Archive for 2024

March 9, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2024

JULIE BURCHILL: These posh eco-loons need to check their privilege.

[Cressida] Gethin is a 22-year-old music student who, among other things, clambered on to a gantry over the M25 in 2022. In doing so, she ruined the trips of 4,000 airline passengers. Whether swinging from gantries or attempting to destroy great art, these young people have the air of never having heard the word ‘No’.

Why are the climate fanatics all so posh? The Just Stop Oil activists are always called Cressida or Amy Rugg-Easey or Indigo Rumbelow. (Rumbelow has inspired an amusing Twitter game called Find Your Silly Posh Girl Name ‘by combining a colour with a defunct shop’.) In this, JSO is simply carrying on the glorious tradition of Extinction Rebellion, the leading lights of which had such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattinson.

Infamously, Boardman-Pattinson opined in 2019 that ‘air travel should only be used in emergencies’, despite having been on a number of skiing trips that very year, which he had foolishly posted on social media. It’s no wonder Cressida Gethin picked on desperate sun-seekers to make her point. Like the dowager countess in Downton Abbey who once asked, ‘What is a weekend?’, posh people who do nothing find it hard to understand what a holiday means to ordinary folk.

Like aristocrats down the ages, these posh clowns get together and breed new generations of clowns. Trans activist Riz Possnett, who glued her hands to the floor of the Oxford Union to protest against feminist Kathleen Stock last year, is the daughter of Extinction Rebellion activist Robert Possnett. He has been arrested several times for making a nuisance of himself. He once glued himself to a Brexit Party bus. The bananas don’t fall far from the tree in this family’s case.

And then there’s poshest eco-loon of them all: This May Be the Dumbest Thing John Kerry Has Ever Said.

“I believe that Russia has the ability to be able to make enormous changes if it really wanted to,” Kerry continued. “I mean, if Russia has the ability to wage a war illegally and invade another country, they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.” Indeed, he went on to note that Russia’s “unprovoked, illegal war” has “sadly” halted progress on climate-related issues. “I say ‘sadly’ because it’s a loss for the world not to be able to have Russia acting constructively on this issue,” Joe Biden’s SPEC concluded.

I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that precisely no one, save perhaps, John Kerry, would be willing to reevaluate Russia’s war if Moscow committed to reducing its aggregate carbon emissions over the course of a decade by a couple of percentage points. Precisely zero observers of the war in Europe would compartmentalize summary execution, rape as a weapon of war, ethnic cleansing on a mass scale, and the subsummation of a sovereign people into Russian captivity because Russia put illusory caps on carbon dioxide and methane discharges. Indeed, in even indulging this fanciful notion, Kerry has only revealed how monomaniacal climate-change alarmists have become.

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor in their high carbon footprint Messerschmidts? Forget it, he’s rolling — in his Prius.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2024

HELEN DALE REVIEWS ROB HENDERSON’S NEW BOOK, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. “Henderson is best known for developing the concept of ‘luxury beliefs,’ which are political ideologies and policy proposals that confer social status on the well-to-do folk who support them. Meanwhile, those same policies injure poor and working-class people when implemented at the state’s behest. His insight is startling and applies to many more interventions than obviously daft ones like defunding the police.”

Plus: “More broadly, Troubled is an excellent primer on the state of elite US higher education. Completed last year—before October 7 and a university presidents’ Congressional hearing now seared into the nation’s eyeballs—it captures the extent to which the activist output of universities is not, in any useful sense, about making things work. It pretends to be at some grandiose moral level but is nothing of the sort. Instead, clever people who’ve never had a difficult day in their lives get to parade their piety, while the Rob Hendersons and Robbie Waynes of the world are left to sink out of sight.”

Here’s a longer, but excellent review of Henderson’s book, too. Excerpt:

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one aspect of this book: the extent to which dishonesty is entirely normalized in our society among the elite. The luxury classes people pretend to believe that marriage doesn’t matter, but very few of them have children out of wedlock. They pretend to believe that fat-shaming is a serious moral affront, while they spend a fortune on organic food and personal trainers to keep themselves fit and trim. They pretend to believe many things that their lives betray they don’t actually believe at all.

It’s easy to think that most of them are just going along with the crowd and don’t realize they’re lying, but the truth is that most of them do know, which is why they expressed agreement with Rob in private. This is a familiar dynamic; I used to get DMs on Twitter from people apologizing that they couldn’t follow me (though they made a point to daily read my tweets) without upsetting their coworkers. These people included a couple of college professors, a Unitarian minister, and a couple of therapists, and possibly others I’ve forgotten.

Dishonesty is so normalized that this kind of performative fragmentation—signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing (or class maintenance, if one starts off in that class).

This dynamic is going to destroy us all if we don’t find a way to fix it. Soon.

Yes.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 9th, 2024

WOEING: United flight goes off runway, forcing passengers to evacuate in latest drama with a Boeing jet.

And from Thursday: Watch: Tire Falls Off United Boeing Flight During Takeoff, Damages Multiple Cars.nyp

https://twitter.com/gregg_re/status/1765863297037807749

Metaphor alert from Athena Thorne: The Wheels Are Coming Off DEI — Literally. “The plane was diverted to San Francisco, where it landed safely. Officials report the tire landed in a Los Angeles International Airport employee parking lot. Several cars got glommed, but, thankfully, there were no injuries — this time. But at this point in our diversity experiment, can that sad day be far?…Warm, sloppy, woke congrats to the broads who made their way into the cockpit and all that, yada yada yada. It would be swell if United could also spare a moment to make sure its freaking planes don’t fall apart in midair, oh my God!”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 9th, 2024

March 8, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Make it special.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 8th, 2024
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