Friday Ephemera (821)
This is one of these. || Closer to the Almighty. || Ad location of note. || He wants to talk to the ladies. || A live map of the London Underground. || Paper-scroll-based in-car navigation system, 1931. || Icarus. || Enoch and Jonny and Dick, 1971. || In terms of immigration, discernment matters. || “A multi-racial society that approaches equal proportions of the different groups… is not workable.” || Wolf and grizzly discuss sharing. || World of big hair, or a TWA flight attendant recruitment film, 1967. || Photography is hard. || On knives and gunfights. || The gratitude of newcomers. || Not all ideas are good ones. || A brief guide to chili peppers. || Repair job. || Propellor polishing. || A way to pass the time. || The MCP 2000. (h/t, Things) || His promising skillz. || Cars fall from sky, cows unscathed.
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Renowned Intellectual Joyce Carol Oates
Bad news: Jeremy Clarkson has prostate cancer
Truth.
Sacred?
“Ad location of note.”
Nothing surprises me about the ad department of TfL anymore…
Not sure what it says of me but the morbid cheek is amusing.
He wasn’t wrong. Can you even imagine that debate on TV now?
Morning, all.
Previously and related:
Also, as noted in the comments, an intriguing lack of “diversity” in the posters.
Beyond the famous Birmingham speech, I don’t know much about Mr Powell. Before my time. But in hindsight, with what we know all too vividly now, he doesn’t seem quite the cartoon villain that I was led to expect. The words unhappily prophetic spring to mind.
And his point about large numbers arriving rapidly and how that affects any prospect of assimilation, and generational assimilation – any inclination even to attempt it – has been touched on here:
Without knowing it at the time, I was in effect paraphrasing Mr Powell.
What struck me most, however, was just how nakedly disingenuous and evasive Jonathan Miller is. Say, his claim, around 5:20, that public concerns – “fear and horror” – will only materialise if some wicked troublemaker draws attention to the downsides of massive, indiscriminate immigration.
As if the phenomenon itself – the rapid and unwanted transformation of neighbourhoods, boroughs and entire cities – would not otherwise be discerned by the dumb, lumpen proles who live there. And on whom said transformation is being imposed.
I think that assumption tells us quite a lot about Dr Miller. It tells us who he is.
As if the phenomenon being noticed by so many of Mr Powell’s constituents weren’t the reason for him giving his most famous speech, in which he quotes some of those relayed concerns, to vivid effect.
Dr Miller is of course prone to wordy indirectness. But if I may paraphrase:
As a translation of Dr Miller’s evasions, his sly clever-cleverness, I don’t think that’s unfair.
And dear God, Miller’s fit of wordy-wordy around 2:20. The twattery is off the chart.
And by way of further irony, at the time of that broadcast in 1971, the population of London, where the programme was filmed, was still overwhelming white native, around 93%. The native white population of London is currently at around 36%. And not going up.
A demographic transformation so striking, so overwhelming, within my lifetime, that I suspect all of the programme’s participants would be rather taken aback. Alas, Dr Miller is no longer with us, so his views on that transformation, and whether the city has been improved as a result, can only be guessed at.
Whoppenheimer.
I did like the leaping about in the fat Matrix. “All I’m offering is calories.”
And the fat Shining, with liquid chocolate gushing from the lift.
Oh, and fat Iron Man.
Speaking of dogs with prosthetics, here’s a TV series about a guy who makes prosthetics for animals. (Hoping it’s not geo-locked.)
Mostly dogs, but he’s done cats, sheep, horses, even elephants.
Animal psychology is remarkable. When they lose a limb they don’t stew about it or ruminate — they just carry on the best they can. Then when they get a prosthetic so they can run again, they take off running and don’t look back.
Must be the smaller frontal lobes, but they really don’t fall into a deep depression when tragedy befalls.
It’s accessible to me.
How does he think women feel when they ask for a female cab driver and instead they get a huge f*cking transvestite?
There are so many levels of irony in those 44 seconds, it’s hard to know where to start.
Also, as someone quips in the replies, big shovel man hands.
