Doctor’s note of note. // Little Mercury, big Sun. // 200 years of U.S. immigration. // Antimatter yield calculator. // Notice of note. // At last, your very own garden igloo. // It’s a good-news-bad-news thing. // KFC edible nail polish. // For dining or ping pong, only $8,200. // Peak Waitrose. (h/t, Damian) // Honey on tap. // Hardcore icing. // For sufferers of phone battery neurosis. // Honest Trailers: Deadpool. // Juggle drumming. // The dead and deadening world of contemporary art. // Annoy your pets with the cat soundboard. // 90 episodes of Suspense (1942-1962). // 2,000 metres of fabric. // Middle-aged break-dancers. // Meanwhile, in China. // “Children make toys out of it.” // And finally, quite splendidly, the 2016 Mylapore Kapaleeswarar Temple Car Festival.

I’m an artist first. But I decided long ago that my art would be in the service of fighting oppression.

Oh dear. I think you can probably guess where this is going. The creative juggernaut in question is Hari Ziyad, “a black non-binary artist and writer whose work centres on creating through the arts alternative ways of living outside of systems of oppression.” And hence being published in Everyday Feminism, where readers and contributors are so varied and diverse, so daringly different.  

Since then, I’ve waded more deeply into social justice spaces, and I find myself surrounded more and more by people professing these same aspirations… It’s comforting not to have to constantly explain yourself and your work. It’s beautiful to learn from and be around folks who understand ideas like microaggressions, gaslighting, white fragility, and all the other odd terms that describe the myriad, important, and insidious ways oppression operates.

And being around other, eerily similar people with similar educations, all begging eerily similar questions, saves so much time and potential aggravation. Instead, the group can bask in its mutual gloriousness as it hovers high above the herd and any unsophisticated objections.

But wait, even paradise has its vipers:

Being in these spaces for a while now, I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly receiving feedback that my writing is inaccessible. I dismissed a lot of this critique on the basis that I am, at my core, a big idea and theory girl. My way of communicating isn’t supposed to be meant for everyone.

Well, obviously. After all, “social justice spaces” are for beings who are lofty and deluxe, and who, like our Everyday Feminist author, a theory girl with a beard, find “academic jargon comforting.” Which is to say, people who are enlightened, piously fretful, ostentatiously egalitarian, and therefore superior. The kinds of people who, unironically, write things like this:

I’d been frustrated by the workings of neoliberalism for the longest,

And,

When I wrote one of my first pieces on my gender journey, I naturally used a quote from Judith Butler about gender realities. Regarded as one of the foremost queer theorists, it made sense to use her words to explore my queer complexities.

Rise up, ye proletariat! Judith Butler will set you free!

Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim on the fundamental defects of “diversity” ideology: 

As practised in most of the top American universities, affirmative action involves using different admissions standards for applicants of different races, which automatically creates differences in academic readiness and achievement… These differences are large, and they matter… As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers. People notice useful social cues, and one of the strongest causes of stereotypes is exposure to real group differences. If a school commits to doubling the number of black students, it will have to reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other schools are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of colour find when they arrive on campus.

Do read the whole thing. See also this by Heather Mac Donald.

Gad Saad chats with Janice Fiamengo about the dishonesties and conspiracy theories of campus feminists: 

[Among campus feminists,] men are expected to constantly apologise for their maleness… I’ve seen that at the talks I’ve given, where men will stand up and before they even speak they have to “check their privilege” and talk about how they’re white and they’re male, and how that means that therefore they can’t really understand the experience of victimisation, and they have to apologise for that, and erase themselves in some way, and acknowledge how terrible they are, and then they might be allowed to speak… as long as it’s in favour of feminism.

See, for instance, these pious confessions of default male wrongness. 

