Incompatible Pretending
Mr Muldoon steers us to a tale of colliding make-believe:
A very modern headline, I think you’ll agree.
They have training courses, you know, and websites, and a federation. We’re all learning things today.
Ms Howard, it turns out, is a “second-generation witch,” following in the mystical footsteps of her mother, “a high priestess” who “ran a coven in the 1980s.”
A very modern heresy. Resulting in a revoking of membership and denial of access to witchcraft course materials.
The Pagan Federation, however, issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate”:
Validity for everyone. Just tilt your head and squint. Apparently, we’re to be told what reality is by people who think they’re witches.
Ah, that Thing That Never Happens.
As these are terribly modern, immensely caring witches, Ms Howard was banned from the organisation’s Facebook page and from the website of the British Druid Order on grounds of being “unequivocally transphobic.” Thereby denying Ms Howard access to the arcane knowledge of “seers and healers,” along with the opportunity to purchase oracle cards, audio recordings of spells and invocations, and “hymns to the divine feminine.” Oh, and guides to coping with stress by wrapping a thick blanket around your head.
No more “walking between worlds,” alas.
At which point, readers may wish to ponder the implied rules of pretending, the hierarchy of make-believe, in which some people pretending to be something that they aren’t are deemed of much greater importance than other people pretending to be something that they aren’t. A world in which pretending one thing now seems to mean that all pretences, of any kind, must be observed.
Further rumblings on the matter, and photographs of uncanny goings-on, can be found here.
By all means consider this an open thread.
Yes. And Thomas Sowell is a tough grader.
Trans and women’s rights is just one area where incoherent beliefs lead to conflicts. Another great one is the emphasis on “planning” in CA means that after 4 months, there are only a handful of permits to rebuild homes after the big fire. I believe they even made it illegal to sell your burned lot to prevent the evil of “developers” taking over. Or “natural healing” leading to death (I mentioned previously 2 women I knew who declined cancer treatment and died in a year). Or “compassion” for criminals leading to suffering by their victims (documented at length by David here). Oh sure, these luxury beliefs are harmless…
and
You forgot the blood.
It seems an odd thing for a national government to pass legislation then hope other parts of the country will introduce the law. It doesn’t quite comport with the notion of authority one associates with the term ‘government’.
No matter how much you “tilt your head and squint”…
Is there any demographic dumber than AWFLs?
They’re not so much dumb as immovably ignorant, with a good 12 – 16 years training in ignoring facts that don’t make them feel special.
It must be quite strange to seek out and become invested in a social circle that’s pretty much defined by a disregard for reality – complete with spells and healing woo – and to then be told that other kinds of fantasy – of a kind that you have personal reasons to dispute – must also be deferred to, unquestioningly, on pain of banishment.
I mean, having already surrendered realism, and having chosen to spend time among others who’ve done the same, reinforcing each other’s fantasy of some supernatural identity, week after week, on what coherent basis do you argue your case? You could hardly say, “Get real” without the risk of choking on the irony.
And to think, it’s Pride month!
Harvey Milk was not a great civil rights leader. Sure, maybe he was the first openly gay member on a Board of Supervisors, but he was a board member in San Francisco, where that hardly raised a ripple.
You know what he did in office? Tried to get legislation and decisions that benefited his constituents . . . in short, he was doing his job, just like all the other city councilmen. Nothing more. His real claim to fame was getting killed (and no, he did not deserve that fate). But that raised him to martyr status and thus a hagiography is written, despite him being in office no more than a year.
…people are scared, upset, and confused…
Blatant hate speech!
And to think, it’s Pride month!
They’re also apparently considering renaming others – USNS Cesar Chavez and the planned USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others. I’m so old I remember when US ships were named after battles, cities, states, and various heroes.
Very good point.
Of course, we was also a sleazebag. He “liked” young runaway boys. He outed a closeted gay man because he felt it would help “the cause”. He was a strong supporter of communist mass-murderer Jim Jones.
When a month just isn’t fabulous enough..
There’s a whiff of fabrication about this, not dispelled by the ever so fortuitous appearance of yet another sticker.
