The Year That Was
The Year Reheated, in which he marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters:
In July, we revisited our experiment in multiculturalism and indiscriminate immigration, in which uninvited newcomers have to be reminded that torturing animals and loitering by school gates in order to film children are activities not generally approved of by the indigenous. There followed a menu of other cultural subtleties not being grasped by new arrivals – say, queuing, courtesy and not raping schoolchildren – along with efforts by governments to tactfully convey local customs, while suppressing any noticing of what must not be noticed. Apparently, we must explain civilisation to those unfamiliar with the concept, while pretending that no such corrective measures are required or taking place.
Via the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint expressed her dismay that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have “cast the protagonists as white once again.” Ms Flint bemoaned the “factory setting of a white perspective” in tales about white people, and the lack of “historical inclusivity” in adaptations of novels set in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ms Flint informed us that she is “left somewhat cold” by period-appropriate pallor. A train of thought that terminated before arriving at the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring racial contrivance.
We also visited Loughborough University, where senior lecturer Dr Ben Roberts has devised, at taxpayer expense, an unorthodox use for yoghurt – namely, smearing it on windows so as to slightly lower indoor temperatures during that rarest and briefest of phenomena, the British heatwave. Dr Roberts assured those intrigued that, as soon as the yoghurt has dried, “the smell disappears.”
Oh, there’s more.
#9 Muhammad
You May Want To Bite Down On Something
Some progressive ruminations on race:
Readers will note that the students, these avowed opponents of racism, refer to themselves, and by extension all black students, as if they were some ancient and unfathomable offshoot of humanity, for whom rapport with outsiders is impossible. And who are supposedly oppressed by the unremarkable fact that, in a white-majority country, their professors will often be white and – as seems unavoidable – older than the students.
Readers may also wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.
Papers Please
Armstrong Economics- The EU and Canada Collaborate on Digital IDs
The danger here is obvious. Mutual recognition means a unified framework. They’re building a foundation to establish a GLOBAL digital ID. Once these systems talk to one another, you have created the architecture for a worldwide database controlled by the political elite. This is precisely what the EU has been pushing with its Digital Services Act and the infamous “digital wallet” proposal. Now they are exporting it, just as they exported their disastrous ideas on Net Zero and financial regulation. Canada, collapsing economically and politically, is following Brussels into the abyss.
One For The Christmas List
Dispatches from the Maple Gulag Truck Stop
Bankruptcies abound, yet the Mark Carney’s job numbers show a huge increase in transportation and warehousing? I am starting to think the job numbers are prepared by the same people who said Mark Carney would win by a landslide in Alberta. Trucking News reports on bankruptcies in Canada and Freightwaves reports on US bankruptcies, so any news of growth in the industry is highly suspicious. Several months ago Gord Magill reported on the financial chinanery in the trucking industry
Sonar truck freight index shows an 11% decrease this year after several years of decreases. Yet somehow we are supposed to believe the economy is adding jobs when trucking is failing, construction jobs are down and housing sales are flat? Something stinks in the state of Denmark.
Let’s All Play A Game
Just Another Ten Chances
Readers will note the sly conceit that what matters, all that matters, is the sum being stolen this time, not the whole at knifepoint or gunpoint business – as if this lively means of cash extraction were some trivial detail, beneath acknowledgment. A thing with no informational content, no clues as to the character of the perpetrator, their fitness for a civilised world.
Those pointing to the smallness of the sum as if it were a significant mitigating factor don’t seem troubled by the implication that someone who will violate others, and threaten them with death, for a mere $20 is someone who will use very small incentives to behave in monstrous ways. Likewise, the implication that robbing people with only $20 to surrender is a matter of no import.
On three-strikes laws and the contortions of progressive critics.
Merriment Detected, Fretting Ensues
White people strum banjos, have fun. Fretting ensues at University of Sheffield:
Obviously, activities that are chiefly indulged in by white people – in this case, folk singing – must be deemed suspect and found problematic with great urgency, and then probed for hidden wrongness. At taxpayer expense. And all this scholarly rigour ain’t cheap, you know…
Behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though, as so often, details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming.
Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.
