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 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.

Will Gu on the deep and worldly wisdom on offer at Scripps College: 

The college will be hosting two Venezuelan officials next week at a three-day speaker series praising the “grassroots initiatives” of the country’s totalitarian government. The officials, Venezuelan Consul-Generals Antonio Cordero and Jesús Chucho García, will be speaking to students on “African solidarities,” “coups and imperial wars,” and the country’s vision for “a new society rooted in political participation, communal economies and democracy.” The description adds that the event is “for all who are interested in economics that serve people not profits.” Venezuela is still facing mass food shortages as a result of its government’s economic illiteracy. People in Venezuela have lost an average of 19 pounds from recent food shortages… The event description does not mention whether the two Venezuelan officials will discuss their country’s rampant corruption problem, the government’s dire financial situation, or the rapid devaluation of Venezuela’s currency to the extent that the government cannot afford to pay for money printing services.

Related: this, and, rather tellingly, the first item here. 

Cathy Young on debate and its enemies: 

When about 30% of college students favour censorship, it should be a cause for alarm — especially because that’s up from 22% two years ago. Moreover, 53% of students believe “promoting an inclusive society” is a higher priority than protecting free speech rights. Over a third say it is sometimes acceptable to shout a speaker down, and one in 10 approve of violent disruption. The last figure may seem small, but it means some 2 million collegians in the United States believe it can be okay to use violence to stop speech they don’t like. That’s not good news.

Gail Heriot on racial discipline quotas and perverse media narratives: