And then he gets indignant. || The Ogmios School of Zen Motoring. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || An unhappy angle. || Notable ceilings. || Cheeeldren of the night. || Coffee time. || Worried cucumber. || Condiment cunning. || “What is in your freezer?” 1976. || They’re made of British. || Because you demanded it, AI music. || I bring you art. Related. || “Someone who is unable to pinpoint their gender due to the stress of the questioning process.” || The progressive retail experience, parts 542, 543, 544, and 545. || Protect your Cybertruck from “electromagnetic pulse disturbances.” (h/t, Things) || Dawn chorus. || “Deeply weird,” indeed. || Question asked, answered. || Children speak of things to come, 1966. || Giraffe and chiropractor. || And finally, scenes of emergency service.

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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.

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!

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

I expect to be busy for a few days. However, being a gracious host, I’ll leave you with some items from the archives:

Marking Their Territory.

Two radical identity groups struggle for toilet dominion.

You’re Reading The Comments, Right?

When wokeness is ascendant and apparently quite stupefying.

The D-Words.

On supposedly racist traffic cameras.

No Relation.

“Diverse identities” and euphemistic convolutions.

Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well.

I bring you art. And atomised dairy products.

Consider this an open thread.

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.

Lifestyle choice. || Where would we be without great art? || Got skillz. || His grandpa “thinks I am his grandson’s girlfriend.” Allegedly. || The German tongue. || Common interest. || Incoming. || “Strong women,” but no fitness test. || Fallen snow versus car. || Maximum fussing. || Meaty goodness. || White ghost apple. || Escape pod. || Pointing out hypocrisy is “white supremacy,” says educator. || Price paid. || Our betters opine. || Uppity hairdresser. I wonder what happens if her salon gets robbed. || Remaining calm in trying circumstances. || The Trautonium, circa 1930s. || Must be that “trans joy” we keep hearing about. || Ladies, he just wants to listen to you pee. || A database of 13,000 specimens. || And finally, it’s the “most transphobic” situation he’s ever had to deal with.

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Time for something grotesque, I think. Grotesque, but very of our times:

I’ll spare you the grim details, but what Mr Sonia did to the victim, a thirteen-year-old girl, over several months, was sufficiently vile to repel over a dozen jurors, who said they would be unable to sit on a case so disturbing. Suffice it to say, Mr Sonia was found guilty and incarcerated for a minimum of 22 years. During which time,

Or, convicted paedophile demands pampering, women’s undies.

As I said, it’s very now.

Because that’s what we do now with male child-rapists. And obviously, it can only go well. No bizarre complications could possibly ensue.

Despite this seemingly intermittent maleness, Mr Sonia has launched a lawsuit against staff at both the Washington Department of Corrections and his previous male prison, citing “cruel and unusual punishment.” Specifically, a failure to provide, at taxpayer expense, “breast augmentation” and “hair removal of the face, neck and jaw,” which is, we’re told, of “paramount importance.” And a lack of which allegedly results in “severe emotional anguish.”

Depending, one assumes, on whether Mr Sonia claims to be a man or a woman on any given day.

At which point, readers may wonder whether Mr Sonia’s mental health shortcomings predate their supposed causes.

Update, via the comments, where Mags suggests,

It does seem – shall we say, possible – that Mr Sonia is so irredeemably broken and malevolent, so committed to antagonism, that, having been obstructed from further child-raping, he now channels his antisocial urges into nuisance lawsuits and the feigning of victimhood.

I mean, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Jen adds,

Well, we’ve already seen the scrupulously intersectional priorities of, for instance, Canadian women’s shelters, in which a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, is deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him.

Can you not feel the progress…?

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

Academia’s Clown Quarter, I mean:

The meaning of the term “marriage fundamentalism,” a term used repeatedly, isn’t made entirely clear, and its allegedly racist and life-crushing particulars are, inevitably, “hidden,” “invisible,” and conveniently vague – despite the loudly announced use of “an intersectional lens.” But it seems to mean something like the tendency of many adults to see marriage as of mutual benefit and an optimal way to raise children.

However, our stipulator of pronouns and lecturer in Critical Praxis in Education prefers a more dismissive formulation:

Well, statistically, and by almost any measure, it is superior. Hence, presumably, the espousal.

Stripped of contrivance, I’m assuming this is a roundabout admission that, on average, people who find marriage an alien concept and much too demanding, and who opt instead for transient partners, fatherless children, and unstable relationship trash fires, tend to do less well in life, along with their offspring. And quite possibly, in turn, their offspring too.

Though I’m not sure why the response should be to blame those who get their shit together, marry, and raise children more successfully. As if their competence in this matter, or good fortune or whatever, were somehow lamentable, and racist, and a basis for indignation. And from the child’s point of view, other, more credible candidates for resentment may come to mind.

A conclusion that is simply untrue. With the benefits of stable two-parent families – an exclusively “white” phenomenon, according to Professor Letiecq – actually extending to all racial groups:

The author of the study quoted above, Brad Wilcox, can be seen being interviewed here. An interview in which he points out,

Buy hey, let’s not let the numbers get in the way of our radical posturing. Instead, let’s offer the young and credulous really perverse advice, and bitch about marriage as merely an act of complicity in “white supremacy.”

And yes, we’ve been down this path before.

Update, via the comments – which you’re reading, of course:

Regarding this,

EmC replies, tersely,

Well, if little Don’t-Know-Who-My-Dad-Is is starting fires at school and looks destined for a life of delinquency and crime, this is not obviously the fault of the happily married Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their two non-fire-starting children. And no amount of chest-puffing about “heteropatriarchy,” “unequal power relations” and “white supremacy” seems likely to alter that fact.

A child in an unstable home and consequently on an unhappy trajectory may have things to grumble about, in between the brawling and disruption, and starting fires in the toilets. But those grumbles have little to do with other people’s parents making better choices. The grumbling, it seems to me, should probably be directed closer to home.

FredTheFourth adds,

That’s this argument here, for those who may have missed it. I recommend reading the linked post in full – there’s much to chew on, and much of it mirrors the assumptions aired by Professor Letiecq.

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.

I bring you art. || You are being educated. || Dating difficulty detected. || So, have you played dress-up with your robot vacuum cleaner? (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Incoming. || How to clean your bat. || Crocodile hairballs. It’s a thing, apparently. || Our betters assemble. || Celebrate Frozen Dead Guy Day at the International Cryonics Museum, Colorado. || The daring, and the disasters, of stratospheric ballooning in the 1930s. || You want one and you know it. || Step aside, peasants, make way for fashion. || A poet opines. || Another poet opines, with expressive accompaniment. || The progressive retail experience, parts 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, and 542. || A pattern is noticed. || The thrill of paint removal. || Because you demanded it, stimulated nipples. || And finally, note the lifting of the leg.

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Lifted from the comments, a tale of what can happen when love, or professed love, collides with designer agonising:

Point of view: you just found out one of your favorite people in the whole world stopped masking and now you feel unsafe.

Also, that person lives across the country pic.twitter.com/teIMYiPBUj

— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) March 12, 2024

For those who missed it:

And so,

As you can imagine, there was some speculation as to whether the outpouring above is a well-executed parody, a feat of satire.

Well. It turns out that no, it’s not.

Update, via the comments:

“It’s your choice to make,” says madam. As if the odd behaviour were somehow not her own. As if the party choosing to end the relationship – a relationship with “the person that I love most in the world” – with a weird ultimatum – were not her.

WTP adds,

It is, I think, a signature of our times. Like many others, I watched the video twice and still wasn’t sure. Though in our defence, I don’t think there’s much reality in the reality, if you see what I mean.