davidthompson

As Good As A Rest, They Said

Or, The Cause Of All The Banging And Salty Epithets.

After close to sixteen years, this blog has a new home.

Come see. Bring cake. 

It Was A Time Of Howls And Tin-Rattling

With my brief absence having doubtless resulted in the rending of hair and garments, it’s as good a time as any to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are buttons below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. If one-click haste is called for, my PayPal.Me page can be found here. As requested, I’ve also added SubscribeStar and Ko-Fi accounts, via which love may also be monetised, whether as one-off donations or monthly subscriptions.

Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link, or for Amazon US via this link, or via the buttons in the sidebar, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. Feel free to buy things wildly and in bulk.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and 150,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start - in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Consider this an open thread.  

The Pretending Can Get Competitive

Genevieve Gluck brings news from Scandinavia:

A man in Norway is sparking outrage on social media after he was sympathetically interviewed about his decision to begin identifying as a disabled woman... In the interview, [he] stated that he had always wished he had been born a woman who was paralysed from the waist down.

So not just a woman, but a woman in a wheelchair, which confers bonus points. So many intersections. So many opportunities to impose on others. The gentleman in question, Jørund Viktoria Alme, is a 53-year-old senior credit analyst for Oslo’s Handelsbanken. He is of course able-bodied, if a tad high-maintenance:

“In the same way that I experience being a woman in a man’s body, I experience that I should have been paralysed from the waist down. This is not a desire to be a burden on society. It is about the wheelchair being an aid for me to function in everyday life, both privately and at work,” Alme stated.

Unsurprisingly, many actually disabled people, whose use of wheelchairs is not recreational or a prop in some theatrical psychodrama, have aired their reservations about this new frontier in the world of make-believe identities. Among them, Noomi Alexandersen, a woman with cerebral palsy, who told Norway’s TV 2 that Mr Alme’s professed “identity” is an insult. Mr Alme, however, prefers to think of himself – an activity well-practised - as an activist of sorts, overcoming prejudice and facilitating “diversity and inclusion.” It’s all terribly selfless and heroic.

Oh wait. 

Rashly, He Left Them Unsupervised

As Typepad is only intermittently functional at the moment, and with some “additional maintenance” occurring this weekend, and with attempts to get anything done during that process a recipe for meltdowns and mood stabilisers, I’ll be taking a few days off. By Monday, the worst of it should be over and normal service will resume.

Until then, play nicely. Use coasters.

Oh, and remember, sometimes one person can make a difference.  

I Have Some Reservations

From the pages of Scary Mommy, where ladies of a progressive bent share their fever dreams,

Could Witchcraft Make You A Better Parent? Real Witches Say ‘Yes’

I suspect the word real is creaking under the strain there. Other creaking may occur during our travels. Still, the author of the piece, Annie Midori Atherton, is keen to entice us with the prospect of paranormal parenting:

As a new mom fumbling through the daily grind of work, caregiving, and what little social life I can manage to eke in, I often find myself wondering how other parents pull it off… Some days I’m so worn down… that I feel I’d need to summon supernatural energy to thrive — rather than just survive.

And so, obviously,

For a growing number of people — including many mothers — witchcraft doesn’t begin or end with Halloween. According to one scholar, the number of Americans who identify with Wicca or paganism has risen from less than 200,000 twenty ago to nearly two million today. 

Uncorrected narcissism, or fears of being an uninteresting person, or both, will do that, I suppose.

Reheated (74)

More items from the archives:

She’s Seething With Empowerment.  

A Guardian contributor encounters a small act of courtesy, screaming ensues.

Ms Huckeba continues, “No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” “I scowled and stormed away,” says she, “completely enraged.” You see, he’s not allowed to do that - holding open the door for her - or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And this being the Guardian, what matters is that Ms Huckeba can invoke victimhood to rationalise having behaved like a complete and utter cow.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings.  

The pretentiously agonised, part 436.

When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous.

You Mustn’t Stop The Hysteria.  

A Professor of Education denounces consequences for… well, pretty much anything.

Friday Ephemera

Let’s call it a partial success. || Sorcery, perhaps. || Ripe and juicy. || Road manners. || Relaxing in the bosom of nature. (h/t, Tim) || For breast-fondling enthusiasts. || Our betters, being so clever, forgot to bring their own. || Suboptimal situation. || Learning curve. || Well, at least there’s lots of it. || Yes, it will be on the test. || Always respect the media. || The progressive retail experience, part 446. || Remember, this never, ever, ever happens. || Harvard student denounces “the violence of statistics.” Which ones, I wonder. || Be careful which questions you ask. || The Internet Movie Cars Database. || When you donate to Wikipedia. || The Manhattan Population Explorer. || Street vibes. || How to thread a needle. || And finally, fragrantly, the thrill of using unfamiliar towels.

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

But What If Your ‘Whole Self’ Is, Frankly, Aggravating?

And back in the world of contrived racial grievance, 

Job postings and corporate ‘About Us’ pages often include a statement about the company fostering an environment where employees can bring their ‘whole selves’ to work. But how often do these claims reflect reality?

At risk of being difficult, I have questions about the premise. For one, why on God’s Fragrant Earth would an employer, or indeed their customers, want employees to drag every last piece of their personal baggage into the workplace and then inflict that inexhaustible tedium on everyone else? If, say, I’m buying groceries, I am as a rule friendly towards the person at the checkout. There’s always eye contact, a smile, and a word of appreciation. However, I rarely have the time or inclination to hear about the cashier’s extensive list of ailments or her difficulties finding a babysitter, or a lover, or a suitable shampoo. Nor do I wish to hear her views on politics. It’s not why I’m there. And ditto her.

Bringing your whole self to your job can be challenging at best and career limiting at worst, specifically for marginalized and racialized peoples.

There we go. At this point, we could, I think, just paraphrase and save a lot of time:

Self-Involvement Not Entirely Practical In The Workplace. Magic Brown People Hardest Hit.

But no. We must push on.

Just Keep Your Hands Where I Can See Them

Meanwhile, in academia – specifically, the University of Southern California - it’s “Sex Week,” and so: 

“Exploring Sensuality and Herbalism,” slated for Tuesday, will be a “virtual evening of plant-play and exploring pleasure, sensuality, and herbalism.”

If you feel an urge to make your own body oil, or herbal tea, or erotic pottery, or should you be in urgent need of a “sexuality doula” and a workshop on “pleasure and identities,” hosted by Ev’yan Whitney, an apparently famed “facilitator and sensualist”… well, your diaries should be updated.

But if anyone here starts fumbling in their pockets longer than is strictly necessary, I’m fetching the hose.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Make Way For The Activist-Wanker Caste

As the activist delight in vandalism and traffic obstruction has cropped up in the comments, along with their bizarre rationalisations, I thought it might be worth revisiting some earlier rumblings on the subject.

For instance,

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.

It is, I think, worth pondering why it is that these supposed displays of righteousness routinely take the form of obnoxious or bullying or sociopathic behaviour, whereby random people are screwed over and dominated, and often reduced to pleading. Pleading just to get home, to children, or to work, or to get to the doctor’s surgery. Even ambulances and fire engines can be obstructed, indefinitely, with both impunity and moral indifference. Among our self-imagined betters, it seems to be the go-to approach for practically any purported cause. Which is terribly convenient. Almost as if the supposed activism were more of a pretext, an excuse, a license to indulge pre-existing urges.

And what kind of person would have urges like that? 

Update, via the comments:

Friday Ephemera

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. 

Reheated (73)

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.