: it isn’t, it’s just been edited for amusement and engagement.
If they develop opposable thumbs we are doomed. Doomed, I say! Remember Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave?