The Year Reheated

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with Europe’s ongoing experiment in massive, indiscriminate immigration – in which crime news is airbrushed of details one mustn’t register, and ludicrous progressive women perform please-don’t-rape-me dances. And in which those on whom this experiment is being conducted, the indigenous population, are expected not to notice any unhappy transformation of their neighbourhoods. Say, by the sudden ubiquity of Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes.

We also pondered the reinvention of maths teaching by progressive educators in order to flatter the selfish and disruptive. A reinvention deemed necessary because “mathematics curricula are saturated in whiteness,” which causes “intellectual trauma” to students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, and who repeatedly undermine the efforts of others. The exact meaning of the term “whiteness,” deployed many times, remained unclear, beyond a claim that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”

And we visited an immensely progressive Austrian kindergarten, where staff saw fit to expose four-year-old children to “sexual education” without parents’ knowledge or consent, using images of naked men pretending to be women. Other visual aids included jolly scenes of obese adult men showering with children. Parents who dared to question the suitability of the staff’s enthusiasms found their children promptly expelled and blacklisted from 93 kindergartens throughout Vienna, on grounds of being insufficiently tolerant and inclusive.

Academic matters weighed upon our minds in February, with news of the new position, at King’s College London, of Yasmin Benoit, a “model and award-winning asexual activist,” whose asexual credentials include pointedly and repeatedly drawing attention to her cleavage. Ms Benoit’s insights, aired via Instagram, included the now mandatory claims of racial victimhood, and the revelation that SpongeBob Squarepants is also asexual. We were intrigued to hear that Ms Benoit would be revealing her first academic paper within three weeks of her appointment. Doubtless a sign of the scholarly rigour in play.

We also learned that Shakespeare’s The Tempest includes scenes of bad weather and must therefore be accompanied by pre-emptive trigger warnings, lest drama students at the University of the West of England be rendered tearful and distraught. Among the 200 similar cautions issued by the university were warnings of references to blood in Macbeth. Not to be outdone, the Chichester Festival Theatre felt it necessary to warn patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most widely seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.

Oh, and we dutifully noted the latest frontier of human suffering – namely, the phenomenon of hair dysphoria. In which, deep psychological distress can be caused both by length and lack of length simultaneously. Such is our age of competitive complications.

The wellbeing of burglars was a topic in March, following efforts by California’s progressive lawmakers to outlaw the defence of one’s home and loved ones against sociopathic intruders with long criminal histories. Said lawmakers were distressed by the thought of the law-abiding regarding the violation of their homes as in any way provocative or a basis for self-defence. Homeowners, we were told, should instead “retreat,” thereby reducing the risk of “force likely to cause death or great bodily injury” to the burglars, whose wellbeing is apparently a matter of great importance, if only to progressive lawmakers. Advocates of the policy claimed that meekly surrendering one’s possessions to criminals, thereby emboldening them, “promotes racial justice.”

We then catalogued some memorable examples of the latest status-seeking fad – namely, vandalising the Teslas of random motorists. We considered the conceit that picking at one’s own arse in a public car park and wiping the excavated material onto some random person’s car constitutes a moral triumph, the sign of a good person, and the decision to do this to a make of car equipped with eight external cameras. An activity that suggests a level of emotional dysregulation, of total impulse control failure, that’s quite hard to relate to.

The month also brought us transgender-sex-offender-urine-hurling news, in which a cross-dressing gentleman in Germany – known, by himself, as “Sophie Koko” and resplendent in a polka-dot ensemble – proved difficult to apprehend. Possibly due to the public being told by both the police and media that the man lifting his frock and flashing his genitals, and threatening to murder women, and spraying children with his own piss, and for whom they should be alert, was somehow a woman.

And we encountered the traumatising outrage of not having one’s feet affirmed as “non-binary.”

The studious observance of fabulist pronouns came to our attention in April, when sexual predation met the world of Scooby Doo. And when Mr Alec Ray Craig, aged 27, found himself in the care of the Albany Police Department, following his activities at South Albany High School, where the bestubbled Mr Craig tried to pass himself off as a fifteen-year-old girl. Mr Craig was indulged by the court with two years’ probation and ordered to stay at least 500 feet away from schools. Local parents were invited to rely on the promise of a 27-year-old man with a history of violating similar conditions, and who is convinced that he’ll be perceived as an adolescent girl.

