Lifted from the comments, a little elaboration on an Ephemera item from yesterday. Specifically, an everyday scene from Ruislip, Greater London:

Queuing means the old, small and weak are treated fairly. Not all cultures queue. I saw this living abroad. pic.twitter.com/XAXOY5n5uq

— Larry Lemon (@larrylemonmaths) May 13, 2024

Note that the would-be bus passengers, the ones accustomed to queuing and now looking on in weary dismay, have varied shades of skin.

As Rafi adds in the comments,

Quite. And the fact that mentioning the degradation may result in scolding or social punishment of some kind is itself part of the degradation. Plenty of people are itching to seize upon any such transgression, thereby asserting their own high status. Above the likes of you.

And so, quite a lot of people who don’t much care about the skin tone of those doing the pushing and jostling, but who do think that politeness and queuing are good things, things that a society shouldn’t lose, are, by many progressives, pushed into the category of Incorrigible Bigot, as invalid by default. As if the grievance, the stated issue – “queuing means the old, small, and weak are treated fairly” – could only be about the pigmentation of the players, not their actual behaviour, to which attention has been drawn.

And with those who prefer politeness suitably cowed or demoralised, the degradation continues.

It should, I think, be pointed out that this suppressing and demoralising effect, the adding of insult to injury, has not gone unnoticed by many of those keen to do the suppressing and demoralising.

Some years ago, I mentioned a car journey in which, for reasons that escape me, I was distractedly listening to BBC Radio 4’s Loose Ends – a sort of whimsical revue of chat, music, and substandard stand-up. The generic left-leaning comedian of the week, whose name I didn’t catch, was pleased by the taboos surrounding immigration and multiculturalism. Lots of code words were used – “Sun-reader,” and so forth – so that the disdain for working-class people and their fears wouldn’t be too overt.

The gist of the comedian’s punch line was, “Isn’t it hilarious that people who have concerns about mass immigration and failures to assimilate – the rapid and estranging transformation of their neighbourhoods – now have to be quiet because otherwise they’ll be called racists and possibly lose their jobs. Ha! We won!”

This triumphal non-joke – and it was blatantly triumphal – was deemed incredibly funny, or at least ideologically congenial, and much mannered clapping ensued. Of course, this was aired shortly before the uncovering of events in Rotherham and elsewhere, and before our immensely vibrant age of Congolese machete gangs.

And so, if that nice Mrs Wilson, the old dear two doors down, can no longer get on a bus, and dreads waiting for a bus because of the Third World scuffle that now ensues, and if she no longer feels she can complain about this without being thought racist, then this is totally fine, apparently. Indeed, it’s a basis for triumphal smugness by BBC comedians and BBC studio audiences.

Today’s word, since you ask, is alienation.

Update, via the comments:

sk60 adds,

Well, again, quite.

And the rate at which new arrivals materialise, their sheer numbers, will have an effect on how well, or how poorly, those new arrivals adapt to the customs and values of the host society. Indeed, it will have an effect on whether those new arrivals feel inclined, or obliged, to make any such attempt.

Which brought to mind this:

And yet, it seems we’re supposed to imagine that such massive, unprecedented immigration, seemingly indiscriminate immigration, both legal and otherwise, couldn’t possibly create problems. Things one might lament. Things lost and irretrievable.

If the word irretrievable sounds too emotive, consider the practicalities in the bus stop video. How does the customary courtesy prevail – how does it reassert itself – against a jostling mass of rude people? People whose attitude is screw the rules – and by extension, screw everyone else. The considerate, including the elderly or frail or physically unimposing, will either have to start jostling too, or just stand back in muted dismay and wait for the next bus. Probably in the hope that the same thing doesn’t happen, or happen quite so badly.

So, one more time. Some things, when lost, may be irretrievable.

And note, as in the case linked above, the progressives loudly denouncing as “hostile” any reservations about massive, unselective immigration can in the very next breath bemoan “societal breakdown,” as if the two things couldn’t ever, under any circumstances, be related.

Our betters, you know. They say so themselves.

Update 2:

Oh, to be in Portugal.

