Usually, being fat is not a career boost. I’ve been skinny and I’ve been fat, and skinny is better.

“I’ve been down and out, and I’ve been in demand….
but I never would have made it without them
Here’s To The Band!”

The Chesterton and Shaw quotes are priceless. Don’t seem to get that quality today. Some one offers a mild critique and they are accused of slamming. I think Will Rodgers would re-think his most famous quote if he was alive today.

Hold on to your intersectionality points, an HIV-positive gay black school teacher in St Louis has been arrested for attempting to have killed the seven year old boy who accused him of pedophilia.
That school’s sports team? The Aristocrats!

https://www.ksdk.com/mobile/article/news/investigations/teacher-charged-with-hiring-hitman-to-kill-student-after-molestation-accusation-pleads-not-guilty/63-c5eeab38-7825-41b7-b969-2907ab1d1f1f

Lifetime of Hunger???

https://www.npr.org/2017/06/19/533515895/be-bigger-fight-harder-roxane-gay-on-a-lifetime-of-hunger

Translation: Roxanne Gay knew she would have gotten her ass handed to her. End of story.

Now that’s diverse !

The organizer should do the next lecture tour with Roxane Gay and Jeet Heer, the Canadian post-modern literary critic.

Roxane Gay has a “management team?”

Must be high-maintenance.

The organizer should do the next lecture tour with Roxane Gay and Jeet Heer, the Canadian post-modern literary critic.

I give up. Which one is which?

Happy St George’s Day, every body! Especially my fellow Anglosupremacists.

Check out the videographer atop this truck lorry in Nottingham at 3:27. That’s the kind of Englishman we need!

BuffaloJoe,

that particular insult and retort are constructed exactly like the exchange often mis-attributed to Lady Nancy Astor and Winston Churchill.

Lady Astor: “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d poison your drink.”
Churchill: “Ma’am, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

People are definitely less witty these days, at every level of society. I don’t hear people telling carefully constructed jokes very much, anymore. It’s just not a part of casual social conversation in our times.

The black guy? Or the guy in chainmail?

One odd thing is that Shaw was much more famous than Chesterton when I was a kid in the 1970s, but now GKC is better known than GBS. Maybe it’s Catholic identity politics?

I think Shaw’s star has dimmed in the last fifty years for a number of reasons. One of them was his staunch support for Fabian Socialism, and during the Reagan-Thatcher era, his politics started to seem very antiquated.

Also, Shaw’s prodigious output of plays and theater, literary and music criticism, as well as cheerfully relentless self-promotion as “the greatest playwright since Shakespear” kept him in the public eye, and naturally, that ended with his death in 1950.

But the biggest factor is probably that Shaw was an early feminist, and explained the feminist/suffragettist point of view at length in his famous long essay style prefaces to his plays. His reward was that he was denounced by Second-Wave Feminists as an antediluvian mansplainer.

Consequently, he has been memory-holed by a generation of literature professors.

Reg Caesar:

Where are the proverbial and well-celebrated English football hooligans hiding?

There is a woman repping a Philadelphia Phillies shirt at 6:00. Found that unusual.

Why would anyone want to hire a black woman for a high-level position? No matter how much effort you put in to nurturing her career, if in the end your assessment of her talent and ability does not match her own highly inflated one, she knows the reason why. Apparently even CBS, the network that celebrates punching Nazis, is full of Nazis itself!

‘CBS Has a White Problem’: Executive Blasts Toxic Culture at Network in Explosive Letter
By Whitney Davis

CBS has a white problem.

The company has a white problem across the board. Did you know that there’s not one black creative executive working at CBS Television Network or CBS Television Studios? Of the network’s 36 creative executives — all upper management roles that deal with content development, casting, current production, daytime and alternative programming — there are only three women of color, none black. There is not one executive of color working in casting at CBS….

There were two black women working in production on the broadcast — myself and another. We both held the lowest-ranking positions on staff. Not uncommon in most predominantly white institutions, most of our white colleagues had trouble keeping our names straight. As a joke, they began to call us We-Dra — short for Whitney and Deidra. In every job I’ve had at CBS, co-workers have confused me with other black women in the office, as if we’re interchangeable. I don’t think most people understand just how demeaning these daily micro-aggressions are. Or maybe they do and don’t care….

