A morality play in three clicks. Or why Mr Godfrey Elfwick is a national treasure.  

Via dicentra, the Z-Man on the ongoing disappearance of mainstream media comment sections: 

The reason news sites are killing off comment sections is two-fold. One, it is usually where you get the bits of the news story our betters edited out in order to maintain the narrative. The “Minnesota man” in the story is identified in the comments as Jorge Gonzalez, an illegal from Guadalajara. It’s where the “suspect wearing a red shirt” is identified as a black guy named T’Q’ull Ferguson with a Facebook page full of pics of him holding a handgun and a bong. The comment sections have become a leak in the system. The other problem, especially for opinion sites like the Spectator, is the comments have become the place that makes the writers cry. Sure, there’s lots of inane chatter, but it is also where some smart people post corrections and point out the many glaring logical errors. [Opinion writers] have fragile psyches, so seeing their mistakes highlighted for everyone to see, right under their posts, is a source of constant distress.

Ed Driscoll has more. See also this. 

Somewhat related, Christopher Snowdon on Oxfam’s dishonesties: 

If you look at the BBC’s inequality report you will find no challenge, no rebuttal and no response from anybody who disagrees with Oxfam’s warped interpretation of the data. Whether it knows it or not, the BBC is complicit in the fabrication.

Thomas Sowell suggests some election year reading: 

If you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and insightful books is Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. What makes Life at the Bottom especially relevant and valuable is that it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States. Many Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that their behaviour cannot be explained away by “a legacy of slavery” or “institutional racism,” or other such evasions of facts in the United States. As Dr Dalrymple says: “It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America — for very similar reasons, of course.” That reason is the welfare state, and the attitudes and behaviour it promotes and subsidises.

I didn’t see that coming. (h/t, Ace) // Cats and dogs. // Have you tied and dyed today? // Testing defences. // Why are breasts called boobs? // Fidget cube. // Is Gab the new Twitter? // Six! is a game. // Can you see all 12 simultaneously? // Marvel’s film music is insufficiently humworthy. // A more common usage has been discovered. (h/t, Damian) // “What sort of man reads Playboy?” // Treat the dear wife to a toilet chandelier. // The taming of the fox. // “The footage depicts E. coli evolving to be 1,000 times more resistant to an antibiotic in just 11 days.” // He keeps ants. // Jack’s back. // How to speak auctioneer. // And finally, a catalogue of failed utopian communes, from poison-wielding sex gurus and tea-shunning vegans to nineteenth century radical anarcho-nudists.

In her last couple of weeks, when my mother’s mind seemed to be floating off somewhere else most of the time, she would sometimes lift her arms into the air, plucking at invisible objects with her fingers. Once, I captured her hands in mine and asked what she’d been doing. “Putting things away,” she answered, smiling dreamily. 

This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. In fact, researchers led by Christopher Kerr at a hospice centre outside Buffalo, New York, conducted a study of dying people’s dreams. Most of the patients interviewed, 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision. And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. The “patients’ pre-death dreams were frequently so intense that the dream carried into wakefulness and the dying often experienced them as waking reality,” the researchers write in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere.

Jennie Dear on what it feels like to die. 

Katherine Kersten on racial discipline quotas in schools – and their ugly consequences:

On [superintendent Valeria] Silva’s watch, the city’s high schools have become menacing places where gangs of out-of-control teens prowl the halls, and “classroom invasions” by students settling private disputes are commonplace. Today, fights that “might have been between two individuals” can grow into “mêlées involving up to 40 or 50 people,” according to Steve Linders, a St Paul police spokesman. Roving packs often attack individuals, and police have had to use chemical irritants to break up what they call “riots.” […] One high school has issued emergency whistles to teachers and assigned a guard to every floor. A teacher who was crushed into a shelf in a classroom invasion now instructs her students to use a “secret knock” to enter her classroom.

The discipline policies that gave rise to this chaos sprang from Silva’s embrace of “racial equity” ideology. In St Paul, as across the nation, black students as a group are referred for discipline at higher rates than their peers. Silva made eliminating this racial gap a top priority. In Silva’s view, the gap is caused by teachers’ racial bias and cultural insensitivity, not by higher rates of misconduct by black students. She mandated “white privilege” training for all district personnel, eliminated “continual wilful disobedience” as a suspendable offence, and shifted many special education students with behaviour problems — students who are disproportionately black — to mainstream classrooms.

