Another great moment in Clown Quarter contortion:

“How to assess writing without judging its quality.” 

We’ve been here before, of course. 

Also, open thread. Feel free to share links and bicker.

Or, Call It A Counter-Protest.

Lifted from the comments and further to recent rumblings, a safe space is violated.

“What is wrong with you?” they ask. 

Says Joan,

We’re going to see a lot more of this. Good.

It seems to me that these ladies actually got off lightly. If you choose to block the roads, determined to needlessly frustrate hundreds, even thousands, of people, just so you can indulge in some in-group preening, while ordering drivers to walk, then you should expect some physical push-back from the people on whose freedoms and imperatives you’ve chosen to piss. Because, hey, sabotaging attempts to get to jobs, airports and doctor’s appointments, while impeding emergency vehicles and thereby endangering lives, is such a lark, baby.

Acts of planned and gratuitous aggression, including narcissistic aggression – which is what these ‘protests’ are – should be treated accordingly. It’s important that these cossetted pinheads, so gorged on their own sense of entitlement, learn to fear those on whom they recreationally impose themselves. Their expectations of impunity should be shattered. Along with the conceit that the way to make people sympathetic with your cause, whatever it may be this week, is to screw them over – because you can – while applauding yourself for doing so.

Update:

Despite the pretence of martyrdom and claims by the participants that they “do not enjoy” exerting power over random passers-by – or would-be passers-by – it seems quite obvious that personal gratification is by no means incidental. These disruptions and obstructions – forcibly immobilising large numbers of people – are very much recreational, a rush of ego, as bullying often is. Now imagine being so privileged, so removed from normal concerns, that being arrested is a form of recreation, a leisure activity, a way to impress your peer group and accrue status.

If your go-to solution, your preferred mode of expression, is to frustrate and harass random people who are just trying to get to work, or to get home – and you do this while feeling enormously self-satisfied about your own imagined radicalism – then this tells us very little about the world or any purported cause. It does, however, tell us quite a bit about what kind of tosser you are.

Two items lifted from the comments: 

When the public have to do what the police apparently won’t.

Our betters at large.

Imagine being so self-absorbed and self-flattering, so untroubled by normal boundaries, that you don’t anticipate how your own disruptive behaviour will tend to be viewed by the wider public – the people on whom your behaviour is being inflicted. A wider public that for the most part can’t afford to spend days on end indulging in Student Union theatrics.

Update: 

In the comments over at Samizdata, Mike Solent adds, 

This is an interesting example of public order being served by the absence of the police rather than its presence.

Well, yes. Quite. 

Update 2:

Know your place.

“Your future’s gone. How old are you?”

Members of Extinction Rebellion block a bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A lively discussion ensues.

Also, open thread.

Via Mr Muldoon, a peek into the comment pages of the Guardian, where Ms Ngaree Blow attempts to sell the merits of prehistoric healing:

Healthcare systems in Australia that are considered “mainstream” are fundamentally colonial organisations: designed, established and informed by Western paradigms and biomedical models of care.

Going with what works and works reliably. How very dare those damned colonials. With their Western paradigms.

At present, the norm is those who will fit within the constraints of the Western worldview of health… Ultimately, this results in a health system which is not fit for purpose,

The term fit for purpose is one to keep in mind. But first, some self-flattery – the urge to self-inflate being a Guardian staple:

First Peoples are the antithesis of colonial; we are inherently disruptive to how the healthcare system (and many other systems in fact) operate in Australia… As a doctor, I have embraced disruption and have chosen to reject conventional medical training pathways.

How terribly daring. With other people’s wellbeing.

Our disruption has historically been, and continues to be, rejected by the mainstream.

Intimations of victimhood being another Guardian staple. Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.”

Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior, as evidenced by a lack of traditional practices in these services.

Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.