One “CBS Evening News” senior producer always wanted to touch my hair while sharing an inappropriate sexual joke….

For the next year, I excelled, covering every breaking news story west of the Mississippi, confident that my work mattered and that I was making a meaningful contribution to CBS News. I soon learned that I was being considered for the L.A.-based weekend-edition producer role. A colleague with insight into the process told me that I had been deemed “not ready.” Although I couldn’t confirm that my career had been sabotaged, I felt as though I had hit a glass ceiling working in news….

From December 2011 through December 2013, I was mentored by execs in casting, drama development, daytime, current programming and marketing. In every meeting I attended in those departments, I was the only black person and often the only person of color. Nothing had prepared me for the lack of diversity I encountered in the entertainment division. In fact, there was not one black creative executive at the network. Today, the only black female executive at CBS Entertainment oversees diversity and inclusion….

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in the Emerging Creative Leadership Experience. I learned a lot and I worked hard, but I wasn’t as lucky as my two colleagues, who were offered creative positions within CBS. It was made clear at the end of the program that I would not be offered a creative role. None of my colleagues was surprised. If there was no shared outrage about the white problem, how would it ever change?…

In debating whether or not to speak out about my own story, I have not forgotten the opportunities that were given to me. But it’s just not enough to open doors to diverse, talented candidates. We need to be respected, promoted and compensated on the same level as our white peers….

Many industry professionals are aware that while CBS proudly touts its diversity programs, a close look beneath the surface reveals that the company is unconcerned about creating space for minorities. It’s challenging to find people of color in executive positions at CBS. The most diverse departments at the corporation are the diversity teams. A company that only has executives of color in roles within the Diversity and Inclusion departments isn’t hitting the mark….

In late July I took medical leave for what I initially thought was anxiety and stress from postpartum depression. I’ve since learned that the source of my anxiety and stress was CBS’ toxic work environment. At the encouragement of my therapist, I hired a workplace discrimination attorney to assist me in negotiating an exit package. My lawyer was informed that CBS doesn’t give compensation to employees wishing to exit the company. After some back and forth, CBS offered me $20,000 and later $50,000. It isn’t clear if I would have been asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but I assumed so. After considering the offer at length, with encouragement from my husband I determined that my integrity and the power of my voice and experience were worth more than any dollar CBS was willing to part with.

I am not an angry black woman with an ax to grind. As a mom, I don’t want my black boys to have to work at a company that doesn’t value them for their talent and skills, and I don’t want other young girls and boys to encounter similar roadblocks in corporate America. They deserve a better world. I’m speaking out to encourage other black, Latinx, native, API, disabled or LGBTQ workers to know that we don’t have to tolerate what is intolerable.

With the investigation into CBS’ workplace culture now closed, it is my hope that my story is a cautionary tale for companies to value the talent and contributions of people of color and those from marginalized communities in the workplace. A diverse workforce is an asset to any company — we make you stronger and more profitable.

It is pretty amazing how successful Roxane Gay has become despite being a subpar talent.

I actually spoke with Roxane Gay at a reading concerning one her first pieces that she ever published that related to the history of Chicago. Her post made some rather clueless assertions regarding the nature of pollution on the South Side of Chicago that she attributed to racism. I gave her an in depth response explaining why her argument contradicted not only Chicago history, but basic physics. She obviously did not know the first thing about the history of Chicago (not even wikipedia tier), but merely injected the concept of racism as an all encompassing justification for her position.

She was taken aback by the criticism, but more or less acknowledged that she had not done much research. She seemed a little insecure, but took the position that even though she was factually incorrect as to certain specifics, she was right to attribute the real source of pollution on the South Side of Chicago to the nefarious forces of racism.

At that stage in her career, her shyness and insecurity caused me to have a fair bit of empathy towards her. My guess is that those traits are now long gone.

This is what the future looks like.

Brown Grimaces the whole way down.

Those pics cost 1/1d4 SAN.

