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Anthropology
Anthropology Free-For-All Policing

What You Wish For

August 29, 2024 52 Comments

Via pst314 in the comments, some intersectional complication:

After employees had gone unpaid, they were left with a dilemma: notify law enforcement about the founder of their company – which has a goal of abolishing the police – or handle it internally.

The company’s founder, Brandon Anderson, is alleged to have embezzled a quarter of a million dollars to fund a “lavish” lifestyle, including an extensive designer wardrobe, international travel and glamorous holidays, and the renting of several mansions. Evidence of which was proudly uploaded to Facebook.

Bling, as I believe they say.

Anderson committed “the perfect crime,” claimed Nancy Mariano, a former software engineer at the nonprofit, who explained that she was sceptical about the company notifying police because Anderson “is a black person” and “the way that police treat masculine-presenting black people is terrible.”

Masculine-presenting black people. Which perhaps tells us something about the company’s employees and the mental landscape they inhabit.

“Even if Brandon committed a crime, I don’t want Brandon to die, so I don’t want to put Brandon in that position,” said Mariano.

No laughing at the back.

However, not all employees felt the same.

The company in question, Raheem AI, is a chatbot app launched in 2017 with a stated mission to abolish the police and to replace them with “community-based crisis teams” and “liberated dispatchers” – namely, anti-police activists and likeminded social workers – who would respond to emergencies armed with bottles of water and lots of “social justice.”

I know. You’re tempted to invest.

And should this particular cake require icing, Mr Anderson was named “one of 100 Black LGBTQ Leaders to Watch” by the National Black Justice Coalition.

Leaders to watch, indeed.

If the trajectory above sounds a little familiar, readers may be thinking of this saga here, in which Ms Xahra Saleem, co-founder of the activist group All Black Lives Bristol, and an applauded statue-toppler, decolonised a charity’s bank account to the tune of £30,000. A sum subsequently put to use enabling Ms Saleem’s appetite for cosmetics, hairstyling, and takeaways.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Politics

Your Affirmation Is Mandatory

August 21, 2024 121 Comments

And he will “take note” of who does not obey:

I expect Liberal MPs to march in the pride parade in Ottawa, even if they do it without party approval. I will take note of who does not. https://t.co/IPxXmgGH9b

— Jake Landau (He/Him) 🇵🇸🇺🇦 (@JakeLandauTO) August 19, 2024

Mr Landau, since you ask, is a “left wing, progressive Liberal organiser” – pronouns “he/him” – who spends a lot of his time being “exhausted and sad.” Oh, and he doesn’t like people who “suppress… dissenting voices.”

Mr Landau has not yet specified what he will do to those reluctant to march on demand. Something progressive, no doubt. Sadly, Mr Landau, our champion of radical dissent, is not permitting questions or replies from those insufficiently like-minded.

Via Mia Hughes.

Update, via the comments:

Rafi adds,

Compelled speech isn’t enough. Now it’s compelled marching.

Ah, but, you see, they’re “dissenting,” albeit in a very conformist way. And any failure to “dissent” – on demand, as instructed – will be punished. Compliance under duress being the way of the dissenter.

The rhetorical inversions may, I grant you, take some getting used to. But you will start celebrating now, comrade, spontaneously, and with great joy.

Lest your hesitation be noted.

Update 2:

Oh, and speaking of affirmation being demanded:

BREAKING: DNC Protesters BLOCK CARS demanding they say “Free Palestine”, angry driver drives through, gets out of the car to CONFRONT protesters when his window was dented pic.twitter.com/HuSWTyJ43Q

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) August 23, 2024

Behold our betters and their recreational malice.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Politics

Reality Is An Inherent Problem

August 19, 2024 130 Comments

I paraphrase, but not by much:

It started, since you ask, with chappie being annoyed by the existence of a cruise ship. Says he,

The amount of money and resources wasted on this abomination could have changed uncountable lives across the globe for the better. 

Readers will note that the word wasted is doing some heavy lifting there. That the building of said cruise ship paid the wages of thousands of people, in several cities, for years, and that the crewing and maintenance of said ship pays the wages of thousands more, and that the thousands of passengers aboard it at any given time will be spending large sums of money in any number of tourist destinations, making lives better across the globe, seems to have escaped our indignant chappie’s attention.

But still, he has “he/they” pronouns in his bio. So some markers of status are totally okay, apparently. Chappie tells us that he’s a “Black communicator,” whose podcast “paints a multi-faceted picture of the Black, brown, and Native American experience through story-telling.”

Relevant footnote.

Relevant meme.

Lifted from the comments, which you’re reading, of course.

Update:

In the comments, EmC quotes this,

The fact that people have to work to eat is an inherent problem.

And adds,

So the socialist wants to be an aristocrat?

Or an owner of slaves, perhaps. Some arrangement in which he, Our Obvious Better, doesn’t have to do things that others find of value. Something non-reciprocal.

From the thread above:

It’s certainly a mindset that’s quite telling. For instance, this came to mind:

So, for some, the very idea that a grown-up person should pay their debts – or keep their word, or honour their promises – is something to be “defeated.”

Or, adulthood is such a drag.

Update 2:

It’s curious how often such complaints boil down to, “Other people, less fabulous people, should labour for free, for my benefit, until I say otherwise.” Which, it has to be said, is an odd construal of righteousness.

