Romanian scenes. || The baby-repelling properties of grass. || Perfect every time. || Exactly how should we perceive you, madam? || The progressive retail experience, parts 401, 402, 403 and 404. || Classing the place up no end. || “I’ve decided to dissolve my wiener in acid.” || An educator speaks: “We have to find a way to re-regulate white people.” || The walking dead. || What cotton buds are for. || “The covert world of spy centres and secret bases.” (h/t, Things) || That’s exactly how I would’ve done it. || It seemed like a good idea at the time. (h/t, Damian) || One month of the Sun. || Stalker, thwarted. || A bathroom tale. || Turning back time. || And finally, enticingly, “I’m working on a children’s book…”

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a male Guardian columnist, Mr Phineas Harper, announcing his plan to heroically advance “gender equality” via the medium of self-absorption and by wearing a pleated skirt. Guardian readers were invited to believe that the sight of Mr Harper “dancing in skirts” and feeling “buoyed up” by compliments regarding his ensemble would, in ways never quite pinned down, liberate British women from their grim, downtrodden existence.

We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.

And we concluded a trilogy of posts on the subject of crime and punishment – and the status-chasing contortions of progressives, for whom, pretentious leniency is a kind of social jewellery with which to impress one’s peers. And according to whom, the wellbeing of habitual burglars is much more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, whose homes have just been violated, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.”

In February, we learned, via a Canadian socialist podcaster named Nora Loreto, that habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime, a trivial thing. Even a third conviction for thieving someone else’s car should not result in incarceration or any physical impediment, because the victims of car theft – who do not exist, apparently – “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” announced Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Other topics included an educational effort in San Francisco, in which elementary school children were expected to “disrupt whiteness,” and to have – or at least regurgitate – strong opinions on the Israeli military. Needless to say, this focus on political indoctrination and imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords,” came at the expense of more mundane subjects, with English and maths scores hitting record lows, and with less than 4% of students considered numerate. All in the name of “removing barriers to learning.”

And we pondered the weirdly woke marketing of retailer John Lewis, whose customers were doubtless inspired to shop harder and more often thanks to photographs of store employees accompanied by details of their mental health problems and niche sexual leanings. Among them, Mr Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby, who was thrilled by “the chance to express my true inner self,” and who was photographed in an enormous rose-adorned wig and while clutching a cat o’ nine tails. Customers intrigued by this in-store display soon discovered Mr Whitcombe’s social media presence, which consists of hundreds of selfies in which he attempts erotic poses, complete with ladies’ lingerie and while gripping sex toys in his mouth.

The world of art enriched us in March, thanks to the Guardian’s gushing coverage of an exhibition – curated “in partnership with local LGBTQ+ groups” – of mass-produced My Little Pony dolls. Faced with piles of items both ubiquitous and banal, visitors to the exhibition were assured that the plastic objects on display, which could be found in any toy shop in any city, are tools of resistance for the marginalised and unseen, and are “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” Yes, a full-on face-blast of culture.

We also stared in disappointment at the creations of Ms Caitlin Blunnie, whose modish but unremarkable illustrations are adorned with slogans of supposedly staggering profundity. Among the penetrating insights to be found were “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” “Smash the state and masturbate,” and, entirely without irony, “Abortion builds new futures.”

Further artistic rumblings were detected at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, where patrons were warned that, by liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption. Via new and scrupulously progressive signage, visitors were informed 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 deemed disconcerting, racist, and very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

The thrills of public transport came to our attention in April – specifically, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where female commuters were issued with “bystander intervention cards” with which to repel the network’s growing number of junkies, muggers and public masturbators. The cards, we were assured, albeit unconvincingly, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” More obvious methods of restoring some semblance of civilisation – say, by arresting the aforementioned junkies, muggers and masturbators – were left seemingly unexplored.

We also marvelled at an attempt to problematise the much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, via the joyless prattle of Lukas Shayo. Mr Shayo, a graduate of CUNY and denizen of Brooklyn, attempted to establish his credentials by telling us how “violent” and “sexist” the strip is, and by complaining about the absence of smartphones, the inaccurate depiction of imaginary dinosaurs, and the strip’s protagonist spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader. Those familiar with the strip 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.

And via the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, we pondered romantic complications of a very modern kind – namely, the woes of a woman who wants to pretend that she’s a gay man, but who was thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps. And so, we had a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, but who can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. The woman in question struggled with her partner’s claims of sudden-onset transgenderism and fabulist pronouns, while expecting observance of her own. Which did rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

May brought to our attention a cornerstone of many a progressive worldview – specifically, allegations of randomness regarding everyone’s birth. As if you – the person reading this – could somehow have been born to entirely unrelated people, with entirely different ancestors who are entirely unconnected to the ancestors one does actually have – and still be the same person. Because, it seems, it was mere “luck and random chance” that your parents’ child was you. Needless to say, the people making these claims were not themselves parents. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some arbitrary or pointless occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events.

