She’s a big girl. // He’s a big girl. // Vertical exercise bike. // The world’s longest running lab experiment, complete with gripping live feed. // Maglev self-levelling elevator goes up and down, also sideways and diagonally. // Cheap old houses. TLC not included. // Looking for lodgers? // Homeland of tea. // Yes, but is the coffee any good? // A dossier of monsters. // The squid and the whale. // I’m pretty sure he does this better than you do. // Oh, what are the humans doing now? // No, after you. // Pea salad. // Pecking order. // “Just don’t provoke them,” he reassured. (h/t, Julia) // A collection of period Maoist posters. // “Sometimes they can act like a solid.” // At last, your very own private island. // And finally, rather emphatically, there may be some softening of the metal.

Time, I think, for a little test of musical discernment. So, Korean or Hasidic? 

Oh yeah, “That wasn’t real communism.” We’ve seen a great example of that in Venezuela, where they put everybody on a kind of weight-loss plan that’s made the average citizen lose 20 lbs. Everyone’s starving in Venezuela. It’s like, “Hey, look – another example of what wasn’t real communism.” When someone says, “That wasn’t real communism,” here’s what it means: “I am so narcissistic and arrogant, and so convinced of the rightness of my ideology and my moral purity, that if I was the dictator of a communist state, the utopia would have come in as promised.” That’s what it means. So whenever anyone says that, you think, “Oh boy, I’ve got your number now. I know what you think of yourself.”  

Jordan Peterson.

Update:

And let’s not forget this:

A couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.

As noted previously, the left’s self-imagined radicals have little to gain from successful, independent people. Because success and independence – independence of them – makes you the enemy.  

Uri Harris on the ideological hegemony of the social sciences: 

[In a survey of the political preferences of social psychologists,] there were almost as many people who chose the furthest possible point to the left as there were who chose all the conservative points, the centre-point and the most moderate left-of-centre point combined… People that freely self-identify as far-left in the abstract, in other words irrespective of specific political issues, seem to me to be signalling something: that they are committed to an ideology. The fact that such a large portion of the most influential people in academic social psychology do so suggests that this ideology is entrenched in their field.

Which in turn suggests that what they’re actually doing may not in fact be science.

Franklin Einspruch on free speech and the prattle of Lindy West: 

West possesses a mysterious gift of psychic progressivism that lets her see into the hearts of men and unearth the real intentions behind their stated ones. Or so it would seem. These men are only pretending to care about freedom of speech, for example. They really want to harass marginalised people for having opinions… “They’re weaponising free speech to maintain their cultural dominance,” she says, obsequiously quoting Anita Sarkeesian, another psychic progressive. That flushing noise you hear is the sound of productive dialogue disappearing into the rhetorical toilet. Identitarians like West have never grasped that it is impossible to found a good-faith discussion on bad-faith premises such as these… The irony of [West’s] essay is that its main point – that all this defence of free speech is really about deflecting criticism – is coming out of a camp of left-identitarianism that spent much of the last decade answering criticism with charges of bigotry.

When not deliberately knocking sleeping passengers with her in-flight luggage and boasting about it in articles for feminist publications, and then complaining that no-one wants to sit next to her on a plane, Ms West, a “fat activist,” shares videos of herself eating biscuits. 

And Ace’s CBD on the obliviousness of the protesting class:

At the Impeach Trump March in Chicago 7/2/17, a group of protesters applaud a speech comprised almost entirely of Adolf Hitler quotes given by Shad Daley. This was 20 seconds after saying they need to fight fascism. After the speech, the organising member of refusefascism.org was desperate to get Shad more involved.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

For those of you about to fly somewhere:

Via Elephants Gerald, via Ace.