Nineteen Years
And yet, bewilderingly, this place is still here.
Which is a half-decent excuse to remind patrons that this luminous establishment is made possible by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to ensure this place exists a while longer and remains ad-free, there are three buttons below the fold with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. If what happens here is of value, this is a chance to show it.
If one-click haste is called for, there’s a QR code in the sidebar, at which you point your phone camera, and my PayPal.Me page can be found here. There are also SubscribeStar and Ko-Fi accounts, via which love may be monetised, whether as one-off donations or monthly subscriptions. Should you be gripped by an urge to express encouragement via currency, by all means succumb.
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Sordid business, I grant you, but it’s what keeps this place here.
For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for nineteen chuffing years, in over 3,500 posts and hundreds of thousands of comments, the Reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year-summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.
Do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.
As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Update, via the comments:
Liz directs us to a Guardian article, adding, not unreasonably,
Indeed, the article in question, by Ms Sangeeta Pillai, “a writer, podcaster and feminist activist” who “grew up in a Mumbai slum,” is, one might say, an example of concentrated Guardian. By which I mean, contrived to the point of being perverse. As readers may deduce from the headline:
In what follows, Ms Pillai informs us of how she is “exhausted by the pointless stream of politeness” – say, when buying coffee. “I now find myself saying thank you at least 10 times a day and sometimes many more,” says she.
And so, we arrive at the framing of routine courtesy – thanking a shop assistant for being helpful, or a waiter for bringing your meal, drinks, etc – as “incessant ‘thank you’ culture.” Something to be dispensed with – banned, even. Because that normal social lubricant – acknowledging others in a tiny but agreeable way – is just too much effort, apparently. Exhausting, to be precise.
Says Ms Pillai, mockingly,
Well, a few months ago, I was wafting around a department store, searching for some new shirts, but with only a vague idea of what it is I wanted. A young woman took maybe fifteen minutes of her time to help me find exactly what I was looking for, with several pleasing surprises. The idea of not thanking her for her help, her eye, and her ability to decode my half-arsed attempts to describe what I had in mind, strikes me as rude, gratingly so. That the young woman was being paid by an employer was, in context, immaterial.
Yet this is what’s being proposed. Adding specks of grit to normal social interactions. Because everyone wants a working day that’s just that little bit shittier.
Commenter Ccscientist adds,
While Fred the Fourth quotes Robert Heinlein:
And that’s before we get to the wearyingly common phenomenon – not least in the Guardian – of tone-deaf columnists who boast of their immigrant status as if it were a credential, a basis for deference, while lecturing the indigenous on the supposedly profound inadequacies of the country to which they have migrated, and in which they choose to remain. Those allegedly fatiguing customs of civility.
As if that in itself weren’t obnoxious.
And at a time when the coarsening of social interaction, a swell in casual rudeness, due in large part to the behaviour of new arrivals, is very much on the minds of a great many people.
Ooh, lookee. Buttons.
He wanted to be a woman so much, that he had his arms removed and replaced with a donor-woman’s legs. Seriously, dude’s upper arms look like thighs.
You’ll sleep well tonight.
But cardy or no cardy?
Happy Anniversary! One more year and you won’t be a teen anymore. 😉
:::::PING::::
Ping!
Bless you madam, and bless you, sir. May crap never accumulate between the keys of your laptop keyboard.
Yes, but nineteen chuffing years…
Tights, or perhaps leggings?
Back when I started doing this, I didn’t have any
grey hairsilver highlights.I didn’t have any grey hair until I started reading this.
PING
Bless you, sir. May you always have kitchen foil. And big zip-lock freezer bags.
Ping…I think. I did different and hit your tip jar via a virtual card but I didn’t see the charge on my card yet. The tip thing didn’t give an error but it didn’t indicate success with a warm and fuzzy email either. Not seeing the charge on my card yet either but perhaps it still has to hop the pond in some manner? Things that used to be so easy…
Re: the lovely lady’s Hill to Die On:
Both of these are from over 50 years ago. Interestingly, RAH does not seem to have anticipated the immigrant attitude.
A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.
Robert A. Heinlein
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the sophisticated deplore these formalities as ’empty,’ ‘meaningless,’ or ‘dishonest,’ and scorn to use them. No matter how ‘pure’ their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
Robert A. Heinlein
Subscribed!
I believe he did recognize that some cultures are highly incompatible with ours, but he did not anticipate that the left would open the borders to admit many millions of such people.
His book Tramp Royale might go into this, but it’s been a very long time since I read it.
Happy anniversary, David! I will lift a glass of wine tonight in your honor–and it will not be French.
