George Monbiot is once again howling at the Moon. He reaches almost immediately for that Guardian staple, the presumptuous “we”:

We may have lost our attachments, our communities and our sense of meaning and purpose, but there will be more money and more stuff with which to replace them. Now that the promise has evaporated, the size of the void becomes intelligible.

Mr Monbiot – for whom the glass is always half-empty, and poisoned, and possibly on fire – uses the word “we” no fewer than eleven times. Like so many of his Guardian colleagues, our anhedonic columnist is infinitely modest and therefore keen to tell us how “we” feel, thereby adding gravity to his own joyless, rather marginal worldview. “We,” it turns out, have “lost our attachments… our sense of meaning and purpose,” and “we” are “lost in the 21st century, living in a state of social disaggregation.” Apparently, “our” world – in which, says he, “most forms of peaceful protest are now banned” – has been “pulled apart by consumerism and materialism.” It’s an “age of loneliness.”

Yes, dear readers. The odds are stacked against us and the situation is grim. Happily, however, “we” – that’s thee and me – now “find the glimmerings of an answer” in, among other things, “the sharing… of cars and appliances.” While yearning, as we are, for an “empathy revolution.” What, you didn’t know?

Previous visits to the Happy Land of Monbiot™ can be found here, here and here. 

It seems to be some kind of budding process.  

Kevin Williamson on lifestyle leftism and class disdain: 

Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc. The people who set the cultural tone in places such as Berkeley, Seattle, or Austin would no more be caught vaping than they would slurping down a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s — and they conclude without thinking that, therefore, neither should anybody else… There is no meaningful evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or safer, but the lifestyle progressives who run the Boulder schools insist on them, along with yoga. What’s banned? Chocolate milk.

And Charles C W Cooke on leftist in-fighting and the endless search for ideological purity: 

“I am out of ideas,” the socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer admitted yesterday afternoon, before inquiring rhetorically what he is supposed to conclude when he sees so “many good, impressionable young people run screaming from left-wing politics because they are excoriated the first second they step mildly out of line?” Among the things that DeBoer claims lately to “have seen, with my own two eyes,” are a white woman running from a classroom simply because she used the word “disabled”; a black man being ostracised for suggesting that there is “such a thing as innate gender differences”; and a Hispanic Iraq War veteran “being berated” for using the phrase “man up.” Worse for him and his interests, perhaps, DeBoer also claims to have under his belt “many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalised in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics.” What, he asks in exasperation, is he supposed to say to them?

I daresay that if I had been in any of the situations that DeBoer describes, I would have walked happily out of the class. Why? Well, because there is simply nothing to be gained from arguing with people who believe that it is reasonable to treat those who use the word “disabled” as we treat those who use the word “n***er”; because there is no virtue in arguing with people who refuse even to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong.

If you want to find bad faith theatrics and unshakeable idiocy presented as virtue, head for the Clown Quarter of the nearest university. It’s where you’re most likely to find the word “privilege” deployed as an ad hominem device. A way of saying, “Your opinion doesn’t count (or doesn’t count as much as mine) because you have a certain level of melanin, or a penis, or the wrong kind of upbringing, or an insufficient number of hang-ups and fashionable pretensions.” Think of it as a kind of Maoist snobbery, in which, as Jesse Walker notes, the unwary are denounced for the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery.

In my experience, the personalities to which such things appeal aren’t terribly interested in civility or justice, “social” or otherwise. What they seem to be interested in is opportunist scolding and one-upmanship, that all-important social positioning. And so what you see, and see quite often, isn’t concern for the supposedly vulnerable; it’s an assertion of status and a pay-off for all that wound-up dogmatism. It’s how professed egalitarians let us know they’re better than us. Because they really do have to let us know.

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A Western Screech-Owl. One of these. Photographed by Brad Wilson. Via PootBlog. 

Apocalyptic weather forecast brought to you by AccuWeather. // Candy carpet. // Catherine the Great’s erotic cabinet. // Sex device patents of note. // Some first-time experiences of virtual reality porn. // Pocket operator. // Unboiling eggs now possible. // Leather and paper. // Leather-bound, shock-absorbing designer crutches. // Alaskan native snow goggles, circa 1900. // Everyone remembers that sad Saturday. // Snow plough of note. // 1.4 explosions per minute. // Playing cards of yore. (h/t, drb) // Monks and sand. // Shooting New York from above. // 18 everyday objects photographed up close. // Big rings. // Board game of note. // “What if everything were cheap?” // When women draw vaginas. “Oh God, wow.” // And finally, scientifically, how to draw mushrooms on an oscilloscope.