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Validation, You Say

September 18, 2025 50 Comments

And from Australia, more thing-that-never-happens news:

Judge Nola Karapanagiotidis… highlighted Harper’s “gender dysphoria” and experiences with “transphobia” as mitigating factors, and appeared to accept the defence’s argument that he only committed the abuse to be “validated… as a woman and a sexual person.”

And for some, validation trumps all else.

Because of our thrillingly modern sensitivities, Mr Harper – who favours the name Autumn Tulip Harper – is currently being held in a prison for women.

The details of the case are, I should add, particularly vile.

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

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Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All

There Was An Attempt To Buy Instant Coffee

September 14, 2025 133 Comments

Specifically, in a London branch of Sainsbury’s:

Coffee in case in Sainsburys store in London

( saphling ) pic.twitter.com/rEEE1LpEpH

— London & UK Street News (@CrimeLdn) September 13, 2025

It does, I think, capture the absurdity of where we are.

For those blissfully unfamiliar with the phenomenon above and how it came to be, broader context can be found here. Along with some telling contortions from our progressive betters.

And from which, this:

And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory, as implied above, entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms [Martha] Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?

See also, the Progressive Retail Experience series, a recurring feature of Fridays here, and whose entries currently number 666.

Update, via the comments:

Jen quotes this, from the post linked above,

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

She adds, drily,

“The Guardian: wrong about everything, all the time.”

Well, it’s quite the feat to construe brazen and habitual thieves who merrily degrade the lives of those around them – the ones sexually assaulting retail staff and brandishing machetes – as somehow being the victims of the drama, the ones deserving of our empathy and indulgence, the ones who shouldn’t be punished.

While blaming the law-abiding, on whom they prey.

And while pretending not to know that the kinds of people who thieve and loot repeatedly, dozens or hundreds of times, often while visibly exulting in a sense of power, an ability to menace others, are quite likely to behave in other vividly anti-social ways. And while somehow ignoring the damning statistics of her own chosen sources.

I mean, even by the standards of the Guardian and Observer, that’s some pretty solid perversity. One might, for instance, contrast Ms Gill’s article, or that of Mr Jones, with all available statistical data, with the accounts of the victims, and with actual footage of the crimes in question – I’ve shared 666 examples to date – and then behold the utterly jarring dissonance.

As I said in an earlier thread,

Progressive wrongness is, it seems to me, often of a particular type. It isn’t just unrealistic or factually incorrect or logically or morally incoherent. There’s very often a sense of contrivance and perversity, of wrongness via effort, suggesting a psychology one might find worthy of study.

And Ms Gill’s Observer article is littered with quite glaring factual and logical errors – things that a professional journalist should know and which are easily found out. And yet she somehow doesn’t know, or pretends not to know, and makes no effort whatsoever to check. Because moral perversity is, among her peers, much more statusful.

Again, a psychology worthy of study.

Consider this an open thread. Pick a subject, any subject.

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Written by: David
Academia Free-For-All Those Poor Darling Shoplifters

The Violation Of Others

September 9, 2025 180 Comments

And in expensive and statusful education news:

At The New School in Manhattan, students can enrol in a four-credit sociology seminar titled “How to Steal,” reflecting broader trends on college campuses where theft is reframed as protest or survival.

It’s protest, you hear. Albeit of a gratuitous and self-serving kind.

The course is framed as an academic exploration of morality, politics, power, and what it calls the “aesthetics of theft.”

Because in order to titillate pinhead students and their pinhead lecturers, you need to frame selfishness and moral squalor as sexy and upscale, and ever-so daring. It’s “radical ethics,” you see.

Fieldwork requires students to visit grocery stores, banks, libraries, and museums, which the course identifies as places where “capital is hoarded and value is contested.”

Unlike modish Manhattan universities that applaud themselves as “a place for fearless progress,” and whose lecturers glamourise shoplifting and the self-satisfied violation of other, better people.

The seminar, since you ask, is the work of Cresa Pugh, a woman who lives in Brooklyn, obviously, and who boasts of “decolonising” and “interrogating” many things, while arriving at entirely predictable conclusions.

The New School’s seminar joins a growing number of higher education programmes promoting anti-capitalist perspectives.

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man.

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Ms Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience. 

And because sometimes the punchlines just write themselves:

The New School charges more than $60,000 in annual tuition… At its per-credit rate, students will pay over $10,000 to enrol in the seminar.

Previously – on needless, habitual mooching as a radical lifestyle thang.

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

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Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All

Or Maybe See If He Needs Help

September 2, 2025 106 Comments

Just a thought.

Imagine that, the first thing that came to that low iq mind was to whip out his phone and hit record, instead of trying to render aid. pic.twitter.com/eA3OlwG7LT

— Liberacrat™️ (@Liberacrat) September 1, 2025

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

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Free-For-All Politics

Some Big Boys Made Me Do It

August 19, 2025 105 Comments

Apparently, and this may be news to you, littering isn’t a moral shortcoming of the people actually dropping the litter:

Which seems awfully convenient, for a certain kind of person, if not entirely convincing.

Litter – and its inegalitarian distribution – is a topic we’ve touched on before. From which, this came to mind:

[Urban Studies lecturer, Peter Matthews] also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” Meaning more street cleaners, cleaning more frequently. He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to, “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.”

But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.

The report that Mr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour.

A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”

And Mr Matthews, our Urban Studies lecturer, is educating teenagers. Telling them how it is.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.