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Anthropology Politics

Reality Is An Inherent Problem

August 19, 2024 130 Comments

I paraphrase, but not by much:

It started, since you ask, with chappie being annoyed by the existence of a cruise ship. Says he,

The amount of money and resources wasted on this abomination could have changed uncountable lives across the globe for the better. 

Readers will note that the word wasted is doing some heavy lifting there. That the building of said cruise ship paid the wages of thousands of people, in several cities, for years, and that the crewing and maintenance of said ship pays the wages of thousands more, and that the thousands of passengers aboard it at any given time will be spending large sums of money in any number of tourist destinations, making lives better across the globe, seems to have escaped our indignant chappie’s attention.

But still, he has “he/they” pronouns in his bio. So some markers of status are totally okay, apparently. Chappie tells us that he’s a “Black communicator,” whose podcast “paints a multi-faceted picture of the Black, brown, and Native American experience through story-telling.”

Relevant footnote.

Relevant meme.

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

Update:

In the comments, EmC quotes this,

The fact that people have to work to eat is an inherent problem.

And adds,

So the socialist wants to be an aristocrat?

Or an owner of slaves, perhaps. Some arrangement in which he, Our Obvious Better, doesn’t have to do things that others find of value. Something non-reciprocal.

From the thread above:

It’s certainly a mindset that’s quite telling. For instance, this came to mind:

So, for some, the very idea that a grown-up person should pay their debts – or keep their word, or honour their promises – is something to be “defeated.”

Or, adulthood is such a drag.

Update 2:

It’s curious how often such complaints boil down to, “Other people, less fabulous people, should labour for free, for my benefit, until I say otherwise.” Which, it has to be said, is an odd construal of righteousness.

We’ve been here before, of course. As when an unhappy young madam realised, belatedly and with some annoyance, that bills have to be paid, and livings have to be earned. A seemingly overlooked detail that prompted much umbrage and baffled indignation, on grounds that cars and food and houses are things “which we should just be able to have.”

As I said in reply,

The emotional assumption that Things Should Just Be There For Me, Forever, In Unlimited Quantities is, I think, something best addressed before one’s children venture out into the world.

Children who, as adults, may then make TikTok videos of themselves bemoaning the fact that they aren’t simply being given a free house, and free food, and a free car, and free petrol for the free car. Children who, as adults, may then seem genuinely bewildered by the prospect of being responsible for the feeding and clothing of any children that they, in turn, might have.

Another thing occurs to me. If pretty much everything you need, or want, should just somehow be there anyway, on an indefinite basis, via some oddly unarticulated rearrangement of the universe, then it’s not obvious how gratitude might fit into such a mindset.

Answers on a postcard, please.

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Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (732)

August 16, 2024 192 Comments

Ample. || Secrets of the ladies’ powder room. || Solve your problems with a septum piercing tattoo. || Close enough to fool ’em. || Close enough 2. || Incoming. || A political question from 1973: Should Hornsea have a nudist beach? || Goodness, she’s got a big one. || Not half bad, all things considered. || Suboptimal situation. || Just one percent. || The progressive retail experience, parts 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, and 574. || Hardcore ping pong. || The thrill of shrimp. || In Pride news. || Kidnapping attempt of note, 1974. || Wrap malfunction. || Much too gentle for my taste. || This chap seems determined. || Some punching needed. || Your deepfake avatar has arrived. || At last, folding coat-hangers. || Fresh bread with flavouring. || And finally, they’re size 10 (Eur 38).

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Anthropology Politics Pronouns Or Else

It’s Super Important

August 15, 2024 69 Comments

Further to The Blurting, a footnote of sorts:

“My Fox News dad makes everything political” https://t.co/JxaZvPwrSg

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) August 15, 2024

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Update, via the comments:

The above, it seems to me, is not so much a declaration of values as a psychological profile.

As Rafi says in reply,

I’d buy my own laser cutter.

Not having to deal with such people does have a cash value. If in order to use a communal laser cutter, you first have to “strive to uphold” the notion that sex differences are unrelated to biology, that “meritocracy is a joke,” and that, despite all available evidence, “nonbinary people” somehow aren’t aggravating poseurs… Then, well, buying your own laser cutter seems a much better option.

After all, this life is finite and best not wasted on proximity to wankers.

Oh, and some of that super important intersectionality.

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Anthropology His Pretty Nails Parenting

Shush, Daddy’s Being Fabulous

August 13, 2024 87 Comments

From the forthcoming film by Vaishnavi Sundar, Behind The Looking Glass, about women whose partners, or fathers, have ‘transitioned’:

You’ve got to pretend that it’s all okay… You have to realise that your dad has fallen in love with himself, and there’s no part for you in that where you are not just a prop.

It’s like this person came along and said, “You know how you had a dad? Well, that was all a lie. And all that time, your dad didn’t like being your dad.” And my dad was kind of replaced by this other person. This other person who didn’t love me like my dad loved me, wasn’t interested in me like my dad was.

And his love was conditional.

“Your dad has fallen in love with himself, & there is no part for you in there where you are not just a prop.”

There is profound silence surrounding the lives of the children with trans id-ing father. Are they just props used for championing a delusion? #behindthelookingglass https://t.co/MGRE78WGLk pic.twitter.com/aw9yFit55J

— Vaishnavi Sundar (@Vaishax) July 27, 2024

Emma Thomas, the woman recounting her somewhat unorthodox childhood, also appears in this longer interview. The subjects touched on include unmentionable erotic motives, ideological capture, and the experience of watching a man publicly enacting an approximation of breastfeeding. It’s a strange listen, necessarily, a little sad, and sometimes darkly funny.

