Category Archive 'Inadvertent Humor'
30 May 2018

After All, Hawaii is Full of Liberal Democrats

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29 May 2018

Trauma at WisCon42

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What would a world be like run by ordinary, not necessarily all-that-elite, college-educated Americans? You can find a pretty good demonstration just by looking at what things are like at a current Sci Fi fan convention.

Last Sunday, for instance, there was trouble with a capital-T at the 42nd WISCON convention.

Today’s geeks and nerds are a sensitive and Woke lot, prone to devote serious thought to important moral questions and to consider the plight of unpopular minorities, minorities like J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs and Robert A. Heinlein’s bugs.

So a chin-stroking panel was scheduled with some serious scrutiny of certain guilty Living & Dead White Authors on the agenda. Its mission was described, thusly:

In SFF with an action element there’s a desire for cool giant battle scenes, heroes who spin, twirl, slice off heads, and general melee violence. This is an old background trope: the killable mook, guard, or minion whose life can be taken in a cool or funny way is familiar from traditional action films. But many SFF stories take this trope further with a killable race or non-sentient army: the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, the Chitauri in Avengers, and the many robot armies that we see represented solely so that heroes can create cool violent carnage without having to answer difficult moral questions. What happens when SFF comes to rely on this trope? If we’re going to have violent action in SFF, is this better than the alternative? Is it ever not just super racist?”

Apparently, however, all the Social Justice was marred by the intrusion of (the horror! the horror!) a dissenter who triggered the panelists and caused harm to these sensitive souls through vocal thought crime.

As we all know, saying things people don’t like constitutes harassment.

The WISCON 42 blog has the details:

During the Killable Bodies In SFF panel at WisCon this morning (Sunday), a panelist engaged in Nazi and Confederate apologia and also appeared to posit that disabled or injured people sometimes “have to be sacrificed.”

They continued this behavior even after the audience and other panel members expressed the harm this was causing them.

WisCon rejects these ideas. They are in conflict with our Code of Conduct. The panelist in question will be banned and asked to immediately leave convention spaces.

The relevant passage from the Code of Conduct is here:

    Harassment includes: Verbal or written comments or displayed images that harmfully reinforce structures of oppression (related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, geographic origin, or class); deliberate intimidation; stalking; body policing (including gender policing in all bathrooms); unwelcome photography or recording; sustained disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact; and unwelcome sexual attention.

Please read the full Code of Conduct here.

If you or anyone you know are in need of any support following this experience, please contact us. We will be working to find folks who can provide emotional support to you.

ETA: This particular individual has been banned for WisCon 42. The decision as to whether this ban will be extended in the future will be determined by our Anti Abuse Team post-con. Should you have information to contribute, you are welcome to email safety@wiscon.net.

26 Jan 2018

Epic Feminist Rant

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Lily Loofbourow asserts that “our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm.”

Women don’t leave encounters they don’t like. Women go through all sorts of inconvenience and discomfort to be attractive. Women dutifully participate in sex which they do not enjoy and may even find painful. And it’s all our fault! Men are such beasts.

When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman’s account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with “takes” arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. “Grace,” the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari’s, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they “slow down” were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.

Why didn’t she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.

It’s a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you’re asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone might have acted as she did, the most important one is this: Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.

This is so baked into our society I feel like we forget it’s there. To steal from David Foster Wallace, this is the water we swim in.

RTWT

HT: Leah Libresco Sargeant.

The problem, of course, is that the contemporary religion of Leftism believes that Ideology and Theory are omnipotent while denying that Nature exercises powers over us outside our understanding or control.

01 Oct 2017

In the Blue Portion of Virginia…

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Who knew things had gone that far?

04 Jan 2017

Congress! Listen Up, Hollywood is Talking Here

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Sally Fields and a bunch of Hollywood types you never heard of are warning Congress that they will not tolerate Donald Trump’s “Racism, Sexism, or Xenophobia” and that they expect Congress to block any legislation opposed to the interests of any and all of the fashionable Left’s pet victim groups of privilege.

