davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

If so, it’s news to me. || Woman preserves her late husband’s tattoos. || Two whole minutes of soul-wrenching art. || In Spain, turnips are being hurled at a man with a drum. || Capturing Death Valley. || Easy does it. || He does this better than you do. || It’s an awful lot of brown. || “His ideas about badgers did very little to make it easier to live in a dirt cave.” || Tim Newman on eternal hypocrisies. || “I care so deeply about the people in this world.” || “The short-term memories of monkeys have been improved by inserting human genes into their brains.” || These bees sleep in flowers. || Food chain negotiation. || Food chain negotiation 2. || And finally, in Kairuppala, India, it’s time for the flinging of faeces.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Public Libraries

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Captain Nemo steers us to the Twitter feed of Library Journal, a “global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators,” and which proudly directs its readers to the mental exertions of Ms Sofia Leung:

Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks. Pause here and think about this.

Ms Leung, an academic librarian, is unhappy that public libraries in the US, a white-majority culture with a white-majority history, tend to have, among other things, lots of books by authors with pale skin. This, we’re told, is an “interesting mini-eureka moment” that our Queen of Intersectional Rumination feels compelled to share. When Ms Leung discovers that public libraries in China and South Korea have quite a few books by Chinese and Korean authors, I’m sure she’ll be equally aghast. Every bit as offended.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history - while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property… When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of colour. 

At which point, things get a little breathless and intermittently grammatical. However, readers may wish to ponder how synthesising insights from around the world, and from cultures long gone, and preserving those insights, in libraries, is somehow a bad thing. Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended, something close to enraged, by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.”

As if sensing that her thoughts aren’t sufficiently lurid and unhinged, Ms Leung then shifts into higher gear:

I Was Reminded Of Rice Krispies

In Snow, the artist creates an abstraction of a dreamlike physical and sensual act. We hear and see sugary snow falling and popping on female genitals.

Behold ye. We’re also assured that the artist in question, Ms Aasa Ersmark, will explode our tiny heathen minds with her “intriguing duality” and references to pornography, thereby bringing us within sniffing distance of “female desire, lust, pleasure and climax.”

For those now engorged with artistic appetite, an earlier effort, titled Volcano, can be found here.

Keeping It Real

I’m in L.A. because I want to be on Instagram… The people who work nine-to-five, that is not me… I’m twenty fucking thousand dollars in debt from college… I am not work material. I will never be work material… I could never work a normal job.

Via Instapundit, a peep-hole into an alien subculture.

I’m not a hateful person. I’m a Sagittarius.

Also, open thread.

Friday Ephemera

Ah, the wonderment of a child. (h/t, Holborn) || Assorted science-fiction dime novels, circa 1890-1910. (h/t, DRB) || Upmarket scenes. || How to make Korean ice-cream rolls. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Iconic consoles. || Coat hangers, obviously. || She does this better than you do. || Art exhibit of note. || Technically correct. || Woke casting call. (h/t, Allan) || They found his skull and trousers. || Twofold Inc is a game. || If you snigger at this, even a bit, you’re a terrible, terrible person. || Always respect the media. || Mural of note. || More snuggest of snug fits. || Heh. || Effective but inadvisable. || “I am unable to can.” || Upscale construction set. (h/t, Things) || And finally, today’s words are escape velocity.

Resistance Is Futile

Via Neontaster comes news of an intriguing technological development. Apparently, the device “makes the patient feel comfortable,” while “the strong currents impact and rub.” Hey, I’m just reading what it says here.  

Oh, and yes, there is a more intimate video. 

Also, open thread.

Saddle Monkeys

Should we stop using the word ‘cyclist’?

So asks Laura Laker in the pages of the Guardian, thereby adding to our collection of classic sentences from said newspaper. This is promptly followed by another contender: 

As the repair man rummaged around in my gas oven, I tried to explain something to him about cyclists.

Which perhaps conveys a flavour of what follows.

Stopping using the term “cyclist” has been up for debate since an Australian study last week found 31% of respondents viewed cyclists as less than human. 

Specifically, a minority of motorists have been known to indulge in “humorous references to violence against cyclists,” which is entirely unwarranted, apparently, and must not be allowed to continue.

It is easy to dehumanise people who cycle… because they often dress differently and move in a mechanical way, and drivers cannot see their faces… Public references to violence against cyclists are not uncommon, and rarely given the same condemnation as, for example, violence towards women or bullying.

