Suddenly, the bar for being offended has gone way down. We’ve all seen the feigned outrage as something that pervades our entire society and if it works as a trump card to shut down discussion, people are going to be attracted to using it. And what people fail to recognise is that feigned outrage is something that was first weaponised and perfected on college campuses.

Greg Lukianoff, FIRE. 

Oh, for a world without consequences.

“Dr Julius Neubronner’s miniature pigeon camera.” 1908. // Putty eats magnets. (h/t, MeFi) // BMX and fireworks. // “Bacon that cooks in your toaster.” 1964. // A chart of Bond kills, in the style of Dr No. // Tai
Chi. // Unfortunate toys. It’s always the crotch. // The frozen faithful. // High-speed photography of exploding things. // Chocolate dice. // Wooden cake. // Giant cardboard ghetto blaster. // Hair barrels. // Couples. // This lady likes to shoot. // Someone is waging total war on the World of Warcraft. // Irregular floorboards. // Bicymple. // Brain candles. // Paintings by Lindsey Kustusch. // Are you ready for some staggering beauty? 

Zombie roams the mental rubble of Occupy LA, where a kind of Slacker Marxism threatens to shake the world. Or it would do, I’m sure, if anyone could be arsed:

Yesterday the motley remnants of Occupy Los Angeles finally got around to celebrating Occupy Wall Street’s one-year anniversary (more than two weeks after all the other OWS groups did so.) In fact, this lackadaisical attitude about their own rally perfectly reflected the newly emergent operational philosophy of Occupy LA, which one might deem Anarcho-Laziness: the right to avoid employment… A major theme of the day seemed to be an active antipathy to the notion of work. “Capitalism,” you see, “has robbed us all of our free time.” If it wasn’t for that mean ol’ capitalism we could just slack off all day. But not everybody is clear on the concept. Quoting Karl Marx directly conflicts with the principles of Anarcho-Laziness: the whole point of communism is to ensure that everybody has a job. Just try telling Che that you just don’t feel like working in a socialist utopia. 

Ace ponders bra-straps and fretful feminism:

There’s a woman I admire for her smarts. I won’t say who. I find her to be a lively and interesting thinker, and funny. But I frequently hear this woman ask, “What do my very minor, trivial fashion choices say about me As A Woman (capitalisation implicit)?” and, “Are my occasional attempts to appear attractive a capitulation to the Male Gaze?” and other such absurdities. In this particular woman’s case, she asks these questions archly, with a bit of ironic distance, so that she is parodying herself at the same time she asks these questions. Nevertheless, these questions occur with such frequency I am reasonably confident that, while she is sort of goofing on herself for thinking about such things, she does think about such things, and not just occasionally, but rather a lot. 

It does strike me that a bright, insightful woman is inflicting something akin to intellectual lobotomisation on herself, filling her head with constant trivialities… A not-inconsequential portion of her mind is constantly being used to chew over absurdities of a quasi-religious nature. Is the fact that I have chosen to leave my bra-strap visible beneath my t-shirt a betrayal of the feminist ideal? What does my exposed bra-strap say about me as a person? What messages am I sending to the world? What philosophical implications flow from this casually exposed bra-strap? …When I see a woman I rather like and respect filling her head with such nonsense – thinking about Gender Issues, as it were, once every seven seconds – I feel bad that she’s been conned, and that her brain is simply not firing on all cylinders, clogged, as it is, with bubble-gum and silly-string.

And there’s this, mentioned in passing by Dan at Monday Books: 

I did read law, haltingly, at university. I can’t remember much of it, apart from… how obvious it was that none of the Criminology module lecturers had ever been burgled or mugged.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

In 1989 Theodore Dalrymple paid a visit to North Korea’s Pyongyang Department Store Number 1: 

It didn’t take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways – yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the ‘customers’. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking. 

Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty ‘customers’, who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.) 

They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that – despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation – they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf. 

And then things started to get strange.  

From The Wilder Shores of Marx, 1991.