Splendid Isolation

Deal-Killer

January 21, 2020 Kim du Toit Bad News, Politics

By now you’ve probably heard at least a little something about California’s shocking new “freelancer” bill that went into effect January 1, 2020. Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) is sweeping and vague but basically it redefines the relationship between employers and employees, effectively ending independent contract work and killing the “gig economy”.
…
Independent contractors across the nation could soon be suffering the same fate as their California counterparts. A federal version has passed through committee and now sits in the House of Representatives waiting for a floor vote. This is not a drill. This is real.

As someone who depends utterly on the gig economy to supplement my shitty SocSec income, let’s just say that I’m casting a very baleful eye on this development.

I can’t see this bill making it into law — I can’t believe it would make it through the House, Senate and be signed by POTUS.

Its title is H.R.2474 — the “PRO Act” — and I would recommend that everyone reading this send a letter (not email, those assholes in Congress have installed layers and layers of screeners to ignore us) telling their Congressweasel and Senator to treat this foul bill like the rabid dog it is, and shoot it on sight.

I’m not going to threaten anybody or anything, but if this bullshit makes it into Federal law, I guess we’ll see just how “real” this gets. I’ve been destitute before, and at age 65 I have no intention of going through that again.

And if any political wiseguy tells me to learn how to code… let’s just say I already know how to code. I also know how to grease a fucking rope — and I’ll leave it to someone else to tell me which one I’d rather do.

About Damn Time

January 21, 2020 Kim du Toit Good Stuff, Men & Women

I have always pressed for a relationship where the men and women have clearly-defined roles — and preferably, one where the man is the earner and dominant partner, while the woman takes care of the home and children. Needless to say, the feministicals come after men like me, spitting and clawing, and spouting bullshit about the “patriarchy” and (in times past) “male chauvinist” etc.

Now, after all the feministical nonsense, we finally seem to have something of a return to sanity:

Amid the Me Too movement and radical feminism, a new opposing trend has emerged across Britain – the ‘tradwife’ trend.
Harking back to 1950s Britain, and already established in the US, the trend sees women reverting to the traditional roles of housewives, practiced in the fifties and sixties.
The belief behind the movement is that wives should not work, and rather spend their days cooking, cleaning, wearing modest and feminine dress, and practice traditional etiquette, being submissive to their husbands and ‘always put them first’.

“Tradwife”… okay, I can live with the term. I could (and do) happily live with someone who believes in it. Even better is this perspective:

‘My view on feminism is that it’s about choices. To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you’re not allowed to stay at home -to me is taking a choice away’.
Distancing herself from the movement’s right-wing links, she argued: ‘Being a tradwife is investing in your family and being selfless. So I would say the opposite of that is someone who is selfish and just takes’.

We need more of this, and more women like her. Society will be all the better for it.

And my favorite line from the article:

‘We say to feminists: thanks for the trousers, but we see life a different way’.

Priceless.

Letting Nature Take Its Course

January 21, 2020 Kim du Toit Vermin

I like this idea:

Eight terriers kill record 700 rodents in just seven hours – after desperate farmer called in handlers in bid to fix vermin crisis once and for all

Talk about creating a service to address a need:

The terriers are trained to kill vermin and are managed by the rat group, who travel around the region to clear farms of unsightly vermin.
Ed Cook, 34, manages the service and said the Suffolk and Norfolk Rat Pack are dedicated to promoting traditional hunting methods.

Now, if we can only create such a group Over Here to see off the vermin who infest the Government Swamp, Social Democrat party, United Nations and other such foul institutions, the world would be a better place.

Maybe Not

January 20, 2020 Kim du Toit Grammar Nazism

I followed a link from Insty to Amazon (“Top Books In Military History”) and found this:

Priceless.

That said, given the Smithsonian’s increasing descent into woke-based illiteracy, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the cover was printed incorrectly, the book is about WWI, and nobody in the layers and layers of fact-checkers picked it up.

Or else it’s the Ockham principle, which would simply say that Amazon done fucked up.

Children Not Wanted

January 20, 2020 Kim du Toit Men & Women

This doesn’t refer to refusing to have kids. Instead, I echo the words of Brit actor Laurence Fox:

Laurence Fox has revealed he once broke up with a girlfriend because she liked a pro-#MeToo TV advert. The actor, 41, told his ex-lover: ‘Bye. Sorry I can’t do this with you,’ after she praised Gillette for their TV campaign on ‘toxic masculinity’.
He also said he no longer dates women under 35 as they are ‘too woke’ and most of them are ‘absolutely bonkers’.

Of course, this is not my battlefield — I’m so far away from the dating pool that I’m positively dehydrated — but I can absolutely see where Fox’s frustration stems from.

All this is the toxic consequence of the combination of militant feminism and modernist principle, as seen in the very next sentence of the article:

It comes after a furious row over his [BBCTV] Question Time showdown with academic Rachel Boyle, which saw him call her a ‘racist’ for describing him a ‘white, privileged male’ in a debate about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
[He] said ‘throwing the card of racism at everybody… [is] really starting to get boring’, triggering a Twitterstorm in which some praised him for his ‘common sense’ and others brand him a ‘disgrace’.

And he’s quite right. Accusing someone of the “sin” of being a “White male [whatever]” is no less racist than calling someone a “Black gangster” or (ahem) a “woman driver” — it’s all racist / sexist bullshit. (But lest I be lumped in with the appalling Mr. Fox, however, let me make it plain that there’s no such thing as a “Black gangster” and all women are excellent drivers.)

I was chatting to the Son&Heir, who has recently split from his long-time girlfriend, about this very topic, and he echoed Laurence Fox’s sentiments almost to the word. Even in conservative north Texas, he finds women younger than him (at age 31) to be… I think the words he used were “inconsequential” and “flakey”. As a result, his dates with the same woman are generally in the low single figures, as it takes him very little time to discover that underneath their superficial shallowness, “wokeness” and ignorance is… noting else. To quote some other guy: “They know absolutely nothing.” He just laughs it off, as I suspect other young men of his intelligence, education and experience do when confronted with those same prospects.

Even worse is that older women of his generation come with either a world of psychological baggage or (sometimes “and”) a ready-made brood of children. He doesn’t see why he should have to deal with their heritage of bad decisions and the consequences thereof, and I can’t say I blame him.

As for Laurence Fox, it comes as no surprise that he’s being attacked for pointing all this out. What people often forget is that the little boy who announced that the Emperor was wearing no clothes was soon thereafter torn to shreds by the mob for showing such disrespect for the ruler.

‘Twas ever thus.

Monday Funnies

January 20, 2020 Kim du Toit Funny Stuff

Wherein we drag ourselves out of bed to face the horror of another week… wait a minute, it’s Martin Luther King Day!!! (a.k.a the holiday celebrated by many, while others go “Who?”)