THOMPSON, blog. Marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (735)

September 6, 2024 172 Comments

You first. || For the latest eye-colour fashion. || Fortresses, palaces and perched churches, a thread. || Could you survive a nanosecond on the Sun? || Well, really. || Make way. || Well, you would. || Namibian waterhole livestream. || How to climb volcanoes. || Will Newquay ban beatniks? || Is language dumbing down? || Our betters wring their hands. || Obligatory crotch grab. || Grooming scenes. || “I can’t even imagine what parent would buy this for their daughter, a child under five years old.” I can. || Incoming. || An excess of dramatic tension. || Help/hazard ratio. || Is your blue my blue? || How snakes move. || Atomic trampoline. Making one isn’t easy. || Today’s word is professionalism. || Sunfish of size. || And finally, from questions asked back in 1975: Are aliens abducting England’s dogs?

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Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Reheated

Reheated (97)

September 4, 2024 102 Comments

For newcomers, some items from the archives:

Your Standards Are Holding You Back.

Dating platform for Brooklyn’s hipster socialists is not entirely successful.

It seems that the ladies and gents who feel compelled to announce their revolutionary ambitions, and their pronouns, and various mental health issues, aren’t meeting quotas for finding each other attractive…

Ms Isser’s indignation at the thought of socialist women being romantically shunned, even by fellow socialists, was aired in December in a Twitter howling session, during which extensive use was made of exclamation marks. After much exasperated rumbling, Ms Isser concluded that the fault must lie solely with men, and that “straight men are shallow and sexist even when they’re socialists.” Thereby proving that, contrary to legend, ladies of the left are in no way high-maintenance or difficult to please.

“Our politics reflect who we are!!!!!” said she, loudly. Which is rather the problem, I think.

The Put-Upon And Marginalised Finally Get A Word In.

Come, let us peek at the Culture pages of the Guardian.

The above is, we’re told, “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…

“Queer stories are so seldom told in museums,” says Jennie Grady, who has worked on the exhibition.

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.

Yes, But Where Are My Novelty Breasts?

Convicted paedophile demands pampering, women’s undies.

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.

Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.

Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist.

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…

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.

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

Reading time: 3 min

Written by: David

History Problematic Taxidermy

Long Live King Victor

September 3, 2024 55 Comments

Via Mr Muldoon, a guide to finding ‘Pride’ in the taxidermy collection of Manchester Museum:

Have you found everything on our Pride Trail yet? 🏳️‍🌈

To Celebrate Manchester Pride we’re shining a spotlight on stories in our museum that speak to today’s LGBTQ+ community.

Here’s Nick with more about why there are so many more males than females in our taxidermy collection. pic.twitter.com/ovcDGbKwUU

— Manchester Museum (@McrMuseum) August 21, 2024

Whether taxidermied birds will in fact, as claimed, “speak to today’s LGBTQ+ community,” and prompt some radical and liberating mental uplift, remains something of a mystery. Still, at least we’ve been made aware of Nick’s fabulist pronouns, and her – sorry, them’s – badge collection. Manchester Museum is, sadly and perhaps inevitably, blocking enquiries and replies from those not pre-approved:

Apparently, the initial comments from the public, including museum visitors, were not the unanimous affirmation that was expected. An expectation that in itself is somewhat revealing. It does rather suggest a mindset, a bubble. And hence the rush to clamp down on unauthorised opinions.

Among which, the opinion that bemoaning the evils of “cis, straight, white men” may require a more solid pretext than the fact that Victorian collectors and taxidermists used for display the most eye-catching specimens they could find.

Similarly, any suggestion that the positioning of some stuffed male birds slightly higher than the females – so that their sexes might more readily be grasped by visitors – is hardly a basis for indignation, or indeed woke job creation.

And remember,

Having the children is really solidifying that nuclear family, that was a big thing back then.

A stable structure for raising offspring. How terribly unfashionable.

Readers will doubtless recall the likeminded “queering” of Portsmouth’s Mary Rose Museum, home of all things Tudor, where visitors were informed, with some satisfaction, that, “Many objects can be viewed through a Queer lens and can indirectly tell LGBTQ+ stories.”

The word indirectly was, it turned out, doing some heavy lifting. And so, those curious about the favourite warship of Henry VIII were shown a mirror salvaged from the wreck, and were told how mirrors in general can induce psychological crises in the sexually dysmorphic. Because, obviously, when you’ve travelled across the country to learn about Tudor England, the first thing you want to know is that reflective surfaces can upset men who pretend to be women.

A display of sailors’ nit combs was likewise accompanied by a reminder that, “for many Queer people today, how we wear our hair is a central pillar of our identity.”

Yes, I know. Breath-taking stuff. The bleeding edge. Those with a taste for cack-handed incongruity will find much to marvel at.

Reading time: 2 min

Written by: David

Niche Pornography Pronouns Or Else

You May Need To Write This Down

September 1, 2024 122 Comments

Natasha Biase brings niche pornography news:

In what might just be the most insane story of the year – Two female OnlyFans models have gone viral after pretending to be transgender to sell porn content.

Trans activists are now accusing the women of “appropriation” for identifying as men who identify as women. / @natbiase pic.twitter.com/z3aqbszcZ7

— ThePublica (@ThePublicaNow) September 1, 2024

So, to summarise:

Opportunist female porn models who pretended to be men pretending to be women, to thereby rake in lots of cash, have annoyed actual men who pretend to be women, including men who pretend to be women while making pornography.

See, I bring you the wonders of the world.

The ladies’ act of presenting themselves as the opposite sex, albeit with extra steps, was not, it seems, deemed affirming by those who like to present themselves as the opposite sex. “My gender isn’t your costume,” said this chap here, a self-styled “eGirl, but like, with a penis or whatever.” Other indignant rumblings included accusations of deception and fraud, the inevitable “transphobia,” and demands that the ladies in question “don’t get in our space.”

Another bewigged gentleman denounced the “masquerade” as “disgusting.”

Update, via the comments:

Needless to say, in the replies to our “eGirl, but like, with a penis or whatever,” mischief is underway:

“Trans trans women are trans women.”

“If they identify as trans then they are trans. Why can’t you just be kind and accept that, bigot.”

“Who TF do you think you are to gatekeep?”

And my current favourite:

“Women are trans women.”

And so on, and so forth. Truly, we live in an age of wonders.

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (734)

August 30, 2024 171 Comments

Wax and other objects. || Bodes well. || The science of bunnetics. || A little buffing should do it. || She doesn’t give two shits. || She didn’t like the look of it. || It’s not cold, Mom. || Comets, catastrophes, and the oldest solar calendar. || Neater than yours. || On animating Akira. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Upper West-side mansion, now only $10 million. || Pride, baby. || On piercings, tattoos and mental health. || Cold plasma. || This doesn’t happen in Waitrose. || Explanation underway. || Your toilet paper is shrinking. || The progressive retail experience, parts 575, 576, and 577. || “That’s alright, it happens all the time.” || Spa day takes a turn. || Suboptimal situation. || I’ll just leave this here. || The thrill of phone mites. || And finally, something to think about before you go to sleep tonight.