It Tells Us Who You Are
Lifted from the comments, this caught my eye:
It’s obviously not about the three dollars and understanding this is a prerequisite for building civilization https://t.co/zzDNdmJ0Rw
— wanye (@xwanyex) September 15, 2026
Turns out you can always find a self-styled communist to defend antisocial behaviour, in this case, repeated, somewhat triumphant fare-dodging.
The chap doing the fare-dodging, since you ask, is a fashion designer who likes to pose with expensive cars, and whose fashion shoots have employed a fare-dodging motif.
Because fashion is so inspirational, you see. A force for our collective betterment.
As one might imagine, our proud communist is experiencing some pushback in his replies, generally from people who actually pay for the services they use, thereby helping to ensure said services remain in existence.
Among the many replies, the not inapt notion that if $3 is too trivial a sum to warrant an arrest or any kind of enforcement, it is also a trivial sum over which to risk being arrested.
And if you’re willing to commit a crime for $3, needlessly, for amusement, that tells us something.
Indeed. Fare-dodging is rarely a crime of desperation. It is more typically a display of contempt. For the likes of thee and me.
And as others note in the replies, people who commit more serious crimes on public transport tend to be fare-dodgers. Enforcing punishment of the smaller crime can have quite dramatic secondary effects:
Keeping fare evaders out of the subway by any means necessary has huge ancillary benefits. https://t.co/rhgBXCBs4r
— Harry Heymann 🥑 (@harryh) September 15, 2026
Needless to say, our proud communist is responding to his critics with all of the mental elegance one would expect:
The subject of fare-dodging – and the assumptions of its devotees – has cropped up here before.
Including claims of supposedly altruistic fare-dodging, whereby stiffing others with the bill, the cost of you getting from A to B, because you can’t be arsed, is somehow the very measure of politeness. Of being a caring and progressive person.
A freeloading world, in which abusing the trust of others is hailed as “the best way to live” and a basis for applause, and whose practitioners pretend a virtue, a moral sophistication, that seemingly has little to do with how they actually behave.
And likewise, the progressive annoyance at those who dare to notice the phenomenon at all. A weirdly uniform contrivance, with lecturers, lawyers and “Oscar-nominated” screenwriters expressing their “exhausted rage” – not at the criminal activity occurring right in front of them, every day, and with ever-greater boldness – but at those who mention it, even in the mildest terms.
That’s incredible. Does she think she’s being paid to destroy public transport?
Well, it’s an odd sentiment, certainly, from someone whose ostensible function is to maintain the very infrastructure that she is merrily undermining.
Resulting in an unsustainable transport network on which an estimated 70% of passengers are now freeloading, having been encouraged to do so by network employees. Because those norms of reciprocation have been deemed terribly racist and unfair. A feat of social progress that law-abiding taxpayers are expected to subsidise without complaint, despite the obvious insult, until the whole thing collapses.
And the blame is placed elsewhere.
And from the replies on X, this:
Ah, but theirs is a game you’re not allowed to win.
Even The Atlantic has been obliged to admit that applying normal moral consequences to fare-dodging has numerous desirable effects. Including a very significant rise in revenue – an extra $10 million in San Francisco – a massive reduction in vandalism and consequent repair and clean-up costs, and a fall in crime of over 40%.
Fare enforcement isn’t entirely or even mainly about revenue recovery, it’s also one of the few permitted means to prevent antisocial people using the system antisocially. If we could police the antisocial behavior, the noise, the boundary testing as such, we could be more open minded about why and how we finance a public transport system.
There’s lots of ways to fund a system other than the inefficient validation of every user at point of use, and there’s even a case to be made for running a system at a loss if you believe frictionless mobility in a city reduces car congestion and creates other market and social opportunities.
But if we’re not allowed to discriminate against boundary testing as such, and we obviously don’t want to create frictionless market opportunities for the boundary testers, then we can’t have nice things like being able to move from A to B without having to fumble for the right token to scan at lots of little gates.
Have you seen the videos of blacks proudly laughingly pouring laundry detergent from one jug to another, to top it off before purchase?
For those who missed it, Ms Malan, a self-styled “artist” in San Francisco, wants us to know, via TikTok, how habitual freeloading and abusing the trust of others is “working smarter, not harder.”
The above is from this:
And these, remember, are among the least obnoxious scenarios.
You know what would be “working smarter, not harder” for our justice system?
Finding ways to permanently remove Ms Malan from society. And everyone like her. Maybe relocated to Soviet style labor camps where they can experience true socialism.
As I said in the linked post, the problem, as so often, is one of a morally subnormal demographic:
The weight of shitty, selfish people is not to be underestimated.
And from the subsequent thread, this:
Which strikes me as immensely convenient – to have a sense of virtue, of moral superiority, that seemingly has little to do with how you actually behave.
In other art news …
(via)
Extreme manicures for the petty thieves?
This.
They should have kept mum and sold it to him…after upping the price.
