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

Slide THOMPSON, blog Poking the pathology since 2007
  • thompson, blog
  • Reheated
  • X
  • Email

Slide THOMPSON, blog Poking the pathology since 2007
Browsing Category
Anthropology Politics

Your Host’s Idea of Hell (2)

June 11, 2013 34 Comments

In my nightmare I’m sitting in this audience of socialists and communists, unable to leave, while other socialists and communists – more statusful socialists and communists – spend an hour telling me how “serious” they are, and how important and “dangerous” their ideas are. Amid references to Lenin, Marx, Gramsci and other totalitarian fantasists, I’m also told how much these gathered “radicals” value humility. After all, when a room full of unhappy leftists say they want to “break the government” and initiate a “revolutionary transformation of society” – in their own image – humility is the word that springs immediately to mind.

Then, while I try biting down on my own neck, Laurie Penny starts to speak, at length, almost randomly. “We need to be talking seriously about trauma,” says she. Because “it’s quite difficult for the left to talk about how it’s feeling.”

A note of caution. The linked video – hailed as “a very good discussion” – lasts for the better part of an hour, and you won’t get that time back. Though there is, I suppose, a grim humour in listening to denunciations of the “elite” and the “establishment” from a blowhard Trotskyist who, like his peers, wishes to be those things, only much more so.

Previously in hell.

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Ephemera

Friday Ephemera

June 7, 2013 14 Comments

Major crab migration. // Sunrises seen from Mount Fuji. // How to feed your hummingbird. // Sloth-facing, it’s a thing to add to the list. // Your very own Xbox gaming module. // Buzz Aldrin and Thomas Dolby need a little more rehearsal. // Bach, visualized. // Avoid that buzzing, crackling sound. // New York in colour, 1939. (h/t, MeFi) // Under construction. // Cows with luxurious coats. // The Guild of Evil’s partygoer cocaine gun still has some minor issues. // Three languages of politics. // Visualising sound with water. // Ladies sit at a table and read aloud while beneath the table an accomplice pleasures them, for art. (h/t, Peter Forsythe)

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Academia Ideas Politics

Shut Up, They Explained

June 5, 2013 42 Comments

The number of bureaucrats on college campuses exceeded the number of people involved in instruction as of 2005. And that’s on average. It’s just been getting bigger and bigger. And when you have so many people whose job is to police the daily lives of students – shock upon shock – they start overdoing it. The reason why college has gotten so expensive, and the reason why free speech and due process are in such trouble on college campuses, is one and the same.

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff on the battle for free speech, the redefinition of ‘harassment’ and the selective uptightness of the “new Victorians”:

Also from the video:

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Anthropology Music Travel

Deploy the Weapon

June 4, 2013 8 Comments

Deploy the weapon

Um. 

Continue reading
Reading time: 1 min
Written by: David
Art Ideas Politics

Elsewhere (94)

June 3, 2013 32 Comments

Theodore Dalrymple on the cult and conformism of the graffiti artist Banksy, an avowed “anti-capitalist,” albeit with means: 

The most famous of the street artists represented, Banksy… has painted a museum attendant in an old-fashioned uniform sitting near a single framed “picture” consisting only of the word PRICK (or, in another version, ARSE). The first of these versions was sold — though admittedly not by Banksy himself — for about $300,000. He has also produced a print of an auctioneer taking bids for a “picture” that consists of the words I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT. Banksy sold about 1,000 of these prints for $180,000 in total, but they were soon selling at auction for $5,000 apiece. This reminds me of the curious fact that a placebo pill has a placebo effect even if you tell the person taking it that it is only a placebo.

Banksy has guarded his incognito so that it has become, paradoxically, an important part of his identity as well as of his commercial appeal. But according to those who have investigated his life, he seems to have been born in Bristol in 1974. He was privately educated, which suggests family prosperity. From an early age, however, he appears to have suffered not from nostalgie de la boue, for he had never hitherto known la boue, but from envie de la boue, a longing for the depths. This common desire results from two ideological assumptions: that somehow the poor are authentic in a way that other social strata are not; and that prosperity, at least in our society, is something to be ashamed of, the product of social injustice or exploitation. The vulgar language in which Banksy expresses himself, which is probably not native to his original social stratum, is thus a form of expiation for the original sin of having been born to the prosperous and inauthentic.

