davidthompson

Titans Walk Among Us

Fearless masked heroes harass and berate the elderly and disabled.

For “social justice,” no doubt.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” shrieks the masked young woman, flanked by her masked comrades for intimidation purposes, and while jabbing her finger in the face of a random man and preventing his elderly, disabled mother from crossing the road.

Update, via the comments:

A longer video of the scene, featuring more of our bandana-wearing bedlamite, can be found here. 

It must be strange to inhabit a social circle in which gratuitously harassing the elderly and disabled, and putting them in some fear for their safety, is regarded as a credential and proof of righteousness. To believe that such behaviour makes you look good and will earn you in-group status. It’s a pretty good measure of just how perverse, and morally demented, the Antifa mindset is.

It reminded me of a telling incident at a conservative convention during the Occupy fad of 2011, in which a mob of Occupiers, largely middle-class Clown Quarter students, amused themselves by trapping a random disabled woman – in a wheelchair and with an assistance dog – jeering at her predicament and telling her, “This is what democracy looks like.” Because nothing screams radical piety like preventing a disabled woman from getting home. And then assaulting her, while trying to steal her assistance dog. Sadly, video of the incident – complete with grinning faces – seems to have been purged from YouTube.

Update 2:

Friday Ephemera

Nommy-nommy-nom. (h/t, Jeff) || Portal says no. || Night vision injections. || Incoming enrichment. || Discharges of note. || Scholarship, baby. || It has four bedrooms and a room full of sand. (h/t, Things) || Bad art, breasts and adhesive tape. || Behold young love, it’s a precious thing. || Wee things called euglenoids. || 251 words you can spell with a calculator. || Cities, accelerated. || Sisterhood. || Teaching AI to play hide-and-seek. || Doing it for science. || Odeon cinemas of the 1930s. || Does anyone here know sign language? (h/t, Darleen) || He’s making the rest of us look bad. || He does this better than you do. || Hers is bigger than yours. || And finally, as situations go, it left some room for improvement.

And They Call It Equity

In the world of the woke, where all shoes are clown shoes, a little pushback: 

A teacher in Minnesota who had complained about racial quotas in school discipline has been awarded over half a million dollars in a settlement. Aaron Benner, who’s black, alleged retaliation by the St Paul Public Schools in the form of four “personnel investigations” following his criticism of discipline policies… Benner said, “We are crippling black students with racial equity plans that do a disservice. We should not be telling minority students they will not be disciplined the same as other students when their behaviour is unacceptable and sometimes even violent.”

Those ‘progressive’ discipline quotas - essentially, a racial ‘free hits’ policy - have of course been mentioned here before, along with their predictable and horrifying consequences.

As I noted at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else.

Such that seven different experiments, in seven different cities, resulted in seven dramatic surges in classroom violence, up to and including actual riots. While white teachers who found themselves being punched in the face, resulting in trips to hospital and permanent injury, were subsequently lectured on their “unconscious biases” and “white privilege,” and told to take comfort in free emergency whistles.

This, then, is “racial equity,” according to our betters. See how it shines.

Update, via the comments:

Sweet Fanny Adams

I got nuthin’. Nada. Zilch. Though I’m putting it down to my lofty standards rather than, say, a lack of mojo or imagination.

Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

Friday Ephemera

Branding decision of note. (h/t, Damian) || They do this better than you do. (h/t, Dicentra) || Baby barn owl hears thunder. || Bus terminal rotation. || Abductees. || Objects in ice. || Mobile phone sales, animated. || Flat-lay inventories of emergency vehicles. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || A drone, some cheesy music and a roller-coaster. || Today’s words are impulse control issues. || Walking in the rain. || “A camera took images of a corpse every 30 minutes. The corpse showed signs of movement.” || Sanitation worker’s museum of trash. || Toilet-mirror note of note. || Heh. || Also heh. || At last, herbal tea on a lollypop stick. || And finally, when your headline includes the words “massive semen explosion.”

For The Children, You Say

Matthew Continetti on the competitive pieties of woke schooling: 

Parents opted their children out of standardised tests, which they deemed “structurally biased, even racist, because non-white students had the lowest scores.” Without tests, there was no way to measure the progress of the student body. The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral. At a Parent–Teacher Association meeting, families split into warring factions. One side was furious at the school for making such an important decision arbitrarily and autonomously. “The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels — and not just on the bathroom doors — led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.”

Mr Continetti is referring to this first-hand tale of bewilderment and woe, in which there’s much to widen the eyes. Regarding the toilet drama mentioned above, this bears quoting:

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms… As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

Update, via the comments: 

We’ve been here before, of course:

Parents only discovered the campaign – which asserts that white pupils are complicit in an “invisible system of privilege” - when their children began complaining about it.

Also, open thread. 

The Revolting Masses

The battle for Brexit, the nature of the struggle, has become much more clear [than it was three years ago]. Before, it was, “Ooh, should we be part of the EU? Should we not be part of the EU?” Now, I think it’s much more clearly a class struggle… On the one hand, you have people who are very much part of the establishment, people who are in the public sector, or who are members of organisations that are paid for out of taxation, whose jobs depend on regulating the lives of others… the arts establishment, the university establishment… You can tell when you go to a party, say, who’s likely to be Brexit and who’s not likely to be Brexit… The media is an utterly ‘Remain’ industry, and they’re absolutely furious.

Peter Whittle interviews filmmaker Martin Durkin.

Two of Durkin’s films - Brexit: The Movie and Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary – have been featured here before, in full, and are strongly recommended. The subsequent threads are also worth a peek.

