His, quite frankly, is bigger than yours. || After several fortifying beverages, he did it for science (a thread). || Buyer’s remorse. || How to suck rubble. || Cutting the cheese. || Cool-dude styling. || How to make a moon and do it fairly briskly. || “Why are they recording me?” || It’s satire, but barely. || I think they may be cybermen. || Today’s word is tits. || Entirely unrelated. || Lively scenes. || Lively scenes 2. || The thrill of clothes shopping. || It pays to be thorough. || Pad of note. || The Lord’s Prayer. || The thrill of Sunday trading, 1972. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || We appear to be experiencing intersectional difficulties. || A preference for flat stomachs is apparently caused by “colonialism and anti-blackness.” || And finally, fashionably, it costs around $300 and it’s called a “fuck hat.”

You can, should you wish to, follow me on Twitter. 

Some items from the archives:

How Dare You Not Pretend.

On pronouns, politeness, and the strange mental rumblings of Ms Laurie Penny.  

Regarding rudeness, I’m generally polite by default, at least in person, and don’t go out of my way to needlessly put a kink in someone else’s day. I’ve had perfectly civil chats with people who regard themselves as transgender or gender-non-conforming or whatever. Nobody got upset. But what is often being asked – or demanded – is not a small thing, not in its implications.

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

Turf War.

At Middlebury College, woke piety erupts. A 74-year-old scholar is quite literally chased off campus.

Jonathan Kay shares the, um, joys of fully intersectional Canadian television:

The taxpayer-funded media colossus known as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has unveiled a new show called Lido TV, in which a pair of talking tomatoes (they look like testicles, but apparently they’re supposed to be vegetables) deliver woke sermons to whoever is so unfortunate as to hit the play button… After video clips from this self-parodic mess went viral, it emerged that Lido’s production company has been bankrolled in the high-five figures (at least) by public funds. Your (Canadian) tax dollars at work.

Viewers of pallor will doubtless be entranced by 20-minute episodes titled Colonialism and Privilege, and stern lectures – delivered by the host, singer Lido Pimienta, and two giant, talking testicles – on just how bigoted and generally awful their collective ancestors were, and how this historical beastliness is, “like, affecting all of us, all of the time, on every level.” Likewise, viewers unpolluted by pallor will be empowered and destined to flourish, armed with the knowledge that any failure or shortcoming in their lives, almost any resentment, can be traced back to, and promptly blamed on, the aforementioned colonialism, privilege, and pale devilry.

The boggling awfulness of the project – applauded by Maclean’s as “subversive” and “surrealist political edutainment,” the work of a “polymath” – isn’t easy to convey in words. Happily, clips are available. And yes, an entire episode. If your idea of a good time includes pretentious displays of indigenous authenticity, rambling, barely relevant interviews, and excruciating sketches about land acknowledgement, this is the one for you.

Update, via the comments:

Three words: post-coital fondue. || Tongue action. || Twitter: The Movie. || He nipped outside for a smoke. || The thrill of carpet fitting. || Cyberpunk excitement. || How to empty one of these with optimal speed. || They have much to teach us. || A cosy murder mystery. || “The erotic mind-control community has a problem with racism.” || Brittany, 27, is not at all religious. || Booby drumroll. || There ain’t no cringe quite like woke theatre cringe. || Divergence. || “What does it matter?” || It’s amazing how quickly the day can turn to shit. || Apparently, he’s not broadcasting it. || Batman: The Silent Motion Picture. || Notice of note. || The thrill of anvils. || Millions of years of fun for the whole family. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || And finally, don’t pull that face – you’d watch and you know it.

And yes, should you wish to, you can follow me on Twitter. 

Jonathan Kay on woke mysticism and the latest must-have identity niche:  

[O]ne of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial.” […]

While the authors of the report were careful to source their work to Indigenous writers and interviewees, it’s interesting to note that all of the listed societal roles attributed to ancient Two-Spirited people align uncannily with the avant-garde outlook of a white 2022-era environmentalist who’s embraced intersectional conceptions of gender… We are told no fewer than nine times, for instance, that the authors are following an “anti-oppressive” approach. Colonialism is denounced more than a dozen times, including in its “heteronormative” (three times) variant.

Needless to say, the whole thing is a bit of a two-legged stool and, shall we say, not entirely consonant with anthropological evidence.

Libby Emmons on cheated female athletes and transgender overreach: