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Free-For-All
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
Food and Drink Free-For-All Politics

His Creative Temperament

August 27, 2024 140 Comments

And in woke dining news:

A Raleigh, North Carolina, chef who rose to prominence after attempting to have a white woman “cancelled” for “culturally appropriating” Japanese cuisine is now facing charges of domestic violence. Eric Rivera, who waged a digital war against an Aussie sushi restauranteur he labelled a “coloniser,” has been arrested for misdemeanour domestic violence, assault on a female, and assault by strangulation.

Setting aside the small matter of, er, assault and strangulation, readers may wish to ponder the notion, advanced by Mr Rivera and his numerous supporters, that white people, especially white people with blonde hair, shouldn’t be allowed to serve Japanese food.

At which point, I suppose I should mention this:

it was learned that [Rivera] was preparing Japanese food as a Puerto Rican man at his Japanese-inspired bar.

A shocking twist, I know. I do hope you were sitting down.

When not harassing people for having the wrong colour skin, and when not strangling women, Mr Rivera spends quite a lot of time blocking those who dare to quote his own social media statements.

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Written by: David
Free-For-All Politics

An Unfamiliar Neighbourhood

August 11, 2024 44 Comments

Lifted from the comments, and relevant to the ongoing liveliness, Peter Whittle ponders a recent, very rapid transformation:

The speed of change has been mesmerising. Indeed, lacking any real sense of overarching identity, the need to impose a sense of community has become paramount. Whether locally or, as we see, nationally, never have we heard the word community so bandied about. But it’s all pretend, really. Community was never talked about before, simply because it didn’t have to be. 

 

An animated chart of some relevance.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the video above, this came to mind. Tim Newman on knowing your neighbours:

The trouble with well-educated, international people like [Kristian] Niemetz is they fall into the trap of meeting foreigners who are much like them except for the accent and assume cultural differences stop there. Of course, if you hang out with academics and white-collar professionals it doesn’t matter if you’re in Berlin, London, Singapore, or Rio de Janeiro, it’s all the same.

But if you live beside someone who has no reason to get up in the morning and decides to play music at full blast until 5am, or deals drugs in the stairwell of your apartment block, or uses it as a toilet, or keys your car on a regular basis, all of a sudden you realise the character of your neighbour becomes central to your quality of life. The only reason Niemetz doesn’t know his neighbour is because the latter is culturally conditioned to be considerate, and to get up at 7am each morning to go to work. If he wasn’t, I suspect Niemetz would know him intimately.

If you start dispensing with old-fashioned ideas like sovereignty and believe a neighbour is no different from a Brussels bureaucrat, you’re going to be in a for a rude awakening when diversity and vibrancy moves in next door. Of course, those who advocate such policies rarely have to live with the consequences.

Having re-read it, it’s not entirely inapt.

Very much related to the above, and because an example is always handy, the rumblings of progressive educator Dr Adam Kotsko:

Given the self-satisfied ignorance on display – or malign perversity – I’m guessing Dr Kotsko doesn’t live in a neighbourhood rapidly being enlivened with Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose social skills, and machetes, are so much in the news here.

The phenomena that Dr Kotsko is unlikely to experience personally, but which he is keen to see inflicted on others, are helpfully illustrated.

See also Douglas Murray on the Simon Schama tendency:

Schama showed something a lot of us had suspected – which is that for a certain type of globe-trotting international celebrity, any concern for borders, national identity and cultural continuity are not just beneath them, but actively ‘common’.

Of course, like so many other advocates of mass immigration, Simon Schama can live pretty much where he wants. And if the area around him goes somewhat downhill because the neighbours all start to come from the rougher corners of Eritrea, then Simon Schama can move. And he will probably move to a very nice area. But not everybody has that choice.

And one thing we can all be certain of is that Simon Schama will never choose to live in Bradford, Malmo or any of the (dare I say it) ‘suburbs’ outside Paris. Yet all the time he will urge other peoples’ neighbourhoods to more closely resemble those great success stories, and look down at people from an ever-loftier height when they dare to object.

Needless to say, Mr Schama’s own neighbourhood is suitably… insulated.

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

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Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All Politics

Ten Times, You Say

August 5, 2024 141 Comments

Not entirely unrelated to ongoing events:

Mr Politano, by the way, is a “He/him. Bi/pan.” Just in case it wasn’t clear that he’s better than you.

The subject of social trust – specifically, its erosion – has, of course, been mentioned here before.

Update, via the comments:

From the subsequent rumblings:

The “I can just will myself to have high trust” thing amongst urban liberals sounds almost exactly like when people try polyamory and obviously fucking hate it, but have philosophical commitments that force them to work through it anyway.

It does rather call to mind numerous polyamory ‘cope’ videos, in which clearly neurotic and unhappy people try to convince themselves that they’re totally cool with their chosen lifestyle miseries. Often while on the verge on tears.