Via the pages of Psychology Today, we noted the evaporating standards of “affirmative psychotherapy.” Specifically, the loudly announced imperative to “validate without hesitation,” in which a willingness to pretend the untrue – that a man is a woman, say – and to then applaud oneself as righteous and heroic – is the highest possible goal of a mental health professional. In this Yes, You Are Napoleon school of psychotherapy.

And academia’s hothouse of pretentious agonising once again steered us to the topic of middle-school mathematics. Writing in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, curriculum writer and “social justice” activist Michael Lolkus claimed that the rules of multiplication, percentages and other simple mathematical operations are being befouled by “whiteness,” albeit in ways left entirely mysterious. Mr Lolkus lamented his “positionality” as a “knower of… mathematical concepts,” and therefore an oppressor, before suggesting that underperforming minority pupils – the party least familiar with the subject matter – should be put in charge of structuring lessons and the broader curriculum. A sure-fire recipe for success.

May prompted us to consider the merits of living next door to antisocial morons, “problem families,” as recommended by two Guardian contributors. That’s recommended for others, obviously, not the columnists themselves. Dr Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer, wants to ensure that more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.” By which he means people who blast out loud music in the small hours and who, for entertainment, hurl pets from upstairs windows. While Zoe Williams, who lives far removed from any rough council estates, told us that those who’d prefer not to be assailed by thunderous basslines at 4am, or to have their evenings enlivened by terrified animals falling from the sky, are merely being “dehumanising” and needlessly judgemental.

We also marvelled at the Labour government’s efforts to spare burglars the indignity of jail sentences in prisons deemed overcrowded. Along with plans to prematurely release murderers and rapists, up to 1,500 each year. We then mulled the implication that the level of serious criminal behaviour at any given time should somehow conform to the amount of prison space you have at that time. As if the moral gravity of a criminal act, and likelihood of recidivism and danger to the public, should be determined by whether or not you can be bothered to build another dungeon.

And thanks to the scrupulously peer-reviewed Journal of Lesbian Studies, we visited a world of tree-licking, politically radical masturbation, and an erotic activity coyly referred to as “lesbian-dog relationalities.”

In June, we beheld some lively scenes from the zombie apocalypse in downtown Los Angeles, where gangs of masked progressive activists throw themselves at moving cars in an attempt to dominate alarmed and bewildered drivers, before feigning outrage when the inevitable self-inflicted injuries finally occur. These supposedly radical activities, a kind of demented recreation, prompted thoughts on how the activists’ own actions – their gleeful disregard for normal moral boundaries, while finding amusement in repeatedly causing damage and alarm – render their wellbeing of very low importance.

We also witnessed the fractious melding of witchcraft and transgenderism, and the hierarchy of pretending things that aren’t actually true. A world of colliding make-believe, in which Ms Angela Howard, a “second generation witch,” found herself expelled from both the UK Pagan Federation and the British Druid Order, and denied any further training in uncanny powers, following her belief that ladies’ toilets should be occupied by women, not oddly dressed men. The Pagan Federation issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate.” And so, we were lectured on reality by people who think they’re witches.

And we unearthed some improbable agonising from the pages of the Guardian, where topics of torment included the woman-unhinging properties of cupcakes, the oppression of insufficiently gender-balanced barbecues, and an exquisitely delicate woman crushed by spellcheck software.

In July, we revisited our experiment in multiculturalism and indiscriminate immigration, in which uninvited newcomers have to be reminded that torturing animals and loitering by school gates in order to film children are activities not generally approved of by the indigenous. There followed a menu of other cultural subtleties not being grasped by new arrivals – say, queuing, courtesy and not raping schoolchildren – along with efforts by governments to tactfully convey local customs, while suppressing any noticing of what must not be noticed. Apparently, we must explain civilisation to those unfamiliar with the concept, while pretending that no such corrective measures are required or taking place.