[ Starts compiling Friday’s Ephemera. ]
[ Tilts head, squints, moves stuff around. ]
Inefficient in what way in 2026?
I used public transit for most of my life–buses, streetcars, and subways–and fumbling for tokens or change was never a real problem.
So 60% of the crime is still committed by fare-payers. What stellar citizens!
This is already on Insty, but it bears being on infinite repeat. The below is just a skeleton. Read the whole thing:
It seems unwise to allow such ungrateful creatures to live among us.
I can’t disagree that making a custodial arrest and hauling someone into central booking over a $3 fare evasion is an inefficient use of taxpayer-funded resources.
So I have a modest proposal. If an MTA or city police officer witnesses someone attempting to dodge a subway fare, Instead of arresting or even citing the scofflaw, the cop simply gets one free no-consequences shot with his baton. Nothing above the shoulders.
Question asked.
Mostly OT, but why this charmer has a case of the ass with Ms. Flying Squad is truly unfathomable, though the point about “object of desire” is spot on.
Muldoon, This sentence fragment
why this charmer has a case of the ass with Ms. Flying Squad is truly unfathomable, though the point about “object of desire” is spot on.
is so perfect as a stand-alone thing, that I can’t bring myself to sully it by clicking the link.
The glasses! The scowl! The makeup!
If a woman objects to the naked ad campaign or anything else that Ms Magnificent Tits does, you can predict 100% that she is ugly. It is envy pure and simple. To deny that men and women find each other very very attractive, so attractive that we do stupid things to woo each other, so attractive that we stay together for life (usually) is to just deny reality.
To deny that there are men and women is to deny reality.
And that charmer really did look like the DMV-type drone in Monsters Inc.
Yes, but proved your point about ugly and envy…
Another kind of “tell us who you are”:
Save us from an apocalypse? I think Pip (real name) and they/them’s pals are more likely to be the cause.
Women see all other women as competitors, because they ARE.
Women are constantly low-key afraid of losing their man to a younger, prettier woman, because we know it happens pretty often. We know how easily y’all’s heads are turned.
Listen to “Jolene.”
Of course it’s envy. What else would it be? A shapely babe like Sweeney who’s not afraid to bare it all is a mortal threat to a woman’s security. If a woman has invested time and emotion and childbearing in a man, she’s terrified that she’ll lose him anyway to a flirty chick.
I’m not sure what the enbys are afraid of, though. They don’t have men to lose. Maybe they just know they never had a chance, and someone hot like Sweeney is a red-hot poker to that wound.
Or maybe sexual abuse made them so averse to their own sexuality that they can’t stand to see it in someone else.
Pro tip: When you’re with a woman and you visibly admire another woman, she sees it as you checking out her competition and maybe thinking of trading up. I’m not saying not to notice; just be discrete.
Maybe the internet wasn’t a mistake.
Isn’t that progressives in a nutshell?
Well, I suppose it breaks the spell, the pretence. And the vehemence and uniformity of the reaction, the instant hostility and personal insults, is quite something. It’s… odd. If you poke through the reactions to Ms Andrews’ original tweet, the pattern is hard to miss. It’s almost surreal. And, I’d suggest, telling.
Again, if sociology were a credible field and not itself ideologically captured, this is the kind of phenomenon that you’d think might be of interest. Maybe a study or two, a little interrogation.
It’s worth noting that Ms Andrews’ initial observation – the one that prompted such vitriol and chest-thumping – wasn’t inflammatory or party-political. She was counting the number of fare-dodgers visible in a five-minute period in order to get some sense of how common it is, this normalisation of antisocial behaviour.
Simply noticing the phenomenon, at all, was enough to trigger the outrage and name-calling, the avalanche of hissing, whataboutery and ludicrous convolution. Which, again, does rather suggest an odd psychology. A weird sensitivity.
Speaking of progressive psychology, a guide for elementary school teachers:
Note the conceit that all teachers must reflect on “how” – not whether – they “perpetuate racism.” And likewise, they must simply “accept” that education is “an instrumental tool for maintaining and furthering the ideology of white supremacy.”
These are not good people. They do not mean well.
Not that you need another excuse to waste time but . . . the Air Theremin.
[ Checks Ephemera one last time, clicks schedule. ]
[ Reddit mods spring into action, deleting posts right and left. ]
TOO SOON.
[ Eye twitches, breathes into paper bag. ]
Treasure.
Lift your elbows.
[ Spits on tea towel, wipes bar. ]
Primum and non look to have gone missing.
It’ll need a chisel, mate.
I’m going to call it a patina. Like jewellery.
On immigration and its consequences.
Encrustation might be more apt.
All things conservatives abhor engaging in when their ideas are on the line, like promoting free markets, individualism, and opposing socialist ideas. Especially by engaging in those things in the third column. Now who do you suppose will win the resulting cultural/propaganda war?
Here. Have a calming gin and tonic.
[ Attempts to lift drink from bar. Finds it is immovably stuck to the “patina”. ]