Ms Thomas also has a blog, Children Of Transitioners, in which she relates her experiences, and those of others, and where she attempts to parse the phenomenon of dads in dresses:

Most people wouldn’t post a picture of themselves in their underwear in this context.

For instance.

Update, via the comments:

Pete SJ visits Ms Thomas’ blog and quotes this:

While many people assume that autogynephilia is all about the clothes, the fact is that children of transitioners are often familiar with the other markers of the condition. When your father wants to go to a bra fitting or make up session with you, or wants to know all about your period, that’s autogynephilia too. If your father is doing this, he is involving you in his erotic world.

Adding,

“Involving you in his erotic world” – an economic summary that catches the ambiguous or boundary-transgressing aspects of the behaviour. 

At which point, this eye-widening saga came to mind.

And note that those applauding Mr Yates, the star of the link above – the bewigged man quizzing schoolgirls about their panties – are overwhelmingly ladies of a progressive leaning. Selling out their own daughters, and the daughters of their neighbours.

In order to be seen holding fashionable views.

Or, as Ms Thomas recounts in the embedded video:

I lived this very, quite sheltered life, really, in some ways, and then I moved to this situation where there are a lot of people who were cross-dressing and, you know, selling sex. There was a guy who was a prostitute. He’d left a wife and two little children to sell sex. He moved in with us for, like, three months. 

So again, some boundaries being tested.

Given the current near-ubiquity of trans activism, it’s curious how little attention is given to estranged wives – ‘trans widows’ – or, as above, estranged children. Who, I suppose, would be ‘trans orphans’.

To which dicentra replies,

When they stick their heads above the parapet they are told to get over their transphobia and affirm their new mum/wife. The term “trans widow” is considered to be transphobic, because of course it is. 

Before citing the following scolding comment, directed at Ms Thomas by a disaffected reader:

“‘Trans widow’ is an appalling term, centring others where the focus should be on the trans person becoming his/her true self. Of course, there have to be difficult adjustments, but this is not death!” 

Yet the popular activist term deadnaming.

And you’d think the news that your husband no longer exists and that your entire marriage was a farce – or that your dad no longer exists and is now competing for the title of mom – or some bizarre hooker aunt – might be a legitimate basis for some, shall we say, irritation.

Even so-called “phobia.”

Update 2:

The entire documentary can now be viewed here.

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Free-For-All Politics

An Unfamiliar Neighbourhood

August 11, 2024 44 Comments

Lifted from the comments, and relevant to the ongoing liveliness, Peter Whittle ponders a recent, very rapid transformation:

The speed of change has been mesmerising. Indeed, lacking any real sense of overarching identity, the need to impose a sense of community has become paramount. Whether locally or, as we see, nationally, never have we heard the word community so bandied about. But it’s all pretend, really. Community was never talked about before, simply because it didn’t have to be. 

 

An animated chart of some relevance.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the video above, this came to mind. Tim Newman on knowing your neighbours:

The trouble with well-educated, international people like [Kristian] Niemetz is they fall into the trap of meeting foreigners who are much like them except for the accent and assume cultural differences stop there. Of course, if you hang out with academics and white-collar professionals it doesn’t matter if you’re in Berlin, London, Singapore, or Rio de Janeiro, it’s all the same.

But if you live beside someone who has no reason to get up in the morning and decides to play music at full blast until 5am, or deals drugs in the stairwell of your apartment block, or uses it as a toilet, or keys your car on a regular basis, all of a sudden you realise the character of your neighbour becomes central to your quality of life. The only reason Niemetz doesn’t know his neighbour is because the latter is culturally conditioned to be considerate, and to get up at 7am each morning to go to work. If he wasn’t, I suspect Niemetz would know him intimately.

If you start dispensing with old-fashioned ideas like sovereignty and believe a neighbour is no different from a Brussels bureaucrat, you’re going to be in a for a rude awakening when diversity and vibrancy moves in next door. Of course, those who advocate such policies rarely have to live with the consequences.

Having re-read it, it’s not entirely inapt.

Very much related to the above, and because an example is always handy, the rumblings of progressive educator Dr Adam Kotsko:

Given the self-satisfied ignorance on display – or malign perversity – I’m guessing Dr Kotsko doesn’t live in a neighbourhood rapidly being enlivened with Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose social skills, and machetes, are so much in the news here.

The phenomena that Dr Kotsko is unlikely to experience personally, but which he is keen to see inflicted on others, are helpfully illustrated.

See also Douglas Murray on the Simon Schama tendency:

Schama showed something a lot of us had suspected – which is that for a certain type of globe-trotting international celebrity, any concern for borders, national identity and cultural continuity are not just beneath them, but actively ‘common’.

Of course, like so many other advocates of mass immigration, Simon Schama can live pretty much where he wants. And if the area around him goes somewhat downhill because the neighbours all start to come from the rougher corners of Eritrea, then Simon Schama can move. And he will probably move to a very nice area. But not everybody has that choice.

And one thing we can all be certain of is that Simon Schama will never choose to live in Bradford, Malmo or any of the (dare I say it) ‘suburbs’ outside Paris. Yet all the time he will urge other peoples’ neighbourhoods to more closely resemble those great success stories, and look down at people from an ever-loftier height when they dare to object.

Needless to say, Mr Schama’s own neighbourhood is suitably… insulated.

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

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