He was ahead of his time too… just for all the wrong reasons.
Yes. I’ve spent the morning watching a documentary about Powell and the reactions to him. There’s a foreshadowing of today that’s quite hard to miss. The same evasions, the same leftwing student behaviour, the same implicit sneering at those would bear the brunt of this Great Adventure In Demographics.
Ted Heath, for instance, much like Dr Miller, made eerily similar noises to BBC broadcaster Dan Snow and our own glorious leaders. As if not talking about the problem would somehow make it go away.
But as Powell himself said in his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, he did not have the right to not convey those concerns, the “alarm and resentment” of his constituents, however improper and taboo those concerns were deemed by people far away and who would never be affected.
Among which, the concerns of an elderly woman, the only white resident left on her street, who was now afraid to go out, due to having her windows broken and being harassed by children who didn’t speak English, and who found faeces pushed through her letterbox by her new “diverse” neighbours.
Yet Dr Miller did feel entitled to suppress any clue as to how a great many people felt about the sudden transformation of their homes. As if those on whom this process was being imposed should be made silent, robbed of a voice, until it was too late.
A typical intellectual. Sophistry dressed up in refined language.
The Labour Party. The entire left, in fact.
What struck me was his use of needlessly high language to make a point that, stripped of adornment, is intellectually feeble, utterly unrealistic, and morally contemptible.
Brief?
Which is the fundamental purpose of such language.
“If you cannot put your ideas in plain language, then you do not truly understand them”–various real intellectuals. “Or you are a malicious liar.”–Me.
You are an inspiration to us all, sir.
The struggle is real!
Blazing new trails, finally the Age of Aquarius and peak Diversity™ is achieved.
Nevermind. “Journalists”, what would we do without them?
Hence the adornment.
There are a lot of them.
Many immigrant groups to the US the past 200 years formed enclaves and continued speaking their language. South of Chicago a German group of farmers continued to speak german in their lutheran church until WWII. Chicago had a Swedish Town, an Irish Town, etc. HOWEVER, these communities were not criminals and gradually dissipated.
Yes, quite. Dr Miller is sly, dishonest, habitually unrealistic. And in that sense, terribly progressive.
And it’s worth lingering on Miller’s central claim in that clip, made around 5:20. The idea that if no-one relays the concerns of those affected, if no-one articulates the problem, then the problem will just go away. Indeed, the problem will somehow never have existed.
And when faced with the practical realities of his own statements, Miller is evasive. “I didn’t say that,” says he, about the scenarios that follow from his own claims. A manoeuvre he repeats again moments later, when Powell rephrases another of his assertions in plain language.
And so, visibly flustered, he attacks Powell for relaying the concerns of his constituents, on whom the transformation is being inflicted, very much against their will. As if he had invented them. Conjured them into being.
Supposedly on grounds that they, the electorate, don’t know their own minds and don’t see what they see. With their own eyes.
Again, Dr Miller strikes me as instinctively dishonest.
I suppose the modern-day equivalent would be in posting this video, or this one, or any of a hundred others I could dig out, and then being badmouthed as a troublemaker. As if any negative reactions – say from the people who see that kind of thing every day in their own neighbourhoods – were entirely the fault of troublemaking bloggers.
And who should instead pretend it isn’t happening, and won’t happen tomorrow.
Like a bad penny.
(via)
Was Miller perchance the archetype for the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal?
I vaguely recall as a child enjoying Miller’s documentary series The Body In Question, on human physiology, but the more I’ve learned about his politics and his attitudes towards the working class, or pretty much anyone less bejewelled and statusful than himself, the less it’s become possible to feel anything like affection.
As discussed in this thread, Miller disdained conservative voters – including those whose taxes subsidised his own loss-making theatre and opera productions – as akin to “typhoid.” Miller gleefully sneered at the conventions and values of normal people – their patriotism and suburbia and their “commuter idiocy” – i.e., earning a living – while expecting the people he was insulting to go on handing over their taxes to fund his uneconomical theatre projects.