We’ve been here before, of course. As when an unhappy young madam realised, belatedly and with some annoyance, that bills have to be paid, and livings have to be earned. A seemingly overlooked detail that prompted much umbrage and baffled indignation, on grounds that cars and food and houses are things “which we should just be able to have.”

As I said in reply,

The emotional assumption that Things Should Just Be There For Me, Forever, In Unlimited Quantities is, I think, something best addressed before one’s children venture out into the world.

Children who, as adults, may then make TikTok videos of themselves bemoaning the fact that they aren’t simply being given a free house, and free food, and a free car, and free petrol for the free car. Children who, as adults, may then seem genuinely bewildered by the prospect of being responsible for the feeding and clothing of any children that they, in turn, might have.

Another thing occurs to me. If pretty much everything you need, or want, should just somehow be there anyway, on an indefinite basis, via some oddly unarticulated rearrangement of the universe, then it’s not obvious how gratitude might fit into such a mindset.

Answers on a postcard, please.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Politics Pronouns Or Else

It’s Super Important

August 15, 2024 69 Comments

Further to The Blurting, a footnote of sorts:

“My Fox News dad makes everything political” https://t.co/JxaZvPwrSg

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) August 15, 2024

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Update, via the comments:

The above, it seems to me, is not so much a declaration of values as a psychological profile.

As Rafi says in reply,

I’d buy my own laser cutter.

Not having to deal with such people does have a cash value. If in order to use a communal laser cutter, you first have to “strive to uphold” the notion that sex differences are unrelated to biology, that “meritocracy is a joke,” and that, despite all available evidence, “nonbinary people” somehow aren’t aggravating poseurs… Then, well, buying your own laser cutter seems a much better option.

After all, this life is finite and best not wasted on proximity to wankers.

Oh, and some of that super important intersectionality.

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Written by: David
Anthropology His Pretty Nails Parenting

Shush, Daddy’s Being Fabulous

August 13, 2024 87 Comments

From the forthcoming film by Vaishnavi Sundar, Behind The Looking Glass, about women whose partners, or fathers, have ‘transitioned’:

You’ve got to pretend that it’s all okay… You have to realise that your dad has fallen in love with himself, and there’s no part for you in that where you are not just a prop.

It’s like this person came along and said, “You know how you had a dad? Well, that was all a lie. And all that time, your dad didn’t like being your dad.” And my dad was kind of replaced by this other person. This other person who didn’t love me like my dad loved me, wasn’t interested in me like my dad was.

And his love was conditional.

“Your dad has fallen in love with himself, & there is no part for you in there where you are not just a prop.”

There is profound silence surrounding the lives of the children with trans id-ing father. Are they just props used for championing a delusion? #behindthelookingglass https://t.co/MGRE78WGLk pic.twitter.com/aw9yFit55J

— Vaishnavi Sundar (@Vaishax) July 27, 2024

Emma Thomas, the woman recounting her somewhat unorthodox childhood, also appears in this longer interview. The subjects touched on include unmentionable erotic motives, ideological capture, and the experience of watching a man publicly enacting an approximation of breastfeeding. It’s a strange listen, necessarily, a little sad, and sometimes darkly funny.

Ms Thomas also has a blog, Children Of Transitioners, in which she relates her experiences, and those of others, and where she attempts to parse the phenomenon of dads in dresses:

Most people wouldn’t post a picture of themselves in their underwear in this context.

For instance.

Update, via the comments:

Pete SJ visits Ms Thomas’ blog and quotes this:

While many people assume that autogynephilia is all about the clothes, the fact is that children of transitioners are often familiar with the other markers of the condition. When your father wants to go to a bra fitting or make up session with you, or wants to know all about your period, that’s autogynephilia too. If your father is doing this, he is involving you in his erotic world.

Adding,

“Involving you in his erotic world” – an economic summary that catches the ambiguous or boundary-transgressing aspects of the behaviour. 

At which point, this eye-widening saga came to mind.

And note that those applauding Mr Yates, the star of the link above – the bewigged man quizzing schoolgirls about their panties – are overwhelmingly ladies of a progressive leaning. Selling out their own daughters, and the daughters of their neighbours.

In order to be seen holding fashionable views.

Or, as Ms Thomas recounts in the embedded video:

I lived this very, quite sheltered life, really, in some ways, and then I moved to this situation where there are a lot of people who were cross-dressing and, you know, selling sex. There was a guy who was a prostitute. He’d left a wife and two little children to sell sex. He moved in with us for, like, three months. 

So again, some boundaries being tested.

Given the current near-ubiquity of trans activism, it’s curious how little attention is given to estranged wives – ‘trans widows’ – or, as above, estranged children. Who, I suppose, would be ‘trans orphans’.

To which dicentra replies,

When they stick their heads above the parapet they are told to get over their transphobia and affirm their new mum/wife. The term “trans widow” is considered to be transphobic, because of course it is. 

Before citing the following scolding comment, directed at Ms Thomas by a disaffected reader:

“‘Trans widow’ is an appalling term, centring others where the focus should be on the trans person becoming his/her true self. Of course, there have to be difficult adjustments, but this is not death!” 

Yet the popular activist term deadnaming.

And you’d think the news that your husband no longer exists and that your entire marriage was a farce – or that your dad no longer exists and is now competing for the title of mom – or some bizarre hooker aunt – might be a legitimate basis for some, shall we say, irritation.

Even so-called “phobia.”

Update 2:

The entire documentary can now be viewed here.

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.