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.
It’s easy to wreck things but harder to build them.
Absolutely. As noted here:
And were Ms Pillai’s example to catch on – more than it has, I mean – it’s not at all clear how that ground might ever be recovered.
I mean, trying to de-rude people is a bit like trying to un-burn stuff. Especially if they’ve been told that their rudeness is a valid expression of their identity, their specialness. In our vibrant, multicultural utopia.
’28 Days Later’ was not a how-to guide.