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.
What’s interesting about that is how you can see the subversion process in one screenshot. The first three items under humility are perfectly reasonable – listen for comprehension, impact over intention, don’t assume perfect knowledge – and then they tilt into full-blown question-begging and a priori statements.
That said, I suspect if you actually applied “impact over intentions” to these freaks they’d insist it meant something very different.
The question-begging is so obvious, such nakedly bad thinking, that it’s basically insulting. Sort of, we think this is how stupid you must be.
This matters. I mean, pointing this out, publicly, matters. They are psychologically aberrant and morally disgusting. They are not good people. They do not mean well. There’s malice afoot.
It’s not merely a case of we disagree on such-and-such. It’s a case of there’s something fucking wrong with you.
I don’t think it’s quite that. Pace Dalrymple, I think it’s a power flex. “We can say this, and we can make you say it, too, or at least not contradict us openly for fear of losing your livelihood and social standing.”
That’s still an insult, but it’s more of a humiliation ritual. Which is, I argue, the entire point.
Yes, quite possibly. I should have said stupid or submissive.
Again, malice afoot.
Classic motte and bailey.
The Other Half is watching an old Mythbusters episode on whether someone could be killed by their own flatulence.
We are now both watching an old Mythbusters episode on whether someone could be killed by their own flatulence.
#QualityTime
Like so many such “reality” shows, the execution never lives up to the premise. They did one episode on an urban “myth” I have direct personal knowledge of, and the situation they tested misunderstands what actually happened (and was documented to have happened) so badly that the entire test was basically useless.
I’ve seen a lot of attempts to defend this kind of “backyard science” but “ideas are tested by experiment” is only valid if you know how to construct an experiment. If you half-ass the experimental design you run the very real risk of “proving” something that isn’t actually true. And the number of people I’ve seen saying things like “Mythbusters debunked that” (bitch, please, Mythbusters has never debunked anything) indicates this isn’t an idle fear.
Remember when they “debunked” splinter wounds caused by 18th century sailing ship cannon fire?
[ Remembers there is rhubarb and ginger gin in fridge. ]
Back in a minute.
I do remember enjoying the episode with the origami lead foil balloon, and the one with the imploding railroad tank car, chiefly because you don’t often get to see very large steel objects behaving like that.
[ Slurps. ]
You know, if there’s a place one should reasonably expect to feel safe, it would be called that.
I lost interest in that show when they “proved” that women can handle pain better than men*. Yet another tiresome argument that I find myself alone in making, in spite of the bloody obvious examples all around. But yes, childbirth FFS.
*Though they were losing me even before that. It’s a shame because some of those experiments were cool and interesting. But after the first season or two it became apparent that they were running out of material that the general audience might be interested in. Then the pandering started to get traction.
The thing to keep in mind about television is that it panders to women – always has – because that’s who watches it. Men watch sports and movies (although they’re being driven away from those media as well), women watch television shows.
There’s a reason why he’s called David Fwench.
Not to reply to myself but…replying to myself…one other episode they did that ticked me off was the airplane-taking-off-from-a-conveyor-belt. Their implementation was cool/creative, and while they didn’t literally fake it, they did it in such a way, with certain commentary and framing, that made what they actually did seem different from what the actual experiment did. This caused a few arguments amongst several friends who ALL understood the basic physics properly but disagreed on what the show showed. And F* Myth Busters for all that wasted time.
It’s always best to assume French is lying.
David French? David Brooks? Are they the same person?
Funny how that question keeps coming up.