“Our aim,” say our tearful academics, “is to break down the barriers for people to get involved in folk music. Opening up the genre to different audiences.”
Different audiences. Not the audience that folk music actually has, mind, the one it attracts and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. And again, no actual barriers to participation are specified. But the audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.
Fishing Without Bait
Or, The Difficulties of Satisfying Progressive Women:
It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid.” As “emotional labour.” As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.
The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether.” Though possibly not in ways the author intended.
As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.
The White Guilt Industrial Complex
National Post- The push to have Canadians hear a ‘slavery’ acknowledgement at public events
After a standard land acknowledgement mentioning the various First Nations whose traditional territories overlap with the City of Toronto, attendees were also asked to acknowledge “those who were brought here involuntarily; particularly those brought to these lands as a result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery.”
“Export Markets”
Dr. Byram W. Bridle- The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Bloodlust for Ostriches: Part 2
The most hypocritical aspect of this is that the people responsible for the deaths of hundreds of valuable, healthy ostriches that were almost certainly virus-free (prove me wrong with data), likely let their own kids play on beaches and parks that are routinely populated by ducks, geese, and seagulls, and stipple-painted with the feces of these birds that serve as natural reservoirs for the virus.
Subordination, Baby
On allyship, so-called, and assuming the position:
The word ally is typically used, by the people who rush to use it, to mean something like advocate, or mouthpiece, or supplicant, or puppet. There’s no discernible interest in, or expectation of, reciprocation; no obvious shared goal or mutual benefit. Indeed, the role, once assumed, appears to entail saying dumb and vividly untrue things, thereby becoming unreliable and absurd.
Say, by insisting that odd, cross-dressing men are somehow, magically, women. Or that a reluctance to mouth fabulist pronouns, to affirm a person’s imaginary themness, is some life-threatening moral oversight.
And then there are the not infrequent detours into outright struggle sessions – as seen, for instance, here, where a disobedient woman finds herself being scolded by a man in an unconvincing wig for not doing the “work” expected of an ally – essentially cowed deference and dishonesty on demand. This, then, is a world in which allyship – “listening to the community” – requires prostration, a suspension of cognitive faculties, and a surrendering of basic probity.
Let Them Eat Bugs
CTV: Chicken prices expected to rise by 20 to 25 per cent over next several months: experts
Little Things, Like Sanitation
On cross-dressing shoe-robbers; “lesbian-dog relationalities”; and a nightmare eco-holiday:
Dish magazine hailed the project as “Seasonal, sustainable, organic, artisanal, waste-free, foraged.” While readers of EasyJet Traveller were told that the resort is “A new way of living that’s as sustainable as it is delicious.” For Ms Helbæk and Mr Hansen, the name of the resort, which is Danish for “sense of place,” reflects “which direction we need to go as a society.”
Readers will doubtless be intrigued by the “foraged” food – i.e., carrots and leaves, served repeatedly – plus the unheated rooms, the lack of running water, and the whole shitting-in-a-barrel thing. For a mere £900 a night, one can’t expect luxuries like plumbing, protein, or the prospect of heat.
Question Asked
“Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?”
Freedom vs Authoritarianism
The authoritarians will not be going gentle into that good night.
Francisco- I don’t know who’s writing the titles for Jordan Peterson’s videos these days but they don’t particular line up that well with the content or context of the discussions.
Middle Class Socialists
Don’t like the poor. But hate the rich.
Peter St. Onge- The French People impose Wealth Tax on themselves
The Progressive Anxiety
On crime, conflictedness, and weird excuses:
Regarding the consequent conflictedness and anxiety, all that progressive wrongness, these three posts include suitably vivid illustrations of the phenomenon.
Among which, a claim that more theatre for schoolchildren would somehow deter the kinds of creatures who repeatedly sucker-punch elderly ladies for being the wrong race, and a chap who insists that women should allow themselves to be mugged lest their mugger, out on probation, come to harm.
Oh, and the belief, expressed by a Guardian columnist, that when you find your home being burgled in the middle of the night, the real victims, the people deserving of sympathy and indulgence, are the ones breaking into your home while brandishing carving knives and then driving off with your valuables in your car.
Our betters, you know. They say so themselves.