The practice of rolling one’s eyes was, in 2022, condemned as an action associated with whiteness, which we all know to be a really bad, horrible, hideous, heinous, and disgraceful thing. More specifically, it was claimed to be an example of “a harmful practice rooted in white supremacy”. This was a complaint made at a school in Oregon by teachers who said that this, and other microaggressions, had undermined their physical and mental health.
I think Marvel are considering a new movie in which the villain, Captain Eye-Roll, is going to possess this superpower of being able to harm people at a distance just by rolling his eyes.
It might be thought that eye-rolling is a innocent practice, much like wanting the best person to get the job, but in reality
My problem is that, with the state of the world today, my eyes are like some kind of fucking insane whirligig. If you hooked them up to a generator you could probably power a small town with them.
When I go out, I don’t use a mask to cover my nose and mouth, but my eyes. I don’t want to cause undue harm.
What is causing real harm is the practice of calling far too many things “harmful”. Any prat these days can claim they have been “harmed” by something and other equally prattish people will take them seriously. It’s even worse, because there’s a whole band of professional harm-seekers out there who try to gatekeep things by claiming harm on the behalf of others - even though no actual harm has been done to anyone.
Thus we have the lunacy that in a hospital, for example, one must not use the term “mothers” because it might cause some unspecified harm to someone.
Making the claim that a transwoman is not a woman, for example, is said to be harmful and, if uttered at work, can create an unsafe work environment.
It’s like magic, you see. Like the various invisible matrices of oppression that can’t be seen or measured, it’s just an assumed mystical property of certain things.
The key feature here is not the rightness or wrongness of any particular viewpoint, but the pernicious and insidious notion that all sorts of things are harmful - and that people must be protected from them.
This push towards seeing pretty much everything as a source of “harm” and the consequent calls to be “protected” from these was given a major boost by covid. Whether or not the virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab by accident or design, it represented a golden opportunity to push the “harm therefore protection” loop upon us.
It’s only when we have an utterly unbalanced, unhinged, and demented view on harms and protections could we ever countenance something like this
This was a picture I took inside a lift (US : elevator) in Norwich in the UK whilst the government and media were still playing covid mind games. I don’t know whether anyone actually ever complied with this insane instruction, but someone, somewhere, actually thought this was a good idea.
A virus so dangerous you have to stand in the corner and face the wall because . . . reasons.
This, perhaps, is one of the more serious harms done by covid - or, rather, I should say imposed upon us by our government during covid. There has been a continual push to warp our ability to properly assess (and respond to) various harms and to view some “authority” as being responsible for protecting us from them, and this was something that was seriously ramped up during covid.
Many people still think our governments were right to impose severe restrictions, to close schools and businesses, to mandate masks and vaccines, to cripple our economies - all in the name of protecting us from harm.
The truth is that we did far more harm to ourselves than covid was ever capable of.
Daughter number 2 has just returned from her vacation with friends. They took a trip to the Emerald Isle of Spudistan. It has long been a crime to blaspheme against the sacred potato over there, but now it’s a crime there to possess material that is “deemed” to be harmful on your computer, some humorous meme, for example - even if you never show this to anyone else. The assumption is that you could post this meme online and thereby cause untold1 harm to millions.
So it’s no real surprise that the Irish still seem to be mortally afraid of handles. Here’s a pic sent to me by daughter number 2
It is quite a surprise that the human race managed to survive quite this long without the benefit of sanitized handles.
Really, every handle should have one of these nifty devices. None of us would ever die. We’d all be saved.
Except that words and eye-rolls and handles aren’t the only source of deadly danger. We’re all slowly cooking, no boiling, because of the Klimate Krisis.
But do not fear. I, the majestic Prof Rigger, have the solution. I’m going to present my life-saving plan at the UN next week. I shall be hailed as the hero who saved the planet.
The answer? It’s devilishly simple.
Drink more beer
Not only is Brewdog’s Black Heart a decent pint of stout, it comes from a “Carbon negative” company.
If we only drank lots of Brewdog, all that nasty Carbon stuff would be mopped up in no time.
I can’t recommend the insipid straw-coloured fizz they call Lost, though. I think they called it this because they’d made a good lager and then lost the recipe. But, hey, if it’s in the interest of saving the planet - then I’ll crack one open.
I don’t know how we do it - but we need to combat phobia. We need to be Phobiaphobes. We need to turn our dismissive and jaundiced bigotry against the idea that there exists this pernicious and insidious web of harms lurking round every entrance to a safe space, just waiting to pounce and cause trauma. We need to stop seeing every sunny day as evidence that we’re all going to die a horrible, and very hot, death.
These were very wise, and prescient, words penned by Frank Herbert in his classic sci-fi novel Dune. Far too much of our society today is being shaped by fear - and it’s fear mostly generated by our own governments.
There are things we should certainly be afraid of - our governments being one of them, but we should never let our fear turn us into something we should be afraid of.
One effective technique is humour. It’s hard to maintain a properly respectful attitude of fear when one is giggling like a loon.
And so I’ll leave you with the “quote of the week” from Twitter.
Not only is it untold, it’s unmeasurable, unlikely, and unhinged.
The "kills 99.9%" thing always worries me.
Doesn't that just leave the 0.1% of unkillable bacteria with no competition & all the food? Doesn't seem like a good idea.
The development of grit used to be the silver lining to being dealt a crappy hand in life. Now we are surrounded by deranged mommies who are determined that our skin remains so thin and our fear of the world so great that we will never, ever leave them lest we melt like the snowflakes they’ve conveyed to us that we are.