And Theodore Dalrymple ponders the strange, changing fortunes of the Pacific island of Nauru: 

The diet that the Nauruans favoured was not refined from the gastronomic point of view. They ate huge mounds of rice and drank vast quantities of Fanta. For those who preferred something stronger, there was Château d’Yquem in the island’s one supermarket. At the time, Nauru must have had the highest per-capita consumption of Château d’Yquem in the world.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Based on his rating, Iron Man beats Captain America in a one-on-one fight 60 percent of the time. The Hulk, an unstoppable force of nature, beats Falcon, a nice man who can fly, 98 percent of the time. Ever wonder what would happen if Spider-Man fought Ant-Man? Me neither, but Spidey wins the bug fight 68 percent of the time. Thor stomps everyone, which makes sense because he is Thor — a god — and everyone else is not.

Walt Hickey has been attempting to calculate who would really win in a big Avengers brawl. He has charts and everything. 

Via MeFi, where rumblings are already under way. 

Nap buddies. // Parenting. // Edible pizza box. // He lives inside a Boeing 727. // A bear’s-eye-view of Yellowstone. // Bee versus nail. // An aid to concentration. // Hair dryer of note. // A short history of human height. // At last, a screen-licking robot. // Bodies of the solar system. // ISS Earth viewing livestream. Everybody wave. // Saturn and Enceladus. // Space invaders. // Psychic sasquatch. You know it makes sense. // Under construction. // Chronas. // Slither. // How to light a match. // Upgrade now. // Its gonads glow. // Nightmare fuel. // The only way to appreciate Wagner. // World’s longest functional golf club. // You want one and you know it. // Photography of note. // And finally, spiritually, “They have no internet. They don’t know what a sex toy is.”

Theodore Dalrymple on self-restraint: 

Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves. There is no doubt which is the easier to undertake, and the more pleasurable and gratifying. There is a considerable element of sadism in political correctness.

Charles Moore on leftist anti-Semitism: 

Both of them [Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah] must feel bewildered by the condemnation heaped upon them, because they inhabit a party whose leader has, over his 40 years in politics, spent hundreds and hundreds of hours sharing platforms with virtually every sort of Muslim anti-Semite and advocate of terrorism that one can imagine. They may have thought they had permission.

Robby Soave on when students can’t escape “social justice training”: 

A student has no method of dissenting during an online training session on the necessity of complying with the university’s diversity dictates. Indeed, students might reasonably fear that agreeing with the ideology of the trainers is a precondition of coming to campus. 

And KC Johnson on massively inflated campus rape statistics: 

A recent Stanford survey… revealed that 1.9 percent of Stanford students said they had been sexually assaulted. This figure, which would translate to around 160 sexual assaults, given the university’s enrolment, would make the Stanford campus the violent crime capital of Palo Alto, which in the last five years has averaged around six rapes or attempted rapes annually. Nonetheless, it generated fury from Stanford campus activists, led by the anti-due process law professor, Michele Dauber — who seemed outraged that it didn’t return the preferred 1-in-5 figure.

If a survey suggests that the rate of serious sexual assault on the typical American campus is higher than the rate of rape, murder, armed robbery and assault combined in Detroit, the U.S. city with the highest murder rate, and higher than in war-torn areas of the Congo where rape is used as a weapon, and at a time when the rate of rape in general is in marked decline, then there’s probably something wrong with the methodology. And if someone’s definitions of rape and serious sexual assault include inept and unwanted flirtation, intoxicated consensual coupling and post-coital embarrassment, and refers to people who are pretty sure they hadn’t in fact been raped, then there may be something wrong with the person using that definition.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Patrons are reminded that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant for a while longer, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love for this low establishment. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. Now you can indulge your base appetites and feel saintly while doing it.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last nine years, and in over 2,000 posts, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start. There you’ll find our leftist betters agonising at length and performing great feats of mental contortion. From a gloriously neurotic guide to inter-racial dating, and the extensive preconditions for ordering takeaway in a politically correct manner, to a deep rumination on litter inequality, and a Marxist academic’s belief that competent, caring parenting and reading to one’s children causes “unfair disadvantage” and should therefore induce feelings of guilt, being as it is an act of class oppression. 

