davidthompson

It’s Harder Than You’d Think

Time, I think, for a little test of musical discernment. So, Korean or Hasidic? 

That Unreal Communism

Oh yeah, “That wasn’t real communism.” We’ve seen a great example of that in Venezuela, where they put everybody on a kind of weight-loss plan that’s made the average citizen lose 20 lbs. Everyone’s starving in Venezuela. It’s like, “Hey, look – another example of what wasn’t real communism.” When someone says, “That wasn’t real communism,” here’s what it means: “I am so narcissistic and arrogant, and so convinced of the rightness of my ideology and my moral purity, that if I was the dictator of a communist state, the utopia would have come in as promised.” That’s what it means. So whenever anyone says that, you think, “Oh boy, I’ve got your number now. I know what you think of yourself.”  

Jordan Peterson.

Update:

And let’s not forget this:

A couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.

As noted previously, the left’s self-imagined radicals have little to gain from successful, independent people. Because success and independence – independence of them – makes you the enemy.  

Elsewhere (239)

Uri Harris on the ideological hegemony of the social sciences: 

[In a survey of the political preferences of social psychologists,] there were almost as many people who chose the furthest possible point to the left as there were who chose all the conservative points, the centre-point and the most moderate left-of-centre point combined… People that freely self-identify as far-left in the abstract, in other words irrespective of specific political issues, seem to me to be signalling something: that they are committed to an ideology. The fact that such a large portion of the most influential people in academic social psychology do so suggests that this ideology is entrenched in their field.

Which in turn suggests that what they’re actually doing may not in fact be science.

Franklin Einspruch on free speech and the prattle of Lindy West: 

West possesses a mysterious gift of psychic progressivism that lets her see into the hearts of men and unearth the real intentions behind their stated ones. Or so it would seem. These men are only pretending to care about freedom of speech, for example. They really want to harass marginalised people for having opinions… “They’re weaponising free speech to maintain their cultural dominance,” she says, obsequiously quoting Anita Sarkeesian, another psychic progressive. That flushing noise you hear is the sound of productive dialogue disappearing into the rhetorical toilet. Identitarians like West have never grasped that it is impossible to found a good-faith discussion on bad-faith premises such as these… The irony of [West’s] essay is that its main point – that all this defence of free speech is really about deflecting criticism – is coming out of a camp of left-identitarianism that spent much of the last decade answering criticism with charges of bigotry.

When not deliberately knocking sleeping passengers with her in-flight luggage and boasting about it in articles for feminist publications, and then complaining that no-one wants to sit next to her on a plane, Ms West, a “fat activist,” shares videos of herself eating biscuits. 

And Ace’s CBD on the obliviousness of the protesting class:

At the Impeach Trump March in Chicago 7/2/17, a group of protesters applaud a speech comprised almost entirely of Adolf Hitler quotes given by Shad Daley. This was 20 seconds after saying they need to fight fascism. After the speech, the organising member of refusefascism.org was desperate to get Shad more involved.

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

You May Clutch Your Armrests Now

For those of you about to fly somewhere:

Via Elephants Gerald, via Ace. 

Friday Ephemera

Simpler times. // Less so. // “Mysterious stains everywhere” and other low-rent hotel horrors. // How sperm whales sleep. // At last, snortable chocolate. // His grip is better than yours. // Battery University. (h/t, Dr W) // Uncombable hair syndrome. // Almost Eighties. // Cocktails 101. Yes, there will be a test later. // Japanese playgrounds. // This just in. // This is one of these. // $15. // Photographing the Moon with a Game Boy camera. // The hazards of golf. // A vet’s life. (h/t, Damian) // Bit chilly out. // Your one-stop shop for Chicago murder stats. // Chinese rap is a thing that exists. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // And finally, futuristically, “The motors are controlled by pressure sensors in your shoes, under your toes, and communicate to the thumb via Bluetooth connection.”

Time Sinks

Commenter John D asked if I had a list of the Android games I’ve linked to in various Friday Ephemera posts. I didn’t, but as he asked nicely, and hit the tip jar, I felt obliged to throw one together. It’s quite possible I’ve missed a few, so the following list may be expanded in the comments.  

Severely Educated

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, here’s a Twitter drama in three four parts:

 

One.

 

Two.

 

Three. 

 

Four.

 

Via Ben Sixsmith. 

Elsewhere (238)

Kyle Smith on what happens when you question the accuracy of a race-activist theatre production: 

Steppenwolf Theatre Company charged [critic Hedy Weiss] with “deep-seated bigotry.” An actor named Bear Bellinger announced that he would not perform if Weiss showed up at a workshop production he was appearing in. An ad hoc coalition that might as well have dubbed itself the Blackball Hedy Movement (but is actually called the Chicago Theatre Accountability Coalition) launched a petition via change.org to organise the theatre world of Chicago against Weiss by denying her invitations to its plays. Several theatre organisations have publicly agreed to join the blackballing effort, and dozens have offered noncommittal statements of support. The group’s broadside against Weiss reads, “Over the last few years especially, we have joined together to make it clear that inappropriate language or behaviour does not have a place within our community, and that prejudice of any kind will not stand.”