Seriously, click through and look at the picture of Gay and Sommers. Gay looks like she’s about to eat Sommers.

Another casualty of anti-bullying programs. Everyone’s social immune system is compromised. Well, not everyone. Men of a certain age or background still enjoy busting each other’s balls, sometimes with more wit than others.

Roxanne Gay is writer. Behold the opening line from her breathtaking novel, An Untamed State.

…which centers around Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American woman who is kidnapped for ransom. The novel explores the interconnected themes of race, privilege, sexual violence, family, and the immigrant experience

. I think they left out obesity.

An Untamed State is often referred to as a fairy tale because of its structure and style, especially in reference to the opening sentence,

I thought it was a fairy tale due to the theme of kidnapping a fat, Haitian woman for ransom.

“Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones,

She dropped out of Yale to ursue a relationship? Right.

Nobody wanted to touch your hair you demented harridan. Who believes this hair touching crap?

Those traits aren’t gone, but her power and self-pity have increased. It’s a terrible combination, but many of us would be the same way if we met no serious resistance. That’s less on Gay than on the ecosystem that rewards her worst traits.

One “CBS Evening News” senior producer always wanted to touch my hair while sharing an inappropriate sexual joke….

Doing both at the same time is a step too far!

…in other words, someone was hitting on her, or just attempting to be friendly and lighten the mood; and what is a non-issue (or at worst, a rude annoyance) becomes another cornerstone for resentment because of an aristocratic sense of self.

I can believe someone told her an awkward, rude joke [and note she says one, this person wasn’t obnoxiously going out of their way to be vulgar or upset people] but I’m still having a hard time picturing this ever present menace of racial hair-touching– young children may occasionally do that, not adults– unless it’s in a more personal, intimate way that has nothing to do with racial animus.

So another way to construe it, is that someone liked her (romantically or otherwise) and was trying to bond with her, probably even sincerely complemented her on her hair while touching it. And now it’s payback time!

At first pass I read that as “Jeet Heer, the post-Canadian literary critic”.

I have photographic evidence.

https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/lion-tamer-royalty-free-image/LS003180

I think these gals don’t understand the fight-promotion game at all.

They are supposed to stare each other down at the weigh-in. And when Gay calls Sommers a “white supremecist,” Sommers is supposed to come back with ” . . . Yeah, well you’re so fat when they took your picture for the book flap, they had to use a satellite.”

And then Gay would say something like “I’m gonna mop the debate floor with your skinny white ass . . . When it comes to intersectional race theory I float like a snowflake and sting like a microaggression.”

And so on. This stuff ain’t rocket science. Unless they really step up their game, no one is going to come out to see two feminists trying to out whine each other.

The relationship between pedophilia and homosexuality is rigorously suppressed in the media. Boys and girls are sexually abused at a 50/50 rate, meaning that male homosexuals are much more likely to be pedophiles (and/or male gay pedos are much more promiscuous). The inventor of ‘gay marriage’, Larry Brinklin, was also a child rapist.

Shaw’s audience was self-confident big-brained secular white liberals, and the number of those has greatly declined.

He thought the human race was in the process of a eugenic upward evolution. That was actually the case for the century before his peak circa 1910, but obviously not the case now.

Another reason for the current unpopularity of the Victorians was that, while they may have been the smartest couple generations in modern history, their writing style is too florid, complex, and indirect for our modern tastes.

Here’s a section from Don Juan in Hell, part of Man and Superman. Does it make you want to read more? Not me.

“I did so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds, as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and, may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is inconceivable that Life, having once produced them, should, if love and beauty were her object, start off on another line and labor at the clumsy elephant and the hideous ape, whose grandchildren we are?”

The simpler older style English writing we regressed to starting around 1930 may be seen in a random passage from The Wealth of Nations, which I read and enjoyed when was I in high school. This first paragraph about the dryer subject of export subsidies does make me want to read more.