Via the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint expressed her dismay that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have “cast the protagonists as white once again.” Ms Flint bemoaned the “factory setting of a white perspective” in tales about white people, and the lack of “historical inclusivity” in adaptations of novels set in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ms Flint informed us that she is “left somewhat cold” by period-appropriate pallor. A train of thought that terminated before arriving at the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring racial contrivance.

We also visited Loughborough University, where senior lecturer Dr Ben Roberts has devised, at taxpayer expense, an unorthodox use for yoghurt – namely, smearing it on windows so as to slightly lower indoor temperatures during that rarest and briefest of phenomena, the British heatwave. Dr Roberts assured those intrigued that, as soon as the yoghurt has dried, “the smell disappears.”

August gave us a chance to parse progressive “empathy,” so often and loudly announced, along with its contradictions and consequences. And in which an attempt to understand the motives and feelings of others – say, knife-wielding burglars and boastful shoplifters – must only result in positive feelings and infinite indulgence. The idea that one might understand the feelings of such people and their monstrously selfish worldview – and find it all degenerate, worthy only of disgust – does not seem to feature prominently in progressive thinking. Needless to say, empathy for the victims of such creatures, including one’s own neighbours, proved much harder to find.

We witnessed the unveiling of a new frontier in niche agonising, thanks to a supermarket shelf stocked with houmous, mere proximity to which can apparently traumatise grown men of a progressive persuasion. The gentleman in question, Mr Amro Tabari, related his dip-induced distress and urged us to “see houmous through a different lens.” Through which, the varieties available were deemed “cultural appropriation” and a basis for sobbing. Mr Tabari’s emotions, or professed emotions, veered towards the operatic, as we were told that this dish of chickpeas and lemon juice is in fact a political identity.

And we noted the cultural-sensitivity complications that can arise at a “2SLGBTIAQ+-friendly” outdoor theatre in Vancouver, where paying customers are turned away for having politically inadmissible hair. Hairstyles being something with which patrons are expected to have “genuine, meaningful relationships.” And in light of which, the venue’s boasts of cultural sensitivity seemed less a welcome or reassurance, and more a warning about the kinds of insufferable people you’d be likely to encounter, should you be deemed sufficiently pure to actually be admitted.

In September, we noted numerous attempts by left-leaning publications, including the Guardian and New York magazine, to portray polyamory, unfaithfulness and cuckoldry as the very zenith of a progressive lifestyle. A lifestyle involving sexual rota systems, pecking orders and endless crying. As when a betrayed husband, Michael Sonmore, boasted, unconvincingly, that he “finally became a feminist” thanks to his wife’s nocturnal sexual adventures with a chap named Paulo. A wife who was “embracing herself” and becoming empowered, we were told, while her children, aged six and three, wondered where their mommy was.

We turned our attention to prison and its occupants and were reminded of how progressives often have a wildly inaccurate conception of the criminal demographic and of the psychology and motives in play, as expressed by the criminals themselves. The fantasies of said progressives were juxtaposed with the self-satisfied crowing of carjackers and some eye-widening statistics regarding recidivism. Among which, that 70% of UK custodial sentences are imposed on those with at least seven previous convictions or cautions, and 50% on those with at least fifteen. A pattern repeated overseas. Which does rather suggest that ending up in prison requires a great deal of effort.

And we bettered ourselves with a visit to the world of modish Manhattan education, where shoplifting is glamourised as “protest,” and where well-heeled students pay $60,000 a year to attend seminars on “the aesthetics of theft.” Via lectures titled How to Steal, selfishness and moral squalor are construed as sexy, upscale and ever-so daring. It’s “radical ethics,” you see. Readers were invited to imagine the educator responsible, Brooklynite “decoloniser” Ms Cresa Pugh, being robbed in broad daylight – say, a bag-snatching or a mugging at knifepoint – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience.

October began with more cross-dressing dramas, when an able-bodied 53-year-old Norwegian credit analyst, a man named Jørund Viktoria Alme, identified as disabled – specifically, as a woman in a wheelchair. Mr Alme, a self-styled activist, insisted that his pretence of being disabled is all about facilitating “diversity and inclusion,” while boasting of experiencing “a lot of excitement,” of a kind we needn’t go into, thanks to his wheelchair-and-heels combo. Other tales of transvestism involved parents being sent unsolicited home-made pornography by a trans-identified high-school school employee, in which a kitchen sink was put to use as erotic apparatus.

