Tag: Stupid people

Well Now

Technology

Was directed to a Microsoft page explaining terms of use and all that stuff, which will take effect in mid-June.  Just for once, I decided to plow through the MEGO document, which is mostly all the usual guff, and not much jumped out and stuck me in the eye.

Until I saw this (highlights added):

3. Code of Conduct.

a. By agreeing to these Terms, you’re agreeing that, when using the Services, you will follow these rules:
i. Don’t do anything illegal.
ii. Don’t engage in any activity that exploits, harms, or threatens to harm children.
iii. Don’t send spam or engage in phishing. Spam is unwanted or unsolicited bulk email, postings, contact requests, SMS (text messages), instant messages, or similar electronic communications. Phishing is sending emails or other electronic communications to fraudulently or unlawfully induce recipients to reveal personal or sensitive information, such as passwords, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, credit card information, financial information, or other sensitive information, or to gain access to accounts or records, exfiltration of documents or other sensitive information, payment and/or financial benefit.
iv. Don’t publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity).
v. Don’t engage in activity that is fraudulent, false or misleading (e.g., asking for money under false pretenses, impersonating someone else, manipulating the Services to increase play count, or affect rankings, ratings, or comments).
vi. Don’t circumvent any restrictions on access to or availability of the Services.
vii. Don’t engage in activity that is harmful to you, the Services or others (e.g., transmitting viruses, stalking, posting terrorist or violent extremist content, communicating hate speech, or advocating violence against others).
viii. Don’t infringe upon the rights of others (e.g., unauthorized sharing of copyrighted music or other copyrighted material, resale or other distribution of Bing maps, or photographs).
ix. Don’t engage in activity that violates the privacy of others.
x. Don’t help others break these rules.

So, for instance, calling Chuck Schumer a rancid Commie cocksucker could possibly cause Big Redmond to yank me off Microsoft?   Or posting pictures like these could cause the same?

Then there’s this:

How about:

or this:

Asking for a friend.  Because he wants to know who, precisely, is going to determine what constitutes “offensive”, “inappropriate”, “extremist content” and “hate speech”.

Incomprehensible Witch

Freaks & Loonies, Seen On Campus

Over at Taki’s place, Ted Dalrymple takes aim (metaphorically speaking;  he’s a Brit) at some total loony university professor:

Professor MacCormack’s book defeated me, not only sapping my will to read further but inducing a state almost of catatonia.  It certainly cured me, at least temporarily, of my obsessional desire to finish any book that I have started.  Her style made  The Critique of Pure Reason  seem as light and witty as  The Importance of Being Earnest.  She appears to think that the English plural of manifesto is manifesti rather than manifestos;  I admit that it conjured up in my mind a new Italian dish, gnocchi manifesti.
Open the book at any page and you will find passages that startle by their polysyllabic meaninglessness combined with the utmost crudity.  By chance, I opened the book to page 144 and my eye fell on the following:

The multiplicity of becoming-cunt as an assemblage reassembles the tensors upon which it expresses force and by which force is expressed upon its various planes and dimensions.

And Dalrymple notes:

I have known deteriorated schizophrenic patients to speak more sensibly and coherently than this.

No kidding.  Let’s take a look at this paragon of literacy, shall we?

…and not in drag:  

This Oz bint is, and I quote:  “a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England” (whatever “continental philosophy” may be).  Also, Anglia Ruskin University is not part of Cambridge University, but a separate school with campuses scattered across several towns, Cambridge being but one of them.

One wonders what John Ruskin (after whom it’s named) would think of this example of its academic excellence.

 

Inconsequential

Politics, Sports

Apparently there’s a big hoo-hah about where Major League Baseball is going to play their so-called “All-Star” game this year because Georgia is an eeevil place because they want to prevent voter fraud such as happened in the 2020 elections.  Other states have weighed in (notably Texas), and so on and so on.

In the first place, MLB should call the All-Star game what it really is — the Steroid Festival — but what really gives me the giggles is that they think that their sport, or any sport come to think of it, matters more than a pitcher’s mound of beans in the grand scheme of things.

I note with great pleasure that the PGA has not got involved in this wokism, because unlike baseball, they know which side their bread is buttered on.  (Boycotting Georgia, when the Masters Tournament is played at Augusta?  Don’t make me laugh.)  Still on the subject of buttered bread, MLB seems to have forgotten who comprises their core fan base, and playing little wokester games is probably not high on the list of priorities for that group.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of shills and fraudsters.

As for the rest of us — that growing number of people like myself who are becoming disaffected with corporate wokism and alienated from all the companies that practice it — where MLB plays their little All-Star game matters less than a flat tire on a pickup.