“Bounties upon exportation are, in Great Britain, frequently petitioned for, and sometimes granted to the produce of particular branches of domestic industry. By means of them our merchants and manufacturers, it is pretended, will be enabled to sell their goods as cheap, or cheaper than their rivals in the foreign market. A greater quantity, it is said, will thus be exported, and the balance of trade consequently turned more in favour of our own country. We cannot give our workmen a monopoly in the foreign as we have done in the home market. We cannot force foreigners to buy their goods as we have done our own countrymen. The next best expedient, it has been thought, therefore, is to pay them for buying. It is in this manner that the mercantile system proposes to enrich the whole country, and to put money into all our pockets by means of the balance of trade.”

Wow, I had to look really hard to see pic 2 wasn’t just Jeet with a more flamboyant haircut.

The masters:

Roxane Gay is an author…whose writing is unmatched….

No qualifier is used. Got that? Dickens, Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Huxley, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Chesterton, Clemens, Hugo, Swift, de Tocqueville, Balzac, London, … No author – not one! – who ever wrote anything – even if we limit ourselves to writers also “cultural critics” as might be argued an implicit qualifier by the claim’s verbiage – no author’s writing has ever matched this woman’s.

“Canadian.”

I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in the Emerging Creative Leadership Experience. I learned a lot and I worked hard, but I wasn’t as lucky as my two colleagues, who were offered creative positions within CBS.

Maybe you weren’t as good as your two colleagues (not clear if the colleagues are white).

It was made clear at the end of the program that I would not be offered a creative role. None of my colleagues was surprised. If there was no shared outrage about the white problem, how would it ever change?…

The sense of entitlement here is amazing..

The advantage of being fat:

All hands to the pumps:

Too much of Tull’s reputation is based on aqualung (which was decent), Thick As A Brick (theme for our times – Oh do you believe in the day), and later stuff. Not enough attention is paid to Benefit or Stand Up.

Even on the classic rock stations, it seems they don’t play as much Jethro Tull as they used to.

Even kids love the Beatles nowadays:

Reminds me of that old joke:

“Obesity runs in my family.”

“Nobody runs in your family.”

Were Jethro Tull never that good?

They were good; quite good, in fact.

Was Zeppelin just that good?

Yes, they were and still are. If anyone is still around in 100 years, you’ll probably hear a Zep song or two being played somewhere.

Yeah, this is much simpler than New York magazine lets on. The project was doomed the moment Desh invited Gay, because Gay is an aggro retard who is simply not capable of the kind of conversation Desh imagined. But Gay does at least know she is dumb, so to avoid being drawn into a “conversion” that would expose her stupidity, she turned it into a feces flinging contest. Gay is the opposite of Desh’s Intellectual-Yet-Idiot: she is Idiot-Yet-Clever.

Any time the prestige press thinks you need a 3600 word thumbsucker to explain something, the truth is usually fewer than 25 words.

The academic publisher Taylor and Francis prints a scholarly journal called “Fat Studies”. It was one of the journals targeted with hoax papers last year by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/

“Fat Studies” has since retracted the hoax paper, “Who are they to judge? Overcoming anthropometry through fat bodybuilding”.

The problem is that every article published by “Fat Studies” appears to be a hoax. Recent titles include:
– Mapping the circulation of fat hatred
– Things I Learned From Fat People on the Plane
– The pleasures of fetishization: BBW erotic webcam performers, empowerment, and pleasure
– The “good fatty” is a dancing fatty: Fat archetypes in reality television

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=ufts20

When kids take on debt for worthless degrees, a significant slice of their money pays for library subscriptions to low-grade pseudo-scholarly journals like “Fat Studies”.

The black guy?

Black, or Indian? Or both (Trinidadian or Guyanese)? Or Fijian?

Does it matter?

My first thought was: Who’s Roxanne Gay?

I recognize Christina Sommers and am familiar with her work.

My second thought was: I don’t care…

>None of my colleagues was surprised.

No wonder none of them were.

In case anyone was wondering, the exchange was actually between Lady Astor and Lord Birkenhead.

I wonder—would the many now-obscure gentlemen whose bon mots are misattributed to Churchill be posthumously offended or flattered?

Trey Anastasio, guitarist/frontman for Phish, collaborates with two very large women, one white one black for his latest side project Ghosts of the Forest:

Note also the morbidly obese white male bassist at the beginning of the clip who always plays seated.

