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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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Written by: David
Food and Drink Politics

He Saw It Through A Different Lens, You Know

August 18, 2025 100 Comments

From the pages of Metro, some highly emotional news:

It was endless – and deeply unsettling. I genuinely felt shaken and that emotion caught me off guard. I picked up the phone and called my mother in Jordan…

As soon as I heard her voice, I started sobbing. She heard me sniffling and, in true tough-love fashion, said, “Ah, you must’ve caught a cold from that British weather?” “Yes, Mama,” I mumbled. “Just a cold.” I couldn’t bring myself to verbalise my shock and disgust because I didn’t yet have the words to describe it.

I do now, though. My mind couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that my culture – houmous – was being culturally appropriated. It makes me sick.

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves. What with the brutality of it all. Namely, a supermarket aisle with – and I quote,

An entire shelf stacked with all kinds of wild, colourful houmous.

Apparently mere proximity to such a thing – again, a shelf of houmous in a supermarket – can traumatise grown men of a progressive persuasion. Including Mr Amro Tabari, whose dip-induced agonising unfolds before you now:

I grew up in Jordan but my family is actually from Palestine. Before I was born, they were forced to flee in 1948 and we became refugees.

No, the relevance escapes me, too. Perhaps something will be made of this later, given sufficient contrivance.

Despite this, I had a happy childhood with my parents and older sister. Throughout it all, houmous was a staple. In fact, we’d have it as a family every Friday as part of a breakfast ritual. Mum would make it from scratch and we’d sit around the table sharing it.

I go for the red pepper variety, myself. Hey, I’m just sharing, too.

It wasn’t until I moved to the UK in 2013 to pursue a Master’s Degree in Renewable Energy that I began to see houmous through a different lens.

No laughing at the back. This is a tearful tale.

In supermarkets, I was stunned: all different types of houmous ‘fusions’ – many without chickpeas at all.

Stunned by houmous options. When not sobbing, I mean, or filled with a sickening outrage. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Mr Tabari’s emotions, or professed emotions, incline towards the operatic. One might say baffling.

Sure, culinary innovation is great. But sometimes what looks like fusion is actually confusion – or worse, erasure.

I suspect an explanation of a sort may be looming.

The reason I felt so shocked in that supermarket aisle was because I was lamenting what had become of my culture. My houmous. To me, houmous isn’t just a recipe; it’s an identity rooted in the Levant, long before modern political borders were drawn.

Ah, the aforementioned contrivance. Houmous as a political identity. I think this is where the credulous are meant to feel guilty, or deferential, or something.

Once I realised how far houmous had been taken from its roots, I turned to a Lebanese-Palestinian friend of mine and asked for his mother’s recipe… Now I try to share my authentic houmous with anyone and everyone I meet – and they love it. In Brighton, where I live, café baristas, flower shop owners, food critics, and even fellow amateur theatre actors have all tried it. They all listen to me when I tell them about the history of houmous, what it means to me.

I would guess that at least some of those baristas, flower shop owners and amateur theatre actors are just being polite. Not everyone needs a sermon with their dip. Even in Brighton.

I have even made huge pots of it and brought it to pro-Palestine marches with me.

You see, that’s where we’re going. Because of course we are. He’s had photos done and everything.

Whenever I offer my houmous to people, they often ask me: “What’s your secret?” “Palestinian love,” I reply with a smile.

This is starting to sound like one of those fabulist anecdotes in which the speaker is supposedly always being asked, “But how do you cope with being so slim and pretty and loved by everyone?”

Houmous… tells stories across generations. When it’s commercialised without context or origin, something sacred is lost.

One more time. Dip.

It feels that houmous is colonised, butchered, brutalised. When heritage is repackaged and resold – especially while communities tied to it are struggling – it becomes an insult. It’s not just houmous; it’s history, belonging, and pride.

And finally, inevitably, the demand:

Stop the cultural appropriation.

Or you could just, you know, dial back the pretentious, self-involved whining. Three or four notches should do it.

Update, via the comments:

John D quotes this bold claim,

my culture – houmous

And adds, drily,

My culture – teabags.

Liz asks,

How do these clowns even make it through the day?

It does seem to involve a lot of needless drama. Such that one can be traumatised and outraged, reduced to sobbing, by the availability of a savoury dip. It all sounds exhausting. And I think we’re expected to admire this emotional self-indulgence and the cack-handed attempt to manipulate.

And ComputerLabRat speaks for many with this:

Ye gods these people are tiresome.

I suppose we might, in theory, feel sorry for Mr Tabari, whose time in leftist circles has led him to believe that his self-involved dramas are a basis for being taken seriously. As someone for whom houmous is an identity and a basis for attention and deference. Someone who invokes the alleged injury of “cultural appropriation” and consequently bursting into tears, as if this would be a good look. A basis for status and applause.

I mean, to imagine that this is the look to go for, in a national newspaper, where people can see, does suggest a level of loserdom.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Politics

Her Values

July 27, 2025 111 Comments

From the pages of Business Insider, more progressive-woman-lifestyle news:

I knew I didn’t want to live in the US anymore. Not only did I feel empowered abroad, but I also felt that the US no longer aligned with my values.

