Including a percolating substance; a manhole, a mishap, and a very small beep; the gruesome death of a shoe; and a situation involving shouting and quite a lot of smoke.
Your Possessions Are Holding You Back
The World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken wants to correct your primitive lifestyle.
Because having strangers, people you don’t know, taking your car, apparently at random, would be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.”
Oh, and forget about owning clothes.
Please Remove Your Shoes Before Using the Crosswalk
On scootering, desecration, and our new sacred symbols:
It occurs to me that the pretentious weeping currently underway could have been avoided by not painting one’s weird religious symbols on the chuffing road at a busy intersection. As if that were a perfectly normal thing to do, and in no way an irritant or an invitation to mischief.
And then, inevitably, the sly conflation:
“The alleged vandalism, which was claimed by many to be motivated by homophobia, resulted in an outpouring of condemnation from Spokane’s LGBT community and those purporting to be LGBT allies.”
At which point, readers may wonder whether the children’s scootering, and the wider disaffection for the increasingly cluttered and kaleidoscopic Pride flag, may have less to do with “homophobia,” as claimed, and rather more to do with a symbol that is now associated with creepy, compelled unrealism, fantasy pronouns, and the steering of children towards experimental drugging and surgical mutilation. The kinds of things that many people, including many gay people, might find a little contentious, or alienating, or morally repugnant.
Much more, including helpful illustrations, at the link.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including how to cope with a telekinetic child; when long-nosed goblins befuddled the Japanese; and a tale of a G.I., his wife, and Hitler’s cloak.
Queerness And Quantum Mechanics, Together At Last
She has “queer temporality,” and is therefore much more special than you.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including an altercation with nude cyclists; a hairy man and his lemon dress; some untimely parking; a level-10 parenting test; and an offer of interspecies intercourse.
You’re Supposed To Find It Relaxing
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a sex scene to remember; soccer rethought; a spankologist named Don; and a man who was approached by a Venusian while washing the dishes.
The Bedlamite Contagion
In any other branch of medicine, doctors would ask why. If you saw a sudden, 5000% increase in young people with bipolar disorder, the mental health world would investigate immediately… If you saw a 5,000% increase in girls suffering from anorexia, immediately we would want to know – what was that trigger, what is causing this? And yet, with gender, the 5,000% increase happens and nobody says a thing. Everybody’s pretending that it’s perfectly normal and healthy. Why? Because… it’s gender. You’re not allowed to question anything. You can only celebrate.
It’s almost as if we’re supposed to celebrate a 5,000% increase in teenage girls showing up at gender clinics and wanting their breasts cut off.
Andrew Gold interviews the formidable Mia Hughes, author of The WPATH Files, about pseudoscience, malpractice, and experiments on children.
A Simple Thing, Made Worse
Oddments For The Weekend
Including some toilet-related innovation; a urinal respect test; on polite bus-stop queueing; a game of peekaboo; and a collection of suboptimal book covers.
Liberties Taken
There is no way that you can say to a man who identifies as a woman, insists he is a woman, that, fine, he can do what he likes, but he can’t actually come into women-only spaces – and that you reserve the right to say that the reason is because he’s a man – that doesn’t offend him…
What has happened is that a lot of women have seen their willingness to be polite absolutely taken advantage of… What it’s come down to is that people who don’t identify as their sex have taken other people’s politeness as license to override other people’s desires, needs, rights, and boundaries…
Helen Joyce on transgender overreach, exploited politeness, and belated pushback.
A Shirtless Man With Long Hair Is Not, In Fact, A Woman
When a mother and her baby are assaulted, and the media and police are not entirely frank:
Happily, passers-by assisted the alarmed mother, and Mr Beekmeyer, who was shirtless at the time, was overpowered and arrested shortly afterwards, before being charged with assault. Unlike the police and several news outlets, including the Vancouver Sun and the CBC, witnesses to the crime were quite comfortable using the words he and man when referring to Mr Beekmeyer.
Then, it has to be said, things get a little strange.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including an ode to cyclists; things incoming; 131,000 historical maps; a questionable Ferris wheel; and a man with fake nails issues an ultimatum.
On Randomness
At which point, readers may object that being born in a relatively congenial part of the world is not a “privilege,” or by implication a basis for guilt, a thing for which to atone. Any more than being born somewhere less congenial is a sin, a thing for which to atone.
“I think they know they ‘got lucky’ but don’t really care,” chides one of the subsequent commenters. “Everything is luck and random chance,” insists another. Note the implication that the comfort and agreeableness of a society is merely a matter of chance, of luck. As if the preceding cultivation of values and behaviour played no part whatsoever.
As if culture and civilisation didn’t matter.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including the new, improved lesbian dating scene; some seismic calibration; a somewhat fraught situation; the hot new innovation in pop music; and an anti-patriarchal therapist opines.
The Small Matter Of The Bar Tab
It’s fundraising week over at my place.
If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and ad-free, by all means do.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including mugshots of paint huffers; some unforeseen circumstances; parenting the progressive way; and when ladies encounter a hotpants interloper.
The Perils Of Progressive Parenting
As a new, supposedly more equitable tradition – at least outside of the Spanish-speaking world – it seems scarcely less prone to complication and trade-offs. When hyphenated offspring come to name their own children – and if they follow the same rules as their hyphenated parents – the whole thing rapidly becomes unworkable, and, at risk of causing offence, names will have to be cut. Lest each child sound like a law firm.
Though I suppose one could take it as a kind of unintended symbolism, a measure of modern progressivism. In that, the problem it allegedly addresses doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for most of those it supposedly oppresses, and the solution offered is somewhat short-sighted and soon results in something close to absurdity.
On marriage, surnames, and the looming hyphenation crisis.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a bath-time peekaboo; custom cars for rats; the logic of fake bus stops; leftist commune job suggestions; and a lesson in how quickly the day can turn to shit.