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The Unspanked Speak Of Points

April 16, 2024 87 Comments

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

And,

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:

It’s interesting just how often “social justice” posturing entails something that looks an awful lot like spite or petty malice, or an attempt to harass and dominate, or some other obnoxious behaviour. Behaviour that, without a “social justice” pretext, might get you called a wanker or a bitch. A coincidence, I’m sure.

It is, I think, worth pondering why it is that these supposed displays of righteousness routinely take the form of obnoxious or bullying or sociopathic behaviour, whereby random people are screwed over and dominated, and often reduced to pleading. Pleading just to get home, or to children, or to work, or to get to the doctor’s surgery. Even ambulances and fire engines can be obstructed, indefinitely, with both impunity and moral indifference. Among our self-imagined betters, it seems to be the go-to approach for practically any purported cause. Which is terribly convenient. Almost as if the supposed activism were more of a pretext, an excuse, a license to indulge pre-existing urges. 

And what kind of person would have urges like that?

As is the custom among the activist-wanker caste, much of the behaviour we’ve seen, and will doubtless see again, amounts to a moral non-sequitur. Rather like saying, “I’m troubled by the plight of the Javan rhinoceros, so I’m going to start spitting at the elderly and keying random cars, and then boast about it on Twitter, while waiting for likes.” 

Hence the need to consider other, less edifying motives.

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

In the video, note the planning, the efforts to maximise the imposition and its somewhat menacing implications. Someone sat down and thought, “How can we really aggravate hundreds of random people, ordinary families, about whom we know nothing, and make them feel unsafe in their own homes?” And then, other, like-minded people agreed, presumably with enthusiasm.

The Mao-lings who obstruct and intimidate random motorists, or who harass random restaurant customers, scaring their children, or who scream amplified profanities at random people trying to sleep, while shining lights into their bedrooms – they don’t do these things because they care about civil rights, or policing, or whatever this week’s Issue Of Great Concern happens to be. They do it because menacing other people – and spoiling someone’s day, or night, arbitrarily – is gratifying. If, that is, you’re a certain kind of person.

They are, as it were, pleasuring themselves.

Update 2:

In the comments, pst314 adds,

They would feel differently about protests that disrupted their lives… Ignore pleas of “I have to get to work” or “to the doctor” or “catch a plane” and see how they react and how the press covers it.

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:

“A judge has refused to delay the trial of Just Stop Oil protesters charged with storming a West End performance of Les Misérables after one of the defendants said she was flying to India.”

No, really. It turns out that Ms Lydia Gribbin, one of the five protestors, had assumed that only other people’s lifestyles should be curtailed, that only other people’s plans can be thwarted with impunity. 

And from which, this bears repeating:

It helps to bear in mind that such ostentatious pieties are very often a kind of camouflage for quite vain and obnoxious people. People whose own hypocrisies and dishonesties, however glaring, do not appear to embarrass them, or alter their behaviour. Consequently, they’re difficult to shame.

They’re the kind of unspanked little tossers who gleefully vandalise petrol stations, rendering them unusable, while applauding themselves, and who conflate “not being heard” with not being obeyed. The kind of preening dolts who film themselves pouring oil onto busy roads, an act morally analogous to sabotaging the brakes of random cars and motorbikes.

One more time. This is who they are.

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Books Free-For-All Media Politics

The Struggle To Find Fault

April 13, 2024 186 Comments

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

Calvin and Hobbes deemed dated, problematic. 

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,

What are you doing that an AI couldn’t do? Type “10 Ways Calvin and Hobbes Has Aged Poorly” into an AI text generator and it will spit out an article similar to yours in seconds…

When you write such a lazy and opportunistic piece, you’re also conditioning readers to expect that sort of prose. You’re conditioning them to expect the kind of regurgitated pablum that a text generator could produce on demand. You’re contributing to your own redundancy, Lukas, and to the redundancy of what we love to do… If you want an image of a future we should try to avoid, imagine a text generator producing mirthless moralistic listicles — forever. 