It occurs to me that cyclists are more likely to be the subject of unkind humour if their behaviour, not their chosen outfit, is causing a problem, or is perceived as such. And note the bold conflation of actual violence with merely joking about it.

Friday Ephemeraren’t

Yes, a glorious opportunity to assemble your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. Gracious host that I am, I’ll set the ball rolling with a display of dad powers; why physicists put a ferret in a particle accelerator; more joys of public transport; a pop icon speaks; and some vintage warnings about the menace of body odour.

Oh, and a headline of note.

Elsewhere (290)

Dave Huber reports from the bleeding edge of intersectional scholarship:

Rutgers University’s Brittney Cooper… an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies… says that the very concept of time itself is racially biased. In an interview with NPR last week, Cooper said that the way we “position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought”; in other words, “white people own time.”

According to our feminist educator, time “doesn’t feel linear” for black people – all of them, presumably - because, she says, they live with “the residue of past historical trauma.” You see, for “African-American folks,” the present “feels like the past” – specifically, “narratives of race that are rooted in violence and a lack of freedom” – i.e., slavery – “can become our reality again at any moment.”

Somewhat related. 

And John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi ponder leftist theories of crime: 

Criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations, and neighbourhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings about the reality of crime… The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of the world sometimes fosters a romanticised view of criminals as victims, making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment. Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences.

At which point, readers may recall a Guardian interview with lawyer and activist Clive Stafford Smith, who airily dismissed burglary as “really quite inconsequential,” thereby implying that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous, often very poor, victims. Especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” According to Mr Stafford Smith and Guardian columnist Decca Aitkenhead - for whom, such things are largely theoretical and not a routine fact of life - anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation are somehow trivial, plebeian and unsophisticated. And so, these enlightened creatures pretend to feel sympathy for career criminals who may prey on their neighbours for years, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of lawfulness, and justice, as “idiotic attitudes.”

Update, via the comments:

Reheated (55)

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Among The Little People. 

Feminist academic Dr Jane Bone has “intra-active encounters” with children’s furniture.

This traumatic and “haunting” experience – being a grown-up among lots of small chairs – apparently reveals “the undervalued nature of teaching young children.” A point Dr Bone underlines with an anecdote involving a teacher who, during a meeting, perched on a chair intended for children, rather than searching out a more suitably proportioned one. Damning and conclusive, I think you’ll agree. And Dr Bone’s mental reach extends beyond mere anecdote: “In order to recapture this [experience]… I went to IKEA to sit on some small chairs.”

Turf War. 

Charles Murray attempts to speak on campus. A riot ensues.

As one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage - hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)

Feign Diabetes, It’s The Only Way. 

The Guardian’s Sarah Marsh is being oppressed by free cake.

Friday Ephemera

“Sport and the territorial anus.” || On making Dr No. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Snacking snails. || Effective but inadvisable. || Young love. || Look at me, I’m fascinating. || Add length to URLs. || Or I guess we could go the long way round. || Tweaked Hitler. || The Wall Street Journal. || When you’ve a hankering for stairs. || The feminist dance. || Tree house. || Karma. || Rymdkapsel is a game. || Population growth, by region, over 12,000 years. || GauGAN is an app that will upgrade your doodles. || The Thompson Twins Adventure, 1984. (h/t, Things) || Saved with a pint of tea and several lemonade enemas. || Meatless Japan. || Paranormal scenes. || And finally, the 10-hour sax solo you’ve always wanted.

Another Balanced Individual

“You should be more conscious,” says she.

The young intellectual quoted above - Denisse Moreno Melchor, the one apparently having some kind of episode - can also be seen here. On Twitter, Ms Melchor describes herself as a “Brown Magic Womxn.” Her pronouns, should you care, are “they/elle/she/ella.”

What’s interesting isn’t the content of the rote psychodrama so much as the dynamic, which is one we’ve seen before. Faced with a seemingly demented woman, one from a Designated Victim Group, other students attempt to appease and accommodate, only to be met with more psychodrama and overtly racial animosity. The targets of this abuse then back away, understandably, as interactions with demented people rarely go well. And so, again, ground is ceded, both symbolically and literally. Until the invited speakers, there to give careers advice, are followed to their cars and shooed from campus.

And, emboldened, the bedlamite claims victory.