I love my condiments. So much so that my daughters will often refer to me as “condiment man”. At any one time my fridge is probably at least half full of various pickles, relishes, sauces, mayos, and other substances purporting to be “good with food X”.
If you’re lucky, lurking somewhere in the salad draw, you might find something that is still vaguely green.
I’m a bit of a fiend for taking perfectly good food and scooping out some months old sugared gloop from a jar onto it. It’s the poor man’s version of good cuisine. Incidentally, if you’ve never tried using marmalade with stilton, do so. It’s an amazing combination. I have no idea why this magic works so well, and it certainly doesn’t work as well with other blue cheeses.
The thing with condiments is that one should use them reasonably sparingly. They’re meant to add a little extra, although the icing on the cake is probably not the best metaphor to use here. “I didn’t have any icing for your cake, so I used Branston Pickle”, might not be the thing you most want to hear on your birthday.
They’re useful in small doses.
I kind of feel that way about the various woke Kens and Karens that seem to pop up everywhere these days. They’re not wholly bad. Their concerns focus on, at least on the surface, trying to make people more aware of things like discrimination, injustice and vulnerability.
This, in my view, is not a bad thing.
The problem is that instead of just a teaspoon or two to go with your cheese, they empty the whole bloody jar.
You end up with an indigestible mess that no-one enjoys.
And as much as I love a Branston Pickle with a cheddar that locks your jaw, the stuff doesn’t go with everything - even if you get the dosage right.
Academics in STEM fields have always been the quintessential condiment people, by and large. They tend to spend their lives adding just a little extra to the sumptuous repast that was science before 2020. Every now and then you’ll get someone who creates an entire new dish, but most of the time it’s only condiments for the vast majority.
Academics in the Humanities tend to work in a different way - they’ll try to convince you that the weird (and unpronounceable) condiment they’ve just created is both (a) an amazing new dish and (b) edible. Neither of which are true, of course. This is how you end up with condiment concepts like white privilege, structural racism, or intersectionality; they sound like they might taste nice, but just ruin everyone’s meal.
Metaphors, like condiments, should be used sparingly and appropriately and so I’ll stop there.
Twitter𝕏 is an endless source of wonder. I don’t know whether they’re still made, but back in the day there used to be a thing to punish poorer people; the pre-paid electricity meter. You’d have to put coins into them, otherwise you’d end up with no electricity1. A bit like the outcome of ‘green’ policymaking. At the time, the largest coin we had was a 50p piece2. Anyway, the best description of Twitter𝕏 is the question
Who put 50p into the dickhead?
It’s almost impossible, at times, to distinguish a genuinely-held opinion from parody. It really is that outlandish.
The first tweet, from someone whose middle name is probably Ina, is a corker. It surely must be parody, but I fear not. The tweet would suggest that Ms Huff’s head is so dense that the truck would come off second best in any collision.
This Karen for our times has her heart in the right place; she’s concerned about people and their safety (although in this case it’s her own safety). Notice, however, how strong the ‘woke’ impulse is. The solution (if any ‘solution’ is indeed required) isn’t any one of the many we can all think of over our morning coffee3. The ‘woke’ solution is to ban stuff.
There’s no attempt at an adult dissection of the costs and benefits, just as there wasn’t during the covid era - just a Pavlovian response to anything that might impact safety.
Lord save us from the Kens and Karens.
The 2nd tweet is a different kettle of fish. Or, as we might suggest from an institute called Brown, a different crock of shit. Brown is one of those DIEvy league places. They used to be held in high esteem, but are increasingly being seen as places that produce ideologically-forced drivel.
Apparently, according to Brown, and for some inexplicable reason, Israeli warfare is more destructive for the planet than anything Putin is doing, or anything that’s been happening in Syria over the last few years. Hamas and Iran, of course, will only use solar powered rockets that burst into a rainbow glitter4 shower upon impact.
Lord save us from institutes chock full of Kens and Karens.
In past times the good King Bollock Brains would spout forth. He’d give head to any who disagreed - usually donating their heads to large spikes placed on the city walls so as to dissuade anyone else from disagreeing with him. This kind of technique worked well for people like Stalin and Mao, too.
These days we don’t eliminate people in quite the same way; we just eliminate their bank accounts or their ability to interact with society on social media and the like. These are the modern tools of oppression.
It is, in my view, hard to overstate the impact of The Enlightenment. It was a vision of humanity freed from the tyranny of ideology. I’ve described our current ‘modern’ era as The Engarblement, or as Richard Gill better puts it, The Endarkenment.
If the sodding ‘greens’ get their way it will be a literal endarkenment.
We are, it seems, all expected to become slaves to an increasingly illiberal and bonkers set of ideologies. It’s all ‘liberal’ on the surface - letting people live ‘freely’ and free from all of those condiment concepts that just hold people back - but not subscribing5 to this program will actually hold you back; you might get fired.
There are encouraging signs that sanity is beginning to restore itself, however. The soy latte sipping bleeding heart who just wants everyone to sing kumbayah and be happy together might find that the 17 immigrants she’s housing in her spare room aren’t quite the paragons of blissful humanity and harmony she initially envisioned.
It will rapidly come to “be kind, just not in my spare room”. We had a good example of this with the residents of Martha’s Vineyard who, when faced with an influx of immigrants basically said “be kind, just not in my town”. It will eventually become just not in my country for most, as the problems with trying to adequately deal with this influx begin to mount up and hit people’s pockets (not to mention their safety and security).