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,

Absolutely lovely take-down: “[…] nauseating combination of complacent presentism and totalistic moralism.” 

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,

Dinosaurs actually had feathers, which contradicts Calvin’s imagination. 

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:

At his age, Calvin should be building his social skills with other children, rather than his imaginary tiger. He should also be spending much more time with his parents. The poor parenting in Calvin and Hobbes has not aged well, given that developing child-rearing theories encourage socialisation and parental involvement. 

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,

I honestly can’t tell if it *is* an AI parody.

While Dean reveals,

At this point I started sharing my cat’s tranquilisers to try to make sense of it all.

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.

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Written by: David
Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (716)

April 12, 2024 134 Comments

Vortex rings, Mount Etna. || Invisible drum kit. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || A brief history of defenestration. || No good deed. || How to deal with insufferable, self-inflated wankers. || Heist movie. || Hygienic button-pushing. || Booty booty booty. || She has jam jars and takeaway boxes containing human brains. || A game of falling balls. A guide of sorts. || “The most unique gift for any man.” || Dragon chicken. || Ladies in a certain line of work. || “The sand is the weight of the artist.” || To send a message to the others, obviously. || Mongolian heavy metal. || Please don’t defecate in my grocery store. I paraphrase, but that’s the gist. || At least the poncho helped a little. || Petrol station scenes. || 1950s Super Panavision 70 Star Wars. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || First impressions, they say.

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Politics Pronouns Or Else Those Poor Darling Paedophiles

Valid And Proud, You Hear

April 11, 2024 49 Comments

And in other this-never-happens news:

We will have to use our collective voices to speak our truth to sway those who are fed up with the far right’s hatred… It’s up to us to use science and show our humanity to convince them and the world that we are not inherently dangerous. 

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:

“I’ve known for a long time that I was a girl-lover. I’ve always found young girls to be desirable, on an emotional and physical level,” Cruz wrote in 2019. He described how, in 2007, “in the midst of lonely turmoil,” he discovered pro-pedophile advocacy and communities online.

“I read through their heartfelt messages about how much they love and care about little girls. What they were writing was exactly how I felt. And what they preached never changed. They all truly love little girls, just as I do,” Cruz said.

Adding, not unreasonably,

Fuck this shit.

Well, quite. One more time:

heartfelt messages about how much they love and care about little girls.  

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:

We’re also told that we mustn’t assume that paedophiles “desire to harm children,” even though their desires, when enacted, via secrecy and deceit, do harm children, often catastrophically, and even though their enacted desire is, by definition, a violation, a betrayal, an act of monstrous selfishness. “There is no reason to posit intentions to harm, disrespect, or expression of ill will on the part of all or even most paedophiles,” says Dr Moen.

This is despite acknowledging that such experiences leave a majority of victims with “psychological disorders… increased likelihood of drug dependence, alcohol dependence, major depression,” etc. And despite the fact that these consequences are very widely understood, at least in simple terms. And despite the fact that many paedophiles have been subjected to similar abuse themselves and therefore know first-hand the likely consequences.

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

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Reheated

Reheated (89)

April 9, 2024 141 Comments

Some items from the archives:

Crotch Funk As Art.

Come, fellow aesthetes. Let us visit the Vienna International Dance Festival.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by fellow Belgian Jan Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat. 

You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.

Militant nudists wave things. Or, “Mommy, what’s a cock ring?”

The denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s protest claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

For many, if not most, of the activists, this isn’t even about an enjoyment of being naked per se. It’s about confronting other people with unsolicited nakedness. That’s the enjoyment – it’s a juvenile kink. Being nude in private or among consenting nudists in dedicated bars, clubs, spas, on nature trails, at specialist beaches, etc. – of which San Francisco has plenty – doesn’t give the activists enough of a thrill. Because the people there are willing… Hence the demand to display their genitals in front of random passers-by, including children. An audience is required in order to feel transgressive and it’s pretty obvious that’s what matters. They want to be naked near you. 

