Lifted from the comments, it turns out that Transport For London is advertising assisted suicide. They seem to be giving it quite a push:

Westminster Death Tunnel sponsored by @dignityindying pic.twitter.com/fW0mbtqVRc

— Fleur Elizabeth (@fleurmeston) November 25, 2024

Very on-brand, I’d say. Almost too on-the-nose. I mean, if London’s buses and tube network were suddenly to be plastered with huge posters saying END IT ALL NOW, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO, it wouldn’t be entirely inexplicable, or entirely dissonant with the customer experience.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Transport For London has a staff training centre, complete with fake station and platform, and “suicide pits,” where employees learn how to manage what are euphemistically referred to as “passengers taken unwell” or “disruptions to the tube service.” Events that occur on average once or twice a week.

In 2019, staff “intervened” in the self-destructive thoughts of 426 customers deemed “visibly in distress,” “up from 252 in the previous year.”

As EmC quips darkly in reply,

Update, via the comments:

The adverts for assisted suicide are now being partially covered, by persons unknown, with posters for a Samaritans helpline.

Consider this an open thread.

Regarding the recent Māori theatrics in the New Zealand parliament:

Interesting. Are we indigenous Danes also more spiritually and culturally connected to our land than the recent immigrants? https://t.co/4WzK6HOr2g

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) November 16, 2024

Oddly, no reply was forthcoming.

Update, via the comments:

On those connections to the land: 

Today’s word, since you ask, is juxtaposition.

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

Mr Destiny, who is, I gather, some kind of deep thinker, a moral colossus of the left, is apparently unable to make a mug of hot chocolate:

My Uber driver brought me my hot chocolate today on bike. It took 45 minutes to get here, and this is what happens as soon as I pick up the bag to bring it inside.

This is Trump’s America. pic.twitter.com/g4iBNXsQjt

— Destiny (@TheOmniLiberal) November 12, 2024

Needless to say, mockery ensues. 

Update, via the comments: 

Mr Destiny – aka Steven Kenneth Bonnell II – evidently felt that the moment above had some symbolic meaning, some charged political relevance. Which, I suppose, it does, in a way. Though not, I think, of the kind he imagines. In that, it merely tells us something about him.

Mags adds,

Quite. And it’s a world in which your cup of hot chocolate has its own driver.

I did briefly wonder if Mr Bonnell might be trying to make some ironic point about modernity and decadence, but that doesn’t appear to be his style at all. And even if the objective were to say, “Look at how decadent we are,” that doesn’t really work, since the more obvious message is “Look at how decadent I am…” The we being rather presumptuous.

And I suspect that many of us here manage to make it through the day, most days, without being overly decadent. Say, by not having single cups of hot chocolate needlessly delivered to our doors, seemingly on a daily basis. Or by not finding loudly announced amusement in the death of a random stranger who was trying to shield his family from gunfire during an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate.

As Mr Bonnell did.

By all means, consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Because I like to bring comfort to those in distress, How To Avoid Tears And Pretentious Agonising: 

Well, you’d think that repel invaders and uphold the most basic of laws wouldn’t be too much to ask of a government. And yet.

And at this terribly difficult time, for some, do spare a thought for this tightly-wound progressive gentleman, presumably now trembling at the prospect of some Trumpian Sturmabteilung. Oh, and this madam here, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones. The one rendered distraught by a flight attendant’s courtesy and its ominous implications for the future of the world.

Update, via the comments:

Writing in the Guardian, the left-leaning novelist Francine Prose is not, I fear, taking recent developments well: 

Following the above, those unhinged leanings really kick into gear, with the inevitable mentions of Hitler, Stalin, dictatorship, people thrown from helicopters, and “the imprisonment and execution of those who disagree.” A feverish, dystopian drama in which, one assumes, Ms Prose anticipates a starring role.

Needless to say, Ms Prose is far from alone in her weird theatre of distress. And as illustrated many times in the comments below, the overlap of progressive politics and mental illness would seem to be quite significant.

And so, we have the round-the-clock delusional ravings of MSNBC, including the repeated claim that Florida is “an extreme right-wing fascist state,” and Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, a once-reputable publication, screeching profanities and insisting, quite emphatically, that anyone who chose to vote differently from herself must be racist, sexist, and “fucking fascists.”

No other possibilities fitting inside her gentle, thoughtful head.  

For seekers of the erotic and forbidden:

Consider this an open thread.

I’ll start the ball rolling with an excruciatingly obtuse discussion about wangs and women’s changing rooms. I say obtuse, but it’s more a matter of practised dishonesty.

Share ye links and bicker.