There’s too much worth quoting so do read in full. Okay, one more:

Banksy painted the words DESIGNATED GRAFFITI AREA in an official-looking way on three whitewashed walls in elegant areas of London, and they were shortly covered with the horrible and idiotic graffiti that usually targets only concrete walls and tunnels. Banksy argues that all public space should be available for self-expression by the people, forgetting that the majority of the people may want to express themselves by leaving elegant blank walls elegantly blank. But then, they are only people, not the people, a crucial distinction in Banksy’s mind.

For more on the subject of graffiti and the thinking of its apologists, see also this.

And a mischievous Zombie ponders where Marxism meets the Tea Party:  

The formula to determine how much each employee gets to keep for living expenses is called “the tax code,” and those who contribute to the national product are called “taxpayers.” The managers deciding how the pile is spent are “politicians,” who are chosen every two years in a shareholders’ meeting called an “election.” This system worked pretty well for quite a long time — until recently. It is only within the last few years that something remarkable happened: The number of contributing “taxpayers” in the country for the first time has fallen to approximately 50% of the population. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed, retired, disabled or indigent citizens grew, as did the number of citizens who earned so little in part-time or low-paying jobs that they paid no taxes, as did the number of people labouring in the untaxed underground economy, as did the number of bureaucrats.

The end result of this epochal demographic and economic shift is that for the first time in American history, the people who actually work for a living and contribute to the common good — the “proletariat” in Marx’s version, and the “taxpayers” in ours — no longer control the company. Vote-wise, the scales have tipped in favour on the non-contributors and the bureaucrats, and suddenly they are the ones making the decisions about what to do with our collective gigantic pile of money — while those who actually created the pile through their work and tax contributions have become powerless. It is outrage over this very power shift that spawned the Tea Party, which is essentially a movement of taxpayers angry that they no longer get to determine how their taxes are spent. Historically speaking, the Tea Party movement can be accurately defined as a workers’ revolution.

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Continue reading
Reading time: 3 min
Written by: David
Page 456 of 706« First...102030«455456457458»460470480...Last »

Blog Preservation Fund




Subscribestar Amazon UK
Support this Blog
Donate via QR Code

RECENT POSTS

  • Friday Ephemera (788)
  • Not Reading The Room
  • Women Hold Sign, Quietly, Pinocchio Gets Upset
  • Reality Will Do That
  • Friday Ephemera (787)

Recent Comments

  • pst314 on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 20:01
  • Mel on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 18:03
  • pst314 on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 17:28
  • F Muldoon on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 17:19
  • David on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 17:05
  • F Muldoon on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 16:41
  • MuNu on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 16:20
  • ccscientist on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 16:03
  • pst314 on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 15:38
  • David on Friday Ephemera (788) Oct 12, 15:30