From Oklahoma City, the thrills and spills of public transport:

Oklahoma City Police arrested an Embark passenger for attacking a bus driver while he was driving this past weekend, which sent the bus directly into the side of a building. The passenger was trying to get the bus to stop at a railroad track. pic.twitter.com/X9oxY61II4

— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) April 25, 2024

Today’s words, since you ask, are bogglingly selfish morony.

Update, via the comments:

As noted here before, many times, when it comes to the criminal underclass, we are but objects in their world.

Given its obviousness, you’d think the whole selfish morony thing might crop up occasionally in editorials and opinion pieces on the subject of crime. Instead, however, we tend to see quite different intentions.

Consider this an open thread.

Regarding the obstruction by activists of the Golden Gate Bridge, a not unfair observation:

My toddler’s new thing when I tell him to stop doing something is to respond, “I’m just <literally the thing I’m telling him to stop doing>, so I’ll be like, “get down off that chair” and he’ll say, “I just wanted to be on the chair.” These people are literally toddlers. https://t.co/JrJMgoQ1ZI

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) April 15, 2024

And,

Reminder: these people arrive at thought-terminating cliches because their views are extraordinarily stupid and cannot be defended on their own terms. “I should get to shut down the economy any time I’m mad enough about something” sounds so retarded that they have no choice but…

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) April 15, 2024

Note the lofty defence offered by our pronoun-stipulating champion of the obstruction – that “protests are meant to be disruptive. It’s the whole point.”

A protest, then, is not meant to persuade the general public, or to get them on-side, or to make others sympathetic with whatever this week’s cause may be. But simply to be disruptive. To gratuitously frustrate, and aggravate, large numbers of law-abiding people. To exert power. By doing random harm. That’s “the whole point.” A vision doubtless attractive to those with antisocial inclinations.

And those inclinations aren’t being indulged and given rein reluctantly or under duress. The screwing-over of others is sought out and chosen, over and over again. This is recreational sociopathy.

We’ve been here before, of course:

And what kind of person would have urges like that?

Hence the need to consider other, less edifying motives.

Update, via the comments, where other illustrations come to mind:

They are, as it were, pleasuring themselves.

Update 2:

In the comments, pst314 adds,

Alas, being incorrigible narcissists, I suspect that reciprocation isn’t a restraining factor, or a common feature of their thinking. See, for instance, this rather glorious illustration:

And from which, this bears repeating:

One more time. This is who they are.

Lifted from the comments, where WTP alerts us to more fun times for commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area:

❓ Did you know ❓

You can ask any station agent for BART’s free bystander intervention cards, which you can use if you’re experiencing or witnessing harassment in stations and trains.

Here’s how they work 👇 pic.twitter.com/09WmyquxVS

— BART (@SFBART) March 29, 2024

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Though given the consequences of recent attempts at intervention – or what Bay Area Rapid Transit refers to as “allyship” – readers may wonder whether prompt and meaningful assistance may be less frequent than one might wish.

In case you had doubts, WTP adds, “This is not parody.”

Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.  It also calls to mind this uplifting scene from no-less-progressive Portland:

What the card for that would say, I leave to the reader.

Update, via the comments:

Diogenese asks, if direct and effective intervention has been discouraged and entails a serious risk of punishment,

Well, I’m assuming the point is largely to misdirect, to conjure an illusion. To give credulous progressive women, like the ladies in the video, the impression that the situation isn’t as bizarrely horrible as it actually is. And to make credulous progressive women imagine that progressives are The Ones Who Care, while so much of what they touch gets much worse, quite rapidly.

By issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.

And – and – every woman in the explanatory video, every single one of them, has brown skin. So there’s that.

Progress!

“Decolonizing” the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau.

From Scientific American, obviously.

You see,

Increasingly, SETI scientists are grappling with the disquieting notion that, much like their intellectual forebears, their search may somehow be undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups…

But of course. Some editorial trajectories are, I guess, inevitable. As one might imagine, the author of the article, Camilo Garzón, is keen to signal his own modish sensitivities, and so the interview with Ms Charbonneau begins as it means to go on:

“Decolonisation” seems to be a problematic term,

This prompts much rhetorical nodding, along with the news that space exploration is “a stand-in for encounters with Indigenous peoples.” Sadly, before this claim can be explored or tested in any way, we shift sideways in search of a point. Says Ms Charbonneau: