I’ll be busy for a couple of days, so you’ll have to amuse yourselves, I’m afraid. Consider this an open thread in which to share links and bicker.

Here’s a customer enquiry that’s somewhat poorly timed.

In case you missed it in the comments, here’s another illustration of the severely educated and their unhappy mental trajectories. In this case, Mr Anthony Oliveira, a writer and “pop culture critic,” who boasts of his PhD, in English literature, and whose pronouncements are, shall we say, very much of a type. And so we learn that, “queer people are permanently disadvantaged and marginalised by the capitalist power structure,” that, “‘the family’ as we now understand it is a capitalist invention and is specifically designed to exclude queerness,” and that, “queerness is incompatible with capitalism.”

What, you didn’t know?  

Readers may pause to wonder how the passing of time will treat those who’ve internalised such woke theatre and made it their persona, their schtick, with the inevitable declaration of pronouns (“he/them”) and equally inevitable pretensions of victimhood. Such that being gay is The Defining Feature Of One’s Life, the basis of a career, and framed by default in terms of exclusion, “oppression” and being marginalised. What happens when the professionally oppressed hit forty, or fifty? Will they still expect the world to be fascinated by their gayness, their queerness, and its supposed incompatibility with a market economy? Will they still be banging on about it?

When you’re a teenager, being gay is, understandably, a big deal. But if it’s still a big deal when you’re in your thirties, or forties or fifties – if it’s still your primary identity badge, the basis of your alleged oppression and intersectional status – as if you lived in the livelier parts of Yemen or Somalia, while actually living in Toronto, as Mr Oliveira does – then the words functional adult aren’t the ones that come to mind.

Via Tim Newman. 

These fine ladies are out of your league. || Unfortunate alignments. (h/t, Damian) || The cat ladders of Switzerland. || On the upside, at least it wasn’t cancer. || Our woke world, a snapshot. || Physiotherapy is ableist and oppressive. || Apollo 11. (h/t, Things) || The hazards of inattentive grocery shopping. (h/t, Obnoxio) || Shadow of a volcano. || Amazon review of note. || Teaching a neural network to drive a car. || Dawn chorus. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Sweet dreams. || Marital duels of the thirteenth century. || One of many. || Lively scenes. || Parenting shortfall. || She’s passionate about recycling. || Apparently, the word honk is no longer permitted on Facebook. || And finally, a notable courtship ritual.

I’m sensing it may be time for an open thread, in which to share links and bicker. While you mull, here’s a lesson in persistence and redoubling your efforts. Oh, and some totally harmless party balloons.

If the cravings are too much, you can always poke through the reheated series and greatest hits.

I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.

In the video linked above, feminist “theorist” Sophie Lewis informs us that the foetus, a nascent human being, is “violent,” does violence to “gestators,” and that abortion is a corrective killing, an “unmaking,” a means of “going on strike against gestational work.” “We need to move away from… arguments around when human life begins,” says she.

So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.

Ms Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. When not arguing for the destruction of the unborn, and the “abolition” of the family – which is to be replaced by comradeliness, apparently – she “participates in the Out Of The Woods anti-capitalist ecological writing collective.”

Update, via the comments:

In this laughably pretentious review of Ms Lewis’ laughably pretentious book, we learn that the author wishes us to embrace the disintegration of the family – our families, all families – “until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all.” As if the “best available care” would somehow be an obvious result of family disintegration, despite decades of real-world evidence to the contrary. Supposedly, we would learn to love the “plural womb,” “radical disinheritance,” and “a world beyond propertarian kinship and work alienation.” The children we have will no longer be ours, it seems, and this will apparently make us happy. It’s a “queer, communist, speculative future.” A narcissist’s experiment. And we are to be the guinea pigs.

Via Mr Muldoon. Somewhat related.