Days later, scenes from a bus stop in Ruislip, Greater London, took on symbolic qualities and offered us a snapshot of a culture being downgraded, rapidly and perhaps irretrievably, thanks to its its supposed enrichment by newcomers for whom queueing is a seemingly alien concept. We then explored the gleeful and not infrequent punishment for those careless enough to notice such things.

We also looked on as the Vancouver Police Department, the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation insisted on referring to a deranged man as somehow being a woman, thereby setting fire to whatever credibility they could still be said to have. The man in question, Nathaniel Francis Beekmeyer, had recorded social-media videos in which he describes himself as “super cute” and “a beautiful person,” and hence his enthusiasm for assaulting random women and their four-month-old babies. The passers-by who intervened and overpowered Mr Beekmeyer faced further strange behaviour on seeing news reports in which this shirtless man was referred to by the police and media as a woman. As if their own, first-hand perceptions, from mere inches away, were somehow wildly and implausibly inaccurate.

In June, we encountered the deep, woke wisdom of Hannah McElhinney, who wanted us to know about her “queer temporality,” and the fact that “LGBTQ+ people experience time differently to straight and/or cisgender people.” Which, entirely coincidentally, makes her much more special than you. Paying attention to one’s queerness is, we learned, a favoured activity, along with mentioning at length the crushing burdens of being so complicated and fascinating. As opposed to those ordinary mortals who experience time in a humdrum, heteronormative way.

Another cognitive colossus raised our eyebrows days later, in the form of the World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken. Ms Auken wishes to correct our primitive, territorial lifestyles – say, by making us surrender our cars to random strangers, at seemingly random intervals, and for purposes unknown. Having people you don’t know take away your car would, we were assured, be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.” This vision of an unpropertied tomorrow, in which everything belongs to the state, and nothing belongs to you, prompted many replies, among which, “Anybody ever wash a rented car? No?” And, “Sorry about your wife going into labour, I needed some cigarettes. By the way, you need some new tyres.”

And we beheld the dazzling thoughts of Atlantic columnist Xochitl Gonzalez, a supposedly downtrodden Person Of Pigmentation, whose article was highlighted by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. Ms Gonzalez wanted us to believe that she is oppressed by expectations of reciprocal courtesy and basic consideration. Say, the assumption that you won’t wander into a library, where people are studying for exams, and start blasting out loud music. When not denouncing the “gentrification” of white library patrons, whose appreciation of Brooklyn hip hop combos is insufficiently fulsome, Ms Gonzalez spends her time mentioning how “minority” and “of colour” she is, as if waiting for applause. Or at least deference.

July introduced us to the world of politically radical tableware. By which, I mean unattractive, poorly made objects intended to propagate pretentious racial guilt. Our guide to this phenomenon, Victoria Burgher, a PhD student at the University of Westminster, insisted that creating unattractive plates is “crucial to any antiracist social justice work.” When not making unsightly tat, Ms Burgher spends her time telling the credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.” You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

No less radical was Kate Auletta, the editor-in-chief of Scary Mommy, a publication for ladies of a progressive leaning. Ms Auletta’s contribution to human advancement entails showing her bare arse to her small boys, then applauding herself in print. Having listed her numerous physical imperfections, including a big, sagging bosom and a fat upper pubic area, Ms Auletta went on to detail the ways in which her two small boys are being politically improved by the sight of her incongruous crack and badger. This feat of not wearing knickers.

And we encountered Argentina’s first transgender pilot, a burly chap now named Traniela Campolieto, who bangs on about the super-girly tightness of his uniform while using the cockpit to take endless, pouting selfies. Before becoming a shimmering vision of womanliness, Mr Campolieto was a professional bodybuilder, a proverbial brick shithouse. Which may explain his enthusiasm for bad wigs, the transformative powers of which may have been overestimated. And so, the pilot in charge of 250 tonnes of Airbus A330, and on whom the lives of 400 or so passengers depend, is a man whose perceptions are somewhat unreliable, not least regarding himself.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, 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. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Oh, and we were treated to the creative efforts of artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose juddering and convulsions were artistically enhanced by twenty-five pounds of powdered cheese. When not “investigating bodies of cultural debris” and being showered with atomised dairy products, Mr Romania teaches those less gifted than himself at New York’s Centre for Performance Research and other places of learning.

In the comments, Nikw211 steers us to the pages of the Observer, where Ms Martha Gill has some thoughts on shoplifting.

First, some setting of the scene:

And,

All rather grim. If not entirely surprising to readers familiar with this blog’s Progressive Retail Experience series. The collection to date, some 495 entries, can be found here.

Ah, that mood of lawlessness.