Transvestite complications came to our attention again days later, when Mr Zara Paquette, a shimmering vision of womanliness complete with five o’clock shadow, took to social media and barked instructions to the actress Keira Knightley, as if she might be watching and dutifully taking notes, with demands that she, and by extension all women, be obedient to him. By deferring to his fantasy and telling obvious lies. In doing so, Mr Paquette provided a textbook illustration of how even the most innocuous and even-handed statement can provoke male-pattern browbeating.

Oh, and we marvelled at the Guardian ‘debate’ series Dining Across the Divide, in which an “always Labour” politics teacher struggled to find differences with a doctor who votes “Labour every general election.” Having expressed a unanimous dislike of Mr Trump, both parties announced that they’d had “a really positive experience” chatting to the other. Or, in effect, to themselves. Previous Guardian debates featured a Green/Labour voter across the table from a Labour/Green voter. Such being the parameters of conceivable disagreement.

Chief among the thrills of November was a peek at the agonies of the ideologically status-conscious woman. In the pages of Vogue, highly-strung ladies posed the question “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” The social blemish of norminess – and worse, being perceived as conservative – resulted in much clucking and agitation regarding whether coupledom or singledom is the more fashionable “flex.” We stumbled into a world of activists, influencers, and content creators, in which being single “is now becoming a desirable and coveted status,” and in which one has to be mindful of any shifts in the script. Such that one might tailor one’s romantic life to the preferences of random strangers on the internet. Dating, or not dating, for likes.

We poked at the word “ally,” so very much in fashion, and noted its debasing and non-reciprocal implications. The word translating as something like dupe or puppet, and denoting a role of saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming absurd. Whether by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow women, or that preferring the civilised to the thuggish is “a white supremacist construct” and thus something to be denounced. All while hoping that the person at whose behest you’re doing this won’t call you names too.

Relationship dramas cropped up again in the pages of Vice, which prompted us to ponder the difficulties of satisfying progressive women. For whom, remembering a partner’s birthday is “emotional labour,” an onerous “unpaid” chore, and a basis for both grievance and financial compensation. And for whom, “mutual support” is to be had, not in a loving relationship, but via “the choice to stay single,” “stepping away from dating altogether,” and “choosing solitude over stress.” In short, to focus on oneself – or more so, I suspect. Because “being alone” – and dependent on the state – is empowering, you see. According to the logic of expensively educated female journalists of a progressive leaning.

The year drew to a close with thoughts on three-strikes laws and being robbed at knifepoint – and the mental contortions of those bent on excusing crime. Among which, the sly conceit that what matters, all that matters, is the sum being stolen, not the whole at knifepoint business – as if this lively means of cash extraction were some trivial detail, offering no clues as to the character of the perpetrator, their fitness for a civilised world. As if the outrage and horror of being robbed at knifepoint – the degree of violation and moral injury, the amount of wrongness – depends only on the amount of cash you happened to have on you at the time.

At Kent State University, we witnessed a game of Who May Sing What, Based On Their Skin Colour? In which, members of an a cappella group who happened to be white were banned from auditioning for certain solos. Polite objections to this overtly racial policy – including its dissonance with university’s own code of conduct – resulted in the complainant being placed on probation and facing a disciplinary hearing. Because if you question a policy of unilateral racial exclusivity in singing, then you must be punished for failing to be inclusive – by those who would exclude you, based on your skin colour – before being issued with detailed preconditions regarding any further discussion. Among which, a pre-emptive warning against any hypothetical use of “aggressive wording.”

And we pondered more immensely progressive ruminations on race, with students at the University of London, supposedly opponents of racism, claiming to be oppressed by the unremarkable fact that in a white-majority country their professors will often be white and – as seems unavoidable – older than the students. Stated grievances included the expectation of being able to communicate clearly, which the students denounced as “structural racism,” along with the “stress and anxiety” of being corrected or disagreed with. Readers were invited to wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.

These, then, were some of the examples set by our betters. Heights to which we lesser beings can only aspire.

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