Friday Ephemera (776)
Food preparation of note. || Possible downside detected. || Shall we dance? || Aerodynamic simulations. || “Diversity would be great… I just don’t think I could live anywhere where there’s, like, one group of people.” || Hyenas deterred. || Today’s word is organised. || I believe the term is hoe. || Bespectacled woman brings language lecture. || Marble. || Bathtime cunning. || Incoming. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || Trolling Antifa. || But she doesn’t look the type. || Pigtails and braless. || But he’s under the umbrella of womanhood. || He waited all week. || On the eye-widening folly of Net Zero. Previously. (h/t, Samizdata) || “Post-conflict fellatio,” butt decoration, and other chimp behaviour. || And finally, one for all those gentlemen out there in search of a “relaxed, fuller appearance.”
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After my second guess, I’d narrowed it down to two words, but it still took me four tries, because seriously? THAT was the answer?
himself
Boy howdy, do they ever.
And yet what’s striking about these self-imagined radicals, these mighty free-thinking transgressors, is their mental uniformity. The wearying predictability of their life choices, their assumptions, their every other utterance.
Ms Beck, by the way, is a painter of somewhat limited talents. Having discovered, belatedly, that spending years and a small fortune on a degree in fine art is not in fact the path to public acclaim, a lucrative career, or even just repaying debts, she now channels her resentments into “creating graphics for social justice” and “making linocuts for a protest.”
Given how common the pattern above is, one might infer that a great deal of unhinged leftist protest is actually about social inadequates displacing responsibility for their own vanities and for the poor choices that have followed, inevitably, from those vanities.
And which still do.
The archives are heaving with iterations of the same conceits, the same dynamic, the same unhappy outcomes.
I recall one young woman – in an early post that I now can’t find – who was outraged and astonished that her expensive degrees in Niche Pretentious Grievance were not in fact a path to lucrative and statusful employment. And yet, rather than considering the possibility that her own vanities had gotten the better of her, and that maybe, just maybe, she had been exploited by hustlers, Really Awful People, she instead continued railing against numerous, oddly invisible forces of oppression.
All couched verbatim in the language and assumptions of the Really Awful People who had taken advantage of her, of her credulity and vanity, and who had wasted her time while she pissed away a fortune.
And then there was the severely educated Melissa Fabello, whose expensive schooling in woo and self-absorption had led her to believe that, regarding every failure or shortcoming, all of the things that “had gone wrong” in her life, “It was never my fault.” And so, instead, and with great haste, she blamed capitalism, patriarchy, “whiteness,” etc.
And hey, an attitude like that is just bound to pay off. No downsides there.
In the years since, we’ve seen countless examples of academic grievance hustlers who encourage their victims, their marks, to cultivate alienation and unearned resentments, and to disavow basic skills, and to disavow even the expectation that one should have basic skills, while actively sabotaging the life-chances of their victims. Say, by encouraging them to repel potential employers with a sour and chippy attitude and the words “Fuck you.”
These are not so much radicals as dupes and suckers. People who, lacking basic skills, lacking usefulness, very much want their politics to make them feel validated and important. A tragic compensation.
We’ve seen this countless times. It’s a standard trajectory.
What do you know, Chairman Mao is back, selling… chairs.
“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.”
Thomas Sowell.
It’s often difficult not to see the ostentatious and competitive political posturing as a compensation for not being remotely interesting or reliable in any other respect. Except perhaps as a case study in a textbook on Where Things Went Wrong.
I mean, you’d think the bundle of conceits touched on above – that to be both radical and fulfilled you should be captious and unskilled, and chronically resentful, and accustomed to displacing blame, and that you can in no way have contributed, ever, to any of the miseries in your life – you’d think that might raise an eyebrow. At least occasionally. Among people who like to tell us how enormously clever they are.
Instead, however, we typically get this:
And variations thereof.