Reheated (107)
From the archives – and from the golden age of the Guardian – some examples of improbable agonising.
Women, we’re told, are being mentally injured by small baked goods.
A commenter asks, “What is it with people’s inability to ignore the things they don’t like?” Meaning things you don’t like and which have no bearing whatsoever on your everyday life or the turning of the world. Say, “our” alleged “obsession” with cupcakes and their supposedly debilitating effects on helpless, hapless womenfolk. Women being so mentally insubstantial that even a tiny cake can unhinge their minds, apparently.
But fretting ostentatiously about things of no importance has long been a standard template for Guardian articles, especially if you can shoehorn in some sophomoric theorising. It’s something most papers do to some extent, due to the obligation to Fill Space Somehow, but the Guardian is by far the greatest exponent and the most grandiose. Many of its contributors have mastered inadvertent surrealism.
As commenter sk60 quipped in reply,
On being oppressed by suburban barbecues, where, it turns out, the Patriarchy reigns and women are crushed underfoot.
I’ve been to a few barbecues over the years, one or two with female grill-keepers, though most with males wielding the Plastic Spatula of Oppression™. I can’t say I was ever aware of much argument as to roles. It generally seems to depend on who’s in the mood or who’s the better cook, at least of the items in question, or – perhaps more commonly – who’s prepared to spend the day on duty, sweating, while smelling of grease and smoke.
I’ve yet to hear of womenfolk being locked indoors, away from the charcoal and firelighters, by surly, hissing men. And at the barbecue I attended recently, the matriarch of the house had a much more important job than merely cooking sausages. My sister-in-law kept the day lubricated with endless, quite colossal, pitchers of Pimms. Priorities, you see.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Mr Power that quite a few people, male and female, actually enjoy the role-play opportunity of the barbecue – the theatre, the ritual, the fun. Even – heresy! – gendered fun. But hey, the point is that some of you heathens are still arranging your leisure time and social gatherings in a way of which our Guardianista disapproves. Your barbecues aren’t being gender balanced in the way he would like.
Also, the assertion by our learned journalist:
Guardian writer is psychologically crushed by spellcheck software, disposable paper cups.
“Angela could get coffee at Starbucks with ease,” says Ms Rojas, “while Icess was still spelling her name out.” Oh, this new realm of suffering: “Jessica was a staple at my local Chinese place even though Icess paid. And even Microsoft Word recognised Jenny as a proper pronoun, a proper person, over me; the red squiggle line was a constant reminder.”
Spellcheck too? Will this oppression never end? And doubtless Ms Rojas is intimately familiar with the spelling and pronunciation of every name of every employee at her local Chinese restaurant.
Prompted by Ted S in the comments. Which you’re reading, of course.
For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.
…THE WAY GOD INTENDED.
MUST I continually edit these cretins’ pitiful prose?
… that your mother was a Cluster B nightmare who gave you a moniker that would cause you Just Such Trouble for the rest of your life.
So go to the courthouse and fill out the paperwork and get a name change, sistah. Then go tell you mom about it.
Apparently social justice demands free cell phones.
Give them free cells. Prison cells.
Victor Davis Hanson interviews David Mamet.
Gauntlet, thrown down?
— VDH
Nothing to see here, just the arrest of the third Chinese national smuggling pathogens into the U.S.
One of the pathogens was a fungus? that has the capacity to wipe out crops on a genocidal scale.
Only noticed this morning the weasel-wording, in which the Grauniadista manages to morally invert our common understanding of ‘practice what you preach’ – for Matt here is not responsibly making personal choices according to his beliefs. He’s just banning something for everyone.
YouTube surfaced these videos for me today:
I swear I don’t know where the algorithm gets its ideas.
Yes, the line “practises what he preaches” suggests that Mr Seaton is denying himself some pleasure in the name of some ostensible good. Rather than imposing on others his own neurotic ideas regarding the “implicit values” of cupcakes and their supposedly mind-shattering effects.
While telling his subordinates, largely women, what they may eat.
Again, not politics, as pretended. Just weirdly messed-up people.
Our moral philosopher, by the way, is Isabella Mackie, daughter of the paper’s editor at the time, Alan Rusbridger. Mr Rusbridger famously denounced the use of “woke” as a pejorative, a term he deemed insufficiently flattering for beings such as himself. As one of his admirers put it, “People who are thinking outward and forwards rather than inward and backwards.”
Mr Rusbridger had previously been puzzled – to the point of speechlessness – by why his ostentatious pieties about capitalism and consumerism as terrible, terrible things, corrupting things, things one must resist, should ever be juxtaposed with his own, very comfortable lifestyle, his £520,000 salary, or his £30,000 grand piano.
Readers may also recall Mr Rusbridger’s enthusiasm for expanding the Guardian‘s brand into the world of trendy Shoreditch coffee shops, which the paper styled as “the future of open journalism,” a supposedly high-tech “data-driven” hub of Fair-Trade beverages and online journalistic collaboration. And which was opened without Wi-Fi. Shortly before going bust.
“Our betters” 🤣
Wait.
Not ICE raids but warrants being served to cartel members for a money-laundering scheme?
And the entire Dem party still goes nuclear? They’re blatantly PROTECTING THE CARTELS?
I mean, I reckoned there were palms being greased behind the scenes, but they’re usually better at hiding the connection.
Also, I don’t know if the tweeter is telling the truth.
Big if true, tho. Big.
Setting aside the technical oversights, the unwise economics, and a hundred other screw-ups, it’s hard to convey in words the sheer ugliness of the thing. The customer-repelling properties.
I did quite like the description of the place, in the first link, as “meant to resemble a cosy living room in a loft development,” but which “actually bore more resemblance to the living room in some care home you might see on Panorama.”
Oh, and the projection screen displaying any tweets with the hashtag #guardiancoffee – resulting in any customers, should they materialise, having to stare at a non-stop avalanche of piss-taking commentary.
It’s also worth considering the unspoken premise of the thing – the Guardian as a lifestyle brand, a kind of social jewellery, a way to signal that one has fashionable, high-status opinions.
Rather gives the game away, I think.
Steyn got it mostly right – but the unexpected wrinkle is Trump’s soaring popularity among legal Hispanic immigrants. Among the various statistical break-out groups, Hispanics give Trump the highest approval rating.
So legal Hispanic immigrants *are* naturally conservative – more religious, more family-oriented…. and they moved to the US to get away from the violent thugs that the Dems are importing.
The problem is the radicalization of their children by progressive “educators” pushing identity politics and La Revolution.
In a similar vein a year or so back I saw this kind of funny parody of the ‘disturbing kids show’ genre, a (mostly improvised) YouTube serial by the name of ‘Hug the Sun’. The humour is a bit hit and miss but it’s still worth having a look at:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqS09O_7fr09VGt9dqsqe-9CTmczMDsoQ&si=5LLUj3t0AzyVwdrh
Heh. I saw that poll in a different context where most comments were beating up on the boomers and as a boomer, I kinda sorta approved and didn’t want to distract but…it also amused me that the Hispanics factor was highest yet none of the commenters mentioned it. Like big elephant in the room. Maybe because they used the term ‘Hispanic’ and not ‘Latino’? I kid. I think.
🎯
The tolerant left, being tolerantly tolerant as usual.
Well, modern progressivism is to a very large extent a status-driven phenomenon. Any attempt to make sense of it without taking into account the status-seeking aspect leaves you with a bewildering patchwork of incoherence and perversity, and, very often, culturally suicidal tendencies.
I think it’s why over the years I’ve had so many odd conversations with people of a progressive leaning. They’ve often assumed I’m one of them and am playing the same game. But if you’re not particularly interested in whether your views are perceived as high-status – if that’s not a priority – then you may well have opinions that differ somewhat from – or are entirely at odds with – those that are perceived as high-status.
If I had a fiver for every conversation of this kind, I could insulate a loft with the proceeds.
Funny. The left invented the term, used it as a weapon for propaganda against conservatives and for enforcing conformity among leftists, and then objected when conservatives used it against them.
Some leftists even go so far as to assert that the term was invented by conservatives (talk about erasing history!)
I vaguely recall a few pundits predicting this 20 years ago, but I was, in Eeyore fashion, rather skeptical: Mexico is strongly leftist so won’t they retain that affiliation?
Also to get away from the cruelly oppressive ruling class. Victor Davis Hanson lives in an area which is majority Hispanic–no more than 10 percent white people in local retail stores–and he has frequent conversations with Hispanic neighbors and strangers who tell him that back in Mexico they were treated with contempt but in America they are addressed as “Sir” and “Mister [fill in name].”
I’ve found it a losing game to bet against Steyn. Note he’s excoriating the Republican use of ‘social conservatives’ & ‘natural Republicans’ to paper over their acquiescence to mass illegal immigration.
Pray good people be silent, these are peaceful protests.
A recent example that comes to mind was when someone I know raised the subject of Net Zero and was then shocked that I didn’t enthuse. As if even the idea of demurral – among Nice People – was inconceivable. I started to explain some of the basic practicalities, but the response was pretty much one of why are you even researching views at odds with The Ones We’re Supposed To Have?
There was a curious air of annoyance.
I offered to provide the person with links to some concise and non-party-political information, including several interviews with researchers who study the energy grid and who are concerned by the very real prospect of blackouts, both here and overseas. (This was around the time of the very close call here in January, and before the outages in Spain and Portugal.) But my offer of supporting evidence was hastily, and quite pointedly, declined.