Flatter, Mythologize, Rinse, Repeat.

Because, admit it, you miss Laurie Penny.

By all means take a moment to realign your mind with the notion of Ms Penny as a “cyborg” writer and in some way marginalised – “marked as other” – and struggling against the pressures of not being heard. Except of course when she’s on TV, or Five Live, or Radio 4, or when airing her various and bewildering concerns in the pages of the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent. 

Vibeslayer.

A song is pondered.

Still, one has to marvel at how the default progressive line is not only tin-eared and wrong, but actually an inversion of the songwriters’ intent. The song isn’t about ignoring or overriding the woman’s preferences, or indeed drugging her – but quite the opposite. Throughout the song, they’re both thinking of ways to delay her departure. Half a drink, another cigarette. And despite the woman running through the list of obstacles to her passion, and saying that she “ought to say no,” because social convention expects her to forego her own preferences, the song concludes with the woman deciding that she’s “gonna say” that she tried to go home but was thwarted by the blizzard.

The two of them then agree, in unison and in harmony, that the weather outside really is terrible. 

Just Surrender To The Will Of Clever People.

Attention, parents. Reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage.”

Readers may wish to ponder the oddness of the idea that caring, functional parents, parents who make sacrifices for their children, have something to atone and apologise for. That, having done the best they can for their children and having given them opportunities, they have sinned against “social justice.” 

Artists For Gaia.

Our betters sail north at taxpayer expense. Gas is released courageously.

Such was the level of inspiration, some of the assembled artists began to work their creative magic immediately: “Tracy Rowledge constructed three series of ‘automated’ physical drawings, mapping the movement of the boat during the expedition.” For readers of a technical inclination, these ‘automated’ drawings involved suspending a felt-tip pen from the underside of a chair, resulting in random scribble on numerous sheets of paper positioned underneath.

This feat was “REALLY exciting,” we learn, as it “explored movement, time, place and permanence.” The radical innovation also freed the artist to leave the dangling pen and do something more interesting. According to her two brief blog entries, the sum total of her commentary, Ms Rowledge spent much of this liberated time struggling with Greenlandic place names and making sure her fellow passengers knew how “overwhelmed” she was. 

Consider this an open thread.

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Anthropology Dating Decisions Free-For-All Pronouns Or Else

A Failure To Affirm

April 7, 2024 96 Comments

From the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, a tale of romantic complication:

Today, my partner of a year just came out to me as a trans woman, and I’m ashamed to say I don’t think I reacted very well. 

The feeling of being, shall we say, misled can do that, I suppose.

It was done over text, and basically consisted of me trying to convince them that their life will be so much harder if they come out as trans, much less a trans woman… I just don’t know what to do. I found them attractive before, what if I don’t now? 

Twist incoming.

I’ve been out as trans man for close to a year and a half now… I’m trans, I’m supposed to be gung-ho about all of this, right? 

Oh my, a spotlight shared. Awkward. Or, “Woman who wants to pretend she’s a gay man is thwarted by male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps.”

As I said, complications.

Readers are welcome to speculate as to whose feelings are more, er, valid in the scenario above.

And before you ask, the outlook isn’t great:

It just seems a lot easier to leave right now because things are already rocky, and this is just a rather large cherry on top. 

Update, via the comments:

Regarding this,

me trying to convince them that their life will be so much harder if they come out as trans, much less a trans woman…

Mags adds,

He she didn’t use her his pronouns. 

Indeed. A notable omission. One that results in finger-wagging from fellow forum regulars:

You do have to respect that SHE is the expert on her own gender, not you, 

It’s a bold claim. And despite which, the person being scolded, a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. There’s no she or her, just a grudging them. Which does rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

Readers who poke through the subsequent replies will note how almost any kind of questioning – even expressions of surprise and concern from an intimate partner – is promptly dismissed as “hurtful,” “transphobic,” and “pretty shitty,” something to apologise for. As if anything short of immediate and gushing affirmation – pretty much any hesitation at all – were an act of wickedness.

