That lo·o·ovable! scamp Karl Groves writes another screed, one-fifth the vitriol of which would do well more than get me permanently ostracized from one of the many fields or domains I co-founded. Of course, that’s already happened – in all of them, everywhere, and on purpose.

Karl continues to get away with murder. At some point, I have to conclude all of this boils down to personal acceptability (now indistinguishable from “intersectionality”). Strapping Karl Groves, with his nice non-White girlfriend, happily fits through the Overton window of acceptability among “accessibilitistas” who shout loudest about inclusion, sometimes with the aid of a sign-language interpreter.

Why, just in the last year I had to threaten a pipsqueak and his new employer with a defamation suit after he and his little friends essentially accused me of an intent to post a dick pic on a conference projector or call somebody a nigger at that same conference. That pipsqueak – not just a figurative term – is Oskar Westin, late of the TTC and now with Telus. He’ll have a long and distinguished career working among seasoned industry professionals who all agree that everything I’ve been subjected to is the least I deserve and barely the beginning of what they’ve all got in store for me.

Ostracism is indistinguishable from an actual knife in the back. Cretins like those I tackle here can’t even man up and talk to me face-to-face.

I would remind fairer-minded readers that ostracism tends to lead to suicide, as in the case of Textism, whose legacy shall not go unavenged; indeed, there will soon be an announcement.

It’s “Deconstructing ‘You’ve Got Blog’ ” all over again as Kottke and his swells take three full opportunities (as via “blogging”; via newsletter; via “blogging” again) to pretend I haven’t been publishing continuously since 1998 or earlier. Just this WordPress installation is 14 years old. And I’m still the only one with valid HTML and excellent type and copy.

I was granted a lifetime total of two acknowledgements from this doyen of webloggisme.

1. “Jason Kottke, you can guard my MacBook,” I say chirpily as I set exactly that down on the floor next to him one time at South by Southwest. He looks up, badge-cruises me. “Oh, hi, Joe,” Kottke says warily.

2. I got two million hits offa how to load the dishwasher. Then that was over.

Kottke is the kind of untouchable who will run an encomium to a pilotess (even though the airplane does not know you’re a girl), then refuse to update it with analysis from an actual pilot, which link I had sent in, that explains the emergency landing in question was barely distinguishable from a simulator run.

Just as print newspapers have a sunk cost in pretending the entire Internet, and especially YouTube and podcasts, simply do not exist, the Kottke caste has a sunk cost in pretending I wasn’t as much of a pioneer as they were, and that I simply do not exist.

Who will last longer? If they do, they can well and truly bury me, and they’ve staked the farm on someday doing that, have they not?

I can coördinate my clothes, but if you hand me a box of pencil crayons (Canadian English) and ask me to put five sets of three together that all coördinate or match among themselves, well, that’s gonna be a long and taxing afternoon for me. (Now get me to make all five sets coördinate across each other.)

Yet, just as I can ID a typeface by a serif sometimes, the paint colour of a car passing by is enough to get me to turn and look even if I only glimpse it out of the corner of my eye. As an example, there is but one shade of indigo that works, and it’s found on the Golf R (and, in violation of natural law, on the “e‑”Golf).

I have a colour sense, but I can’t produce. And I say again: The New Yorker’s documentation that Jony Ive has one designer working on nothing but colour makes me wonder how the hell she keeps up. It’s a big job.

Edgar Murillo (homepage; Tumblère) is a deaf gay artiste from Spain. (Yes, he’s the one.) He seems to draw in pencil crayon. As such Edgar is freed from the handicap of the computerized colour palette, which hinders more than it helps. While Edgar uses the right tools, so could you or I; neither of us could manifest his colour sense, because when you’re functioning at this level it’s so deeply embedded that “innate” is a term that doesn’t do it justice.

The shadowy Colo[u]r Marketing Group and any number of graphic designers will do a lousy job of explaining colour (inept description is what we expect from designers), tritely minimizing colour’s effects as “emotional.” In truth the effects are primal. Edgar Murillo is working at the primal level.

I hope you like male nudes. Edgar sure does. [continue with: Colour sense: You’ve got it or you don’t →]

(UPDATED AGAIN) Diversity propaganda holds that male/female couples in television commercials should be non-White or mixed-racialist. (If a “spot” shows several or many couples, you can mix and match. A current Canadian Homo Depot commercial, for example, features unmistakable Mohammedans, among many others, and finishes with a barely implied pair of homosexualist males. They couldn’t do more than barely imply it without angering the Mohammedans.)

Last month’s Ford Excape commercial (inexplicably still running – these “offers” tend to be time-limited) does the obvious thing and makes the male White and the female Orientalist. But this time he’s a brown-eyed ginger – sadly losing his hair and with too much gel. (She’s seemingly Thai.)

Gingers have a hard enough time reproducing as it is. Orientalist girls have no trouble snagging White boyfriend units and do not need ad campaigns to help them out.

Updates

• (2018.07.14) Snag one commercial spot and you start snagging more spots. Here, in an Ikea advertisement I urge you to watch on mute even without captioning, our brown-eyed ginger actually snags a White wife. (Is she ever!)

  

• (2018.07.18) Our brown-eyed curly-haired ginger has achieved the unlikely outcome of starring in two commercials on the air simultaneously – this one for reverse mortgages.

  

  Kind of dining lower on the White-wife food chain in this one, admittedly. Even if she’s also a ginger, increasing the heritability odds.

