davidthompson

A Sudden, Quite Rapid, Relocation Of Stock

One for our ongoing series on the progressive retail experience. I believe this is part 445:

A young woman asks in a brazen voice as the destruction and theft rages behind her, “Are y’all gonna make the sandwiches or are ya’ll just gonna keep recording?” The Wawa employee responded, “Uh, it’s going to be a while.”

“No arrests were made.”

Update, via the comments:

The celebratory twerking seen in the background is, you’ll agree, a charming touch. Presumably done on grounds that trashing someone’s business and stealing their property, while exulting in mob intimidation and giving two fingers to the idea of civilisation, is all so jolly. Perhaps we can look forward to another Vice article telling us how looting is a good thing when black people do it.

After all, self-styled progressives - the people who loudly announce their supposed compassion and altruism – are famed for making weirdly contrived excuses for pathological selfishness. Say, the kind of pathological selfishness seen above and throughout the progressive retail series. Indeed, excuses for sociopathic behaviour are a staple of progressive posturing, appearing all but weekly, and with increasing moral convolution and outright perversity.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Reheated (71)

As I expect to be busy over the next few days, some items from the archives.

Something About The Tone.   

Urban Studies lecturer bemoans litter inequality, suggests bulldozing homes nicer than his own.

Our postcode class warrior also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” Meaning more street cleaners, cleaning more frequently. He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to, “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.” But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.

The report that Mr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour. A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. 

The Dunning-Kruger Diaries, Part Two. 

Behold the creative outpourings of Ms Angeliki Chiado Tsoli.

Two Items, Possibly Related

Lifted from the comments, and further to this, more Mao-ling loveliness.

As someone quipped on Twitter,

If you’re comfortable screaming in someone’s face, for any reason, it means you haven’t been hit in the mouth enough.

Which sounds about right.

And that’s the thing about the kind of tribal, collectivist psychology we’re seeing – there’s no interest in, and an overt denial of, personal responsibility. In the eyes of those possessed, people – at least white ones - are merely types. The cells of some identitarian organism. Something to poke and abuse. There’s no reciprocity, at all, and no regard for personal boundaries, except as something to violate, repeatedly and gleefully. It’s a game of domination and quite literally dehumanising. 

Also, sealing doors with concrete and trying to burn people alive.

For “social justice,” no doubt.

Utopia Under Construction

Andy Ngo reports from Seattle’s super-woke world of tomorrow:

Those unfortunate enough to have homes or businesses within CHAZ — an estimated 30,000 residents — have no say over their new overlords. Residents have discreetly voiced their concerns to local media. Gunshots and “screams of terror” at night have been reported... Every business and property inside CHAZ has been vandalised with graffiti. Most messages say some variation of “Black Lives Matter” or “George Floyd,” but other messages call for the murder of police. Most businesses are boarded up. “ACAB” — all cops are bastards, an Antifa slogan — is written over them.

Needless to say, there’s more, much more, including armed warlords, triumphant racism, bomb-making, and the sexual assault of deaf women. But hey, we mustn’t judge. After all, we’ve been assured that it’s a precursor, a blueprint, of a brighter, kinder, more liberated world.

Thinking Like Children

And expecting applause. In the pages of Vice, a moral lecture, delivered from on high:

How to Talk to Relatives Who Care More About Looting Than Black Lives.

As an exercise in question-begging and dense, self-satisfied presumption, it’s quite a thing, that headline. It’s very now.

Among those of us deemed insufficiently woke and therefore suspect, questions may arise. For instance, in what way will those “black lives” be improved by the destruction of local infrastructure, local businesses, and the subsequent, perhaps dramatic, reduction in trust and goodwill? And what if the stores and homes in question - the ones being smashed, stripped of their contents and set ablaze - are owned by people who happen to be black, as has often been the case? What if the places being looted and vandalised with abandon, indeed exultation, are depended on by people who also happen to be black, whether as customers or employees? After the razing and ruin of their places of work, should these people be pleased to be former employees? Unemployed people who now have no local grocer, or garage, or pharmacy?

Alas, such considerations appear to have eluded the keen mental processes of the article’s author, Ms Rachel Miller, a young woman who dutifully declares her pronouns and boasts of being a “Buzzfeed alum.” 

If you’re not Black but want to support BLM, having fraught conversations with your kinda (or definitely) racist loved ones will likely not be fun, but it’s a very worthy undertaking.

Right from the off we’re informed, firmly, that any perceptible reservations about looting and rioting, or reservations about the Black Lives Matter movement – say, regarding its demented far-left agenda, its racial tribalism, and the stated goal of abolishing capitalism, prisons and the police – must be taken as an indicator of being “kinda (or definitely) racist.” Wokeness is not, it seems, a recipe for cognitive subtlety. “Some people,” we’re told, “appear to be far more worried about the fate of a Nordstrom or Target store than that of the actual human lives of protesters.” Again, one might deduce that only those protesting with, shall we say, physical enthusiasm have “actual human lives,” unlike their victims, whose hopes and livelihoods can be gleefully destroyed as an act of righteous liberation. From local amenities.

