Civilization vs. Barbarians
According to figures obtained by London, England’s Sunday Times, an overwhelming 120 of the 134 complaints of sexual attacks at facilities lodged in the island nation between 2017 and 2018 related to incidents taking place in unisex changing rooms.
Like nobody saw that coming…
I’m not talking about your mouth when the smell of steaks grilling over the fire hits your nostrils. Nor am I talking about Harvey Weinstein’s reaction to seeing a fresh young actress who wants a part in a movie.
Nope, I’m back to my old gripe about people who dress like slobs. Theodore Dalrymple takes up the cause:
Indeed, if there is one thing that unites mankind today it is casual slobbery in dress.
This is rather odd, considering that so many people seem to spend a lot of their spare time shopping for clothes. The fact is, though, that however much time they spend on shopping, they will always look just as much a mess as ever. They choose, but they do not discriminate.
Our unwillingness, and increasing inability, to dress elegantly represents the triumph of self-esteem over self-respect. We dress to please ourselves, not others, and not looking like a slob takes effort, especially keeping it up through the day. Convenience is all, and it is easier to throw on a few casual clothes than to dress well.
What sparked Dalrymple’s ire was his experience at a couple of airports:
Sitting in two airports last week, in Paris and Riga, it suddenly occurred to me that I had not seen a single person who was smartly, let alone elegantly, dressed.
Now I seldom disagree with Teddy about much, but I do on this occasion. Imagine this scenario:
You get dressed to go to an important business meeting, so you do it properly: ironed shirt, tie, decent navy-blue suit, leather belt and shiny black lace-up Oxfords. You check yourself in a mirror and damn, you look good.
But did I mention that the important business meeting was out of town, and you’d need to catch a flight there?
Now go back and reflect how difficult it’s going to be when you’re confronted by the surly TSA apparatchiks at the airport. Belt? Take it off. Shoes? Unlace them, and take ’em off. Jacket? Run it through the X-ray. And that gold tie-clip? We’re going to pat you down and run you through our Magical Cancer-Generating Full-Body Scanner, bub.
All of a sudden, a tee shirt, sweatpants and slip-on moccasins make a lot more sense, don’t they? And the net result is that you look like a slob, because it’s a big enough chore to dress properly in the first place without having to do it all over again at the airport in front of hundreds of people.
However, while I may make a (grudging) allowance for looking like a slob under the above circumstances, the next scenario is absolutely unforgivable.
You’e married to one of the most beautiful women in the world — an actress, as it happens — and you have to attend a promotional red carpet event with her, to hype up her latest movie. So you both get dressed and let the limo sweep you off to this important event.
Your wife, of course, looks sensational:
You? Not so much:
It’s even worse when you look at the pair of them together (and small wonder she’s not looking at him, I imagine, out of pure embarrassment):
This is “dressing up”? A shabby cardigan, an untucked golf shirt, too-short casual trousers, socklets and sneakers? Are you fucking kidding me?
What bemuses me (and I’ve had this thought before) is why Anne Hathaway didn’t take one look at this slob and tell him either to change into a tux or stay the fuck at home.
I don’t care how “fashionable” this little fart thinks he is, or how important he may be in the business, or any of that crap: there is no excuse for this.
What this is, folks, is a total lack of respect; for the event, for the occasion, but most of all, towards his wife. In the old days, he would have been horsewhipped for looking like this outside the home — which is one of the many reasons I hanker for the old days.
Now: where did I put that sjambok?
Apparently, some financial “experts” in Britishland have taken exception to the massive bonus paid out to a company’s executive chairman:
One of Britain best-paid female bosses has been slammed by critics over a £29million bonus.
Avril Palmer-Baunack runs British Car Auctions, which owns We Buy Any Car, the car-buying website known for its catchy jingles.
On top of the £29 million bonus, which is linked to an increase in the share price, she also got an eight per cent increase to her basic salary to £525,000. The company defended it by saying it needed to pay a ‘competitive’ rate.
But in a report to investors, influential advisory firm Glass Lewis called the £29 million payout to Palmer-Baunack ‘exceptionally disproportionate’.
…and needless to say, the politicians want to get in the game:
Last year, Theresa May announced plans to censure stock market-listed firms who drew exceptional levels of complaints from shareholders over bosses’ pay.
There is just one problem with all of this outrage: it’s total bullshit. Here’s why (from the article itself):
The vast sum, 59 times her normal salary, is the result of an incentive plan drawn up four years ago to grow the firm.
In other words, four years ago the board of directors told the CEO that if she managed to grow the company’s value by x, she would be paid y. (And I should also point out that this incentive plan would have required a formal agreement from the shareholders — the same shareholders who are now bitching about the thing — before being implemented.)
Well, that’s exactly what our Avril did, so she has to get paid the bonus. (The size of the bonus is irrelevant, because it was obviously based on a sliding percentage driven by the amount of growth.)
Of course, the trolls at Glass Lewis don’t see it that way, because (and once again from the article):
[Glass Lewis] said the increase in the value of BCA may have been boosted by broader swings in stock market prices ‘rather than company or management performance’.