As Silva’s new discipline regime took hold, reading and math scores dropped and headlines about assaults on teachers appeared with disturbing frequency. Yet instead of reconsidering, her administration moved quickly to control public relations damage. For example, district officials attempted to silence critics by accusing them of having “issues with racial equity,” one veteran teacher told City Pages. In December 2015, teachers threatened to strike over mounting safety concerns… Meanwhile, St Paul families of all races began flooding into charter and suburban public schools, taking millions of dollars in state aid with them.

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. Including, of course, children with browner skin who somehow manage not to indulge in routine fits of thuggery.

Readers may recall this rather startling article by Paul Sperry on how similar policies of racial favouritism in six other cities promptly resulted in six surges in violent classroom assaults. With apologists for the policies in effect claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and just can’t help punching teachers in the face, or groping them, or setting other students’ hair on fire. Because it’s how black Americans “engage in learning.”

Also relevant, the first item here and the links immediately following it.

In case there was any doubt about the appeal of bedlamite feminism and the kinds of personalities who find it congenial: 

I often joke with people that feminism has been like a born-again religion for me – that once I found it and let it into my life, my entire perspective shifted in such a way that suddenly, everything made sense – and that I feel compelled to spread that gospel. See, because when I first started discovering feminism, I realised how many of the bad things that have happened in my life, big and small, have been part of a larger social system. And coming to understand that it was never my fault or about me individually gave me space to start an immense healing process.

Yes, it’s Melissa Fabello, whose neurotic contortions have been noted here previously. 

Apparently, “intersectional feminism” not only explains “what had gone wrong” in Ms Fabello’s life, all of it, but also “every awful thing in the world.”

One lucky dog. (h/t, Damian) // Public transport. // Christopher Lee reads five horror classics. // Can bats swim? // British artist stranded out at sea. (h/t, Albino Finger) // The unmaking of gelatin sweets. // The (post)modern scholar. // New York, 1940s. // Everything wrong with Citizen Kane. // Hong Kong density. // What dad did. // What cats do. (h/t, Julia) // Upscale fashion show of yore. (h/t, Coudal) // Refresh the ramsophone. // Ancient Roman dinner party etiquette. // The triggering. // Time travel radio. // Classic Trek antagonists, ranked. // Autonomous tractor. // Freediving under ice isn’t for the faint-hearted. // A dragon made of flowers. // And finally, on the art of choosing band names. I do like French Toast Emergency. And Librarians In Uproar.

How dare you want a say in what we, your betters, do to your children?

Previously. Via Damian Counsell. 

Colleges to avoid, #124:

New students at Pomona College, Claremont, California, were welcomed to campus with posters in their dorms… stating that all white people are racist. The signs state white people should “acknowledge your privilege” and “apologise if you’ve offended someone,” adding that offensive language includes words like “sassy” and “riot,” which are “racially coded.” “Understand that you are white, so it is inevitable that you have unconsciously learned racism,” it asserts. “Your unearned advantage must be acknowledged and your racism unlearned.” Further, the poster claims that white people should “just listen!” rather than explaining their own perspective.

Don’t talk back. Dialogue is oppressive. Unilateral racial scolding is where it’s at. Because, for people of pallor, your very existence is something to atone for – and no-one would ever take advantage of free hits. After much “unlearning,” and suitably chastened and humiliated, you will then take your place in the new and glorious progressive pecking order.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, here’s Jeff Goldstein on the ‘alt-right’ manifesto:

This counter-trend [to the identity politics of the left], make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimises individualism. As with much of the left, the alt-right remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent. […] 

It is an identity movement on a par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other tribal products of the kernel assumptions that inform cultural Marxism. That it pretends to throw off some of those trappings — it enforces an anti-PC ethos in a way that creates yet another tenor of the same PC, this time attached to white nationalism instead of multiculturalism — is but camouflage.

Worth reading in full. In the comments at the Federalist and on Twitter, things get lively, and a little strange.