Tag: Stupid people

Vox Populi

Riotous Assemblies

I see that the Micks have the temerity to be angry about yet the latest crime committed by an “immigrant” — one of the many thousands dumped in Northern Oirland by the various British governments of recent times.

Of course, being Irish, they are expressing their displeasure in the traditional manner:

Violent scenes were witnessed in Northern Ireland again on Wednesday as tensions remain high in the wake of an apparent attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast, allegedly at the hands of a Sudanese asylum seeker.

Hordes of black balaclava masked men clashed with riot officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) on Wednesday in areas such as the Belfast suburb of Newtownabbey, where a lorry truck was set on fire by agitators. The truck is believed to have been a municipal “gully emptier” used to clean street drainage systems.

A car was also set on fire on Antrim Road in the area, while fires were also lit at the Sandyknowes roundabout, the Belfast Telegraph reported.

Nearby, police were forced to deploy a water cannon to push back a large crowd attempting to break into a Newtownabbey hotel, likely over at least rumours of migrants being housed inside.

Next will be the bombs, I’m guessing.  I’m pretty sure that the IRA Provos still have a few hidden somewhere since The Troubles subsided.

Needless to say, the BritGov is responding in its traditional way, by labeling the protesters as “extreme Rightwing”, suppressing all online mention of the protests as well as going with the water cannons (in stark contrast to their treatment of the BLM-inspired riots a couple years back).

The response from the British government has seemingly attempted to shift the blame for the violence to those commenting on social media, rather than the horrific stabbing attack, footage of which was widely seen and reports indicating that the UK government had granted the suspect asylum after entering into the country illegally.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to “crack down on anyone who is fuelling this division,” adding that “there is no justification for the violence and disorder that we saw threatening our communities, nor for those who encouraged it, online or elsewhere.”

Tell that to the Beheaders, old cock, and maybe then we can believe you.

When all the smoke has cleared, I’ll just be curious to see what’s left.  Of everything.  Over There.  In the meantime…

Proportionate Response

Foreign Affairs, Law and Order

See, here’s the kind of statement that makes me want to reach for the old nail-studded cluebat.  (I know I know, it’s a Brit ergo a fucking dumbass / ideologue, but I’ve heard the same drivel being spouted by our Lefty assholes Over Here.)

British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has said that not all ethnic groups should be treated the same by police in the wake of the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who died in police handcuffs after officers refused to believe he had been stabbed by a Sikh man.

Wait, it gets better:

Lammy, who also serves as the left-wing Labour Party government’s Justice Secretary, said that while the “starting point” should be equality before the law, it is not always appropriate to be treated “the same”, noting the disproportionate arrest rates of certain ethnic minority groups, such as Roma travellers [Gypsies] and black Britons.

…and as we all know, the reason that gypsies and Black Britons get disproportionately arrested is — wait for it — because they commit a disproportionate number of the crimes.

It stands to reason (except to people like this twerp) that if you go fishing in a pond where 80% of the fish are yellow-colored, you’re going to catch a disproportionate number of yellow fish.

I’d like to give tits like this Lammy the benefit of the doubt — i.e. that they’re just statistically ignorant — but the truth of the matter is that for them, everything is viewed through the RAAAYYYYYCISM! lens.

Which is what led to the horrible outcome for the Nowak kid, above.  (For those who don’t know what that story was all about, go here.)

Forced Participation

Retailing

Of late, there’s been a lot of what I’ve come to call “forced participation” in that after almost every retail transaction, it seems, one has to respond to a follow-up questionnaire on said transaction.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind, but the problem is that this is becoming increasingly tiresome.  FFS, the transaction took at most a minute, which is what one would expect from a routine transaction, and now I have to take three minutes to say the thing was worth 5 stars?  Frankly, given that the transaction was unexceptional — I paid my money, got the item, all pretty normal — in the normal scheme of things I’d just give it three stars and away we go.

Except that’s not how it works these days, is it? because now Management uses these “service metrics” as a performance indicator for the staff member in question, and (I’m told) anything less than 5 stars has (bad) consequences for the employee come salary review time, or bonus time for that matter.

So now one is more or less compelled to give 5 stars regardless (unless the service was crap, in which case the reduced star count is or should be unexpected).

And here’s the problem.  If five stars is de rigeur, then how do we describe or reward outstanding service?  Like so much grading nowadays, if everyone gets an A, then what is the worth of an A?

I remember once awarding a single star (because I couldn’t give 0 or a negative) for a truly horrendous experience.  The problem was, as I explained to the drone who actually called me to see what had happened (!), that the problem was not with the customer service rep — who had been truly excellent, by the way — but with the corporation’s stupid policy, something over which the poor girl had no control.  But what was I supposed to do?  Give five stars for a monumental clusterfuck?  How does that help?

The situation didn’t improve when I asked the supervisor if I was going to get a survey on his service call, because he hadn’t helped the situation either.  At the end of it, I simply told the supervisor that the outcome was that I was never going to do business with his company ever again, given their shitty policy and terrible backup.  (And I never have.)

As with so many of he little technologies that have injected themselves into our lives of late, this one is being misused (even abused) by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing and don’t know how to set up or manage information streams.

A plague on all their houses.

Oh, and there will be a followup post on a related matter, all about how I stopped doing business with a longtime service provider precisely because they’ve started abusing the data that I’ve been exchanging with them.  I have to allow a little time to pass before I do because if I rant about what I really think at the moment, there could be lawyers (theirs, of course).

Watch this space.

