Classy lady of note. || In coffee-related news. || Thriller, deconstructed. || This is not drawing. || A robot that draws on walls. || Because you’ve always wanted one. || The cost of lowered standards. || The British at play. Yes, we all do it. || Footpath of note. || A famous fibreglass foetus. || Monolith action figure. “Zero points of articulation.” || It’s a suitcase and a mini-kitchen. || It’s a pocket knife, a bottle opener, and a pivoted USB stick. || New York, seen from above, in very high definition. || Snake attack. (h/t, Julia) || Ten hours of ocean creatures. || Camel versus cactus. || Excuse of note. || This. (h/t, Dicentra) || The Einstein Theory of Relativity, 1923. || Please stop noticing reality. || Meet the robots of Ocado. (h/t, drb) || And finally, a size-conscious twister overcompensates.

Following a number of enquiries as to why I don’t have a specific tag for items involving the cartoonish Laurie Penny, I thought I’d compile a few of my posts on the British left’s foremost unreliable narrator. It’s necessarily incomplete – there are several short posts and endless, lengthy comments I haven’t included – but it should convey a flavour of Laurie’s intermittent relationship with reality, her ongoing struggles with logic, and her delightful personality. 

And 8 minutes should do it. Specifically, 8 minutes of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, whose Pace Investigations No. 7, seen in edited form below, “asks how one copes with acceleration and deceleration while enduring institutional mediation, shared space, and other external forces.”

Well, obviously.

This immense artistic work, “repeats 15 times consecutively over 6 hours and 27 minutes. In each cycle, the performance duration is either increased or decreased by half.” And thus, “What begins as a 1 minute performance incrementally becomes a 2 hour 13 minute performance, then incrementally becomes a 1 minute performance again.” “The tension between mechanical and affective time is,” we’re told, “always palpable.”

A tension illustrated by the deafening applause that greets the climax of Ms Schaefer’s performance, and by the lady seen on the right, around 1:30, who enters this arena of profound activity armed with carrier bags, and who then looks unsure of what to do, before heading to the adjacent cafeteria, seen on the left, where a fortifying beverage is purchased.

It’s nail-biting stuff. And do stay tuned for Ms Schaefer’s much-anticipated revisiting of the Great Coat Hanger Feat – seen previously here – not once, but many times.

Or, How Dare You Not Perform Our Fashionable Contortions.   

In times of extremism, moderation itself can come to seem the greater enemy to those ideologically possessed, in part because it is the true danger: The public will tend to move toward it by default, and thus the instinctive recourse by those who sense the fragility of their extreme doctrines to resort to coercive means to prevail in arguments they would not otherwise win.

Speaking, as we were, of the more mendacious and hysterical reactions to Jordan Peterson by activists and journalists (and increasingly, activist-journalists) – here’s Wesley Yang on the same: 

Further to this unedifying exchange, more mouthings of the woke:

Some of us identify as queer, non-binary, asexual, femme, men, POC, etc. We are your neighbours, we are your co-workers, we are concerned citizens who feel that one does not need to be part of an organisation or pre-existing group to speak up and oppose oppression wherever it rears its ugly head.

So says Humans Against Hate, a group of anonymous Portland activists who rail against the “oppression” of ideas being discussed, and whose implied definition of neighbourliness is, shall we say, intriguing.

You see, if Jordan Peterson is permitted to speak to people who wish to hear him and wish to ask him questions, then the venue being hired will be assailed by a mob of ill-informed Mao-lings, for whom Peterson’s arguments exist only as caricature, and who promise to “disrupt” not only the event in question, thereby spoiling the evening of roughly 3,000 people about whom the Mao-lings know nothing, but also other, unrelated events, involving unrelated people, just because they can. “We will not stand for bigots coming to our city,” say these self-imagined warriors, these champions of the downtrodden.

Because harassing random people and ruining their evenings, while exulting in the thrill of mob coercion and intimations of thuggery, is what people who aren’t full of hate do, apparently.