Ah, four months of preening, perversity, and pathological self-involvement.
We could just call it The Wearying.
Of course, we was also a sleazebag.
The latest cry from the leftists that the renaming is an outrage is that he was a Navy “combat veteran” of the Korean war, but if the reliably red Wiki is to be believed he never got closer than San Diego and took an OTH separation in lieu of court martial. As I said, ships used to be named after heroes…
There’s a whiff of fabrication about this…
Unpossible, “hate” hoaxes never happen.
I don’t wish to sound overly sceptical, but I couldn’t help but notice that no specifics, no highlights, were teased to whet the appetite. I mean, three months of spotlighting and celebrating and recognising seems an inordinate stretch of time, an inordinate preoccupation. Yet no particulars are forthcoming to sway those of us Yet To Be Enthused.
It does rather invite the suspicion that any butter may be spread quite thinly.
That was the lead up to our election. Now we have to go through Pride season.
Perhaps we can look forward to more events of this staggering calibre.
Depends on where you put the crystals to get the best reception.
and various heroes
You know, like military heroes. Specifically, naval and Marine ones ’cause you know – these are ships of the US Navy. And the men and women serving on them should be inspired appropriately . . . again, it being military, and all.
Blatant hate speech!
Straight Pride? At what point do we at least get a pat on the back for keeping the species going?
Picture of a dog for a bookmark and to keep my blood pressure down.
4 months of pride: those who died for our country get a single day. Veterans get a single day. 4 months? Yes, you must continually celebrate their sexual preferences. Next year will be a 12 month celebration. Narcissists never get enough.
Specifically, naval and Marine ones ’cause you know – these are ships of the US Navy.
Generally. The crews of the Churchill, Roosevelt (T, not the other one), and the Inouye were unavailable for comment. There are (and were) others but those are off the cuff. Of course it all went downhill in The Days of Woke and politicians were thrown into the name bin.
Misgendering.
Mine was right beside my bed’s headboard. The headboard was made of steel and acted as the antenna for my radio. I didn’t have a lot of wire so it was very close to my pillow which was convenient for the earphone. I got great reception.
And don’t forget about pyramid power.
It’s no lie
You can keep the edge
Of a razor as sharp as an eagle’s eye
You can grow a hedge
That is vertically straight over ten feet high
All you really need is a pyramid and just a little luck
And don’t forget about pyramid power.
Rookie stuff, Orgone is where it’s at.
It’s no lie . . .
Not just razor blades. I saw all sorts of claims regarding pyramid power.
Orgone boxes are very useful for isolating kooks where they won’t annoy us.
Ghetto fatigue.
Putting them in an Orgone box won’t help–unless it’s hermetically sealed.
+1 for the Alan Parsons ref.
My friends and I were totally into his stuff in the 80s.
And yet what caught my eye – amid all of that – were the expensive cars.
Presumably, the participants are all doctors, architects, lawyers.
What?
Needless to say, the vibrant exchange of views was livestreamed on Facebook.
Jesus wept. They’re so busy filming it they don’t even get their kids to safety. At first I thought it must be faked. There’s no fixing that culture.
There is, I think, an unrealism to the scene, the behaviour. An alien quality. The, shall we say, broad spectrum of human possibilities is quite something. And should you live somewhere vibrant and diverse, best not forgotten.
I shouldn’t think so, no.
This came to mind:
In the above, there are links illustrating that phenomenon, quite vividly.
Two observations:
First, one of the markers of the lifelong poor is impulse buying and spending on flashy status symbols rather than on education and savings/investment.
Second, black ghetto behavior tends to persist into the middle class. Even the children of middle class blacks tend to commit crimes at higher rates than poor/working class whites.
This protest will certainly bring Target to its knees for forgoing “pride” crap this year.
I was watching the thing for a third time, still in something close to disbelief, and thinking about the usual excuses wheeled out for such behaviour – socioeconomic factors, racism, “white privilege,” and so forth. And set against the actual behaviour, the actual choices being made, in this and countless other, very similar videos, the excuses seemed so implausible as to be ludicrous.