If Congress fails to oblige, I guess they’ll all sit down and have a great big cry or make another ineffably self-important video.

27 Jul 2016

Are You Quite Sure About That?

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DNCWall

27 May 2016

Hillary Really Wants the Millennial Vote

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ManEnough

By any measure, the funniest political image since Pajama Boy. That beard, the tattoos, the model-fit appearance, Man Enough? This guy is obviously as queer as a three-dollar bill.

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UPDATE: Awww! Ed Driscoll reveals that the ad is actually a spoof.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

06 Mar 2016

Heil, Trump!

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SiegTrump

14 Feb 2016

Don’t Go to Protest Marches Without Thinking Through Your Wardrobe

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DownWithUSA

06 Jun 2015

“Some Minutes Are Enough to Reduce to Ashes the Enemies Attempting to Hurt the Dignity of Our Supreme Leadership”

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NorthKoreaVideo

Hilarious North Korean propaganda videos showing fanatical pilots taking off in 40 to 60 year old Russian jets to crush their American adversaries, pretty ladies shopping in friendly stores packed with merchandise, advertising the automobile of which they have successfully produced 1000 examples in 16 years, depicting the long-promised “Three-Day-War” in which North Korea completely routs South Korea and her American ally, and so on.

io9

03 May 2015

The Baltimore Way

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Jamal

1:00 video

Nick Valencia (CNN Reporter):”What is it like, explain to our viewers exactly what it’s like to be a young, black man, growing up in Baltimore.”

Jamal: “We gotta struggle. We gotta grind. You know, everything that you get, you gotta earn it. Nobody…”

Nick: “What does that mean? What does that mean? Explain, don’t speak in abstract.”

Jamal: “You gotta earn it. Like… like if there’s food over there, and they’re saying you can’t have it, you gotta take it. Sometimes, you gotta… if it’s yours, you gotta take it.”

27 Dec 2014

No “Readymade” “Stratergizing”* Here, Just “Hauntingly Beautiful” Handmade (Though Unusable) Urinals

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Christie’s bullshit is so totally audacious that the listener’s mind boggles at the notion that anyone with that kind of money would be stupid enough to buy it.

*And do note the spelling error!

Daily Paywall (not working today, but quoted by Fred Lapides) was appropriately skeptical.

Among the many records set at Christie’s astonishing $852.9m contemporary art sale in New York…, one has so far gone strangely unreported; the highest price ever paid for a urinal.

Robert Gober’s 1988 installation Three Urinals sold for $3.52m, which works out at just over $1m per urinal. They do not actually work – that is, they only take the proverbial in a figurative sense. But this is a good thing, for according to Christie’s their “smooth contours invite the viewer’s touch”, and hand sanitiser was not included in the price.

That a urinal by an artist you have probably never heard of is worth more than a masterpiece by one you have (a Gober urinal will buy you a fine Rubens) is down to the unique way in which the contemporary art world functions. There, the merit of works such as Gober’s is not judged in any traditional and objective artistic sense, but by value.

Expensive, say the experts, equals good. After all, Three Urinals is indistinguishable from three actual urinals except by virtue of its price, and several paragraphs of impenetrable art-speak in a catalogue. And if Gober’s urinals are worth $3.5m, then one of his sinks (he does a whole range of toilet ware) must also be worth millions.

In other words, we have collectively lost the ability to assess art for ourselves and on its own merits. Instead, we follow such indicators as fashion, price, and, in this case, hype. You may say it was ever thus. But the result today, when allied with an ever wealthier elite for whom buying contemporary art has become a form of conspicuous consumption, is an unprecedented art boom. Can it last?

Normally, speculative bubbles end when an underlying financial reality hits home. The subprime boom ended when homeowners stopped making repayments. But in the art world there are few such constraints. The only requirement is that works keep edging up in value.

Read the whole thing.

Gober-Urinals
Robert Gober, Three Urinals, 1988. Sold for $3.52 million on 12 November 2014.

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