K.C. Johnson on dogmatic faculty, the Duke rape hoax, and why due process matters: 

It was, I think, unprecedented, the sort of behaviour we saw from the Duke faculty. Faculty members essentially chose to exploit their students’ distress to advance a campus pedagogical agenda, to push their own ideological vision and to abandon any pretence of supporting fairness, due process and the dispassionate evaluation of evidence… A complete abandonment of any pretence of objectivity, of any interest in the truth.

Ann Althouse parses Hillary Clinton and is taken aback by what she finds:   

Read it again and see how shocking it is. Not only did Hillary completely turn her back on “balancing competing values” and “more thoughtful conversation,” she doesn’t want to allow people on one side of the conversation even to believe what they believe. Those who care about gun rights and reject new gun regulations should be stopped from holding their viewpoint. Now, it isn’t possible to forcibly prevent people from holding a viewpoint… but the question is Hillary Clinton’s fitness for the highest office, and her statement reveals a grandiose and profoundly repressive mindset.

Somewhat related, Jayson Veley on the joys of modern schooling:   

Andrew Lampart, a student at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, Connecticut, was assigned an in-class debate on gun control during his “Law & You” course. While preparing for the debate during study hall, Lampart logged onto the school-provided internet and found that students were forbidden from visiting The National Association for Gun Rights… “I used my study hall to research gun control facts and statistics. That is when I noticed that most of the pro-second amendment websites were blocked, while the sites that were in favour of gun control generally were not… I found it nearly impossible to get solid information to debate my side of the argument.”

Meanwhile, a book critical of modern feminism, but written by a feminist, catches fire mysteriously. And Perry de Havilland discovers another classic Guardian sentence. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

By Parker Paul. 

In which we share the unending woes of three Guardian columnists. First, Nell Frizzell conjures a grand tale of sorrow and social injustice from her own unremarkable sleeping patterns and tells us that “going to bed early is our last great social taboo.” You heard her. Going to bed “before midnight” is a great social taboo. The last one. Such waywardness is, we learn, “a one-way ticket to condescension… and pariahdom.” “You will be ridiculed,” says Ms Frizzell. “If not shunned.” She is, nevertheless, being very, very brave. “It won’t stop me.”

Meanwhile, Bella Mackie, a Guardian comment moderator and daughter of the paper’s editor Alan Rusbridger, recounts her own fearless, indeed Herculean struggle with an addiction to… Diet Coke: “Giving up my favourite drink was as difficult as I had feared. I set about it with a determination to go cold turkey, knowing that even one can would make me slip back into old habits.” There followed a dark downward spiral. “For the first month, I felt exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open at my desk. Then came the nerves, the feeling that something was missing.” Yes, dear reader. Feel her pain and weep.

And finally, the chronically unhappy professional lesbian Julie Bindel bemoans the evils of marriage, including same-sex marriage, and is sternly disapproving of the fact that “there seems to be an almost total acceptance of [marriage] by lesbians today.” Specifically, what troubles her is that so many gay people, an overwhelming majority, “have a desire for ‘ordinariness’ and do not want to be seen as living ‘alternative’ lifestyles.” Given Ms Bindel’s niche career as a quarrelsome misfit and radical ‘activist’, this desire for bourgeois normativity simply will not do. And so she invokes the wisdom of feminist lecturer Nicola Barker, who tells us, flatly, that, “Same-sex marriage fits comfortably within the conservative ideology of the self-sufficient family and contributes to the politics of state austerity.”

Of course Ms Bindel goes further, as she must, and in doing so coughs up a contender for our series of classic Guardian sentences: “Isn’t marriage merely a clever ploy to keep us quiet about the trickier issues such as the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers?”

A question foremost on everyone’s lips. 

Franklin Einspruch on the new censors: 

For a long while I’ve been trying to interest my friends in the art world to get behind freedom of speech in a bigger way, to recognise that the very health of the marketplace of ideas depends on its openness to entry and its freedom of transaction… This usually doesn’t persuade anyone who isn’t already liberty-minded to begin with. So next I resort to self-interest. We creative types rely on that openness to function. If we don’t stand in defence of hate speech — not the content, just the right to express it — any mechanisms for cutting it off will eventually be used against us. If injured feelings take on the seriousness of injured bodies, we will become a society that pulls art off of walls, cancels performances, and strikes essays from public view. Sadly, this usually doesn’t work either, because the targets of accusations of hate speech typically lean right, and the art community leans left. 

Franklin also links to this Pew survey of social media use, which suggests that self-described progressives are statistically much more likely to ban or block people with whom they disagree. A finding that may not be entirely shocking to regular readers. 

And somewhat related, Greg Collins on the unremarked privileges of the self-appointed privilege police: 

The paramount privilege at universities is not race, class, or gender, but intellectual soft despotism… A student whose worldview clings to that of university administrators and professors has the advantage of accessing university resources, money, and time to drive his cause. These instruments are far more powerful in granting benefits to politically preferred groups in higher education than subconscious biases in favour of particular races or classes. It is a privilege when your views conform with those of more than 90 percent of your professors. It is a privilege when your worldviews are blessed by a proliferation of like-minded commencement speakers and guest lecturers. And it is a privilege when you have university resources, money, and time within fingertips’ reach to wield to advance your political cause. 

As an illustration of this leverage, Collins mentions one of many sabotaged speaking events – a talk by the conservative writer Don Feder at the University of Massachusetts in March 2009, the subject of which was, or would have been, free speech. Within 20 seconds of opening his mouth, Feder had been interrupted, shouted down and called a racist, before being screamed at repeatedly and assailed with epithets about his daughter. Despite his pleas for civility, Feder was unable to speak for more than three minutes without further, often deafening interruption by members of the International Socialist Organisation and Radical Student Union. Footage of the disruption can be seen here. Despite the students’ prolonged attempts to intimidate Feder and prevent the intended discussion taking place – a goal they accomplished – campus officials later claimed that Feder “chose to discontinue his speech.” An interesting, and revealing, choice of words.

I’m off to a barbecue this afternoon, but I thought I’d leave you with something to chew on: 

“Culinary insiders have long known that it is only in the cheapest dumplings that one finds non-inverted rectums.” Via Kate.