It’s hard to watch those events – unfolding at a children’s playground – and to see anything but irretrievable dysfunction. Pathological creatures, who are utterly unlike me or anyone I know, and who reproduce.
Watching these things isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It can all be, shall we say, wearying. But I think it’s important to have some idea of just how degenerate the degenerate can be.
Over the years, I’ve encountered a number of what I suppose one might refer to as Well-Meaning People – generally, Well-Meaning Ladies – who seemed to have no real grasp of the degeneracy in play – it being so removed from their own lives – and who, more to the point, showed no appetite for finding out.
An oversight, or aversion, that led them to faulty assumptions regarding the issues on which they opined, and human nature in general, and to political positions – Things That Should Be Done – that were implausible and unworldly, to say the least.
“[…] what follows is horror and desperation recalled in tranquility. Many people – I know from experience – will dismiss what I say first by denying its truth and then by denying its significance.” — Theodore Dalrymple, Second Opinion
I’m thinking of the kind of Well-Meaning Ladies who, apropos of nothing, wanted to lecture me, politely, on how awful prison is and how Something Must Be Done, at enormous expense and risk to the public, but who didn’t want to know about recidivism rates or how much crime the typical criminal has to have committed even to be sent to prison in the first place.
That kind of thing.
Think we’re referring to the same type, just at different stages.
It’s not just the insistence on leniency while being ignorant of criminal and underclass realities so much as the quite common resistance to absorbing such information, even of the most basic and pertinent kind.
Just mentioning the statistics on prisoners’ criminal histories – as in the link above – is met with a sudden urge to change the topic and an air of disapproval – not of the habitual and conscienceless criminals, of course, but of me, for mentioning such details. And thereby harshing their piety buzz.
It’s sort of why my loose trilogy of crime posts includes several fairly vivid illustrations of the criminal phenomena being discussed. It makes all that abstract, wafty forgiveness a little more difficult to sustain.
So in this context…. Making a co-pay at my doctor’s office, there was a line for if I wished to add a tip. Anyone else encounter such BS at medical or dentist offices?
And yet it was destroyed by deliberate decisions taken by “their betters.”
In 1964 the War on Poverty was sold as a way to eliminate poverty, because we’re an advanced country, so why shouldn’t we fix it all?
But the architects of that war were labor leaders, as I learned in Amity Schlaes’s book. Why would labor leaders be involved with welfare? They only care about workers.
Workers in the workforce, that is. When you put people on welfare, you take them OUT of the workforce. And when you do that, the labor market tightens, and wages go up.
So the SOBs weren’t about helping the poor at all; they were stuffing their own pockets. The fact that welfare would disproportionately take black workers out of the workforce could only have registered as a feature.
Then they built them “projects” in the inner cities to make sure they didn’t move into white neighborhoods. Wow, the civil rights movement must have scared certain people into taking action.
So having laid all these people idle and warehoused them in bleak housing, what effect is that going to have? Certainly nothing salubrious. Imagine having nothing to do all day, nothing to aspire to, no way to improve your life. (A few of the more clever ones managed to work their way out, but the less-competent couldn’t have managed it.)
That’s only going to derange people. Robbed of hope and purpose, people begin to malfunction: alcohol and drug abuse, gangs, illegitimate births, child abuse, fatherlessness.
Once you get that kind of cycle started, the only way to fix it is to help people at the individual level, mentoring them into health, but that’s only going to work for a few.
The other way would be either mass sterilization or intercepting all newborns and raising them in healthy homes.
But that would eliminate the culture, and we can’t have that.
So the moral of the story is that “well meaning” (but actually nefarious) liberals wrecked the black community, and have forcefully resisted all attempts to rescue people from the pit they’ve been tossed in.
Until we as a country can recognize that — especially the affected black people — there’s no fixing anything, ever.
I wonder if that’s a default feature of the card reader, and they didn’t know how to shut it off.
Tipping your dentist? I didn’t see that coming.
Heh.
[ Slides ashtray of boiled sweets to Dicentra. ]
[ Leaves photo of adorable puppy next to tip jar. ]