With the season of good cheer bearing down upon us, like the walls of the Death Star trash compactor, patrons are reminded that any Christmas shopping done via this Amazon UK link, or via the widget in the sidebar, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

Readers are of course welcome to direct any surges of goodwill to the tip jar buttons located in the sidebar and below the fold. I promise not to protest.

Oh, and open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

But, you know, in a jolly kind of way.

Laughed, not sorry:

Imagine the daily torment of being married to someone high in neuroticism (emotional instability), low in conscientiousness, low in agreeableness, and eager to try anything new or exciting.

Imagine a spouse with the psychological profile of a Green Party member. pic.twitter.com/szrZP9A8o9

— i/o (@avidseries) November 25, 2025

And from the replies.

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But with late-in-life cross-dressing.

Make it stop 🤣 pic.twitter.com/3gTboejRnf

— Binky (@TheOnlyGuru) November 11, 2025

No, don’t go. Put down those car keys.

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Or, Assume The Position.

A point made in the comments and possibly worth repeating:

From what I’ve seen over the years, the word ally is typically used, by the people who rush to use it, to mean something like advocate, or mouthpiece, or supplicant, or puppet. There’s no discernible interest in, or expectation of, reciprocation; no obvious shared goal or mutual benefit. Indeed, the role, once assumed, appears to entail saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming unreliable and absurd.

Say, by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow, magically, women. Or that a reluctance to mouth fabulist pronouns, to affirm a person’s imaginary themness, is some life-threatening moral oversight.

And then there are the not infrequent detours into outright struggle sessions – as seen, for instance, here, where a disobedient woman finds herself being scolded by a man in an unconvincing wig for not doing the “work” expected of an ally – essentially cowed deference and dishonesty on demand.

Specifically,

This, then, is a world in which allyship – “listening to the community” – requires prostration, a suspension of cognitive faculties, and a surrendering of basic probity.

In the case above, regarding race, the duty of the ally would presumably be to announce, as Mr Zellie does, that preferring the civilised to the thuggish is “a white supremacist construct,” to regurgitate his assertions about the character and motives of “straight white men,” to demand the “defunding” of the police, as Mr Zellie does, and jumping through whatever rhetorical hoops, and taking whatever “action,” Mr Zellie deems appropriate or amusing.

The only benefit I can see for those willing to debase themselves in this way would be the hope that Mr Zellie won’t assert or imply that you’re a racist, or that you’re insufficiently “anti-racist.” And therefore racist.

Not, it has to be said, the most tempting offer.

As someone notes in reply to the post quoted above,

Not an unfair summary.

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Lifted from the comments, Mr Burkett ponders crime and its apologists:

A thread ensues.

Regarding the consequent conflictedness and anxiety, all that progressive wrongness, these three posts include some fairly vivid illustrations of the phenomenon.

Among which, a claim that more theatre for schoolchildren would somehow deter the kinds of creatures who repeatedly and gleefully sucker-punch elderly ladies for being the wrong race, and a chap who insists that women should allow themselves to be mugged at bus stops lest their mugger, out on probation, come to harm.

Oh, and the belief, expressed tearfully and at length by a Guardian columnist, that when you find your home being burgled in the middle of the night, the real victims, the people deserving of sympathy and indulgence, are the ones breaking into your home while brandishing carving knives and then driving off with your valuables in your car.

In the examples featured in the posts above, the perpetrator is typically black and the apologist white. This recurring racial hang-up is often made explicit – as when the activist and lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, mentioned here, dismissed objections to being burgled as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes,” while telling Guardian readers that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

Mr Stafford Smith went on to chide and insult the victims of burglary, and the law-abiding generally, while offering implausible excuses for those who break into strangers’ homes and steal their belongings, and who do this over and over again with ever greater boldness. And none of these claims were challenged, at all, in the Guardian‘s fawning interview. Apparently, among many progressives, such contrivance is not only congenial, but terribly high-status.

Perversity as piety.

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