Update: 

The old word is treason… A large part of the British political elite has deliberately gone and negotiated against their own country…. They regard [the electorate] with absolute contempt.

Via Samizdata, and very much related, David Starkey has some thoughts.  

Also, open thread.

Friday Ephemera

Peeling skillz. (h/t, Dicentra) || Ink-powered leaf. || No, you first. || Can snails fart? || Does it fart? A quiz for all the family. || Infinite patterns. (h/t, Morpork) || Your children, their politics. (h/t, Darleen) || When you want your freshly squeezed in an orange-peel cup. || “Without the proper type of music your programme will be more difficult.” || I hadn’t noticed these. || What are the odds? || Whatever it is, it smells funny. || At last, a decoy keyboard for your cat. || “You’re more likely to become a Navy Seal than click a banner ad.” || “Am I being detained?” || Blind engineer invents interactive smart-cane. || Because you’ve always wanted asymmetrical jeans. || And finally, obviously, hers is bigger than yours.

Pudding First

Over at Vox, where leftist brains pulsate, Ms Kelsey Piper has an idea: 

The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely... There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote… I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly, and it’s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they’ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway.

I didn’t say it was a good one.

It occurs to me that if you start demanding that small children be allowed to vote in general elections – largely because you assume that their choices, their politics, will tend to mirror your own - then perhaps it’s time to ponder why your own politics correspond with the imagined preferences of children, who are, by definition, unworldly and irresponsible. Such that you grudgingly concede that, “Enfranchising everyone [i.e., including small children] will make the electorate less informed on average.” The rest of us, meanwhile, may wish to ponder whether a leftist’s desire to exploit the ignorance of small children in order to further her own socialist vanities is not only farcical, but degenerate. 

We’ve been here before, of course, when Professor David Runciman claimed that not allowing primary school children to vote alongside adults amounts to “an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.” As if small children are renowned for their selflessness and conscientious forethought. As noted at the time,

The irony being that children and teenagers tend to be quite selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree unbecoming in adults, and are accustomed to free stuff, all paid for out of sight by someone else, much to the youngsters’ indifference. It would therefore hardly be surprising if voting children tended to favour policies that pile up unsustainable debt, all left for whatever generations follow them… What comes to mind is an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, in which the boys steal Hal’s credit card and run away to start a new and grander life in a hotel room, making enthusiastic use of room service.

How this sits with Ms Piper’s claim that “Kids have… a greater stake in political issues than adults do,” I leave to the reader.

Reheated (57)

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Her Loveliness Revealed.

Slate’s Christina Cauterucci has discovered a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism.”

You see, those “right wing, centrist, or politically complacent parents” - the parents you love, presumably - must be purged of their “ill-informed allegiances” and made to conform politically, with the threat of never seeing grandchildren. Which is how well-adjusted adult offspring behave, of course… Ms Cauterucci’s parents are no doubt proud of their daughter and her charming, terribly enlightened fantasies of coercion, in which children are imagined primarily as a form of political leverage, a tool of rather sadistic emotional punishment. And all in the name of progressive piety.

Your Failure To Enthuse Is Violence, Apparently.

Roy G Guzmán is oppressed by the “violence” of people not liking his poetry.

After dismissing the recent, rather negative appraisals of his work as driven by “toxic masculinity” and “(white) male fragility” - no other possibilities being conceivable, of course - Mr Guzmán has apparently retired from Twitter. We are, it seems, a terrible disappointment to him.

Hear The Lamentations Of Unstable Leftist Women.

Their marriages failed, they have psychiatrists on speed-dial, and it’s all Trump’s fault. Oh, and white men, obviously.

Friday Ephemera

The clock is ticking, someone save the cat. || Close enough. || Close enough 2. || Breakfast cereal amplifier. || On second thoughts, perhaps not. || I question the parenting. || Toilet-related submarine mishap of note. || Burger-chain kitchen scenes. || His chocolate-cake lollipops are fancier than yours. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || It also makes spherical ice. || The Megatherium Club. || Smarten up, your date’s here. || Tough day. || Tim Newman on standards and woke condescension. || Every Noise At Once. || Build your own wooden hurdy-gurdy. || Build your own functional paper organ. || And finally, when you mislabel baldness medication as an acid reflux treatment and inadvertently produce really hairy children.

The Blurting

Neo notes a phenomenon that may be familiar to some of you:

Some (not all) of the liberals I know seem to have a constant need to assert their Trump-hatred at regular intervals and inject anti-Trump remarks of various kinds into ordinary non-political conversations.

We’ve previously mentioned bizarrely emphatic and incongruous outbursts, the relevance of which to ongoing, often mundane conversations was hard to fathom, and which seemed driven by a compulsion to signal some imagined piety or status. A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit - implicitly very bad - and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.

At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree - that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common. That the poem’s sentiment of friendship and community was being soured by divisive smugness escaped our local academic, whose need to let us know how leftwing he is was apparently paramount. The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.

It wouldn’t generally occur to me to shoehorn politics into an otherwise routine exchange, or into a gathering with strangers, or to presume the emphatic political agreement of random restaurant customers. It seems… rude. By which I mean parochial, selfish and an imposition - insofar as others may feel obliged to quietly endure irritating sermons, insults and condescension in order to avoid causing a scene and derailing the entire evening. The analogy that comes to mind is of inviting the new neighbours round for coffee and then, just before you hand over the cups to these people you’ve only just met, issuing a lengthy, self-satisfied proclamation on the merits of mass immigration, high taxes and lenient sentencing. And then expecting nodding and applause, rather than polite bewilderment.

Update, via the comments. Two additional illustrations of the same phenomenon: