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.

Natalie Solent on magical thinking, then and now:

Nongqawuse was a fifteen year old Xhosa girl who in 1856 had a vision in which three ancestral spirits told her that if the Xhosa people showed their trust by destroying their crops and killing their cattle, then on the appointed day the spirits would raise the dead, bountifully replace all that was destroyed, and sweep the British into the sea. Thousands believed this prophecy and slaughtered their cattle. But the dead slept on and the British remained in place. Nongqawuse explained that this lack of action was due to the amagogotya, the stingy ones, who had kept their cattle back from slaughter. She urged everyone to greater efforts. A new date was set for the prophecy to finally come true. The rate of cattle-killing rose to a climax. Eventually the Xhosa lost patience, and, with remarkable mercy, handed Nongqawuse over to the British. By then famine had reduced the population of British Kaffraria from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000.

Do click for the ‘now’ part.

Konstantin Kisin on the unhappy realities of ‘progressive’ utopia: 

These enemies of the [Soviet] state included my great-grandparents who met in a concentration camp for political prisoners. Every morning at their camp, three people would be picked out at random from the general population of the camp and thrown into the icy waters of the lake to freeze and drown in full view of the other prisoners to ‘keep things under control.’ With this background, I am —perhaps understandably— hypersensitive to the emerging far-left in Western politics. I can’t help noticing similarities in the rhetoric about “eradicating inequality,” “smashing the class system,” and a new age of “radical egalitarianism.” And when I do, I shudder, because… it’s a reminder of the unforgiving reality that those who don’t realise how good they have it, or take their lives of plenty for granted, are vulnerable to demagogic ideologies that promise to tear it all down to build a ‘better tomorrow.’

At which point, these budding intellectuals came to mind.