Friday Ephemera (778)

Looking like shit and screaming is not a plus

Hard to argue with that. 

Two days ago, I had to look up who this Sydney Sweeney person is. I’d assumed she must warble in some happening pop combo.

Don’t laugh. 

As Wanye Burkett has said more than once, despising such creatures, wishing them gone, is not a result of some failure of empathy, as progressives often claim, but of precisely the opposite.

One can understand their feelings, their assumptions, their monstrously selfish worldview, and find it all degenerate, worthy only of disgust. In fact, the more you try to imagine being in a similar situation and how you might behave, the more alien and repugnant their behaviour is likely to seem. 

Regarding which, this.

And this one still makes me chuckle.

I denounce myself, of course.

Understanding the mental states of others, their motives and assumptions, insofar as one can, doesn’t necessarily result in positive feelings towards them, or to a default forgiveness and a willingness to excuse their behaviour. In short, if your “empathy” results in you being endlessly forgiving, endlessly accommodating, over and over again, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.

Or not doing it at all.

Case in point, burglary victim and Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan: 

Readers may wish to ponder how someone can tell us, vividly and at length, about how distressing the experience of being burgled is – the anger, the shaking, the persistent sleep loss, the sense of violation – and who can simultaneously dismiss that same experience as a minor inconvenience, a mere bagatelle.

As if it were “nothing” compared to the imagined woes of the monsters who treated her with utter, unequivocal contempt, by violating her home and thieving her belongings. Monsters who, statistically, have almost certainly done it before and will likely do it again. And who, with practice, will get bolder.

Readers may also wish to ponder the implicit conceit that the burglars – the ones brandishing carving knives – are the real victims and should therefore be spared any meaningful consequence of their own chosen actions, their own sociopathy. Because, apparently, one should sympathise with the people breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff. In one’s own car.

Perhaps these are skills only available to Guardian columnists.

Readers will also note Ms Spargo-Ryan’s zeal in blocking people who dared to demur from her affectations. And her claim that I, your host, was much worse, much more scary, than the feral creatures who broke into her home in the middle of the night, and the homes of her neighbours, while brandishing carving knives.

her other online oeuvre, which is equally venomous.

Our intellectual does seem to spend an awful lot of time calling people cunts and shitstains, often for reasons that are not altogether obvious. Not so much debate as reflexive barking. It does suggest a certain emotional dysregulation, an arrestedness.