Well, guess what? “Broader swings” in the stock market are a result of shareholder confidence in the market’s activities and results — and if the company and its boss benefit from that, it’s called “good luck”. I should point out once again that if the market is tanking and it takes a company down with it — through no fault of the company boss, mind you — the boss may well get fired anyway because at the end (and please note this, because it’s important), executive management is responsible for one thing, and one thing only: growth in the value of the shareholders’ investment. How it gets there is irrelevant (except in the Land Of Wealth Envy). When they say, “The buck stops here”, that’s precisely what it means: the ultimate responsibility for shareholder value lies with the executive manager, and with this comes either termination or reward, as agreed by the shareholders.
All the other guff about Palmer-Baunack being a female executive, incidentally, is just smoke — her sex is completely irrelevant, as it should be. Then there’s this:
The vote on the pay report is only advisory so, if Palmer-Baunack feels able to shrug off criticism, she will be allowed to keep the lot.
Let’s hope the woman has an iron nerve (which she seems to have, by the way), and tells all the wailers to fuck off.
Palmer-Baunack, who has a grown-up son and daughter and is married to a German executive at Volkswagen, previously defended her £7.1 million pay packet for 2015 by saying: ‘Anyone who says they don’t want money is talking bullshit. We all want to earn money for our family.’
The Edinburgh-born executive, 54, has been vocal about women in the workplace in the past. She once said she was ‘very cynical’ about the existence of ‘glass ceilings’ – the term used to describe the limits on the career opportunities for women in big corporations.
Considering that she started off as an agent for a car rental company, I think she’s proved her point.
And if the wailing gets too much, she should really tell them all to get stuffed by taking her £29million bonus and going off to live in Switzerland, Monaco or the Caymans, beyond the reach of the would-be wealth confiscators.
Good luck to her, say I.
From Myron Magnet at City Journal (on another topic):
“Don’t you think the whole effort of modernism—in architecture, in literature, in music, in painting—might have been a huge dead end, from which Western culture will painfully have to extricate itself?”
Longtime Readers of my fevered scribblings and rants will know that I am an implacable enemy of Modernism (and its bastard child, Postmodernism), so to me, Magnet’s question should really be a statement, with no conditional verbs.
Modernism has been a spiritual dead end, in its subjugation of beauty and form into soulless utilitarianism and the inscrutable abstract, and wherever its proponents (Le Corbusier, Duchamps, Von Der Rohe, Kandinsky and all the other charlatans) might be today, I hope the temperature is set to “BROIL”.
Kandinsky: Garden of Love II
As for Magnet’s primary thesis (that of the imperilment of free speech), I think I’ve covered it already in my recent “Kicking Down Fences” post, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading Magnet’s greatly-superior take on the topic.
I read this article via Insty a few days back, and it’s stayed with me ever since because it’s becoming an increasingly-familiar feeling:
Would you feel comfortable wearing a MAGA hat? Or would you worry you might get assaulted?
…
The Democrats are now embracing “democratic socialism.” Their activists are dressing up in hoods and masks and terrorizing citizens.
…
But we’re not supposed to complain about it. It’s getting dangerous to speak your mind. Dangerous to your career, and even to your safety.
…
I worry about how free America still will be in six years because the Democrats… they’ve got an agenda. They want to narrow the range of acceptable opinions. To cow us, restrict us, make us scared to speak. From day to day, Americans are getting bullied, browbeaten, and herded like sheep. The Democrats are driving us into the narrow, reeking pen of political correctness. Its fences are constantly moving, and in only one direction. They are closing in on us.
Here’s what worries me about this. I don’t worry about being assaulted for wearing some kind of “offensive” clothing. I don’t worry that my car will be keyed because I have an NRA/TSRA decal on the back window. I don’t worry about being screamed at or spat upon because of [insert Lefty outrage here].
I don’t worry about any of that. I worry about how I’ll react to any of the above.
I don’t want to beat the shit out of some snotty punk screaming insults into my face, or break someone’s hand when they’ve just keyed my car. And if some Pantifa asswipe comes at me with a bike lock or pickax handle, I sure as hell don’t want to shoot the little prick in the face.
But I might well do any or all of that — and then have to face the legal consequences.
It’s all very well to say, “Oh, but you were in the right: you were justified in responding to [whatever just happened to you].” I might be in the right, but there will still be a mountain of legal crap to be endured, lawyer’s fees and all that nonsense. It’s like having a car accident when the other guy ran the red light: he’s in the wrong, but you’re still the one with a wrecked car.
That said: I think these little Lefty shits need to face up to something: it’s all very well to play these little games, but I don’t think they realize that our patience may be great, but it’s not limitless.
It’s only a question of time.
But in the meantime, I find excuses not to go to Austin, even though I have close friends there I want to visit, because Austin TX is Loony Lefty Central. I sometimes worry about that NRA sticker getting me a bad Uber review from a passenger (I’m a “five-star” driver, which has its privileges). I worry about some SJW waiter spitting in my food after overhearing my dinner-table conversation. And those are just the things that trouble me off the top of my head.
As the linked article suggests, they and all the other little micro-terrorisms are all fences. And I’m starting to resent them. Greatly.
“Interestingly, this very segment [White men] produces by far the most of our engineers, and judging by what we have accomplished, they have done a damn good job,” he said. “Why do these ideologues want to run them down?”
Answer: It is precisely because White men have produced this long, storied list of achievements, and the social justice warriors haven’t (and can’t), is the reason why they seek to run us down.
It’s the politics of envy, pure and simple — pulling the outstanding back into the herd — and there’s no accommodating or reasoning with this mindset. The sooner we all recognize this — and crush these pathetic fuckers wherever we can — the happier and more successful we all will be.
