Lifted from the comments, which you’re reading of course:

In the piece linked above, Ben Sixsmith responds to an attempt, by Lukas Shayo, to problematise a much-loved comic strip, one that must now, it seems, be fretted over as both “violent” and “sexist.” Readers familiar with the strip in question may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.

As Ben replies,

I’ve said before, regarding the pop-culture site io9, the more insufferably woke the site has become, the more generic and unwritten its content feels. By which I mean, it was once possible to stumble across lengthy articles on niche pop-culture subjects, often written with an affectionate expertise. Now, however, it’s difficult to differentiate one contributor from another. The content doesn’t read as if anyone in particular wrote it. It’s flavourless, uniform in its politics and ideological assumptions, both pointedly announced, and uniform in its tone. It might as well be generated by an algorithm.

Regarding Ben’s piece, Aelfheld adds,

It’s practically a genre – and a tool for the forging of progressive credentials. Basically, take something that’s very good and that a lot of people like, or have liked as children, and then problematise it, sour it, generally in a narrow, glib, and self-satisfied way. While getting details hopelessly wrong and missing all kinds of subtlety.

Or as Ben puts it, “joyless Buzzfeed-esque finger-wagging.”

See also, certain popular songs of the 1940s.

The author of the joyless prattle, Lukas Shayo – CUNY and Brooklyn, naturally – does rather struggle to find his “10 ways” in which Calvin and Hobbes should elicit regret or disapproval. We’re told, for instance, that,

And we’re informed that the absence of smartphones and GPS tracking devices – the strip concluded in 1995 – may be “baffling for young readers.”

Mr Shayo also bemoans Calvin spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader.

We’re told, with improbable earnestness:

Also troubling to Mr Shayo is the thought of our comic-strip protagonist being “unsupervised in an enormous forest.” Or, unregistered by the author, what Calvin perceives as an enormous forest. This, remember, is a six-year-old boy who regularly ventures into outer space and who perceives his stuffed toy as an eloquent, talking tiger. This one reminded me of being six or so myself and, with my cousin in tow, fearlessly exploring a small strip of woodland behind my grandmother’s house, and which six-year-old me chose to see as enormous and therefore a basis for adventure.

Given that the charm of Calvin and Hobbes so often hinges on the mismatch between what Calvin imagines and rather more mundane reality, you’d think that Mr Shayo might entertain such possibilities. But no. Wokeness must be announced, a posture assumed, and things found problematic. Because contrived disappointment, a souring of all the things, is the latest must-have. For a certain kind of person. And everything, especially things that many people have enjoyed, must be judged – and found wanting – by the narrow standards of one’s own self-admiring in-group at this precise point in time.

Update, via the comments:

Aitch adds,

While Dean reveals,

I suppose that’s what makes it grimly funny, in a disappointing modernity kind of way. If you poke through Mr Shayo’s other, numerous contributions, the tone, such as it is, is much the same. There’s no obvious personality – no sense of any particular person having written it – no sense of mischief, and no discernible wit. Mr Shayo is, however, capable of making entirely contradictory claims, on the very same subject, mere days apart.

For instance, in the “10 Ways” article quoted above, Mr Shayo worries that the absence of smartphones and GPS tracking devices may be “baffling for young readers,” and he bemoans how the strip “doesn’t have any modern technology.” And yet we’re told – days later – that, “the lack of technological influence makes the strip read as a timeless work.” “It always feels that it’s something that could still happen today… the absence of technology is hardly notable.”

Likewise, Mr Shayo insists that “ending Calvin and Hobbes is exactly what saved it,” and praises the strip’s creator, Bill Watterson, for refusing to license spin-offs, adaptations, and potentially lucrative merchandise, thereby “living up to the ideals that the strip… championed.” “Ending the strip,” we’re told, “was a good decision” and “there is no reason to tarnish that legacy by adding more to an already concluded work.”

While, one week earlier, “Calvin and Hobbes needs to be an animated show.” Because “an adaptation or continuation is essential.”

These, shall we say, inconsistencies, among many others, aren’t a result of some cunning AI spoof, some infinitely deep intelligence. This is just the standard of writing, and thinking, now deemed good enough.

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

And in other this-never-happens news:

He just wants to molest little girls, you see, while pretending to be a woman.

Mr Katie Cruz, quoted above, is, he says, a role model for “trans kids,” and has been “working behind the scenes” to “reduce stigma.” That would be the stigma of being bent on child molestation – specifically, molesting girls between the ages of 9 and 13. Just so we’re clear.

It’s a “trans age” thing, apparently. Which seems to mean that our grown man, a man who pretends to be a woman, also likes to imagine himself as a teenager, aged between “13 and 17ish.” So there’s nothing to worry about, you “far-right” bigots. It’s all totally legit and above-board.

Mr Cruz, also known as Cali Miller, goes on to denounce the “harmful rhetoric comparing the LGBTQ community to paedophiles” – and he does this while using the fig leaf of “queer” activism to advance his own predatory, paedophilic ambitions, and the predatory ambitions of others like him. Which, if not exactly coherent, is certainly bold.

“While I’m empathetic toward children and want the best for them,” says Mr Cruz, “I also hold the view that no one should tell others what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.” Or, it seems, the bodies of others. Say, sweet little Sally two doors down.

And so, those of you not yet fully enthused by the prospect of Mr Cruz’s liberation and empowerment will have to “move toward a more progressive and empathetic worldview.” While Mr Cruz himself, despite his claims of empathy, remains utterly selfish regarding the children whose lives would be monstrously degraded by the imposition of his desires. Given the chance.

And because things aren’t quite twisted enough, the paedophilic groups of which Mr Cruz is a member, and whose goals include “reform” of the sex-offender registry and to “achieve protected class status,” frequently deploy the term “social justice.” And how dare you far-right bigots deny such noble beings their child-molestation rights.

Update, via the comments:

Readers will doubtless have registered just how easily the rhetoric of victimhood and “social justice” is appropriated. A phenomenon we’ve noted here many times. As when we were told, in the pages of the Independent, that when paedophiles claim to remain celibate but still search out employment that puts them in regular and intimate contact with children, their potential prey, this is somehow a “social good” and a basis for congratulation. Because every parent wants their child to have a teacher who harbours fantasies of molesting them.

Regarding Mr Cruz, Nikw211 notes this passage from the original article:

Adding, not unreasonably,

Well, quite. One more time:

That’s the kind of loving and caring that just happens to be abusive and generally traumatising, and which can have serious lifelong consequences for the victim. If another real-world illustration is required, see also this. Though I should point out that it’s not for the faint-hearted.

At which point, I’m going to quote this, on the unconvincing contortions of Dr Ole Martin Moen, and which I recommend reading in full:

Hence the stigma, of course. The stigma that Dr Moen and Mr Cruz find so terribly problematic.

Time, I think, to better ourselves. Come, let us peek at the culture pages of the Guardian:

That’s Perth, Scotland. Lest there be confusion.

Bear with me. I’m setting the scene. Stoking your anticipation.

White horse. Big horn.

Again, big horn.

Ah, tat.

Brace yourselves for a full-on face-blast of culture:

Such wonders you’ll behold. Memories to treasure forever.

Because the above is “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” And so, while claiming to give exposure to the supposedly marginalised and unseen, the virtuous by default, the curators are expecting visitors to be enthralled by objects of mass-produced banality that are, by their own admission, utterly ubiquitous.

But wait. There’s more.

One of the above. Presumably the most photogenic.

I’m just going to leave this here, I think. Consider it an illustration of what can be done. A cultural benchmark for our times.

Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

So seldom. So terribly seldom.

Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.

Despite which, Ashleigh Hibbins, the head of audiences at the Perth Museum, where unicorns await, tells us,

Ah yes, those unheard voices. The dear downtrodden.

Via Julia.

Lifted from the comments, more pretentious agonising:

Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist.

Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.

Likewise, the demographics of Cambridge are skewed rather significantly by students, who make up about a fifth of the city’s population, and of which more than 40% are students from overseas. Which, again, may tilt one’s view of what constitutes “representation.”

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

Update, via the comments:

It’s worth noting that the museum apparently had its annual Arts Council funding reduced – from £1.2M to £637K – on grounds that the institution “hadn’t fulfilled its targets of diversifying its audience.” Hence, one assumes, the new signage, the fretting about “representation,” and the stern moral warnings about “nationalist feelings.”

It’s not clear to me how one might “diversify” the racial makeup of visitors to the museum, which is what is meant, albeit coyly. And it occurs to me that part of that problem – if indeed it is a problem – might be a “diverse” immigrant demographic that by and large shows less interest in the artistic and cultural history of the country to which they have moved.

See also, the British countryside.

Update 2:

Regarding the urge to correct the racial makeup of museum visitors, Julia asks,

Which isn’t entirely out of step with the general air of farce. The supposedly corrective fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to. Those doing the fretting then set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they have travelled to see, and with which they may feel some affinity, may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness. By liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption.

Andy adds,

Indeed. It’s very often a condition of taxpayer subsidy, as illustrated above. And of course such ham-fisted measures, along with the encroachment of wokeness more generally, may strike some visitors as inapt or patronising, or vaguely alienating, thereby deterring further visits. While the sought-after “diverse” demographic continues choosing not to visit anyway.

But hey, progress.

Lifted from the comments, where Mr Muldoon directs us to,

There is a dull mediocrity, a predictable trajectory:

I think it’s fair to say that, whatever her creative limitations, Liberal Jane, aka Ms Caitlin Blunnie, does like her slogans. One might say incantations. Almost all of which have an air of self-satisfaction, as if some previously unregistered profundity had been heroically unearthed.

One creation extols the radical virtues of skiving in the workplace and not doing the work one is being paid to do. “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” reads another. Also, “Self-love is self-care.” “Riots, not diets.” “Hex the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” “Fantasy is for everyone.” “Abortion builds new futures.” Oh, and “Smash the state and masturbate,” and “Stretch marks are ubiquitous to the human experience.”

And if even more excitement is called for:

The item below is a recent and fairly topical example of Ms Blunnie’s morally corrective offerings to the world:

Happy #InternationalWomensDay! 💜 pic.twitter.com/8LEdvZDeSj

— Liberal Jane (@liberaljanee) March 8, 2024

At which point, readers may note just how often progressive posturing seems to require a fairly high tolerance of contrivance and short-cuts, internal contradiction, and the kind of begged-question soundbites that are all but designed to shut down thought. A kind of pre-emptive short circuit.

For instance, in Ms Blunnie’s X feed, a professed concern for “bodily autonomy” appears alongside the slogans “Abortion builds new futures,” and “Funding abortion is an act of radical empathy,” along with a jolly pink poster for “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day,” which suggests that the bodily autonomy of some people, very small ones, doesn’t count.

And even if “bodily autonomy” applies only, and rather conveniently, to women, or a subset of women, one might have thought that it could extend to concerns regarding creepy, mentally ill men barging into women’s intimate spaces for a furtive wank.

But apparently not. Because “a woman is anyone who identifies as one.”

Update, via the comments: