You may have noticed a disturbance in the force this week as the orbits of high fashion, academia and Hollywood collided to form a woke astral plane of epic proportions.  If only it were science fiction.  

The soy boi’s new clothes 

The original emperor may have been stark naked but his latest high-fashion iteration spares us the sight of a cadaverous birthday suit in favour of girly glam. The world of woke men’s fashion, Gucci style, makes you yearn for the portly old poseur of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale. 

Gucci’s men’s fall/winter line features a parade of gimlet-eyed, pouty, androgynous models wearing fluffy jumpers with cute motifs and Liberty floral–printed shirts and shorts. My personal favourite is the orange tartan cotton smock with delicate stitching, a satin bow and a Peter Pan collar. It’s a steal at only $2600 US (about $AU3600) and it comes with a side order of Gucci’s ‘inclusivity, diversity and equality’ at no extra cost. Bargain. 

The con artists — my apologies — copywriters in the marketing department clearly had some fun with their description of the aesthetic abomination: 

Inspired by grunge looks from the ‘90s and styled over ripped denim pants, this tartan smock in delicate colors reflects the idea of fluidity explored for the Fall Winter 2020 fashion show, disrupting the toxic stereotypes that mold masculine gender identity.

I’ll say it does.  

And Gucci doesn’t just lecture about toxic masculinity, you’ll be pleased to know. In amongst the brand’s virtue-signalling online pages you’ll find them crowing that 95% of their manufacturers are based in Italy. They just neglect the bit about a history of outsourcing to Tuscan sweatshops using illegal immigrant Chinese workers. But their tags can state ‘Made in Italy’, which is the main thing. 

Gucci knows which side its hideously expensive (and just plain hideous) sourdough is buttered on. Pity the privileged, wealthy ‘mostly peaceful’ rioters didn’t get the memo and looted their SoHo store earlier this year anyway.     

It’s Quack-ademic  

If some of our previous articles haven’t convinced you that academia has finally gone ‘full retard’, then the latest contributions from Dr Ben Bramble, lecturer in philosophy at ANU, should just win you over.  

In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy Bramble makes the case for painlessly killing predators because —trigger warning, if you continue reading smelling salts may be needed — predators kill other animals!  

Bramble, who sees eating meat as a serious moral failure, opens with:  

Consider, for example, the harms of predation, i.e., of being hunted, killed, and eaten by other animals. These harms include anxiety from being hunted, as well as pains of being attacked and eaten. They include also the loss of pleasures that these animals would have felt had they not been hunted or killed prematurely. These harms are substantial. Should we intervene in nature to prevent them? 

Well, his answer is obviously yes or we’d be spared the poignant polemic.  

So he provides two alternatives: ‘herbivorising’ predators i.e. genetically modifying them to ‘gradually evolve into herbivores’, or painlessly killing them (PKP), while incidentally rejecting sterilising them because it “would cause many of them to feel unbearable pains—pains, for example, of being unable to reproduce and then of watching their species slowly die out”. Of course.  

He comes down firmly on the side of PKP for reasons I won’t go into here (but you can have a laugh or head-banging episode over here).  

Perhaps a bad experience in his biology frog dissecting class made him eschew biological science in favour of ‘ethics’ where you can postulate to your heart’s content. His whole argument takes no account of what might be the impacts of wantonly removing secondary consumers, tertiary consumers and apex predators from the complex food webs on which the world depends.   

But there’d be lots more cute little bunnies hopping around, though, which could only be a good thing, right? 

Wikipedia tells us that “[F]ollowing the advice of ethicists is one means of acquiring knowledge” but Brambles’ pathos-ridden conclusion will probably lead you to a different verdict:    

[C]onsider how predators themselves might feel about their lives were they somehow to come to understand the true nature of the harms they inflict on prey. Many of these predators, I suspect, would feel deeply sad, or even horrified, at what they are involved in—indeed, at what they are. I could even imagine them forgiving or excusing us for painlessly killing them. If my existence depended on my stalking, tearing apart, and eating the flesh of many other beings, beings whose lives involved or produced no less value than my own, I, at least, would not want to keep on living.

And I think perhaps we should leave it right there, except to direct you to Brambles’ other recent contribution to the world of philosophy, a cute little opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald: A philosopher’s view: Why you don’t need to feel sad about Donald Trump catching COVID. 

Read it and weep. 

Cleopatra-cide

Critics weren’t as happy as they might have been with the announcement that Israeli actress Gal Gadot will play the part of Cleopatra in a just-announced feature film to be written by Laeto Kalagridis and directed by Patty Jenkins. A Hollywood girl power triple threat. What’s not to love?  

Freelance journalist Sameera Khan raised her overdrawn eyebrows and let loose with: 

Which Hollywood dumbass thought it would be a good idea to cast an Israeli actress as Cleopatra (a very bland looking one) instead of a stunning Arab actress like Nadine Njeim? And shame on you, Gal Gadot. Your country steals Arab land & you’re stealing their movie roles… smh. 

Ouch! 

Epidemiologist Dr Abdul El-Sayed strayed right out of his lane with: 

So…there were no Egyptian women to play, um, an *Egyptian* queen?

While author Steven Salaita went full anti-Semite: 

Whatever you think of her being cast as Cleopatra, never forget that Gal Gadot proudly served (and continues to support) a colonial army notorious for maiming and murdering civilians.

What seemed to be lost on the woke commentariat was the fact that poor old Cleo was, in fact, an in-bred Macedonian Greek. Actresses fitting that particular bill are probably a little thin on the ground. 

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