I’ll let you find out for yourselves what was deemed to constitute “bigotry” and “inappropriate language.”

Tim Newman spots a pattern: 

I suppose Nigeria and the UK are not the only countries where the wealthy and privileged get together and pretend they’re on the side of the downtrodden masses, but I am nevertheless surprised at how universal such delusions are.

Jim Goad catalogues more examples of leftist high-mindedness: 

It happened amid an insane cultural climate where the day before James Hodgkinson’s rampage, a black male shooter in Indianapolis fired at a truck that was flying a “Make America Great Again” flag. Where on June 11, the Huffington Post ran an article that openly called for Donald Trump and “everyone assisting in his agenda” to be tried for treason and publicly executed. Where a successful TV producer can encourage Trump-haters to “pick up a goddamn brick,” and he doesn’t get fired. Where a college professor says that Republicans “should be lined up and shot,” and he doesn’t get fired, either… A climate where the left is so egregiously insane and bloodthirsty — all in the name of compassion, of course — that the incomparably wormy Jesse Benn, who has previously called for “white wounding” and for violence against Trump supporters, saw no problem with a fellow traveller “shooting a racist lawmaker in the hip” last Wednesday. It’s a climate where, after the shooting, an obese New Jersey Democrat openly calls for the murder of Republicans with the hashtags #HuntRepublicans and #HuntRepublicanCongressmen.

Oh, and trans activist and self-declared “insatiable researcher” Zinnia Jones struggles to apprehend certain aspects of reality: 

Pretty sure they were trying to keep them from jumping.

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

Friday Ephemera

When your meticulously planned attempt at bank robbery is cut short. // Close enough. // Under London. // When men lactate. // LSD ‘microdosing’ is apparently a thing now. // Planet X is cloaked. // Plus one. // Pedal cars of yore. // Showbiz. // Hombre. // Birth of the camera phone. // Feel my babies. // Place your bets. // On Britain’s collective tea-making menace. // Animated bodies. // Paper puppets. // 1970s Spider-Man. // Cityscapes of note. // Tornado. // Storm. // Squirrel combing. // “A flight in China was delayed for five hours after an elderly passenger threw coins into the aircraft’s engine for good luck.” // And finally, rather pleasingly, “When a security developer was contacted by an IRS phone scammer, he decided to do more than simply ignore their call.”

Incoming

The deal we seem to have come to in Europe is that, on the minus side, we’ve got a bit more gang rape and beheading than we used to have, but on the plus side, there’s a much wider range of cuisine. So it’s all swings and roundabouts.

Mark Steyn talks with Douglas Murray about demographic transformation. 

Somewhat related, the Simon Schama Tendency. 

Forked Tongue

I’m actually, personally, very speech permissive. I would say I’m very pro-speech, almost absolutist on speech… um, but…

In the clip linked above, assistant professor of English Aaron Hanlon attempts to portray the physical suppression of speech on campus as a quality control issue and a cross-party phenomenon, as if these things weren’t overwhelmingly a default of the campus left. The assistant professor, whose activities include combing through rap lyrics for supposedly righteous and subversive anti-capitalist content, does this while simultaneously invoking the importance of intellectual standards, to which, by implication, said campus leftists, people such as himself, have some proprietary claim.

Update, via the comments: 

Elsewhere (237)

Joe Simonson on the latest innovation in anti-Trump “resistance”: 

Just Nips [are] the “official nipples of The Resistance movement,” according to founder Molly Borman. Started last January in time for the Women’s March, Just Nips provides synthetic nipples that you can wear over your bra or over your nipples. The product “cements the idea that women can and should do whatever they want,” Borman told me over the phone. In this case, “whatever they want” means making random people in public think you’re not wearing a bra — for empowerment or something. Just Nips’ release date is no coincidence. Borman sees her product as a direct challenge to President Trump’s administration. According to Borman, “a lot of women feel unsafe” under Trump, and her product helps provide comfort and “a safe space.”

Apparently, they’re “the WMDs of nipple erectors.” 

Sarah Hoyt on processed youth:

I don’t know who coined “Reeeee” for the sound progressives make when in the middle of a scream fest about some – mostly imaginary and unintended – offence. I know that for several months now my friends have been using it, usually when just having dealt with some idiot who keeps yammering on about moon ferrets. Or patriarchy. Or white supremacy… Thing is, if you’ve read about the Cultural Revolution… those too were a bunch of ignorant kids, taught only Maoism, and completely ignorant of what the peasants needed to do to survive and grow food. Their advice, their demands, their theories, were not only stupid but actually life-threatening. But people had to follow it because otherwise they’d be denounced and held up before revolutionary tribunals… The people who destroyed Chinese culture and productivity in the Cultural Revolution, and who filled the Yellow River with so many bodies that they washed up en masse on the shores of Macao (where my dad saw them), were nothing more and nothing less than weaponised Reeeee brigades.