The Ita Trifecta

Ugh, in a horrible display of false piety, Mammon worshiper Donald J. Trump attended a National Prayer Day event, and you can just feel that aura of beatification radiating from his ogreish visage:

I'm reminded of the sermons of a simple parish priest of Sicilian heritage, a decent man who delivered synopses of the lives of the saints in a pronounced Brooklyn accent on the Sunday of the week of a saint's feast day. One particularly memorable bit from one of Father T's sermons concerned St Ita, otherwise known as Íte of Killeedy. According to tradition, when asked by St Brendan the Navigator what three things God most abhorred, she answered: "A scowling face, obstinacy in wrongdoing, and too great a confidence in the power of money." Three out of three for the Trumpster... three out of three...

Apostle to the Incels

The NY Times has been on a downward spiral since the days of the runup to the Second Iraq war, but this may be a new low for the paper- an editorial written by Ross Douthat echoing Robin Hanson's 'redistribution of sex' post. As an aside, I suggest to Douthat, like I suggested to Hanson, that, if incels not getting laid is a problem, they can personally let the incels fuck them. Sic transit glory hole mundi.

Douthat is a proto-manosphere CHUD, as his 'origin story', related in his first book, reveals:


One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–“Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–“You know, I’m on the pill…”


Let's run this one through the translator...

Okay, so we get weak-chinned Ross, a high school beta, who now has encountered a former Stacy (Reese Witherspoon), who has gone down in Sexual Market Value (chunkier), so she is attempting to lure Ross into the 'Beta Bucks and Alpha Fucks' (Harvard guys) system, but Ross is turned off because she has got to have been riding on the 'cock carousel' (on the pill).

Ross had the incel lingo down pat before there was even a movement.

Mayday!

The tip-off that I wrote yesterday’s post on Sunday is the lack of any mention of Walpurgisnacht. Oh, well, can’t adhere to tradition all the time. At any rate, I spent the traditional workers’ holiday doing nothing of any consequence, which is perhaps the best way to show solidarity with my fellow working stiffs. Tonight is bar trivia night, so I figured I’d pay homage to Oscar Wilde’s aphorism: “Work is the curse of the drinking class.”

I can’t complain about work, so it’s not even a curse, but who am I to contradict such a wit as Wilde?

A Musical Counterpoint to Internet Misogyny

I decided that I would follow up yesterday's post with a musical coda...

One of the recording artists who caused my ears to perk up last year is Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett, whose droll songs delivered in a deadpan style I found very amusing. Ms Barnett's new single, which incorporates Margaret Atwood's most famous quote, tackles online misogyny and its spillover into the real world:





The catchy melody belies the dark content of the lyrics, and the video images hilariously satirize the toxic internet culture which fosters misogyny, but one look at the comments on the video is enough to prove that Ms Barnett is one-hundred percent correct.

Bodyshame Boomerang

The big topic on certain midsized liberal blogs has been the threat posed by 'involuntarily celibate' men in the wake of the 'incel' terrorist attack in Toronto and the subsequent bloviation by an
antifeminist 'academic' who suggested a morally repugnant 'sexual redistribution' scheme. Note, thinking of sex as a commodity is creepy- sex is communication, recreation, procreation, and should be shared by consenting adults, preferably in committed relationships... it's not like pork bellies or tungsten.

Wading through the filth of the 'blackpilled' groups, I noticed a bizarre fixation with physical attributes that well-adjusted people tend not to even notice. This became especially apparent when a CHUD (Celibate Horrible Undesirable Deplorable, as opposed to Chad) started whining in this comment thread about how Chad's rock-hard jawline and physical features brought all of the women to his yard. This individual then made reference to his negative canthal tilt and wrote an all-caps cri du cul about how someone else should pay for 'corrective' plastic surgery. Yeah, you read that right- these idiots are obsessed with such physiognomical features as canthal tilt and philtrum to chin ratios... there is a meme about how the difference between Chad and a 'beta' male is just a few millimeters of bone. Suddenly, something clicked in my mind- these CHUDs were gaslighting each other and themselves about appearance.

There has been a long, disgusting history of bodyshaming women, lately a lot of it is in service to the Beauty Industrial Complex, though trolls engage in it for their entertainment. It's so bad that even a supremely physically conditioned woman is subject to bodyshaming. In an infamous 4chan hoax, a troglodyte tried to conjure up yet another physical attribute with which to cudgel women- the bikini bridge. Social media was yet again being weaponized against women. It seems to me that this bodyshaming has now boomeranged against the malcontents who seem to infest the 'chans' and make up the 'incel' community. The canthal tilt is the equivalent of the bikini bridge- the /B/tards were hoist on their own petards. I'd almost feel sorry for these creeps, but they are causing a lot of harm to innocent people.

Pro-Confederate Northern Aggression?

From the trials, travails, and tribulations of the troglodytes, we have this story of 'Crying Nazi' Chris Cantwell getting arrested for public intoxication and cursing in Leesburg, Virginia.

Cantwell exhibits a strange dualism, to be sure- he's a fan of the Confederacy, but as a New York-born New Hampshirite, he's also a perpetrator of Northern Aggression against the people of Virginia.

Viewing Art, Meeting an Artist

Today was dreary day, cool and overcast, punctuated by drizzle. Needing inspiration, but being far from Philomath, I decided to visit the lovely Union Church of Pocantico Hills before heading off to work. The Union Church is renowned for its stained-glass windows. The church was built in 1921, at the behest of John D. Rockefeller Jr. The rose window of the church was designed by Henri Matisse, to memorialize Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Marc Chagall, who had escaped from Nazi occupied France, was commissioned to design a stained-glass window depicting the Parable of the Good Samaritan to memorialize John D. Rockefeller, Jr. After the large 'Good Samaritan' window was designed, another Chagall design was commissioned to Michael Rockefeller, who had disappeared in the waters off Papua New Guinea. After that, the rest of the windows were replaced with Chagall-designed stained glass windows.

In the middle of my tour, a charming nonagenarian, accompanied by his lovely daughter, entered the church, and I told my wonderful tour guide that I would be perfectly happy for her to restart the tour for the benefit of the new arrivals. In the course of our conversation, the gentleman introduced himself as Bob Jones, an illustrator and commercial artist who worked as an inbetweener for the classic Warner Brothers animation studio, and designed the Esso Tiger (we all got a kick out of the fact that this commission was for a Rockefeller corporation, and we were in the heart of Rockefeller Country). He also did a lot of magazine illustration work (I made a joke about him working for the glossies). Mister Jones was a perfect gentleman, an interesting man with an impressive body of work, who worked with the Titans of Termite Terrace. Altogether, it was a great way to brighten up a dreary afternoon.