What those values might be will, perhaps, become clear, if only by implication.

I quit my job, divorced my husband, and moved to Italy to retire.

That’s the article’s headline. The star of this drama is Ms Cindy Sheahan, a former real-estate agent. Judging by the tone and triumphant photograph, I’m guessing we’re supposed to regard Ms Sheahan as some kind of inspirational figure. No explanation is offered for Ms Sheahan divorcing her husband, taking half his stuff, and then putting half a planet between her family and herself. There are no mutterings of neglect or infidelity. No hardships of any kind.

The nearest we come to a justification is,

I didn’t want just to walk the dog, play pickleball, and tend a garden. I wanted a bigger life.

And, er, so,

Once I stepped out the door and visited places I had only dreamed of and ate food I had only read about, it was ridiculous to think I was going to go back to my “normal life.”

Again, the whys and wherefores of this radical uprooting remain oddly nebulous. Beyond, that is, the intrigue of unfamiliar food. We are, however, informed,

I wasn’t into the US’s overconsumption. With the divisive political climate and the ridiculous gun culture, there was no way in hell I’d live there after experiencing a more peaceful life in so many other countries.

So says our woman of high progressive principle – the woman who abandoned her husband and family, and her job, seemingly forever, despite promising to return:

My company was kind enough to let me take a sabbatical while I sorted out my world. It turned out to be a mistake for them, because I decided I wasn’t coming back.

Quite what Ms Sheahan’s employers made of this, or indeed her husband and four children, is, alas, not disclosed. Evidently they were deemed of no importance in this tale of progressive empowerment. And so, Ms Sheahan went searching for herself in Cambodia, and in Vietnam. And Laos. And Madagascar. And Turkey and Cyprus. And France and Spain and Portugal and Greece. Indeed, this quest for self – this attempt to find an alignment of values – spanned “nearly fifty countries.”

Before – presumably thwarted – trying Italy:

I moved to [Palermo] in October 2024. I didn’t want to live in the suburbs – though living in the outer areas will always be less expensive and, in some ways, more authentic.

And as you can imagine, Ms Sheahan is so into authenticity.

So, I chose to live in the city centre.

And being so authentic, so attuned to higher matters, her days are now spent eating alone in restaurants:

Eating… when you want to is nice. You can go back to the same restaurant twice… You have no one to apologise to or explain yourself to.

Oh, and grocery shopping. Specifically,

tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, sun-dried tomatoes,

Ah, the inexhaustible romance of buying tomatoes. It’s all about personal growth, you see:

I feel like I outgrew a lot of people and places in the US.

For some reason, the abandoned husband and four distant children come to mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I desperately miss my friends and family, especially my kids.

Ah.

But they’re all able to travel,

So screw those guys. Madam has tomatoes to buy.

If the above sounds vaguely familiar, you may be thinking of this.

Via Dicentra.

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Reading time: 3 min
Written by: David
Anthropology Politics

Explaining Civilisation

July 1, 2025 121 Comments

And in thriving multiculturalism news:

Exactly zero men who would loiter near schools to harass or sexually assault young girls will be deterred by a power point presentation. If that’s not innately unthinkable to you, no amount of talk will make it so and you simply have no place in civilization. https://t.co/5Beehg9EGK

— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) June 27, 2025

From the Telegraph piece in question:

Officers have drawn up a PowerPoint presentation for asylum seekers in hotels on the key points of “UK culture” which they are told they should respect. It includes recognising that women “have the same rights as men,” so “must be treated with respect and courtesy.” They are also told that violence of any kind is “not acceptable,” which is emphasised by being capitalised in the presentation.

Ah, capital letters. That should do it.

The unhappy statistics quoted in the article – say, that illegal migrants from Afghanistan are 22 times more likely to commit sex offences – will melt away in no time. And the fact that remarkably similar patterns are found in other European countries suddenly drenched in vibrancy is something that will doubtless just sort itself out.

The uninvited newcomers – chiefly, it seems, men of fighting age and all mysteriously unencumbered by identifying documents – are given helpful pointers on the customary use of pavements and pedestrian crossings, and are warned about the hazards of randomly strolling through moving traffic on busy roads. They are also introduced to the novel concepts of avoiding foul language in public and not abusing animals for amusement purposes.

Other teething problems have, it seems, arisen:

The initiative by Northamptonshire Police followed community and parental complaints over young male asylum seekers loitering near a primary school in the county, including claims of filming.

Not loitering at the gates of primary schools in order to film small children being another cultural subtlety requiring clarification.

The police presentation, obtained under freedom of information laws, warns migrants against taking photos and videos. Its disclosure comes just days after a 29-year-old Afghan asylum seeker tried to defend his rape of a 15-year-old Scottish schoolgirl by citing cultural differences and a language barrier.

Lawyers for Sadeq Nikzad, who entered the UK illegally on a small boat in 2023, told the court that he had not been educated about the significant cultural differences between the UK and Afghanistan. He was jailed for nine years for the sex attack, in Falkirk town centre.