HAL 9000 had a Canadian voice, about which

University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal’ – that’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”

This isn’t just the accepted wisdom, it’s actual fact, as I wrote in Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours:

As it stands, the Canadian accent isn’t dainty or broad or anything else. It’s pleasingly neutral, at least to Americans, which explains why so many Canadian broadcast journalists and actors have sought, and secured, gainful employment in the U.S. (That’s why we sound like U.S. newscasters – lots of them are Canadian.) We sound like Americans whose hometowns a listener cannot quite place. Actually, we sound like Americans whose hometowns are so noncontroversial they aren’t even worth thinking about.

I have never actually met or talked to Jack Chambers, which self-evidently makes no sense. Meanwhile, the writer of the Times piece quoted above, Gerry Flahive, turned down a documentary project of mine during his tenure at the NFB, which, in his last E‑mail, he insisted was not a funding body.

Ian Capstick is an adorable scamp with a hot husband almost a foot taller than he and a cute miniature dachshund several feet shorter. [Two of those get annoyed (more like furious) whenever I describe one of those as I just have.]

This former NDP stalwart had some kind of communications consultancy that seemed to me to be quite unique. Capstick was a regular on the institutionalized natural governing political panel show, Power & Politics, that airs on one of the national governing broadcaster’s networks. I distinctly recall reading real-time captioning of his insisting Canada should have no form of space program whatsoever until “Indigenous” communities all have fresh water.

In other words, Canada should not act like it operates even in the 20th century until it gets its Indians out of its, or their, Iron Age. That (zero‑)sums up left-wing politics in a nutshell, and nuts is what it is. (We can have a space program and clean water. Then we can put a fully hydrated aboriginal into space, if he or she is otherwise qualified. Why the hell not?)

• Capstick wrote a Facebook posting (where he’s still straplined as a “News Personality”; text archive) and, later, a piece for national governing newsweekly Maclean’s. Apart from constantly using the word “entitled,” which use he refused to clarify for me, he wrote:

  I reviewed clips from various years, and watched myself over the last year experience small lapses in attention on air; forgetting familiar political words and remote locations was especially distracting.

  For the first time, I recognized some of my signature knee-jerk confrontational behaviour on‑ and off-air was because of what therapists call rejection-sensitive dysphoria (RSD), or an acute sensitivity to criticism that is found in many adults with attention-deficit disorder. I had let my routines slip, my self-care slide[,] and the constant barrage of negativity overwhelm me.

  As I reflected on these moments with family and friends, I realized how similar my entitlement and anger was to the actions of many of the politicians and staff who had berated me – online and off – for whatever they saw fit.

  I noticed, ultimately, that I was failing to comment with empathy. I decided to leave the show on March 20.

  (Whatever the hell “comment with empathy” means on a panel show or in politics.)

• I told Capstick his situation was reminiscent of that of Fredrik de Boer, the ultra-left-wing young American writer with, it turned out, serious mental-health issues he could only address by divorcing himself from news-cycle-based writing (his term). de Boer looked unwell in videos announcing his de facto retirement. (Of interest is the fact he never used the word “hypergraphia,” from which he clearly suffers; he ought to read The Midnight Disease.)

• de Boer was extended all sorts of understanding and leeway for two reasons: He’s extreme-left-wing and very handsome, with stunning blue eyes. Capstick will be given proportionate (I don’t mean height-proportionate) understanding and leeway for comparable reasons.

  Conservatives and uggos who dare to admit to any form of illness are treated as prey by the Left, who, in my direct lived experience and after years of observation, are the bloodthirstiest, most inhumane, most malign and untrustworthy cohort in any liberal democracy not itself under the thumb of the actual fascism they wish to impose. Leftists really do want you dead – even while dressing that up with environmentalism, with feminism, with “LGBT+,” and, here and there, with veganism.

Let me twist the knife in the side of national governing media critic Jesse Brown, whose business has a run rate of over $366,000 a year, according to published figures and reasonable inferences, but who never bothered to respond to my repeated suggestion that he provide even moral support to Hack Mental Help Week, under whose ægis Ian Capstick could find himself. On this topic, Jesse Brown is national governing hypocrite.

Ukraine, the White country with “nobody to discriminate against.” (Reordered for cohesion, with about 80% of the article elided.)

I live in Kyiv (Kiev [actually Kyyv]), Ukraine. It has a homogeneous population[, but o]nly Gypsies are thought of as crime-prone. With the exception of Jews and Gypsies, most of the elements in this mix think of themselves as pretty much equal. Jews are vastly overrepresented in business and government.

Even the Gypsies aren’t that bad. Their crimes are not violent, and they don’t commit any at all in neighbo[u]rhoods like the one I live in – a quarter-mile from where they live in condemned, unheated houses along the right-of-way of a future metro. I have to respect the Ukrainians’ apprehension of Gypsies – they know them better than I do – but I have never seen anything untoward.

Homosexuals are tolerated the way they were in the U.S. when I was young. They don’t make an issue of it, and people don’t bother them.

With nobody to discriminate against [except Gypsies, Jews, and homosexuals], Ukraine does not have antidiscrimination laws.

Ukraine, like the so-called Viségrad or V4 countries, is satisfied to trade overt anti-semitism and homophobia for almost-completely-Muslim-free societies not subject to Third World invasion. As ever, they are the last to learn their options are not Manichean.