Miller, no pauper boy and terminally grand in his manner, was contemptuous of Mrs Thatcher’s aspirational fervour, her “odious suburban gentility” and her petit-bourgeois background. Just as he was repelled by the aspiring suburbanites who voted for her in large numbers. Say, people who wanted to do well and own their own homes, and maybe to send their kids to a less rough school.
Oh, and Dr Miller, our champion of the demographic degradation of other people’s neighbourhoods, famously got upset when a small taste of that transformation approached his own neighbourhood, railing against the “feral children” who were bringing crime and graffiti close to his own very comfortable north London home. Formerly the home of one Charles Dickens.
It is designed to try your patience and thus it deserves a strong rebuke. Mr. Powell does an excellent job in that regard yet was still dismissed as raaaaaycisss.* There simply is no reasoning with the left. They obfuscate and fill time with a dozen fancy words where a few will do, then dismiss your eye-roll as ignorance. The thing is though that most of them don’t fully understand the meaning or broader impact of the words they use. They’re just words they picked up, prepackaged for argument sake. There were even parts of Mr. Miller’s ramblings, some about empiricism, that could be used to support conservative arguments today but that’s a rabbit hole I would rather not go down.
Elon Musk’s trillionaire status has flushed out much underlying ignorance about economics from the even so-called moderate left and even many on the center right, again so-called. Yet as low as my expectations are, I am still a bit surprised at the degree of economic ignorance by older people. Some whom I have personally known for decades, others more famous too. Then it hit me that they themselves didn’t suddenly become stupid. They just never really understood the things/concepts they previously mouthed or pretended to agree with. They just knew what the latest approved words were and as the new words/ideas have now been downloaded they mouth that. They can only think “in the moment”.
*As you relate. He looked/sounded vaguely familiar to me but I had no knowledge of his cultural context in the UK.
Pretty extensive. Glad to see datil peppers included. Even in Florida they are not very well known outside of the general St. Augustine region. Very hot, yet very sweet as well. A coworker, native to StA, used to make a datil pepper sauce and bring it in to work to share. It was always a huge hit.
As I’ve said many times, this place is a nourishing intellectual resource.
[ Waits for government subsidy. ]
This is an infuriating thing about discourse with many of the higher educated leftists. They will make statements that exclude all possibilities except the thing they didn’t say and when you try to establish the part that remains as clear due to the process of elimination, they play “I didn’t say that”. Yet otoh, if you make any generalizations that fail to account for every little detail, they seize on the slightest oversight and infer whatever BS they want to tar you with as if that was your entire argument.
And it’s the same trajectory, the same stereotype brought to life, again.
As long as it’s just low-status oiks getting their property vandalised or shit shoved through their letterboxes, by beings brown and therefore magical, then the victims’ complaints are unimportant, according to Very Grand Lefties, like Dr Jonathan Miller, and indeed must be suppressed. For the greater good, baby. But when the same phenomenon starts happening to Very Grand Lefties, like Dr Jonathan Miller, in nicer parts of town, then it’s an outrage and something must be done.
Dinner and a show.
“Honka taught French Language and Culture…” well, I guess if was French kissing, then, it was OK.
Meanwhile in California a new certification drops.
Things are heating up in the AI art space.
‘TikTok Star’ doesn’t seem much of a credential.
[ Orders bejewelled blogging sash. ]
So much for the myth that lesbians are never rapists or child molesters.
I’m rather sorry that students did not spontaneously beat shit out of her. Tattooing “racist” on her face would have been the cherry on the sundae.
Every human alive of every race/sex has the capacity to lie, steal, cheat, rape and murder. The conceit that women never lie was a big claim during “believe all women” and has wreaked havoc in many false rape claims over the years. So of course lesbians can commit sex crimes. The question is how much/often. I am sure it is less often than trans. Someone (maybe linked here) compiled a list of mass shooters and political shootings and trans were way way more prominent on the list than their representation in the population.
I recall encountering endless radfem bullshit in the 70’s and 80’s about how evil men were and how virtuous women were.
I’m sure you’re right. Also less than gay men.
Perhaps not quite what you were looking for?
[ Orders full-length fur coat. ]