Also, this caught my eye:

I think my main fear is them looking like a drag queen? Where you can tell that it’s a man dressed as a woman, and that I don’t find particularly attractive. 

Which is something of a drawback, given the odds on that matter.

One of the commenters then replies that “drag queen is a look,” by which they mean valid, a possible aspiration, and that one should “interrogate those feelings” that looking like a drag queen is probably not ideal.

Via Rafi.

In other, happier news, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (715)

April 5, 2024 142 Comments

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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Anthropology Free-For-All Travel

Perhaps The Cardboard Has Magical Properties

April 1, 2024 184 Comments

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

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,

Then what’s the fookin point? 

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.

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Reheated

Reheated (88)

March 27, 2024 305 Comments

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.

Naturally, the first task was to give the toilets a makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti, thereby communicating the life-enhancing qualities of prostitution: “Less abolitionism, more whoring,” and “less TERFs, more sex.” Needless to say, the conflict has escalated… With the facilities now being used by rival tribes, all gorged on intersectional compassion – and with so much graffiti to be written and responded to indignantly – students are reporting queues and “lengthy wait times.” 

You’re Reading The Comments, Right?

When wokeness is ascendant and apparently quite stupefying.

Pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.

Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.

No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction, “These playing fields… are never theoretically far from plantation fields.” Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million. 

The D-Words.

On supposedly racist traffic cameras.

Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less. 

No Relation.

“Diverse identities” and euphemistic convolutions.

I can understand the reluctance to appear indelicate or to cause needless offence; and in some situations, there may be scope for polite fudging. But pretending-as-default, or worse, pretending-as-law, can lead to unhappy farce and a kind of collective derangement. And the media presenting the reader with an obvious distortion of reality, and seemingly an expectation that we should all pretend too, is also rather offensive.

Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well.

I bring you art. And atomised dairy products.

The mighty talent featured in the following video is artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose work teeters on the edge of profundity, as will doubtless become clear, via juddering and convulsion, and the strategic deployment of 25 pounds of powdered cheese. Come, sup ye at the teats of creativity.

Consider this an open thread.

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Anthropology Art Politics

The Put-Upon And Marginalised Finally Get A Word In

March 25, 2024 81 Comments

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

the unicorn is the subject of a major exhibition opening next weekend in Perth.

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

The first UK exhibition to investigate the cultural history of this elusive, magical, and well-loved creature will be the centrepiece of the opening celebrations at the new Perth Museum, after a £27m transformation of the former City Hall, 

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

“We’re exploring how people conceptualise an animal that they’ve never seen,” says the lead curator, JP Reid, 

White horse. Big horn.

“The unicorn was a symbol of innocence and chastity, and, in time, the story develops that the only way you can catch one is by baiting it with a virgin woman,” says Reid. He pauses. “There’s obviously a lot of innuendo going on.” 

Again, big horn.

at least half of the exhibition is dedicated to present-day incarnations. A mass display of crowd-sourced items – including My Little Ponies, novelty hats, rainbow-hued stuffed toys, and clothing – reflects the creature’s ubiquity across pop and kid culture. 

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.

the final section of the exhibition features six newly commissioned pieces exploring the ongoing challenges faced by the queer community globally, including transgender inclusion, conversion practices and institutional homophobia, transforming blank, life-size horse heads around the theme of “unicorn hunting in 2023.” 

One of the above. Presumably the most photogenic.

“Queer stories are so seldom told in museums,” says Jennie Grady, the community co-production officer who has worked in partnership with local LGBTQ+ groups on the exhibition. 

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,

“This is a £27m project and an opportunity to tell stories in a different way – we’ve been telling the pale, male and stale stories in museums from time immemorial and for institutions to stay relevant we need to represent the people around us. It’s not just a moral consideration but a practical one.” 

Ah yes, those unheard voices. The dear downtrodden.

Via Julia.

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Written by: David
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