Jethro Tull is as awesome a name for a rock band as has ever been thought of.

I really ought to look up the history of the band to find out who named it so I can praise that man by name for his remarkable wit.

I had never heard of Roxane Gay before today. I learn so much here. Some of it quite useful.

I am not an angry black woman with an ax to grind.

*eye roll*

Wikipedia says she is bisexual. A shoo in for 2020.

Jethro Tull is as awesome a name for a rock band as has ever been thought of.

What is so good about it?

One odd thing is that Shaw was much more famous than Chesterton when I was a kid in the 1970s, but now GKC is better known than GBS. Maybe it’s Catholic identity politics?

Shaw was deeply in tune with the emerging zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Chesterton was doing his best to write Sub specie aeternitatis, often very successfully. As Dean Inge wrote, “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next“.

At Purdue, Dr. Gay will be remembered for her refreshingly non-traditional approach to pedagogy: progressively taking longer absences from campus (owing to the psychological demands of a truly rigorous two-course-a-semester teaching load,) courageously leaving grad students to teach her makework teevee-discussion seminars, all the while periodically tweeting about how unreasonable it is for universities to expect such Herculean efforts from celebrity-American faculty.

The ‘local interest’ section at Barnes & Noble is still laden with her books, which is perhaps overly generous given that she never held back her contempt for stale, pale Hoosier lumpenproles.

As a corn-fed Midwestern badwhite, I don’t mind being kept out of the new intellectual vanguard; it’s not as if we used to find a place there, prancing among the Finkelbaums fresh off the shtetl. What does make me grimace is knowing how defiantly proud Professor Gay is of being poorly read (the bestseller-American term is “unfamiliar with the canon,”) given that she went to Philips Exeter Academy.

It became much easier to understand this unfamiliarity when I read her Twitter posts and saw that she’s immersed in cable television and capeshit all day. We’re careening towards post-American consumer-shitworld monoculture; at least there are spotty Midwestern teenagers in decrepit public libraries somehow managing to read from the canon without the $50,000 tuition. They’ll be like the last of the Irish monks in their Icelandic hermitages, at least until the long ships turn up.

“Brown Grimaces”

There isn’t an official Brown Grimace yet, but there is an Uncle O’Grimacey who loves Shamrock Shakes.

They’ll be like the last of the Irish monks in their Icelandic hermitages, at least until the long ships turn up.

At the end of the day those longships were no match for those Irish monks, nor will their equivalents be today or tomorrow.

I think the Southern Poverty Law Center should change its name to the Southern Poverty Hate Center!

Chesterton might be more name-famous these days, but when you factor in each of their works? Since no one reads anymore, they’ve got to be more familiar with Shaw’s corpus. Or at least things he inspired.

I think they made t.v. shows out of Father Brown mysteries, but aside from that Chesterton is scarce beyond the page.

I have no idea, but Jethro Tull was an actual person, inventor of a plow or whatever and a figure in the Second Agricultural Revolution.

I have no idea, but Jethro Tull was an actual person, inventor of a plow or whatever and a figure in the Second Agricultural Revolution.

You may be thinking of Jethro Till.

I think they made t.v. shows out of Father Brown mysteries, but aside from that Chesterton is scarce beyond the page.

There is an ongoing Father Brown series produced by the BBC. Mark Williams, who was Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter movies, plays Father Brown.

We’ve watched a couple seasons; it’s not great, but the short (45 minute) episodes and generally light approach are sometimes just the thing after a long day. Very few of the episodes are based on the original Chesterton stories.

The band’s namesake invented the mechanical crop-sowing seed drill, which was capable of prodigious yet precisely-targeted work.

He was also a pipe organist, a lawyer, a multiple inventor, a successful farmer, and a writer.

Also just as electronic amplification and the electric guitar made it possible for a small rock band to do the crowd-pleasing work of a large band of unmiked acoustic musicians, Jethro Tull’s inventions allowed a few mechanically-aided farmers to do the work of many peasants.

Interesting. Thank you.

Handy identification guide: /__\ = Jeet, |___| = Gay

Fantastic name by the way. Just wish I had thought of it first.