Meanwhile, aesthetes among you can savour a wide, possibly baffling range of artistic projects, including some thrilling interactions with automated hand dryers, Shakespeare enhanced with underpants and shrieking, and the immense political radicalism of amplified trousers. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Checkout nightmare. // Scientific discovery of note. (h/t, Captain Nemo) // New York at an angle. // How ink is made. // An interactive map of global shipping. // Stylish prosthesis. // “Doctors amputated her leg, removed the knee, then re-attached the rest of the leg backwards.” // Living dolls. // Defend the galaxy in a retro-super-80s style. // GradeInflation.com // Expired goods. // Everything you need to know about porn parodies. // Euphemism of note. // Insect portraits. // Painted toenail stockings. // Legs & Co vs Laurie Anderson, 1981. I believe the term is “conceptual nightmare.” // The vault of VHS packaging. // Stasi aesthetics. (h/t, Coudal) // Trend of note. // Water 2.0 // Washing the dog. // Walking the walk. // All the fries. // And finally, fire in a jug goes whoosh.

Attention, citizens. A hate crime has been detected at Salisbury University:

The image, found April 10 on a whiteboard in Blackwell Library, showed a stick figure being hanged and labelled with a racial slur. Underneath was the hashtag “#whitepower.”

That’s this image here. 

After much wailing and fretting, and declarations of being “passionate about diversity and inclusion,” and after the involvement of police and the Wicomico County State’s Attorney’s Office, the white supremacist culprits have now been apprehended:

The university confirmed Tuesday, April 26, that the students involved in the incident were black.

Why, it’s almost as if fabricating racial animus were fashionable on campus. And of course beyond. 

In the pages of the Guardian, masculinity is once again being piously disdained. This time by Mr Grayson Perry, a part-time transvestite and maker of unattractive pottery: 

The Turner prize-winning artist has turned his sights on the survivalist [Bear Grylls] and his exceptionally rugged version of masculinity, arguing that it isn’t fit for the 21st century. “He celebrates a masculinity that is useless,” Perry said… Perry said that the masculine ideal presented by shows such as The Island, in which Grylls is currently putting a third group of hapless contestants through survivalist hell, is making it harder for men to successfully negotiate modern life. “Men might be good at taking the risk of stabbing someone or driving a car very fast, but when it comes to opening up, men are useless,” Perry told the Radio Times in an interview to promote his new series, All Man.

And then, because we haven’t had one in a while, a classic Guardian sentence:

“Masculinity is a decorative feature that is essentially counter-productive.”

Well, it’s true that rafting skills and urine-drinking may be niche concerns and of obvious practical use only to explorers, hardy outdoors types, and people whose package holidays have gone catastrophically wrong. But – and it’s quite a big one – there’s something to be said for seeing people in unfamiliar and rather trying circumstances achieving more – sometimes much more – than they thought they ever could. Which is both the premise and appeal of Mr Grylls’ various, quite popular TV programmes. However, showing people that they may be much more capable than they previously believed, resulting in a sense of great personal satisfaction, is apparently unimportant, a mere “hangover” from more primitive, less Guardian-friendly times.

Regarding the claim that masculinity is functionally obsolete and is now merely decorative, and at risk of seeming unkind, readers are invited to compare the mugshots of Mr Perry and Mr Grylls, these two contrasting expressions of modern masculinity, and ponder which is likely to attract the more widespread and vigorous sexual attention. Or indeed which of them might be more likely to prevail in a more hazardous physical exchange – say, an attempted mugging. And on the supposed uselessness of archetypal masculine skills, Mr Grylls’ lengthy television career, his extensive property portfolio, and his estimated annual earnings from UK merchandising alone of £3.3 million, rather speaks for itself.