“A couple of years spent spectating on people’s CrossFit obsessions instead of doing something useful with my life has led me to believe that CrossFit has a lot to tell us about life in late western capitalism.”
Err, yes:Eleanor Robertson is a writer and feminist living in Sydney.
Is there some factory somewhere producing these people?
David Thompson is going to have a field day with this one….
You know, it is a cruel thing to say, but I keep hoping these people are going to breed themselves out of the human gene pool. After all, look at the comparison between Bill Clinton’s genetic contribution to the future – likely to be zero – and Mitt Romney’s.
But I think that is misplaced for two reasons. One is that there is bound to be someone who will take one for the team. And think it an honour. A Brony perhaps. And second, such people rely on recruiting rather than reproducing.
All I have left is the hope that becoming a parent will teach some common sense.
Memetic is so much faster than genetic.
“Is there some factory somewhere producing these people?”
It’s called the university system.
It’s pure link-bait. Post an article about some fitness fad, and nobody cares. Throw in a weak tie to the topic du jour (capitalism), and suddenly you’ve got a few hundred thousand clicks.
In the Guardian’s “most viewed” list, the article with the shiny headline rises to the top; not the article with the best content.
New name maybe, when I joined the Army in 1972 it was called PT.
De-fund and close all University arts and humanities courses at once. That’ll slow them way down.
Probably a refugee from The Global Mail.
http://www.brw.com.au/p/entrepreneurs/rich_lister_graeme_wood_to_shut_QonP0M88hUxLC5hK9I9QqK
I wouldn’t, would you?
I honestly try to read the Graun, explore life’s rich tapestry and all the rest, but I am in danger of becoming a UFO believer, if exposed too frequently. She’s a Vogon as is Polly as is Moonbat. Alien, utterly alien, they have to be.
What Bloke in Spain and Mr Ecks said.
Universities are churning out these Leftbots by the thousands. Often results in spectacular collisions with reality when they graduate and find out how much prospective employers value degrees in postcolonial feminist anthropology and the like. They can’t all get jobs in the public sector or writing for the Guardian.
Ironically, perhaps, late western capitalism is to blame for creating the surplus wealth that allows free riders like Ms Robertson not starve to death.
There seems to be a kind of belief in Keynes’s misrepresentation of Say’s Law going on. Say said that people produce in order to consumer. Keynes misrepresentated that as “supply creates demand” and then said (correctly) that that is not true.
The post-graduate generation seem to really believe that supply does create demand, and thus that if one arrives on the market as a post-modernist feminist writer, there should be demand for post-modernist feminist writing, and if there isn’t there is something wrong with the economy (which the government ought to fix).
It’s thus not remarkable that the supply of such people is so great.
By the way, has everyone watched this video of Laurie Penny getting pwned by David Starkey?
http://youtu.be/oj9dA6E3fJw
I’d blame this sort of thing on the intellectuals conceit, a university education is a benefit in its own right. The broadening of the mind yadda yadda yadda. It simply isn’t & never has been. It’s just a way of hanging around with other people go to university. It’s a very limited & limiting world where a great deal gets taken for granted that bears no relation with the wider world whatsoever. Like the opinions of writers & feminists have any more value than what someone will pay for them
That video clip was glorious – thanks Ian!
The really spooky thing about David Starkey is that (in my opinion) he both looks and sounds quite like our good friend R Murphy Esq.
Oh, and both of them are irascible, intolerant cvnts.
@BIS, Mr Ecks, Steve
I think you’re being a bit unfair. I went to university and did Arts & Humanities, namely English Lit. My third year thesis, if you want evidence of sheer wankery, was in ‘mapping postmodern dystopian narratives’. Then, having seen the writing on the wall and realising that my BA was going to be worth the square root of bugger all (even if I did get a free upgrade in the post) I did a MPhil in Sociology during which they made me read lots of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodore Adorno. I won’t tell you the title of that thesis, you might actually vomit.
