Stupid people – Splendid Isolation

So Much For Compassion

January 16, 2025 Kim du Toit Immigration, Marxists, Morons & Idiots

Okay, you would truly have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this one:

A theatre in Paris which is known for its radical shows and exhibitions has been occupied by more than 250 African migrants after they were let in for a free event five weeks ago.

The Gaîté Lyrique theatre in Paris staged the conference, entitled Reinventing the welcome for refugees in France, on December 10.

It involved talks hosted by academics from top universities and Red Cross officials, and saw activists welcome in the migrants.

But when the conference was finished, the migrants, who mainly come from France’s former west African colonies, refused to leave the venue.

Still occupied, the leftist theatre now faces going out of business after weeks without revenue from ticket sales, and has had to cancel all performances until at least January 24.

Its management said in a statement last week that the number of people taking shelter in the theatre is ‘continuing to increase’ and has swelled to around 300 people.

Who could have seen this coming? Raise your hands…

Oh… everyone, huh? [exit, howling with laughter]

Not Likely

January 8, 2025 Kim du Toit Wokism

The usual bleg:

…my response:

Fuck You

…and the reason (one of many):

They lost me long ago.

Degradation

January 2, 2025 Kim du Toit Corporate Fuckery, Eco-Crap, Engineering, Resistance, Two-Minute Hate

When I first moved to the U.S. back in the mid-80s, I was impressed by how well things worked. I mean, you have to understand that all around the world — such as in Third World countries like Zimbabwe, India and Italy — things often just do not work as one would expect them to. Whether it’s because they are badly made, or badly assembled, or just operated by fucking idiots (try doing a relatively simple thing like booking a flight out of Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport — which isn’t even in Rome but miles and miles out on the coast, a story for another time) and you’ll soon see that not much works as originally intended.

I am also familiar with concepts such as planned obsolescence, where corporations deliberately design products that will eventually fail or fall to pieces so that you will be forced into buying a new one as a replacement.

But there’s another factor in stuff not working, and this is the one which really, really sets my teeth on edge, and it’s embodied by an appliance which is common in households all over the U.S.: the dish washing machine, or dishwasher.

When I first came over, I fell in live with the dishwasher, because I had never owned one. Most families in South Africa didn’t, either because they had Black servants to hand wash the dishes, or they were too poor to afford such expensive (and they were expensive) machines.

But these GE/Frigidaire/Whirlpool dishwashers? Oh man, there were great. You piled your dishes in, coated with caked-on gravy or food particles or whatever, added a little detergent, and switched the thing on. All sorts of magic would happen behind the closed door, and when the thing stopped running, you waited about ten minutes and then opened the door, and there were your dishes: clean, dry and warm (maybe even still hot) to the touch.

And that was it.

Sadly, that is no longer the case.

Now, you have to pretty much hand wash the dishes first, or at least rinse them into near-cleanliness before loading them into the dishwasher, then do the same stuff as above and then, when the buzzer sounds or a light goes on, you open the door to find that your dishes are not completely clean, still wet or at best damp, and in fact, many times you will have to rinse them off and do the whole fucking thing all over again — with no guarantee that the outcome will be any different.

And why is this?

Because the dirty fingers of government have been stuck into the operation. Thanks to an excess of Green zealotry, dishwashers can’t use as much water as they used to so the spray can’t be as fierce (and effective), and the heating element has been turned from its furnace-like operation into something that wouldn’t keep you warm on a cool autumn day if you gripped it in your fist.

Our dishwashers, in short, have been turned from appliances that once worked perfectly at their intended function into flabby little things that are the equivalent of convict labor: surly, unproductive and unreliable.

There’s no point in complaining about this because Green Worship has become so ingrained in our culture that anyone daring to rail against the Great God EnergySmart (blessings be upon its name) might well face severe sanction and even penalties.

Such as happened to my friend Patterson when he rewired his 2015-model dishwasher to 1980 specs and made it work properly. Me, I’m too stupid to do something like that, and too old to want to kick against the pricks in that manner.

So my private little rebellion against this nonsense is that I just wash my dishes again and again until they are as clean as I want them to be. (I do the same with my low-flow-low-use low-efficiency toilet, which requires two and sometimes three flushes to take care of the old #2 bowel movement discharge, and has been know to rise to five, after a particularly stupendous roast beef dinner.)

Or I power-rinse my dishes with steaming-hot water before loading them, using twice as much electricity (via the water heater) as I would have used to run the dishwasher if it was working properly.

End result: I use twice or three times as much water and much more electricity to wash my dishes as I would have in 1986.

And all this just so I can have clean dishes to put away in the cupboard. Or else I do my part for the environment by using paper plates which don’t need washing and just end up in the landfill.

I know this sounds like a really pointless and futile gesture, doesn’t it? But it’s far less ummm radical than, say, were I to assassinate the CEO of Whirlpool or the politicians responsible for turning once-efficient U.S. products into pathetic Third World failures.

Isn’t it?

At Long Last

December 31, 2024 Kim du Toit Two-Minute Hate

…we’ve got rid of that asshole Jimmy Carter. I know, I know, one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but the hell with that: I never said anything good about the sanctimonious, vapid Carter when he was still alive, and I see no reason to stop now that he’s croaked his last.

The only reason he won the 1976 election was because of the post-Watergate blues, and the minute he came up against a serious candidate (Ronald Reagan) he had his ass handed to him.

And his presidency was a total and utter disaster — only recently surpassed in its muddled neo-socialism by that of soon-to-be-ex-President FuckJoeBiden.

Good riddance, and I hope we never see his like again — although with the Democrats, I fear that this hope will be forlorn because there’s no telling who they’ll come up with next. (H’Angus The Monkey, no doubt, who come to think of it would have been a better President than FJB or Carter.)

So Much For The Ivory Tower

December 30, 2024 Kim du Toit Marxists, Seen On Campus

As universities all over the Western world start to sputter and fail because of funding shortages and bloated, costly bureaucracies, here’s an interesting take:

Universities’ response to the cash crisis reveals their deeper crisis of purpose. Up to 10,000 university jobs are reported to have been cut this year. Yet diversity, equity and inclusion teams seem to have been largely spared the axe. Instead, universities are cutting core academic disciplines. The University of Kent has closed its philosophy department, while Canterbury Christ Church University will no longer teach English literature – a university spokesperson described the course as ‘no longer viable in the current climate’.

Once, it would have been unthinkable for a university not to offer degrees in major branches of learning, such as literature or philosophy. These subjects were taught not because ‘the market’ made them ‘viable’, but because they contributed to our understanding of the word and what it means to be human. That they can now be so readily discarded speaks to an impoverished intellectual climate that universities themselves have helped to create.

Note the emphasized sentence.

What it shows to me is that the so-called intellectual rigor of the ivory tower has faded, if not disappeared altogether. (I know, I know: “Wake up, Kim, it’s been going on for decades!” )

As long as universities continue to be regarded as simply an adjunct to the marketplace — i.e. providing certification for careers — then of course the “thoughtful” classes such as philosophy or Shakespeare are going to suffer. (Of course, certification is probably critical for careers such as engineering, medicine and the hard sciences, less so for law and suchlike.)

Why one would need a B.A. to be a personal assistant or office receptionist, of course, simply underlines the fact that the high school diploma has ceased to be any kind of qualification whatsoever.

And universities are becoming equally useless. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of Gramscian Marxists.