Last week the Telegraph revealed that foreign nationals are responsible for more than a quarter of convictions for sex assaults on women.

As I’m sure you’d agree, it’s all going terribly well.

Readers will, of course, recall Finland’s answer to such sudden-onset vibrancy – namely, the please-don’t-rape-me dance, performed below.

Finnish socialist women dance to ask fake asylum seekers not to sexuaIIy abuse European women. Socialist women are a problem. pic.twitter.com/PtIwNRpwx9

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) April 27, 2025

As a yardstick of civilisational self-destruction, and dark farce, it’s quite a thing. As is the pernicious conceit, so fashionable among Our Betters, that if only we were kinder and more thoughtful, if only we fretted more and were somehow more accommodating, and if only we’d stop noticing, these things would just go away.

As illustrated during last year’s tribal rioting:

There’s also a weird air of displacement, of vehemently resenting those who notice the problem. And so, we get claims like this one, in which BBC broadcaster Dan Snow denounces as “stunningly racist” even the suggestion that incompatible tribes exist. Because Mr Snow feels they shouldn’t exist, that they somehow ought not to. And so, magically, they don’t. And only Very Bad People would say they do.

And from the same, what one might regard as a telling detail:

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.

The unrealism of such people and their peers, Our Betters, has created a problem on a vast scale and which is dire in its implications – a problem that they are apparently unwilling to fix or even clearly identify. And so, they retreat further into unrealism and absurdity – with PowerPoint presentations on not abusing animals and please-don’t-rape-me dances – while expecting others – those on whom they’ve inflicted the problem – to become unrealistic and absurd too.

It’s the progressive way. In this and so much else.

Update, via the comments:

One of the consequences of massive, indiscriminate immigration – equivalent to the entire population of Sheffield, every year – is that it radically alters the general mood of those on whom this demographic transformation is being imposed. One might, for instance, aspire to the role of gracious host, as it were, of making newcomers feel welcome. But this ideal presupposes an immigration policy that is limited and selective, and in which newcomers have good reason to feel lucky – and grateful.

The graciousness of the locals, the ideal, depends on the notion that the host country is regarded as something special, a desirable thing, something worthy of respect.

But massive, indiscriminate immigration undermines that ideal. If seemingly anyone can walk in and demand goodies, any ill-mannered flotsam of the world, and if they can do so with no discernible sense of gratitude, or any expectation of such, and with no apparent regard for the norms and values of the host society, as if they were unimportant, then the indigenous population may feel they have little reason to be gracious. Indeed, being gracious may be something of a struggle.

I realise that even the idea that the locals might dare to think in such terms – of being the gracious host – is, for some, anathema, a basis for tutting and scolding. But the sense that the value of one’s society – one’s home – is being pissed away, sold off cheap, is not a promising basis for coexistence.

And yet here we are.

Doubtless there are progressives who would regard the ‘gracious host’ attitude as wickedly hierarchical and ‘othering’, or even racist. But I suspect it’s how quite a few people process a sudden influx of newcomers, regardless of the gasping of lefties. I suspect that something along those lines is a necessary precondition of any subsequent coexistence. A social lubricant.

And were I to relocate to, say, South Korea, I think I would feel much like a guest – and feel a corresponding obligation to be on my best behaviour. Possibly on an indefinite basis. I very much doubt I’d feel entitled to disregard queueing norms, or to, quite literally, shit on the doorsteps of the indigenous.

But hey, maybe that’s just me.

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Written by: David
Agonies of the Left Film Politics

Dumb, Yes, But Fashionable

June 21, 2025 90 Comments

From the world of cinema and pretentious agonising:

The world is big and different people will be interested in different things, but this seems like a really stupid thing to think about for more than two seconds https://t.co/qWAKhVNMKG

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) June 20, 2025

The implications of Mr Boyle’s modish piety, presumably unintended yet implied nonetheless, are explored quite pithily in the replies.

Among which, the implication that white writers and directors should only concern themselves with suitably pale-skinned characters, carefully excluding non-white characters, and non-white actors, lest they appropriate or colonise something or other.

Likewise, the implication that a white person couldn’t possibly comprehend the inner life of a brown person – these magical, put-upon beings – which itself rather implies that white audiences needn’t turn up to films in which non-white people appear prominently. Due to their alleged incomprehensibility.

Strange basis for a global film industry, if you ask me. But there we are.

Update, via the comments:

Previously in the world of pretentious agonising:

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.

Do follow the link for the inevitable twist and colossal hypocrisy.

And from the comments following which, this:

The dogmatic scolds who bang on about “cultural appropriation” rarely display much understanding of how culture comes about. Perhaps they imagine that the world would be richer and more pious without Akira Kurosawa’s vivid reworkings of Shakespeare, or his ‘appropriation’ of American band music of the 30s and 40s, and without Kurosawa’s own films inspiring Sergio Leone and George Lucas, etc. The riffs and copying, the to-and-fro, are to a very large extent what culture is.

But no, we must all become twitchy and neurotic. That’s bound to go well.

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