If anything I emerged even more right wing than I went in. And I hated that lot at the start. Basically I got to spend four years trolling people like that, which was bloody good fun.
I was drinking a relaxing glass of red when I saw Ian’s link.
Made my evening. Ms. Red has no sense of shame.
I may not like her ‘friend’ on the panel but dearie me, he left her speechless floundering around like an octopus locked in a dark garage.
Oh what fun!
@ SimonF
Quite.
Add Robbie Brightwell who admitted (I think it was after he got a bronze and his, then future, wife got a gold at the Olympics) that he threw two or three times a week in training.
Me, I never ate shortly before training so I never threw up – but then I was never good enough to compete at international (let alone Olympic) level – even my wife does a double-take when I mention that I trained with X who competed in the Olympics/Empire Games or Y who won an European Championship.
The girl just does not understand the elementary principle that eating shortly before violent exercise is stupid.
The nice thing is watching Penny shift from denial, to an explanation seeking sympathy (“i do not earn much money”) to thinking furiously for ten minutes and trying that last cock and bull story (“I was avoiding abuse by David Starkey”).
It’s pure comedy gold.
@Steve: ‘Ironically, perhaps, late western capitalism is to blame for creating the surplus wealth that allows free riders like Ms Robertson not starve to death.’
Well established, Steve, and best articulated in a slightly different context by Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, USMC.
Trouble is, we’re all left partly hoping for the collapse of western civilisation in order that fuckwits like this are confronted with the reality of their airheaded dreams.
@sam
“I think you’re being a bit unfair.”
Life is unfair. Get over it.
I don’t like Starkey, though obviously he’s better than that stupid bint. Just the sound of her voice makes me want to jab hot forks in my ears.
At least he stood up to her – lots of people sit there and take it. His next move ought to be (or have been) to have sued her for calling him a racist.
You have to, you absolutely have to, fight these people at their own game. It is a very serious business, this.
Use the courts, use abuse, use lies, use evasions, raise your voice, shout them down etc etc. It’s no good sitting their being polite, or using mere facts in civil debate.
Andrew M
“It’s pure link-bait. Post an article about some fitness fad, and nobody cares. Throw in a weak tie to the topic du jour (capitalism), and suddenly you’ve got a few hundred thousand clicks.”
Exactly. There was a Guardian piece at the same time saying NFL was a socialist spot. Same thing, just rearrange it every week and you have a life time of content.
She’s hardly a Steyn, or even a Dellers, but I thought the piece was an amusing pisstake of something rather ridiculous. If Steyn had written a Crossfit pisstake, it would have been funnier and he would have taken another hobbyhorse opportunity to see a frivolous indulgence as an indicator of the end of “western civilisation”. Her throwaway “late western capitalism” line is similar and fair enough from her point of view, and you can’t blame her for its elevation to headline status:
https://twitter.com/marrowing/status/430231273638879232
“i really thought the guardian would be a safe place for wanker glasses”
“why do rich people act like their juice cleanse is going to stop global warming”
“i don’t believe in smacking but i do believe children should be correctively keelhauled”
https://twitter.com/marrowing/status/428072699345108992/photo/1
She’s 24 and a smart kid. You can believe in a lot of utter tosspottery at age 24 and still recover. I did.
“https://twitter.com/marrowing/status/428072699345108992/photo/1
She’s 24 and a smart kid. You can believe in a lot of utter tosspottery at age 24 and still recover. I did.”
She seems to give as good as she gets, a bit wasted in the Guardian!
It’s not a factory Tim. They grow them in potato bags.
@BIS
Life is unfair. Get over it.
touché. 🙂
What I clearly meant was: just cause you’ve got a degree, doesn’t mean you’re a left-wing twunt…
Kickyk,
I think you’ve got it wrong. Not with the potatoes, but with the mushrooms, which we all know, thrive in manure.
In my experience almost anyone from Sydney is a wanker, particularly if they is media or finance types.