Reciprocal Principles Are Above Her Pay Grade

Via Min in the comments,

Arlene Dávila, a professor at NYU and founding director of the Latinx Project, believes that looting, theft, and destruction are all part of this essential tapestry of protest. She writes, “Anyone surprised that protests include looting of luxury stores in Soho & elsewhere doesn’t know the 1st thing about racial capitalism & luxury consumption. Racial exploitation is at the root of consumer capitalism built on the commodification of black bodies through slavery.”

Those with a taste for adolescent nihilism tarted-up as woke theorising can head over here for more of the same. There, you’ll learn that sweatshops exist and that “advertising is one of the whitest industries in corporate America,” and that therefore - yes, therefore - people who recently found their businesses and neighbourhoods violated and ablaze should just quit complaining and suck it up, baby.

One can only hope that Professor Dávila returns home one evening to find that it too has been chosen as a target of ‘protest’, i.e., robbed of anything valuable and merrily on fire. Possibly as a result of parents belatedly registering the kinds of people now entrusted to educate their children. Or would that somehow be unfair? I ask because, stripped of its rote contortions, Professor Dávila’s reasoning seems to be, “I am unhappy, therefore I am obviously entitled to smash whatever I choose, terrorise whomever I choose, however arbitrarily, and to destroy the hopes and livelihoods of countless random people.”

Because - magic words - social justice.

Readers may note just how often leftism is functionally indistinguishable from sociopathy.

Update, via the comments: 

Note too that Professor Dávila carefully sidesteps the countless scenes of feral violence against random people, including elderly women, even terrified animals, and wants us to imagine that the rioting and looting and arson have been neatly confined to “luxury stores” and is therefore, somehow, acceptable, even righteous. Something to applaud. Of course, this is a lie, as hours of video footage demonstrate. But it’s interesting how our dishonest woke educator, our teacher of other people’s children, seems to believe that the property of the owners of those stores, and the livelihoods of the people they employ, and the ongoing nightmare for the people who just live nearby or in the same smashed and burning buildings… well, they don’t matter.

He Wants To Call You Names

Lifted from the comments: 

It goes without saying chappie is an educator. Also needless to say, our educator chappie has form.

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.

Of course, it’s much easier to be dismissive of rapidly changing demographics and to disdain expectations of cultural common ground if your own immediate neighbourhood hasn’t yet been enriched by gangs of machete-wielding sociopaths, or by people butchering animal carcasses in the back garden, or newcomers struggling with the concept of electricity, or getting lively in the name of Islam, or just shitting on your doorstep, as happens in some of the more vibrant areas.

And yes, we’ve been here before.

Decolonise Your Mind

A title I’ve stolen shamelessly from Orwell & Goode:

A new superstitious belief has emerged in some areas of Mozambique - that bald men have gold in their head. However, the head has to be taken to a witchdoctor who will use magical powers to extract the gold - and make them rich. As a result, police say five bald men have been killed in central Mozambique.

Adjust those holiday plans accordingly, baldies.

Not entirely unrelated.

We Are Enriched

Via the BBC, some vibrant multicultural news:

Breast ironing awareness should be made part of the mandatory school curriculum to protect young girls from abuse, the National Education Union has said. The practice involves ironing a girl’s chest with hot objects to delay breasts from growing, so she does not attract male attention.

Given the perversity of the phenomenon, readers may not be entirely surprised to learn,

There is no specific offence for breast ironing.

There’s more, though it doesn’t get any less grotesque.

Elsewhere (267)

Douglas Murray on crime, migration and modern dishonesties: 

In Germany, friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them.

Related: “Vibrant and diverse.” And of course these items here. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” versus merit: 

Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades… The result: wasted resources, the side-lining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t — because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

And Roger Kimball on being outraged by the obvious-but-unmentionable: 

Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered. What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” […] As William Henry argued back in the 1990s… “Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal… It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” True, too true. But in a pusillanimous society terrified by its own shadow, it is one thing to know the truth, quite another to utter it in public.

