Saw this on Insty’s sidebar not long ago, and it stopped me in my tracks:
I have seen some ugly shit in my time, but these so-called “Newchic” things are Hillary-grade hideous. Somebody elucidate the concept to me, because I must be missing something. “Fugly” doesn’t begin to describe them.
Of course, if these are The Most Comfortable Shoes Evah, then I stand rebuked.
I’ve opined on this situation before, mostly when it comes to topic of the success of comic-book movies among so-called grownups:
The Democratic Party’s vision of the American future is a kind of permissive classroom, no doubt appealing to its base of spoiled children. It is not a place where real work will ever get done. Democrats tell their voters there is nothing they cannot have, and that if they complain and demand loud enough the stingy, bad parent (the Republicans, the rich, Old White People©) will be forced to give them treats. They are led to believe that anyone who does not give them what they want freely (free health care, free college, reparations, housing, jobs) is doing so out of malice.This jejune political rhetoric is mirrored on social media in the left’s call for people to be deplatformed. Censorship is the demand for teacher to restore order in the classroom and punish the disagreeable pupils. Unanimous agreement on all the big questions is a precondition for playing in the same nursery.
…
Going beyond politics, the infantilization of America is unmistakable by the success of Disney. As a film company, they’re on a hot streak almost unparalleled in Hollywood history. Within any given year they drop new releases in Star Wars, Marvel superheroes, children’s cartoons, and live-action remakes of children’s cartoons. These movies do well with children and with adults. It sucks the satire out of another Onion headline, “Rising Disney World Ticket Costs Prompting Many Parents To Leave Children At Home.”
This trend is also evidenced by the numerous toys geared for adults. Electronic toys and video games for men are extremely popular. Equally ridiculous is the number of adult women who have an affinity for Disney princesses.
Millennials (born 1980–1994) and Gen-Zers (1995–2009) don’t seem to realize that video games, toys, and the like were things you were only supposed to be into until you were old enough to drive, date, get married, and be an adult. But millennials don’t drive, they don’t date, they don’t marry, and they don’t really grow up. So it’s no surprise they are stuck in a preadult world [].
Don’t even get me started on supposedly-adult men of voting age who are infatuated with My Little Pony (a.k.a. “Bronies”). Great Napoleon’s bleeding ulcers, it actually turns my stomach to read about these fucking losers.
At the risk of sounding all White Christian Male and stuff [irony alert], allow me to remind everyone of this excellent precept from Corinthians:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Except that men aren’t doing any of that. Instead, they’re clinging to the artifacts of their childhood, hoping that Mommy will be there to keep the Big Bad Wolf/Zombies away.
What will inevitably happen is calamity. As Charles Norman puts it: “The world is running out of grown-ups. It will probably take tragedies and a prolonged era of diminished affluence for people to grow up.”
Like I said: calamity.
From Glenn Reynolds, commenting on this nonsense:
If I were a young single guy, I’d be inclined to bank a bunch of sperm, then get a vasectomy. For men, that’s pretty much the only way to achieve “reproductive rights.”
…or maybe it was “grass”, but either way, the result was the same: a perfectly good word was hijacked by bastards in order to make something socially unsavory become more acceptable. Hence “gay” for homosexual — deeply ironic considering that homosexuals in general are the gloomiest and most unhappy people on the planet.
Now, of course, we have a similar situation, only now it’s words hijacked by Big Tech:
According to a study by the University of Leeds, which looked at datasets of informal conversations, all mentions of the word ‘tweet’ in the Nineties referred to birdsong, while one in 100 do now.
We need not despair that, in future, our children will think of a remote data-storage system when they hear the word ‘cloud’. But we should offset it by teaching them the names of clouds.
We need not despair that, in future, our children will think of a remote data-storage system when they hear the word ‘cloud’. But we should offset it by teaching them the names of clouds.
Seven in ten uses of ‘web’ in the same period referred to spiders: this has become one in ten.
‘Field’, ‘fibre’, ‘cloud’, ‘branch’ and ‘net’ have all changed meanings, too, co-opted for commercial or technological ends.
This is the living mutability of language, the way it shifts to keep tight its embrace with the world. But there is an edge of loss to this change.
Now, the speaker is not contemplating a sky or the running twists of water, the slender might of a spider’s web, or pasture, trees or the music of birds. He or she refers to a ‘virtual’ world, conjured in pixels.
What the tech firms call ‘disruption’, when they destroy old trading networks, is one of the forces of our time. Populist politicians disrupt electoral tribes*; the Leeds study shows that technology [is] disrupting language itself.
I have a very dear lady friend with the ancient and lovely name of “Alexa”. She’s considering renaming herself as “Lexie” (a nickname), simply because Amazon’s electronic Stasi toy has become ubiquitous in ordinary conversation — and that’s not to mention all the jokes made when people get introduced to her. (As she puts it, you can only hear “Alexa? Turn on the coffeemaker” so many times before it starts getting really old.)
And it’s all quite unnecessary. Tech firms should actually create names for their products instead of lazily co-opting existing words or names.
We can talk about homosexuals and hippies some other time.
*Actually, no. All politicians create electoral tribes; “populist politicians” (e.g. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump) simply create new electoral tribes out of elements of those electoral tribes made by establishment politicians.
Every time I rethink my position on the death penalty — i.e. that maybe I should reconsider my support thereof — I somehow stumble across a story like this one:
A convicted killer who had already murdered one girlfriend was left free to kill a second following a catalogue of police and probation service blunders, a jury has ruled.
Paul O’Hara, 48, was on life licence after serving 15 years for killing a former partner when he met businesswoman Cherylee Shennan.
They began a relationship but within weeks manipulative O’Hara, who had been diagnosed with psychopathic traits in prison, began controlling and beating the 40-year-old mother of one.
Over the following months police missed several chances to stop the ‘high-risk violent predator’.
When unprepared and unarmed officers did finally go to Miss Shennan’s home, O’Hara attacked them before stabbing his girlfriend to death.
So basically, this murderous asswipe was out on parole when he killed Victim #2.
Everyone who favors the abolition of execution for murder is all “O noes, what about the innocent people wrongly convicted?” when in fact they should be all “O noes, what about the innocent people killed by assholes wrongly freed?”
It’s bullshit. Anyone convicted of murder should be locked away forever while the appeals process grinds on, then executed. There should be NO parole (or “life licence” — what a crock of shit) for convicted murderers, ever.
Unless, maybe, we go all Hammurabi and if a parole board releases a murderer who then goes on to murder someone else, then the members of the parole board responsible should also face life imprisonment (or execution — a.k.a. Full Hammurabi) for having allowed Murder #2.
And while I’m still in a charitable mood, why hasn’t convicted cop-killer Wesley Cook (alias Mumia Abu-Jamar) been executed yet?
I am often accused of being an old-fashioned man. This, despite the fact that I’m using a keyboard to enter my thoughts into a digital medium via a thing called the Internet. And hey, I prefer brass cartridges over muzzle-loading, so I’m not that old-fashioned (unlike some of my Readers, who believe that this brass thing is just a passing fad).
If you want to know what gets me going, however, consider the following pics, and guess why I tend to prefer tradition over modernity. We’ll open with the modern ones:
Interior design:
Cars: 
Handguns:
Women:
Men’s appearance:
Foods:
And you all know about my preferences in architecture: 
So yeah, I guess I am old-fashioned. Feel free to envy me.