Reheated (128)
As I’m a little under the weather, some items from the archives:
Their Happiness Hurt My Feelings.
The intersectional perils of Zoom meetings. With mad people.
Other taboos include references to “simple activities like family dance parties,” which are apparently a thing, and “gardening with a spouse.”
Curiously, given the stated importance of “sensitivity” and being mindful of what things might mean, we aren’t invited to ponder the kind of person who would resent someone else’s wedding photo. And then complain about it. Or whether such neurotic affectations, these unhappy mental habits, are something to be actively encouraged. In the name of progress. At a university.
On ‘anti-capitalist’ lifestyles and a misremembered sitcom.
Practically every week the couple’s survival is dependent on the neighbours’ car, the neighbours’ phone, the neighbours’ unpaid labour, a convoluted favour of some kind. And of course they’re dependent on the “petty” bourgeois infrastructure maintained by all those people who haven’t adopted a similarly perilous ‘ecological’ lifestyle.
The Goods’ highly selective rejection of bourgeois life is only remotely possible because of their own previous bourgeois habits – a paid-off mortgage, a comfortable low-crime neighbourhood with lots of nearby greenery, and well-heeled neighbours who are forever on tap when crises loom, i.e., weekly.
To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is therefore unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions.
And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends.
If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.
Literary World Unveils Doomsday Machine.
Underwhelming artists threaten to strike, world continues turning.
For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
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They’re threatening me with a good time.
The threat – a period with no poetry readings by poets no-one seems to care about – does seem rather limited in its consequence.
I’m still processing the logistics of a strike by unpopular novelists. As I said at the time:
Better stock up on those canned goods, people.
That.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, barkeep.
Some of the Margo gags still hold up. Her interactions with tardy workmen and uppity council staff are quite funny, fifty years on.
Though I’m still trying to fathom the idea, aired in the Guardian, of The Good Life as some biting critique of capitalism, or “the opposite of Thatcherism.” I mean, Jerry grumbles about his commute to work, but that’s about it.
None of Tom’s self-righteous ramblings have any kind of persuasive impact – nor are they meant to. The prospect of keeping the lights on with a loud, unreliable generator powered by faeces somehow, amazingly, didn’t catch on.
I suppose one way to discern the preferences of the writers, and certainly of the audience, is to see which character gets most of the best lines. And that’s Margo. She may be high-maintenance and an insufferable snob, but her indignation at the state of socialist Britain in the mid-70s definitely struck a chord with viewers.
As I said in the original thread,
The comparisons with Mrs Thatcher – elected as Tory leader at around the time the series first aired – are hard to miss. As the Spectator put,
Which, again, doesn’t exactly support claims of the sitcom being some validation of socialism and modern ecological posturing.
No Vogon poetry readings? Oh no!
[ Monty Python’s “The Poet McTeagle” comes to mind. ]
If this be Hegelian farce I’d rather less of it.
(via)
Pictured.
My exposure to Dame Penelope is limited but it’s difficult to imagine anyone else in the roles I’ve seen.
Okay, I laughed.
Laughed again.
There exists Margo fan art.
Quite right, too.
Lifted from the previous thread:
Apparently, it’s Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller History Month.
We must all gush and pretend again.
Coming soon: Trespasser, Thief, and Antisocial Nuisance History Month.
“Only some accounts can reply.”
Can’t help feeling it’s a tad symbolic that the only replies allowed are his own.
Almost too on-the-nose.
Also Pride Month.
The sin from which all others flow.
The ZombieTime blog remains a reference source for examples of such depravity.
It’s an odd sensation, the realisation that there are people who would expect me to identify with… that. As if it would speak to me, affirm me, or enhance my standing in some way.
Which lets any rational adult left in the room that one isn’t in the presence of any kind of artist but a con one.
Whether I produce a great cup of coffee or write the Great American Novel or put paint on canvass, what I produce is only as good as what other people are willing to pay for. Period.
[ Sneezing, wheezing, rustling of tissues. ]
Kind of sounds what happened to the 80s American show “Family Ties” … the parents were old hippies now living middleclass lives with their kids and the oldest son (played by Michael J Fox) was the Republican/capitalist-running-dog of the family to the consternation of his parents.
He became the favorite of the audience.
Related is the show “All in the Family” (70s) with Archie Bunker — a working class “bigot” with his 60s hippie daughter and son-in-law living in the house.
Audiences got to hate “Meathead” and his ‘woke’ lecturing of Archie. Archie turned out quite popular with the audience.
Also Pride Month.
The look on the little boy’s face in the upper right photo says it all, really.
Poetry readings: I once (once) by accident saw some college students slam poetry. That is it. If they think a strike of poets would bother me….hahahah I wouldn’t even know!