Foreign Darwinism

Mocking Furriners

What the title means is what happens when tourists travel to a foreign country and then act stupidly — usually with the excuse “But it isn’t a problem back home!” — and are then astonished when they’re arrested, abused or have similar bad things happen to them.  Here’s an excellent example of such stupidity:

Police in Dubai arrested a group of people for public debauchery over a widely-shared video showing naked women posing on a balcony in the city.
Violations of the public decency law in the United Arab Emirates, including for nudity and other ‘lewd behaviour’, carry penalties of up to six months in prison and a 5,000 dirham (£983) fine.
The sharing of pornographic material is also punishable with prison time and a fine of up to 500,000 dirhams under the country’s laws, which are based on Islamic law, or Shariah.

I know, I know;  the airwaves and newspapers are going to be full of cries such as “How ancient and barbaric are their laws!” along with excuses such as “They were only having a little fun!”

Yeah, ancient and barbaric they may be, but let us not think for a moment that these silly tarts didn’t know that what they were doing was illegal in the country they were visiting — I’m willing to bet that this was part of the allure of acting like this — and now they’re going to discover exactly what happens to “whores” and the “debauched” in the oh-so-enlightened UAE, with their swanky hotels, huge shopping malls and international airport.

The “Darwinism” I refer to in the title doesn’t mean Darwinism taken to its extreme, of course.  That’s what happens in little garden spots such as Southeast Asia, where drug smugglers face the death penalty.  By comparison, this is small potatoes:

I would have little problem with this bunch of idiots getting a few light lashes with a cane — a fairly common punishment in those parts for that kind of behavior.  I’m not suggesting this particular punishment, of course, but all in all, it could be worse.

Take it from someone who knows:  after a while, your ass stops tingling after a caning — and given the choice, I’d gladly take that over six months’ imprisonment in an Arab jail.

Fakes & Phonies

Crime, Fine Art

Lat night I watched an interesting movie on Netflix called Made You Look, about a string of art forgeries sold for unbelievable sums of money from the late 1980s till 2018.

Actually, I have only one quibble with the show, in that it should have been entitled Made You Look Foolish — because not only were art collectors taken in by the fakes, but art authenticators, catalog printers, auction houses and of course, art dealers (who are to the art business what agents and managers are to the music world — i.e. a bunch of venal rogues, thieves and manipulators).

Spoiler alert (although anyone with a brain could see this coming):  when works of art sell for bajillions of dollars, the incentive for forgery increases exponentially.  In the case above, all the forgeries were created by one man — some little old Chinese (quelle surprise ) artist living in Long Island NY — who had a real talent for painting in the style of most of the American abstract artists of the 20th century.  He handed them over to a guy who faked the paintings’ condition (so they’d look as though they were painted in the 1950s, say, instead of 1986).  Then the paintings were given to a shady art dealer with absolutely no history of art dealing (!!!!!) who then told a gullible art dealer in (where else?) Manhattan that the paintings came from an anonymous collector of unknown name and no history (!!!!) — and then the fun ensued, when the dealer purchased a painting by Jackson Pollock for, say, $950,000 (!!!!) who then turned around and sold it to some rich asshole for… $9.1 million (!!!!!!!!).

What astonished me is that this didn’t happen back in the 18th century, when nobody knew nothin’ about art authentication;  no, this happened during a time when a paint’s age (and even the age of the canvas) could be determined by chemical- or spectrographic analysis.  Even when this was done and the forgery exposed, nobody did anything, because there were so many reputations at stake:  those of the collectors, of the art dealers, of the art critics, and so on.  Nobody likes to look a fool, but untold hundreds of people were.

I’m going to make one statement here that was never mentioned in the movie.  Frankly, the abstract style of art is such that I’m amazed that there haven’t been millions of forgeries, all done in middle-school art classes.  Think I’m joking?  Take a look:

(Longtime Readers will know of my utter loathing for Pollock’s art, for all sorts of aesthetic reasons, but the others are no less awful.)

Never mind the sneers you get when you say that your 4-year-old granddaughter could paint a Rothko;  maybe she can, and maybe she can’t — but a 70-year-old Chinese artist of no particular artistic merit could, and did:  fooling all the above pretentious assholes into going into raptures about this kind of dreck, and paying lots of moolah for it.

By the way, I have no problem with people owning copies — even great copies — of masterpieces.  I happen to have a dozen or so scattered around my house myself.  Here are some, for example:  Monet’s Blue House At Zaandam :

…Winslow Homer’s A Wall, Nassau :

…and Childe Hassam’s Lower Fifth Avenue :

The big — giant — difference between me and those rich suckers is that I paid about $80 (eighty) each for my copies (including shipping), and I cheerfully admit that they’re not originals.  (They come from iCanvas.com, by the way, and they’re created by machines using acrylic paints which look so like the original oils that it makes little difference.)

They’re also Impressionist paintings (none of that abstract splashing and daubing for me, no thank you).

I have to tell you that even if I won a huge lottery, there is no way I would ever pay millions for an original, no matter how much I may love the artist.

Especially when the “original” may turn out to be a fake, painted by a little old Chinese guy in Long Island.