And then Professor Wax mentioned other obvious things, much to the agitation of people who like to pretend.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Elsewhere (256)

Heather Mac Donald on a certain newspaper of record: 

The day after the New York Times informed its readers about the “professional” world of astrology, it ran a front-page story about ICE agents’ alleged reign of terror in Atlanta, Ga., under the Trump administration. This reign of terror consists in targeted enforcement raids against individuals like an illegal Mexican who has been deported twice, served time in prison, convicted of two domestic-violence incidents, and charged with rape which he plea-bargained down to a lesser crime. The number of illegal alien law-breakers in Atlanta is so high that one is booked into a county jail every few hours, reports the Times. The Times notes with dismay that illegal aliens are being arrested for driving without insurance and without a licence. Apparently Times reporters would not mind if their car were totalled by an uninsured driver. A reporter for the Spanish-language newspaper Mundo Hispanico sends out Facebook alerts of sightings of ICE agents so that illegal aliens can evade the law. Yet we are supposed to believe that it is the Trump administration that poses a threat to the rule of law.

Apparently, readers of the New York Times are expected to concern themselves with the violation of their borders by illegal aliens only insofar as illegal alien status is to be construed as excusing other criminal activity.

Peter Wood on perverse art and its admirers: 

Take the elevator to the sixth-floor offices of the college president, however, and… you will find… a celebratory exhibit of art created by the friends and allies of the 9-11 terrorists… The paintings and the models in the show are unremarkable as art. They display no special skill or aesthetic sensibility. That has not stopped Erin Thompson and her two fellow curators from attempting to squeeze whatever portentous meaning they can from the paintings. For example, in reference to a painting of a glass vase, a bottle, and two cups, by Ahmed Rabbani (a member of Al Qaida who trained as a terrorist in Afghanistan), the curators observe in the exhibition notes, that the “empty vessels also serve as an oblique reference both to Rabbani’s absent family and to his acts of self-denial and resistance.” What you won’t find in these paintings is any trace of repentance. These artworks are by terrorists and their accomplices who seem untouched by the monstrousness of their actions. They can wax sentimental about their own families and can draft images of hearts and flowers, but pity for the victims of their jihad is beyond their imagination — at least their visual imagination.

Curiously, or perhaps not curiously at all, the reasons for detention are downplayed or entirely absent. Nor is there any mention of released detainees’ recidivism rates. And despite the claims of artistic and sociological heft, there is, as Peter Wood notes, a baser motive in play – the wearying, juvenile need to be seen as transgressing bourgeois proprieties: “What better way to rile people than to celebrate terrorist art at a college that educates students for careers in law enforcement?” In New York City, no less. 

Somewhat related, this video here, in which students share their views of the exhibit, and of course this somewhat revealing faculty profile. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Elsewhere (255)

Further to this Kafkaesque episode, Lindsay Shepherd explains the difficulties of dealing with the Mao-ling mentality: 

I know absolutely nothing [about my accuser or the accusation]. I don’t know how many people complained; I don’t know if it’s something specific that I said or that was in the [Jordan Peterson] clip; or something even that someone in the class said. Currently, the Rainbow Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University is demanding an apology from me… but first I feel I need to know… what am I apologising for?

Henry George on the Clown Quarter’s pathological coddling and its strange selectivity: 

King’s College London has made impressive new strides in its efforts to be crowned “social justice warrior college of the year.” As of this term, the King’s College London Student’s Union is paying what it calls ‘safe space marshals’ to attend speaking events and sit in the audience to protect the attendees from speech that might prove offensive or uncomfortable, with instructions to intervene at the first sign of wrongthink… The first speaker to enjoy this new form of policing was the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is, of course, considered a dire threat to student safety and wellbeing… This raises the question of whether or not these ‘safe space marshals’ would have intervened when the university’s Islamic Society hosted a speaker who failed to condemn stoning for adultery, calling it as merciful as euthanasia earlier this year.

And Jordan Peterson on the psychology of leftism: 

Hatred turns out to be a very powerful motivation. If you think about the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union, all these places that were supposed to be workers’ paradises - if you look at the outcomes and you had to infer whether it was goodness of heart and care for the working man that produced the genocides, or outright bitter resentment and hatred, it’s a lot easier to draw a causal path from the negative emotions to the outcome than from kind-hearted benevolence. You just don’t get gulags out of benevolence.

As noted here before and illustrated at length, it’s interesting just how often “social justice” posturing entails something that looks an awful lot like spite or petty malice, or an attempt to harass and dominate, or some other obnoxious behaviour. Behaviour that, without a “social justice” pretext, might get you called a wanker or a bitch. A coincidence, I’m sure. And it seems to me that when your chosen means of expressing piety and high motives include terrorising a lone female driver, picked at random, and trying to smash her car’s windscreen into her face while videoing her distress, then some self-reflection may be in order. And likewise, when Black Lives Matter activists and “social justice” juggernauts deliberately and laughingly obstruct ambulances and other emergency vehicles, and endanger the lives of random people, while giving the ambulance drivers the finger, this doesn’t exactly indicate some lofty moral purpose.

It does, however, tell the rest of us, quite vividly, what you are.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.