The only culture/country he was dismissive of in that book was New Zealand. IIRC he described a lowest-common-denominator egalitarianism with a large dose of parochial resentment for seasoning.
“Immigrant” diversity is our strength.
I mean, nice looking machine, but a 40+ year old Fiat 124 is not exactly what anybody would call a super car. #mensacandidate
INCOMING …
Sometimes a weeping young mother is merely overwhelmed.
And sometimes she’s a weeping monster.
Ker-ching!
Bless you, sirs. May your upholstery be unblemished and pleasing to the touch.
Nothing this end. Via PayPal or Ko-Fi, it’s usually an immediate transfer. I don’t see anything marked as pending. You may want to check on that one.
Were you typing with your feet again?
Any supposed upside to Ms Pillai’s vision of tomorrow is not apparent to me. Again, it strikes me as a way to make other people’s days that little bit shittier.
But then we’re talking about a woman who doesn’t seem to register how her own chosen stance – an immigrant lecturing the natives on their apparently irritating customs of civility – might itself be a tad irksome. Especially at a time when so many new arrivals feel entitled to disregard those customs of civility.
[ Post updated with the implausible agonies of Ms Sangeeta Pillai. ]
“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”
It’s 3:30 a.m. here in Chicago. The hydrocodone has worn off, and my kidney stone–a novel and exciting sort of pet rock–still remains stubbornly lodged between point A and point B. So I decided to drop in for what’s poppin’ in Davidland. As a sort of diversion therapy from the exciting stabby bits of this experience.
Congratulations to you and your legion of wise and witty weirdos. May you never have a kidney stone.
So you’re saying this blog is preferable to unshifting kidney stones? I should put that in the brochure.
Demand more drugs. The good stuff. And do keep us posted.
[ Passes bunch of grapes, dreary magazines. ]
Well, you’d think that the flaw in this vision of a better tomorrow – that an escalation in routine rudeness will somehow make things more agreeable – would be hard to miss. And yet.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/02/more-dildos.php
Speaking of which: “Bored Geezers and Hippie Wannabes”, a play in two acts.
Act 1: “This land is your land, this is Somali Land”
Act 2: “A Wandering Minstrel I”
I’d bet the cast party after where they all crowed about sticking it to the man was lit as they passed around the Ensure™ and “medical” weed.
Ah yes, but… as we learned quite recently, those murderers, armed robbers and child molesters are the lynchpins of the community. The solid rock on which all else rests.
A mere trifle compared to the overriding importance of their feels.
Well, quite. In my experience, the kinds of people who want to participate in these farces aren’t overly concerned, if concerned at all, with the facts of the matter. They seem much more concerned with how such behaviour makes them feel, given their weird misconceptions, and how it makes them seem in front of their peers.
I once had a lively exchange in which someone told me, quite passionately, that they “don’t care about ‘the facts of the matter’…” I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. I ended up saying something like, “So you just want to screech at me and call me names while being wrong?”
That didn’t go down particularly well. Amazingly.
Speaking of those weird misconceptions.
Regarding the above, very much related. Again, weird.
And of course this.
Act 3: “Dildos on Heads”
That was the prologue. Regardless, if he was truly dedicated he’d superglue that thing on, not that he had to advertise he is a dickhead.
Making victims of criminals and criminals of victims is not a recipe for peace, let alone justice.
Which it is certain may not be neglected when addressing such as Ms Pillai.
Would it be far-fetched to think she finds these customs fatiguing only when addressed to people of pallor?
Ambiguous Manatee: band name or album title?
Hard to say. But taken at face value, it doesn’t conjure a flattering picture of the author. The word uppity came to mind. Some have suggested it’s an exercise in rage-bait. In which case, that also speaks to Ms Pillai’s character, the kind of person she is.
Bet he’d find a 30% reduction in his income significant.
Aarrgh. Interstitial pop-ups.
[ Smashes vase. ]
Buy them by the gross do you?
[ Drops in on old dear across road, admires her antique vases. ]
Pinged…again…apparently worked this time. No need to verify. WTF a “virtual card” does for me except make the process even more convoluted, I have no idea.
Second attempt worked a charm. Bless you, sir. Should you be knocked down by a bus and require emergency medical treatment, may your undergarments be of the highest quality.
Thanks, but I really could use a blessing along the lines of “May you never again stay in a rental abode of any kind where the front door lock (MADE BY YALE, HINT, HINT) just magically unlocks itself and your first attempt to resolve the problem via You Tube video does not take you to a video of an…interestingly accented person of…umm…accented melanin explaining how to fix it on a different model than the one you are looking at”. Something like that. Just a suggestion.