Update:  Got another one just this morning.

“You recently made contact with Tina at our Customer Service Center. As one of Tina’s customers, we believe you are the most relevant and credible expert to offer advice to help Tina continue to improve. Tina would love your help and it should only take two minutes. Click on the button below to take the survey.”

Yeah, “Tina would love your help” — like she’ll ever see my input other than if I call her service (which was outstanding, by the way) terrible.

Assholes.

Beaten To The Punch

Lies and Untruths

I got this meme by email from some organization (which I don’t know, and from which I never asked for communication, don’t get me started):

I was going to blog about it, and offer to pay a crisp $50 bill to anyone who could find me a large McDonalds fries order for $1.99 anywhere in these United States.

Then this guy did a complete takedown, complete with actual fact-finding instead of just snark.

Damn.  Go and read it anyway, it’s brilliant.

Another Nail In The Male Coffin

Eco-Crap, Pussification Parade, Science!

There’s a massive danger to Earth, uncovered by !Scientists!:

Men are bad for the planet, a controversial new study has claimed.

Researchers from 13 countries have joined forces on a new paper, titled ‘Men, masculinities, and the planet at the end of (M)Anthropocene.’  According to the experts, men tend to have a greater carbon footprint than women, largely through travel, transportation, and tourism.  Blokes are also less concerned with climate change – and less willing to change their everyday practices to fix it. 

No shit.  We’re too busy building stuff, moving stuff, drilling for stuff and in general making the planet habitable for everyone.  But wait, we’re doing even MOAR Evil Things!

In addition, typically ‘manly’ activities negatively impact both the environment and the climate.  This includes things like fishing and hunting, as well as meat consumption.  ‘Men tend to be more involved in owning, managing, controlling heavy, chemical, carbon–based, industrialized agriculture, high environmental impact and extractive industries, and of course militarism, with its own devastating environmental effects.’

However did they miss “car racing”?  And only in the fevered mind of academia would hunting and fishing be a danger to the environment, when any fule kno that practitioners of the above are the most ardent supporters of environmental protection.

Of course, it’s all dressed up in the usual pseudo-scientific gobbledegook:

Professor Jeff Hearn, professor of sociology in Huddersfield’s Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, said: ‘There is now plenty of research that shows clear negative impacts of some men’s behavior on the environment and climate.  What is astonishing is how this aspect does not figure in most debate and policy in a more sustainable world.’

That’s because “most debate and policy” concerns itself with more important issues, such as whether Sidney Sweeney’s ever going to do OnlyFans.

On that topic:  they also missed “wanking”.  I’m not sure how that lovely activity is linked to Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©, but I am sure that as we speak there is a group of some asshole “scientists” busy working on a (taxpayer-funded) study on the topic.

People are being paid — in thirteen countries, no less — to produce bullshit like this.

Fach.

More “Legal” Bullshit

Grifters & Cons

Here’s an interesting take:

A University of Miami law professor recently offered reasons why that the public should consider extending copyright law to include “collectively held cultural identities.”

In an excerpt of her paper “Protecting Cultural Personality” in Race, Racism and the Law, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu notes companies such as Timbuk and Louis Vuitton “have designed and marketed clothing based on traditional ethnic clothing styles or symbols” … but without the “knowledge, consent, or involvement of the cultural group” in question.

Osei-Tutu argues intellectual property laws are “underinclusive — at least in relation to valuable intangible cultural heritage from indigenous communities and local communities from the global south [which] allows corporations and those outside the community to capture and monetize this unprotected resource, which means that it is exposed and subject to misappropriation.”

Sounds like bullshit, dunnit?  Gets deeper, though:

In order to protect “cultural personality rights,” Osei-Tutu (pictured) says cultural groups should have “sufficient boundaries and markers, or indicia” by which to identify them.

Groups can be “self-defining,” and it’s “not necessary for the public to have significant knowledge of the group.”

Sure, just make it up as you go along.  Okay, I’ll play.

Supposing I composed and released a blues song in the style of, oh, B.B. King.  (Note:  “in the style of”, not a copy of.)  Am I making an appropriation of the blues culture — defined on the fly as something that is inherently of Southern Black origin?  According to this college harpy professor, probably so.

Fine.  But let’s just examine that “blues culture” thing for a moment.  It was indisputably a lament, born of a race’s suffering, and played on either piano or else guitar by Black musical luminaries such as Otis Spann and Muddy Waters, respectively.

On the piano?  You mean, that keyboard instrument invented and devised in 1700 by Italian Bartolomeo Cristofiori, a White man?  And about the guitar:  the “classical” acoustic version was invented by inter alia  Spaniard Antonio de Torres Jurado, and its electrical counterpart by inter alia  Adolph Rickenbacker and Leo Fender (to name but two).  Regardless, both instruments were invented by White men of European heritage.

If Spann and Waters had had to operate under those pesky “cultural appropriation” restrictions, it’s safe to say that the blues would still be being sung in Black Christian churches and not in concerts all over the world.

Wait:  did I say “churches”?

Doesn’t look too much like something African (or African-American), does it?

Of course, I’m just screwing around here.  But at the heart of this little piece of satire is a very serious message to the racist hustlers like this Osei-Tutu creature:

Stop fucking around and claiming that “cultural appropriation” is somehow an evil thing.  That, or don’t wear jeans (invented by White Jewish guy Levi Strauss) ever again.

And steer clear of fried chicken, while you’re about it, or else the Romans are going to declare a classical fatwa on your ass.

I could go on all day, but I think you get my point.