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.
Well, one dental hygienist’s technique bore a passing resemblance to a lap dance.
Fortunately and unsurprisingly she was gone on my next visit.
My hairdresser does tend to lean in close, presumably to correct imperfections at the subatomic level. Which means that my shoulder does sometimes encounter her ample womanliness.
Both of her womanlinesses, in fact.
re accusations that black crime is caused by whitey: welfare has a lot to do with it because it incentivizes young women to have kids with no father around which leads to higher crime no matter the race. Further proof is that kids in the inner city of big cities can grow up scarcely seeing a white person. The cops are black, teachers are black, retail staff black. And yet somehow whites reach down and cause black crime. hahaha no I don’t think so.
“Wait, what? Am I one of the baddies?”
I cannot tell you how much I want to slap this woman silly.
Skinner boxes could help with their upbringing.
I want to slap the cuffs on her.
So…posted that while stewing in the waiting room…
It seems lately…lately as in this century…that I am always the one who has to point this shit out. I am sooooo tired of being the one (or whatever) guy pointing this shit out. So I decided today that I wasn’t going to say anything. I was already mildly annoyed because my primary doctor office had just called me, while on my drive to this dermatologist, to tell me that their office was closing and I had until the end of the month to get my records from them and/or sign releases, whatever. Not a big deal except now having to find another primary and it was a hassle just finding this guy. Anyway…I was doing a good job of not pointing it out until I get into the exam room and my blood pressure is…shall we say ‘elevated’. Well…I kinda lose my temper a bit explaining why I’m a bit…’elevated’. The physician assistant or whatever sounded genuinely surprised to know about this and she told me to mention it to the doctor myself in case he sees me before she sees him first. Apparently…being dermatologists they are somewhat tied into a cosmetology office, though not one that I noticed in the area. This is a dual doctor office, sharing common office staff, but the other guy is a gastroenterologist. Anyway, after much apologies they thanked me for letting them know. But surely I wasn’t the first person to notice the tip line in a dermatologist’s office.
…
See? That would qualify for a tip. Good things happen to the wrong people, apparently.
A tip might give you some skin in the game.
From that link:
I think I found the problem. And it ain’t just hers.
That’s an extremely specific blessing.
It’s a real tragedy when some airplanes are shot down by terrorists. Others…
They need to establish weighing stations all over the UK. “Does she weigh the same as a duck?”
It’s science.
[ Eye twitches. ]
It wasn’t just my shoulder. I’m sure she knew what she was doing.
“Each province is a laboratory of Islamism.” — Louis Brandeis, Jr., probably
As our host says, “liked” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Is there a reason not to say, “He sodomized young runaway boys?”
May you never, while doing housecleaning, trip and suffer a bimp on the head.
I was pleasantly surprised by that link.
Orgone boxes! Get yer orgone boxes!
Pro Tip: You see a mad black woman waving a gun around, you get as far away as you can as fast as you can.
Or, it’s not the culture, it is the genetics.
Yet Whites on welfare commit far, far less crime than blacks on welfare. Somehow, no matter the social policy, blacks always immediately drive it straight to the bottom.
Maybe it’s not just the bad policies.
LGB tolerance leads inexorably to the T.
[ Checks tomorrow’s Ephemera links one last time, clicks schedule. ]
You may be underestimating the pervasive and persistent effects of culture.
National Review steps in, admonishes us that Harvey Milk was a patriot.
No, really, not a hoax, they went there.
My ocd compels me to leave this here and burn my own coat, tyvm…
Culture: it has been found that many cultural traits and attitudes among immigrant groups persist for generations. Thus we should not surprised that attitudes toward, for example the police or getting an education, are instilled with some intensity by statements in the general social group. Such as calling cops “pigs” and making fun of anyone who studies. Even at young ages.
The experience of the Irish is noteworthy. As immigrants during and after the potato famine, the Irish got a reputation for drunken fighting and not being good workers. There was a conscious effort to reform their group from within, and it was successful. Led I believe by the US Catholic church. The black church was a similar force for order but they have been dumped by blacks in the past 50 yrs.
We kneecapped them by putting them on welfare and setting up generational dependency.
It doesn’t require daily interaction.
There are, in absolute numbers, far more poor Whites in this country than poor blacks. They, too, have access to all the welfare programs blacks do. They, too, lack generational wealth. They, too, have been denied mortgages.
Yet the crime rates of poor Whites are far, far below those of blacks. Somehow “black culture” always drives any social policy straight into the ground at a rate not experienced by any other race, regardless of circumstance.
People on the right treat “black culture” as a reverse cargo cult, the explanation for all disparities.
Where, exactly, do you think culture comes from? It is an expression of the human nature of the people in question, which is largely influenced by their genetics.
It is an expression of the human nature of the people in question, which is largely influenced by their genetics.
I disagree. I think all human nature/genetics is to be selfish, lazy, and tribal. Without purpose in life, degeneration is easy, no matter who you are or what you look like. It’s entropy. We have to work hard against it to succeed.
Thus culture. But big picture culture. @ccsientist’s example of the Irish in the US – and degenerate white chav culture in the UK after generations on the dole – or the Travelers (also white, and just as degenerate as any US ghetto rat). Easy living without a purpose devolves people. It destroys the civilized veneer.
Like the Irish immigrants in the US, religion played a large role in post-Civil War black culture. Black culture, and many black people, in spite of all the laws trying to hold them down, did much better before the War on Poverty welfare handouts destroyed the black family and religion. There was accountability, and consequences for bad behavior, coming from the religion, the family, the community.
The difference today is white people don’t celebrate white trash. We still mock them, and there are likely more consequences for white trash bad behavior than for ghetto bad behavior. White trash has not become the Identity of white people, and no one is afraid to criticize them because no one feels sorry for them. Until the black community stands up to the ghetto culture and stops supporting and making excuses for it, there won’t be any change.
Strongly agree. And yet plenty of people refuse to see this–most because their ideology requires them to reject the evidence, others because they are too autistic to understand human nature.
Related: How the ceding of education to the left has resulted in generations who know nothing of civics and how/why our culture succeeded.