Presumably, on grounds that there’s no social status to be had in acknowledging the realities of the matter, only in being seen to mouth support for a fashionable cause. Even when the particulars of that cause, its actual implications, remain utterly mysterious and of no discernible interest.
It’s neither conservative nor natural to hand your nation to foreigners, on the belief that no man is foreign to you as long as he has a family and a religion.
There’s no shortage of “natural conservatives”,the past, present, and future norm outside the current Western bubble being conflict between incompatible groups of natural conservatives. The car-burners on the LA streets are natural conservatives asserting their group loyalties and their willingness to defend what they now regard by force of numbers as their territory from what they’ve always regarded as alien authorities.
Growing up in south Florida, the overwhelming majority of Hispanics that I knew were Cubans, with a couple of Argentinians, Peruvians, and Puerto Ricans thrown in for…uh…color. I cannot recall a single Mexican that I knew back then. Those Hispanics, especially the Cubans, trended conservative. Today, most of those Cubans whom I am either still in touch with or whose situations I know about through the grapevine are in the woke domain. The one Peruvian guy is solidly a Trump supporter. Not sure how conservative he is in general but he cheers on Trump. He doesn’t say much about his brother anymore tho.
In the last couple of decades I have gotten to know a few Americans from Mexico. Every one of them is either expressively conservative or such that I would bet 80/20 that they were so.
Is it wrong to think the LAPD needs remedial marksmanship training?
Re LAPD marksmanship, my sentiments exactly.
She stands between the police and the “protesters” and is shocked when she’s shot.
[ Playfully rattles ashtray of unwrapped, oddly dusty boiled sweets. ]
[ Washes hands thoroughly. ]
Don’t know why you do that. You know they only stir about at night.
[ Slides ashtray of oddly dusty boiled sweets closer to aelfheld. ]
People who plan to participate in this June 14 “rise up” BS need to understand in no uncertain terms that their participation, violent or not, is an endorsement of the violence that has been occurring over the last several days. F’ing tired of hearing from “the grown ups in the room” about how certain protests even when peaceful are acceptable. Especially when many of these same people are so understanding as to why some say these ongoing violent protests are actually peaceful.
I grew up in SoCal and was in high school (grad 1972) when the whole “La Raza” and “Reconquista” figleaf for racist Marxism was exploding. There was this whole “You white people are living on stolen land” … THAT was even from one of my high school teachers (who formed the first La Raza club on campus).
There are two fairly distinct factions among Mexican-Americans in SoCal (and AZ, IIRC). You have the ones, families long ago legal in the US and are proud to be Americans with a Hispanic flair. Big on families, hard-working and humble. This is the family of my ex-inlaw (the other grandmother of my grandsons). Then you have the chauvinistic MexicoFirstLaRaza types given to activism and intimidation who are sometimes gang affiliated or who hold “jobs” with Leftwing organizations including labor unions.
They annoy Hispanics from other-than-Mexico, too with their arrogance that somehow they are the only ‘true’ Hispanics around.
I could only stand a few minutes but watched some live coverage yesterday of a bunch of SEIU labor activists take to a stage to scream (sometimes literally) about how they weren’t going to stand for ICE in “their” neighborhoods, that they were going to finally “defeat” capitalism and “bury” the fascists (all of us who disagree with them) once and for all. Deja vu the “Reconquista” rhetoric of the 60s right there.
Mr. Seaton could spare everyone the proselytizing. Just put on the hair shirt and STFU.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. The Raza shit that I haveseen via the entertainment media and such infuriated me as well. I totally get that. The thing is the lazy worthless Mexicans who sneak across the border out west there are…well…lazy and worthless, so their prospects in Florida, especially south Florida, even if they were to have gotten the gumption to get there, pretty much filters them out. Especially years ago.
Which itself was commie propaganda the likes of which Bezmenov warned us would persist unless we address it. The problem being that “the grownups in the room” conservatives…conservatives…said ignoring it would make it go away.
He’s an attorney, you know.
But remember, they’re the empathetic ones.
Not entirely unrelated:
If you haven’t seen it, the post quoted above may reward a visit. It is, I think, quite telling of the type.
Speaking of attorneys, Popehat is now barking at the moon.
Looter lives don’t matter.
Curious about Popehat–where did you see him? His site popehat.com is inactive for a year. I used to read him but several years ago he started coming down on weird sides of some issues.
Victor Davis Hanson on the consequences of illegal immigration:
Somebody quoted a tweet of his.
Unfortunately, I lost the link when I closed my browser yesterday and it would take prohibitively long to go through my entire Twitter history to find out which Twitter feed posted that retweet or screenshot.
Were we speaking of foreigners not respecting local traditions? I think we were.
That was pretty interesting. At the end they talk about Elon Musk, and Mamet thinks he’s awesome. Says interesting things about him.