Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don’t say when.
—Tom Lehrer
Quote of the Day
2
Category Archives: Culture
A Summary of Today’s News
Everything proceeded as I had foreseen.
I wish I’d been wrong.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
It’s being reported that this meme was removed by Instagram for inciting violence.
Ok, they’re not reindeer, but still …
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
At least YouTube hasn’t taken this down. Yet. (H/T, @elonmusk)
Gender Discrimination?
I’m so old, I remember when the price of a haircut went up to 75 cents.
You Keep Using That Word
Merriam-Webster has announce that the Word of the Year for 2022 is gaslighting.
But that involves the use of a fossil fuel …
How Things Change
I’m sitting in my office drinking my second cup of coffee and watching the morning get started outside. Parents are walking kids to the school bus stop in front of our house. Some of those parents were kids who were getting on and off the bus at that stop when we moved in 28 years ago.
Our son rode the school bus to elementary school and high school. Given that the stop was in front of our house, he never had an adult walk with him. When he was in middle school, he walked to school by himself.
When I was in the first grade 69 years ago, the kids on the street where I lived all walked to the school bus stop at the end of road without any adults escorting us. An eight grader walked with the other first grader and me, but I can’t remember ever seeing any adults at the bus stop.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Paging Potiphar Breen. Potiphar Breen to the white courtesy phone, please.
As A Language Evolves
By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Don’t Know Much … um … Anatomy
There’s a story over at Daily Mail claiming the use of the thumbs up emoji by us Boomer geezers is seen as “hurtful” by members of Gen Z.
Really?
Or is it just that some 24-year-old on Reddit can’t tell the difference between a thumb and a middle finger?
BTW, inspection of this blog and my Twitter and Gab accounts shows that I rarely bother with emoji. The like/dislike icons are not really emoji.
L’etat c’est nous
New Class Traitor has a post over at Spin, Strangeness, and Charm about what Putin and the woke Brahmandarins have in common.
They are both looking to set up neo-feudal systems with themselves at the top, with a willing clerisy as enforcers looking to ‘cancel’ anyone who isn’t down with the program.
Both greatly benefit the feudal lieges at the top (cf. Orwell’s “Inner Party”), somewhat benefit those staffing the clerisy and enforcement apparatus (cf. Orwell’s Outer Party), and fornicate over the vast majority of their “Proles” — aside from this or that mascot group that is temporarily useful to their regimes.
And since neither is able to substantially and durably deliver the goods to the Proles (except the illusion thereof, in the alleged fashion of Prince Gregory Potemkin), the one thing both have to do to legitimize their rule is find some “fascist” or “Nazi” monster that they are supposedly fighting.
Read the whole thing.
Brexit, Trump, Orban, and Meloni, aren’t fascist-inspired or neofascists. They’re the result of what happens when the proles begin to understand how The System has been rigged. This November, the proles may not let the wokies win.
Embrace the Power
It’s National Ampersand Day.
Statistics v. Natural Selection
There’s a post over at statistica about the percentage of U.S. adults who identify as LGBT. It shows that the incidence of LGBT identification has increased from generation to generation.
The sexual practices of at least the LG portion are sterile—that is, they can’t result in a child being conceived. So if LG people are born that way, it is likely the result of one or more recessive genes which will not be passed along as a result of same sex relationships. So where is this increased LGBT identification coming from?
Hmmmm.
Time and Grammar
Time has published a piece about a woke artist and posted this tweet to promote the article.
The tweet appears to have been written in English. If so, the wrong words have been used for third person pronouns.
Of course, Time‘s current ungoodthinkfull confusion about pronouns will be resolved as the company completes the transition to Newspeak.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that WHOM had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had been dropped …
Bullies
Fuzzy Slippers has a post over at Legal Insurrection headlined Trans Activists Shout Down 80-year-old Woman Who Spoke Out Against Biological Male In Women’s Changing Room. “Julie Jaman was banned from Port Townsend’s Mountain View Pool after complaining about a biological male ogling young girls in the changing room. Jaman was showering when she saw the man staring at little girls undressing. She said that she felt her and the children’s safety was threatened. When she later tried to give a speech about the incident, she was heckled. Trans activists ripped down the suffragette flags behind her and tried to sabotage her microphone.
I’m so old I remember when men who picked on women were considered bullies, and it may be that incidents such as this are beginning to remind others. The appearance of the #LGBDropTheT could be a sign that a sufficiently broad swath of the public have had enough and that women will have their safe space protected again.
One can hope.
A New Acronym Appears on the Interwebz
SNABU—Situation Normal, All Bidened Up
Quote of the Day
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
I’m So Old …
… I remember seeing pretty women on the cover of Sports Illustrated‘s swimsuit issue.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
The Daily Mail reports a child sex abuse center at Johns Hopkins University has hired a trans professor, who was forced to resign from Virginia school for defending pedophiles as “minor attracted persons.” Allyn Walker will start work as a postdoctoral fellow for the school later this month at a center aimed at preventing child sexual abuse.
Forget it, Gentle Reader. It’s Baltimore.
Quote of the Day
You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
—Frank Zappa
As Memes Evolve
The Gentle Reader may write his own captions.
Quote of the Day
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
—Richard Feynman
Quote of the Day
Как наука является разумом мира, так искусство — сердце его. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
—Maxim Gorky
Quote of the Day
Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to him.
—Leo Tolstoy
Women of the Year
I don’t find it the least bit ironic during Women’s History Month that a man (Rachel Levine) has been named Woman of the Year by USA Today or that a man (Lia Thomas) has beaten a woman olympic medalist at an NCAA swim meet.
Irony stems from a disconnect between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result. We’re getting what we (allegedly) voted for. What should we expect when, for example, we allow cowardly men to bully women at sporting events?
This is disgusting but not ironic.