Ms Gill links to an article including figures by the British Retail Consortium showing a steep increase in predation. Unmentioned by Ms Gill, however, is the equally marked rise in retail staff experiencing physical abuse, sexual assault, and threats with weapons. Thieves, it turns out, are “becoming bolder and more aggressive” as shoplifting has blurred into mob robbery and open, gleeful looting. Though, again, this detail is not explored in the Observer.

Ms Gill, you see, is in search of less obvious, more exotic victims:

Retailers who’ve been sexually assaulted or threatened with machetes may, I suspect, take a different view. And whether the person wielding the machete could be construed as “vulnerable,” a feat accomplished in the Observer article, may not, at the time, have been foremost in their minds.

Except, of course, that studies on the subject repeatedly point out that the majority of shoplifting is not done out of some noble desperation, but rather for kicks, or status, or for black market resale, including the aforementioned baby formula. In reports on the phenomenon and its common causes – say, by the same British Retail Consortium – the words alcohol abuse and drugs crop up frequently, as do the words gang activity and organised crime.

By most estimates, shoplifters are on average caught around 2% of the time, usually after dozens, even hundreds, of thefts; and of those apprehended, roughly half are turned over to the police for prosecution. The National Association for Shoplifting Prevention adds, “While the romanticised face of shoplifting is the starving parent stealing bread to provide for a child, the reality is this is rarely the case.”

Apparently, Ms Gill could not find space in her article for such insights. Instead, Observer readers are treated with a detour into the world of Dickens and literary solidarity with shoplifters – “quite often we are on the side of the light-fingered lifter.” Indeed, we’re told that shoplifting can be construed, by those so inclined, as an act of “social defiance.” We are, however, reminded that small businesses should, perhaps, where possible, be spared such predation – and that, “stealing is not always the best way… to address inequality.”

Eventually, we arrive at the offering of solutions. Naturally, this being the Observer, rumblings of punitive consequences are frowned upon. Jail time for repeat offenders is, we’re assured, “exactly the wrong approach.”

Says Ms Gill,

What those difficult moral problems might be is not made entirely clear. Nor is it obvious why imprisoning habitual thieves, thereby interrupting their criminal adventures, should be considered a total failure and unworthy of the effort.

Instead, with some contrivance, responsibility for thievery is laid elsewhere:

Retailers, it seems, are asking for it. What with those short skirts. Sorry, accessible goods.

Ms Gill then cites academic Gloria Laycock, whose solution to the swell in shoplifting and mob robbery is suitably unobvious and therefore statusful:

Quite how a supermarket might function with all of its goods rendered inaccessible, hidden away under lock and key, is, sadly, left to the imagination.

The general idea, presumably, is that the rest of us, the law-abiding, should resign ourselves to ever more inconvenience and social degradation, and being increasingly alienated from our own neighbourhoods, because punishing habitual criminals, even those armed with machetes, is terribly unfashionable. At least in certain circles. Those inhabited by academics and Observer columnists, for instance.

And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory, as implied above, entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?

Update, via the comments:

Leaf-blowing drama. || DIY policing. (h/t, Julia) || Needs more dress. || Near miss. || A masterclass in stealth redistribution. || He does this better than you would. || That’s exactly how I would’ve done it. || How deep are the oceans? || “Do you see this?” || Today’s word is oversharing. || An educator speaks. “I’m not anti-white,” says she. || A virtual 1950s electronic music studio. (h/t, Things) || Just tap it, he said. (h/t, STG) || Can pigs jump? || The progressive retail experience (or how to undermine a high-trust society). || “The propped-up people in Victorian ‘post-mortems’ look alive for a much simpler reason.” || A game about a very long baguette. || And finally, because you’d never, ever tire of it.

Update:

I know its creators think it is clever but all I get from it is a sort of prequel to A Clockwork Orange.

Lifted from the comments, where Stephanie is unimpressed by the latest advert for John Lewis home insurance, shared by fellow commenter John. It has to be said, the advert in question does seem to be sending messages that its makers, and executives at John Lewis, don’t quite understand. Presumably, the urge to seem trendy and affirm transgenderism – while coyly hiding behind the fig-leaf excuse that, well, some boys just like to vamp around in their mother’s clothes, so, hey, we’re not really being political – blinded them to other, perhaps more obvious construals. Given the attempt at woke messaging, it does seem odd to associate transgender people with juvenile roleplay, antisocial self-absorption, and gratuitously destructive behaviour. It’s almost funny, in a dark kind of way.

The advert – a theme of which appears to be “I’m fabulous, so fuck you and your possessions!” – isn’t going down terribly well with the department store’s customers, who, it seems, aren’t amused by the thought of their homes being wilfully trashed by an incredibly spoiled child in bad drag. Apparently, we’re meant to find the boy in the advert adorable and affirming. Not, say, selfish and malicious, and old enough to know better. Which is the actual effect.