Bondi beach memorial was linked to. A sizeable % of leftists claim to believe (who knows what they really believe) that Bondi beach massacre was staged. Sure, the liberal media were in on it? The online vids? FFS words escape me.
[ Rechecks estimated arrival of chicken-soup-laden swallow. ]
Staged? As in actors pretending to be shot dead? Really?
Speaking of insane thinking, Paul Krugman seems to have gotten crazier.
Silly boy, legs won’t get you anywhere.
Don’t much care for video games but the movie version might well be worth the price of a ticket.
I wonder how long it’s going to be before it is revealed that Henry Nowak had form as an armed home invader, counterfeit distributor, and drug addict. After which he will be able to be sainted alongside G. Floyd.
I am rather upset right now.
Is it the being wrong about, well, everything all the time do you think?
Alan is a leftist academic. Alan tells lies.
‘Professor specialising in British colonialism.’
A professional liar.
Well, it must be strange to have so much of one’s life, so many hours of every day, premised on an urge to deceive.
Just going to leave this here for no reason whatsoever.
The first thing they mention is a wedding photo? That’s the biggest oppression? These people need serious therapy.
If you pick away the mannered language, all those hastily begged questions, what’s left, stated plainly, does seem rather absurd. A laughable contrivance. And these are the intellectual titans telling unworldly teenagers how it is. And charging for the privilege.
As I said in the post:
The dynamic of such grievances, or professed grievances, is familiar, indeed almost always the same, and weirdly resentful. It smells of malice. The whole thrust of the thing – the motive behind the rattling of their mouths – is to make you insecure and compliant, to make you defer and become neurotic and dishonest. Just like them.
Bad medicine.
The past is what we say it is, comrade.
Quite. The inversion is quite daring.
The Guardian reader referred to in the post claims that Tom Good is a role model for modern eco-fretting lefties. “See how far ahead they were,” says he. And rather bizarrely, “they usually prevail in the end.” But the Goods only survive – insofar as they do, narrowly and temporarily – with endless mooching off other, less fanciful people, chiefly their neighbours. And the final episode does rather throw their prospects into further doubt.
And as commenters noted in the original thread, Tom, whatever his pieties, is not altogether admirable. Richard Briers, the actor who played him, referred to the character as a bully and a selfish parasite. A man who has dragged his wife into a needlessly dire situation, bullies her into giving up things she loves, including at one point her home, and who has made no plans for when he and his wife are too old and frail to haul sacks of potatoes upstairs and into the spare bedroom.
All because he was sometimes bored at work.
As role models go, there’s some room for improvement.
Leftists themselves stage events for political gain, so they claim that their enemies* are also doing the same.
*Leftists don’t just have “opponents”, they have actual enemies.
[Looks at rubber boats hitting the beaches] Invasion, check.
[Looks at the percentage of London that’s British and Irish over time] Displaced from their lands, check.
[Looks at the policy of the British government and the stated intentions of the left] Culture deliberately undermined, check.
It’s too late for that. They need to be quarantined from normal society so as to prevent further infection, social contagion and damage.
Sort of like BlueSky.
Redundant, however, from the link…
I’ll denounce myself now.
Is like the baby boxes at fire stations, only bigger. Do you have an unwanted gay person? Drop them off here.
Watching the video, though, I couldn’t help but think if this is intended for victims of a “hate crime,” why the rainbow? if a Jew were being harassed and entered one of these establishments, would they keep them safe until “help” arrived . . . assuming it does at all?
What’s that you say? Slipping standards and students who can’t read?
Band name.
Alan is a leftist academic. Alan tells lies.
“Indigenous” is a liberal laundering and selective reapplication of blood and soil claims. Under the liberal regime, whites are propagandized that blood and soil claims are the worst thoughts of the worst people in the world, the root cause of hatred and war, the obstacle to Utopia. Also under the liberal regime, nonwhite blood and soil claims are deferred to and legally protected under the concept of “indigenous”.
There’s no general principle of denying peoplehood to those who win wars and colonize, because that would be denying it to everybody. You win a war rather than losing a war, you do to the other guys what they would do to you if they had the chance: it’s not nice but that’s just one more round of history where your people don’t go extinct. Whites are different, and being exploited for it now, not because they conquered but because they didn’t feel entirely triumphant about it, and had charity towards the people they conquered.
He can play word games, we can play word games, but he’s perfectly able to distinguish the historical people who he pretends don’t have distinct historical peoplehood, and he exults in describing their being lost in the blender as paler skinned individuals who happen to be within the Yookay boundaries. There’s no principled debate here where you persuade him that your group identity and interests are moral according to his axioms. You either act like a group and make it non negotiable or you get lost in the blender.
Replace “deceive” with “destroy”.