You can say you have high trust, but I know that you got screamed at by a crazy person one night when you were leaving the bar and now you’re scared to walk home alone, and I know that your bicycle was stolen last year and now you feel a low level of panic about securing your new bike every night.

If you want to wake up every morning and repeat into the mirror that you don’t actually mind that there are strangers fucking your girlfriend, then that’s your own private business. But the world exists independently of your framing of it.

Pretending not to see the obvious implications of, say, this phenomenon here, and variations thereof, or this lively, uplifting scene, is, I suppose, a skill of sorts. But I wouldn’t say that such pretensions are a basis for applause.

Update 2:

And speaking of practised unrealism:

As Steve E adds, drily,

That cat will start behaving like a dog any day now.

The idea that there may be very real physical constraints on some favoured policy – that reality may not comply with half-baked theory – seems entirely alien to Mr Snow. An attitude not uncommon among his progressive peers, and which may help explain the lively events currently underway in several British cities.

Mr Snow, since you ask, is married to the philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor, daughter of the sixth Duke of Westminster, one of the country’s richest landowners, with an estimated fortune north of £7 billion. Needless to say, Mr Snow does not live in, or anywhere near, the kinds of “diverse” neighbourhoods now being trashed and terrorised by competing tribes.

Tribes that apparently shouldn’t exist.

Also open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Academia Art Free-For-All Radical Ceramics

The Bollocks Is Bolted On

July 30, 2024 168 Comments

Further to this, and also via Charlotte Gill, let’s visit the world of politically radical tableware. Specifically,

Whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. 

Because this is what you need to know when taking a class in ceramics:

We funded this.

But remember, universities need more money 😉 pic.twitter.com/gKEbweQsVG

— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) July 29, 2024

For those deeply intrigued:

Participants will gain an understanding of the history of whiteness as a racial and social construct and discuss how it continues to embody and uphold white supremacy today. 

Well, obviously, you can’t just learn how to make plates.

Participants will be able to reflect on how highlighting whiteness in this way is crucial to any antiracist social justice work. These workshops are inclusive and open to all and will create a sensitive and supportive environment in which to develop our racial awareness. 

And hey, who wouldn’t want some of that lovely racial awareness? Or, less coyly, practised question-begging and pretentious racial guilt. Or unearned racial resentment, depending on how brown you happen to be. I mean, you can’t just go through life interacting with people as individuals. You have to cultivate a neurotic habit of seeing people as avatars of some supposedly put-upon racial group. Or conversely, as oppressors, as proven by their pallor, their deplorable whiteness.

And a fragrant utopia will surely follow.

The creative titan behind the project – named, inevitably, Working With Whiteness – is Victoria Burgher, a self-styled “artist from a colonising country,” for whom pretentious, and rather invidious, racial agonising has been a path to many grants and awards. Ms Burgher, we’re told,

uses porcelain as a ceramic material and investigative tool to reveal and challenge the hegemony of whiteness in relation to the values and legacy of British colonialism.

You see,

Porcelain, cherished as it is for its ‘purity,’ becomes an apt material and concept to embody, expose and contest social, cultural and historically constructed ideologies of whiteness.

And,

Her practice-based research explores how the properties of porcelain – its fractiousness and vulnerability when raw, its strength, whiteness and translucency when fired – can challenge terms such as fragility and innocence explored through ideologies of whiteness.

Strained metaphors are very in, it seems. Along with teetering piles of assumptions. Also, Bad Whitey. It’s all terribly original. Very daring. Not at all conformist.

It occurs to me, however, that Ms Burgher’s contrived, modish waffle may make a kind of sense if you think of it as an attempt to add social heft to the otherwise pedestrian art that she actually produces.

For instance:

“From The River To The Sea… #2 (2023). Porcelain, cobalt, gold lustre and glaze, 27cm.”

And,

“White But Working On It (2022). Glazed porcelain ceramic badges, 5-6 cm.”

And,

“Whiteness (2018). Ink on bagasse (sugar cane fibre), fabric, pins, 14 x 14 cm.”

It would, I think, explain a few things. As it often does.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the unattractive objects shown above, and others very much like them, Martin D adds,

What kind of f*cked up people would think these were cool? Or even well made?

A fair question. One worth pondering.

Ms Burgher approvingly cites Ms Robin DiAngelo, the peddler of neurosis mentioned here, the L Ron Hubbard of wokeness, and whose devotees, as we’ve seen, are often wildly unhinged and nakedly malevolent. Which probably tells us much of what we need to know about Ms Burgher and her racial affectations. The mindset she wishes to inflict on others. And by extension, those who succumb.

And so, Ms Burgher makes her unattractive tat, and calls it art, and treads on ceramic eggshells, and calls it performance art, while listing the hallucinatory evils of having pale skin. And while telling those sufficiently credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” the source of all that is wrong, a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.”

You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

So, yes. Someone quite fucked up.

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

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