SEARCH

Archives

Archive by year

Interesting Sites

Blogroll

Categories

  • Academia
  • Agonies of the Left
  • AI
  • And Then It Caught Fire
  • Anthropology
  • Architecture
  • Armed Forces
  • Arse-Chafing Tedium
  • Art
  • ASMR
  • Auto-Erotic Radicalism
  • Basking
  • Bees
  • Behold My Anus
  • Behold My Massive Breasts
  • Behold My Massive Lobes
  • Beware the Brown Rain
  • Big Hooped Earrings
  • Bionic Lingerie
  • Blogs
  • Books
  • Bra Drama
  • Bra Hygiene
  • Cannabis
  • Classic Sentences
  • Collective Toilet Management
  • Comics
  • Culture
  • Current Affairs
  • Dating Decisions
  • Dental Hygiene's Racial Subtext
  • Department of Irony
  • Dickensian Woes
  • Did You Not See My Earrings?
  • Emotional Support Guinea Pigs
  • Emotional Support Water Bottles
  • Engineering
  • Ephemera
  • Erotic Pottery
  • Farmyard Erotica
  • Feats
  • Feminist Comedy
  • Feminist Dating
  • Feminist Fun Times
  • Feminist Poetry Slam
  • Feminist Pornography
  • Feminist Snow Ploughing
  • Feminist Witchcraft
  • Film
  • Food and Drink
  • Free-For-All
  • Games
  • Gardening's Racial Subtext
  • Gentrification
  • Giant Vaginas
  • Great Hustles of Our Time
  • Greatest Hits
  • Hair
  • His Pretty Nails
  • History
  • Housekeeping
  • Hubris Meets Nemesis
  • Ideas
  • If You Build It
  • Imagination Must Be Punished
  • Inadequate Towels
  • Indignant Replies
  • Interviews
  • Intimate Waxing
  • Juxtapositions
  • Media
  • Mischief
  • Modern Savagery
  • Music
  • Niche Pornography
  • Not Often Seen
  • Oppressive Towels
  • Parenting
  • Policing
  • Political Nipples
  • Politics
  • Postmodernism
  • Pregnancy
  • Presidential Genitals
  • Problematic Acceptance
  • Problematic Baby Bouncing
  • Problematic Bookshelves
  • Problematic Bra Marketing
  • Problematic Checkout Assistants
  • Problematic Civility
  • Problematic Cleaning
  • Problematic Competence
  • Problematic Crosswords
  • Problematic Cycling
  • Problematic Drama
  • Problematic Fairness
  • Problematic Fitness
  • Problematic Furniture
  • Problematic Height
  • Problematic Monkeys
  • Problematic Motion
  • Problematic Neighbourliness
  • Problematic Ownership
  • Problematic Pallor
  • Problematic Parties
  • Problematic Pasta
  • Problematic Plumbers
  • Problematic Punctuality
  • Problematic Questions
  • Problematic Reproduction
  • Problematic Shoes
  • Problematic Taxidermy
  • Problematic Toilets
  • Problematic Walking
  • Problematic Wedding Photos
  • Pronouns Or Else
  • Psychodrama
  • Radical Bowel Movements
  • Radical Bra Abandonment
  • Radical Ceramics
  • Radical Dirt Relocation
  • Reheated
  • Religion
  • Reversed GIFs
  • Science
  • Shakedowns
  • Some Fraction Of A Sausage
  • Sports
  • Stalking Mishaps
  • Student Narcolepsy
  • Suburban Polygamist Ninjas
  • Suburbia
  • Technology
  • Television
  • The Deep Wisdom of Celebrities
  • The Genitals Of Tomorrow
  • The Gods, They Mock Us
  • The Great Outdoors
  • The Politics of Buttocks
  • The Thrill of Décor
  • The Thrill Of Endless Noise
  • The Thrill of Friction
  • The Thrill of Garbage
  • The Thrill Of Glitter
  • The Thrill of Hand Dryers
  • The Thrill of Medicine
  • The Thrill Of Powdered Cheese
  • The Thrill Of Seating
  • The Thrill Of Shopping
  • The Thrill Of Toes
  • The Thrill Of Unemployment
  • The Thrill of Wind
  • The Thrill Of Woke Retailing
  • The Thrill Of Women's Shoes
  • The Thrill of Yarn
  • The Year That Was
  • Those Lying Bastards
  • Those Poor Darling Armed Robbers
  • Those Poor Darling Burglars
  • Those Poor Darling Carjackers
  • Those Poor Darling Fare Dodgers
  • Those Poor Darling Looters
  • Those Poor Darling Muggers
  • Those Poor Darling Paedophiles
  • Those Poor Darling Sex Offenders
  • Those Poor Darling Shoplifters
  • Those Poor Darling Stabby Types
  • Those Poor Darling Thieves
  • Tomorrow’s Products Today
  • Toys
  • Travel
  • Tree Licking
  • TV
  • Uncategorized
  • Unreturnable Crutches
  • Wigs
  • You Can't Afford My Radical Life

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

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