I’m reading Joyce Maynard’s autobiography At Home in the World, and it’s really funny to me how back in the 1970s, being suspicious of childhood vaccinations, trying to grow your own food, conducting childbirth and childrearing outside of the official medical and educational apparatus, and being opposed to the state machine was a lefty thing to do.

Of course, the Left has overtaken the state and the official education and medicine, and as a result, it’s the Right that is now suspicious of it. But healthy eating, healthy child-rearing, and valuing freedom to figure out one’s own worldview has traveled to the Right, too.

Another story in the “how dare we notice” series:

A man who forced himself on a young woman as she walked home alone late at night has walked free after complaining he would lose his job if he went to jail.

Takeaway worker Javed Miah, 23, ambushed the terrified victim in the street before pulling her to the floor and molesting her.

The defendant faced jail after admitting sexual assault but was sent on a sex offender rehabilitation programme after pleading he was a ”the sole earner” in his family.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/man-who-attacked-woman-walking-20157910

There are people in the UK right now sitting in jail for posting on social media or selling anti-immigration stickers. Yet sexual assault goes unpunished. There’s a sustained, long-term campaign in the UK of not prosecuting sexual offended and instead jailing the people who speak about them.

The British legal system used to be the glory of the world, and look what it turned into. It’s now a political repression apparatus, uninterested in prosecuting even the worst kind of crime.

Today, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (@RCSLT) published a 5-month long investigation into the fact that its CEO was ‘following’ Tommy Robinson on X.

You read that correctly.

Not that he praised Tommy Robinson. Not that he amplified or re-posted Tommy Robinson. But that he was ‘following’ Tommy Robinson, from his own personal X account.

A sub-committee was established with a barrister appointed to investigate, in order to reflect the “gravity of the situation”.

Even more ludicrous, the investigation found that “on the balance of probabilities it was deemed that this was an accidental follow”.

The outcome? The CEO has been forced to issue a “personal apology for his actions”. In this apology, he has apologised for the “hurt, distress, fear and anger that this caused”.

https://x.com/JamesEsses/status/1876285240848580920?t=Y-xXHQlRTQjO75nDr2dW5A&s=19

And after all this, we are told something is wrong with us when we observe that something is deeply messed up in Great Britain.

I follow tons of people I completely disagree with. It helps to stay informed, stay open-minded, know what to expect. I purposefully seek out points of view that are very different from mine. And it’s precisely that openness, that kind of curiosity and inquisitiveness that merits long investigations and groveling apologies.

It should shock everybody’s sensibility that people are made to apologize for social media follows.

Dude, not even I am that autistic.

In these situations, I always wonder, OK, he’s unusual. I’m also unusual, so I get it. But why doesn’t anybody around him gently steer him towards an explanation of the things that puzzle him.

I was, for instance, not very young when I discovered that you aren’t supposed to wear the same clothes two days in a row. It freaks people out. I don’t necessarily get it but I’m glad the information was made known to me.

I was past the age of 30 when the information regarding the activity called “folding laundry” was imparted to me. Since then I learned to enjoy this quaint pastime, but why did nobody bother to bring it to my attention before?

Not a moment too soon, my friends. It’s time for Canada to take its own hard-right turn.

We are told that an evil, despicable action is to talk about these crimes and not the crimes themselves:

This is one of the least graphic descriptions. People can consult trial transcripts for details of absolute horrors that were done to these children.

Victims report that after the very short sentences received for these horrific crimes, rapists were back in these communities, raping the next generation of girls. This never ended and it won’t until we all speak about this and make the scandal impossible to ignore.

Female friendship can be poisonous. Joyce Maynard’s novel Under the Influence narrates how a woman throws away a possibility of a happy, quiet family life over a friendship that promises excitement, fun, and a reflected light of somebody else’s glamor.

Years after writing this novel Joyce Maynard became infected with TDS, and everything she has written since 2020 is embarrassing. This novel, however, is good, and its sensibility is profoundly conservative. Maynard writes in defense of normalcy, family, and contentment. Chasing excitement, especially when you are no longer very young, is a terrible idea. Helen, the main character, finds out when it’s too late that nobody’s life is free of burdens and that the era of youthful friendships should give way to the time when one makes a family.

It’s a very good novel, the characters are believable, the plot is never boring, and while the protagonist is very annoying in her immaturity and flightiness, she’s also endearing in her love for her small child. I read the book in one very enjoyable snow day, and I haven’t had this much fun since Moa Herngren’s novel The Divorce. As we all understand, I will now proceed to read Maynard obsessively because it’s not easy to find an author one can enjoy this much.

Proud to be American;

Fellow is not wrong. I still can’t get over the amount of effort it is taking to prod the Brits from across the ocean into noticing the rape gangs on their soil. They are pouting all over social media that somebody is trying to kick them out of their torpor.

Not my experience at all. A small child is so fascinated by the parents that one feels like a movie star. I’ve never had anybody who’d be so minutely, unflaggingly, intensely interested in me as my child. I’ve never had such a thankful audience for my every joke, anecdote, or story. It’s a very intense feeling to be so extremely important to another human being, to be so admired, so studied, so passionately defended from mostly imagined slights.

Your children think you hang the moon every evening because for them you actually do. And another thing is that they will need you even when you are eighty, so it becomes very, very important to stay alive as long as possible. So please don’t worry, it will become about you like never before when you have a child.

Even just knowing that the father existed, had a name, was present in the child’s life, wanted the child to exist and did not abandon the child of his own volition makes an enormous difference.

To be known to the father and to be accepted by him is crucial for a human psyche.