Free-For-All THOMPSON, blog.

Free-For-All

Eighteen Years

February 9, 2025 48 Comments

And this place is still here.

Do help yourself to cake. For newcomers, here’s a pretty good introduction to what goes on here. If you like… that, well, there’s plenty more.

Oh, and open thread.

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Free-For-All His Pretty Nails

Scenes From Current Year

February 5, 2025 143 Comments

A possible series on a theme of belated pushback. I’ll set the ball rolling with this, lifted from the comments.

Fat Man With Far Side Glasses Takes Down Flag:

Queer, trans teacher with they/fae/she pronouns films himself removing the progress pride flag from his classroom following President Trump’s EO.

SO👏MUCH👏WINNING👏pic.twitter.com/Kh5Q5Xy4gM

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 3, 2025

When not mournfully taking down flags, the chap above, named Emerald, our shaper of young minds, imagines himself as Barbie, and likes to stipulate his fabulist pronouns, which are numerous, and which vary according to location, mood, and medication:

They/Fae/She for friends and family.

She/They to co-workers.

She/Her to strangers.

And,

He/Him to strangers when I don’t feel safe.

Whether children should feel safe when left in a subordinate position with a mentally unstable cross-dressing man whose forearms bear what appear to be self-harm cutting scars, I leave to the reader.

Emerald would have us believe,

My presence doesn’t indoctrinate kids. I am just here to teach them English.

Which raises the question of why flags affirming serious mental illness, compelled unrealism, and surgical mutilation were felt to be necessary props in a classroom where children learn English.

Or, as commenter EmC put it,

Kids having to learn his made-up pronouns is indoctrination.

Kids having to pretend he’s a woman is indoctrination.

Yes, that.

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

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Anthropology Free-For-All

Our Betters Issue Threats

January 27, 2025 125 Comments

Behold the latest milestone in fearless resistance:

Tiktoker says she will ruin your car if you support Trump and eat at a Mexican restaurant pic.twitter.com/DTqrVcAQdj

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 26, 2025

Because vandalising the cars of random strangers is progressive piety now, the very measure of heroism. Oh, and note the implied conflation of Mexican restaurant and US citizens of Mexican ancestry and illegal, criminal migrant.

I believe there’s a word for that kind of thing.

Readers are welcome to speculate as to what Madam might do upon discovering that the car she’s just vandalised – with such self-satisfaction – belongs to someone of Mexican ancestry.

Update, via the comments, which you’re reading, of course:

What’s funny about these things, given a certain sense of humour, is the unearned moral certainty, the rush to smugness.

The posturing above, the promise of gratuitously antisocial behaviour, does fit what has become a default template, a pattern seen countless times. Some obnoxious, childish liberal woman records herself saying something childish and obnoxious – in this case, about the joys of vandalising strangers’ cars, with a bit of bigotry thrown in – and she then awaits likes and applause. As if her boast of incoherent malice were a basis for congratulation.

And when the inevitable, much deserved pushback occurs, including statements of basic logic from those she would have happily wronged, she then locks down her social media and feigns victimhood. As if she were enduring some outrageous persecution. As if a smug racist who threatens vandalism on random strangers, people she deems inferior, were an obvious candidate for sympathy. As ways to pass the time go, it’s an odd mental drama.

And just a tad self-flattering.

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

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Anthropology Free-For-All

I Know, Let’s All Film Our Mental Breakdowns

January 20, 2025 49 Comments

As Mr Trump unboxes his kettle in the White House, I’m going to offer this reminder of the meltdowns and moon-howling that greeted his election victory. Such were the feats of pretension and competitive neuroticism, some kind of historical document seems in order.

Among those traumatised was the novelist and Guardian contributor Francine Prose, whose mental health took a catastrophic turn, complete with hair loss and sudden-onset eye-twitching. Symptoms that were accompanied by agitated ramblings about Hitler, Stalin, dictatorship, people thrown from helicopters, and “the imprisonment and execution of those who disagree.”

Of course, Ms Prose was far from alone in her weird theatre of distress, and social media was ablaze with performative convulsion. Among the titans of the fabulist resistance was this tightly wound progressive chap, who envisioned internment camps for those like himself, i.e., tightly wound progressives, with the streets being patrolled by some Trumpian Sturmabteilung.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Ohio high-school teacher Danielle Mann, whose post-election demands, issued from her classroom, included a list of the addresses of likeminded progressives, all of them, everywhere, and the mandatory wearing of identifying bracelets. So that she would know how everyone else voted.

At which point, readers may wish to imagine an alternative timeline, in which society has been customised to accommodate the fevered twitching of our self-imagined betters. A world they would find congenial, shaped in their image, according to their compulsions.

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

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Anthropology Free-For-All