Reality, as it always does, will eventually play the winning hand.
The recently published Cass review of child ‘gender identity’ services is another case of reality playing, if not a Royal Flush, at least a Full House.
The screams of outrage and bluffery bluster over this are very instructive. Critics of the report have tried their best to ‘debunk’ it. One of the central claims is that ‘hundreds’ of papers were just dismissed by the team of reviewers (presumably the wrong sort of experts from the University of York were used?) and so Cass’ report is hopelessly biased and phanstrobic to boot. These people have obviously not read the report because this claim isn’t even remotely true. The team carefully outline their rigorous methodology for assessing research quality (and use established methodologies for this assessment).
But it’s no surprise, is it really, that the political party known as The Greens are up in their environmentally friendly arms about it all? Their reaction is a mini case study of the increasing desperation with which the ideologically possessed present themselves.
The Green Party’s response to the Cass report is illuminating6. I won’t dissect the whole thing, you can read it for yourselves, but a couple of things caught my eye.
We support scientific studies that lay out their biases clearly; try to avoid them where they can, and ensure that the groups most affected by the findings are best represented
Eh? What fresh wanky word salad is this? It’s like that 3-week old lettuce leaf in my fridge; not fit for consumption however many condiments you throw at it. What does it even mean to suggest that those “most affected” by the findings are “best represented”? Non-scientific gibbershit.
The Green Party supports voting at sixteen.
I’ll bet you do. Me, on the other hand, thinks the voting age should be raised.
We know that by sixteen, most young people are capable of making serious decisions- about their lives, about their futures, and about what those futures look like
They are certainly capable of making such decisions. They’re not all that good at making the right decisions.
There is inexcusable bias; trans people ignored and transphobes platformed. There is infantilisation- saying that young people, even young adults, are not capable of making decisions about their lives
Translation; we can’t really argue about the scientific content so we’ll just label anyone involved as a phanstrobe.
In my last piece I posted some of Stonewall’s gibbershit who seem to believe that children as young as 2 ‘know’ their trans ‘identity’.
Is it “infantilisation” to suggest that people of this age are not capable of making decisions about their lives?
Might it be more accurate to say that we treat them like infants because, err, well, you see, they ARE infants for fuck’s sake?
What in God’s name is wrong with these people?
Don’t answer that, but the attempt to treat children as adults for things which are of a sexual nature (including their very sex) might give one some pause for thought here.
We call for a review into the impacts of segregated healthcare, of the danger of ‘trans broken arm syndrome’
That’s a new one on me. Is that a sprained wrist that only identifies as broken?
The response, in full, is very typical of the ideologically possessed. It seeks not to argue on content, but on grounds of morality and tries to paint the report’s authors as morally compromised people.
I have my doubts that GAC (Gender Affirming Condiment) is right for anyone. Even were I to admit that it might, just possibly, be the right approach for a very small percentage, we can only ever know that in hindsight. Cass’ report lays it all bare; GAC is an ideological and not a scientific position.
It’s absolutely right that we’re not shitty to trans people, but the problem is that the Trans Rights Activist interpretation of “not being shitty” is equivalent to being shitty to women, to name just one example. It’s the overuse of the “don’t be shitty” condiment.
We all live, or at least try to, according to our personal ideologies. We all like different condiments - and that’s fine. But you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) force people to like Branston Pickle if they hate the stuff.
I don’t know, because I never had one, but I always wondered what happened when the box was full. Did you just freeze to death?
Which probably isn’t enough to make you a cup of tea, these days
Like, perhaps, don’t step in front of a large moving vehicle?
Using only the finest bio-degradable glitter
I mean selling your soul and prostrating yourself before altar of woke
Whereas we could reasonably surmise that the Green Party’s policies are, literally, non-illuminating
“The ‘woke’ solution is to ban stuff. There’s no attempt at an adult dissection of the costs and benefits, just as there wasn’t during the covid era - just a Pavlovian response to anything that might impact safety.”
The Sue Huff twixt doesn’t say any of this. It just makes a couple of factual assertions and asks a couple of questions.
I knew a mom who made sure she drove her young family around in one of the biggest available SUV models because she didn’t want to be on the losing side in case of a collision. Does a person considering the environmental and safety costs associated with that sort of arms race make kinetic energy woke?
Öhm. .. . .. . Huff? She's named Huff? Oh dear me, so when her partner "goes home", it's in a Huff?
She should marry some frenchman named Le Puff, so she could call herself Sue HuffLePuff. And get Sue-d.
Seriously - if a truck like that hits her head-on at any speed above 30kmh, she'll get hurt. A high truck will either drag her under the wheels - ouchtime - or swat her to the side, also ouchtime. A low truck will snap her legs and deposit her through the windshield - and at speed even carglass shreds flesh - or hurl her above the car so that she lands rolling and bouncing on the ground.
I mean, I don't even need to be physicist to realise that 1500 kilos moving at say 55kmh hitting 50kilos of meat equals bad news, no matter what kind of vehicle said 1500kilos are.
As to why the truck needs to be big and raised; ground clearance plus accessability plus the more I can haul in one go, the less I need to drive.
Maybe she should try Huff-ing some reality?