Twist. (h/t, Holborn) || “Syrian paralysis cheese” and other translation errors. || Scenes from a small planet called Earth, specifically South Tyrol in the Alps. || Today’s word is precocious. Also, turn the bloody phone round. || Ambition. || Berlin, July, 1945. || Existential iPhone unboxing video. || Your self-driving Mercedes. || Morning glory. || Pretty moths. || Swatting flies is hard. || This. || That. || This too. (h/t, Franklin) || “Fuck your laws,” says she. (h/t, dicentra) || “On the third Friday of September, the small village of Binissalem shuts down to have dinner in the streets.” || Owl sneeze. || Kaleida. || Nigerian ladies’ hair, animated. (h/t, Coudal) || 1980s New York, a searchable photo-reference. || And finally, ladies with “manipulative cleavage” and other casting calls of note.

In case you missed it, via Rafi in the comments: 

“The performative shit is done,” says she, performatively.

Richard Bledsoe on high culture: 

Pity the poor Hirshhorn Museum. They occupy a prime piece of real estate, right on the National Mall in the wretched hive of scum and villainy, Washington, DC. And yet, as a museum dedicated to contemporary art, the institute just doesn’t seem to get much love or respect… An article about a recent acquisition the Hirshhorn made may give some insight as to why they lack esteem. Smithsonian.com is eager to explain it in this article: Why the Artist Ragnar Kjartansson Asked his Mother to Spit On Him.

As you’ll no doubt want to behold this artistic spectacle, this feat of aesthetic phlegm projection, here it is. 

Glenn Reynolds on campus radicals’ bad counsel: 

Deriding the bourgeoisie is de rigueur in the academy… But this contempt is doubly hypocritical since the academy exists largely because others still embrace bourgeois virtues of hard work, education, and upward social mobility. Relatively few students at the University of San Diego Law School are there solely to improve their minds, I suspect. Rather, they hope that they will improve their lives if they work hard and try for success. The faculty — and dean’s — salaries are paid by this phenomenon. If students only went to law school out of intellectual curiosity, there would be a lot fewer law schools. […] These same [bourgeois] behaviours… are even more valuable to people whose social and economic status is poor. Upper middle class families have a lot of social and financial capital to draw on when a kid flunks out, loses a job, gets pregnant outside of marriage, or gets in trouble with the law. For people with less, these experiences are likely to be disastrous and life-ruining. To suggest otherwise is to engage in a monstrous and damaging deception.

See also this. Examples of the aforementioned deriding, and a full-on gale of fashionable hysteria, can be found here and here. 

Or, Hysterical Woman Is Hysterical:

Hate speech… makes one wish one was dead or worse had never been born, the ultimate existential black hole. Hate speech is a speech act that can harm the central nervous system, it can result in PTSD, and when used by police and jailers to humiliate prisoners hate speech is psychological torture, a civil rights and human rights violation. In short, hate speech is an act of violence. 

So writes Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropology lecturer at Berkeley. She’s referring, of course, to the recent visit by Ben Shapiro. Though quite why Mr Shapiro should be mentioned alongside psychological torture and the violation of human rights remains unclear, and Dr Scheper-Hughes takes care not to offer even a single direct quotation by way of evidence. Instead, we’re treated to some inventive ventriloquism, to the extent that readers are expected to believe that Shapiro has somewhere referred to black people, all of them, as “criminally inclined, drug addicted, homicidal losers.” Those familiar with Mr Shapiro’s actual output may find this a little bizarre. Almost as bizarre as the claim that Shapiro is not only “racist, sexist” and “misogynist,” but also “very dangerous” and a “physical threat” to students.  

Perhaps Dr Scheper-Hughes has some thoughts on whether publicly and hyperbolically defaming people – accusing them of racism and misogyny, and of being a physical menace to students, for instance – also constitutes “violence” and a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder.  

It’s a good-news-bad-news story: 

Several Hurricane Irma victims called a 1-800 number for help and were offered phone sex instead of hurricane relief assistance.

It’s very kind, I’m sure, but perhaps now isn’t the time.

The Miami Herald reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Region 4 office accidentally tweeted the number Wednesday, which offered assistance to people dealing with damaged roofs. The number was supposed to be a “1-888” number, not a “1-800” number.

Via Sam.

“This Fall, lightning strikes three times!” || This. (h/t, Julia) || That. || A bit of the other. || At last, a miracle breakthrough in atomised butter consumption. || Always respect the media. || Merging, self-healing ‘bots. || Man’s best friend. || The tasty parts of pigs. || Japanese slot machines of yore. || ESL students learn new gender pronouns. || Sweet dreams. (h/t, dicentra) || On nickel weeklies and dime novels. || Today’s word is mindset. || Meanwhile, in Sweden, love is in the air. || Sport is too competitive and must be reformed, says feminist academic. || A brief history of gated reverb. || Shredding golden slime. || And finally, a little-known episode of space travel history: “Pieces of faecal matter free-floated around the command module for several minutes.” A whodunnit ensues. 

Further to comments in this thread here, regarding Dr Michael Isaacson, an adjunct professor who specialises in “anti-capitalist economic theories,” further details have emerged regarding the loud and relentless buzzing noise inside his head:

The Daily Caller was alerted… to a host of tweets by Isaacson that were only just brought to light Wednesday. The tweets, some of which were deleted following coverage of Isaacson in the media, call not only for Antifa protests, but for killing the police.

“What’s even the point,” asks Dr Isaacson, “of a cop that isn’t dead?” Titillating thoughts of police officers being murdered, including future officers among his own students, and violence generally, are a recurring theme in said gentleman’s Twitter feed, with many variations. Including, rather succinctly, “Dead cops are good.” You see, hinting coyly about burning down police stations “with an accelerant” is what the modern educator does. Oh, and apparently, if students can “overthrow capitalism,” and if certain people are killed, this will “stop war.”

And remember, these aren’t the ravings of a delinquent, simple-minded teenager. These are the ravings of a grown man employed to impart knowledge at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

First, the bad news:

Today’s college students are tomorrow’s attorneys, teachers, professors, policymakers, legislators, and judges. If, for example, a large fraction of college students believe, however incorrectly, that offensive speech is unprotected by the First Amendment, that view will inform the decisions they make as they move into positions of increasing authority later in their careers.

And now the bad news:

The results [of the survey] are notable for several reasons. First, the fraction of students who view the use of violence as acceptable is extremely high. While percentages in the high teens and 20s are “low” relative to what they could be, it’s important to remember that this question is asking about the acceptability of committing violence in order to silence speech. Any number significantly above zero is concerning… A surprisingly large fraction of students believe it is acceptable to act — including resorting to violence — to shut down expression they consider offensive. And a majority of students appear to want an environment that shields them from being exposed to views they might find offensive.

And in somewhat related news: 

Pomona College emailed students Monday night to announce there would be no penalties imposed on Pomona students who were “present and did block access to buildings” during [Heather] Mac Donald’s speech, preventing audience members from getting into the venue or, for those few who made it in earlier, exiting.

Details of the incident, in which Ms Mac Donald had to be escorted off campus by police officers for her own safety, can be found here. 

Update:

And because the above isn’t quite bad enough, here’s a video of students informing us that the masked thugs and sociopaths known as Antifa are merely trying to “educate” anyone who disagrees with them. For those who missed it, here they are randomly “educating” some young women. 

Further to the last item here, and various rumblings in the comments, here’s Nanette Asimov on The Screeching Left versus Ben Shapiro (and anyone who wants to engage him in debating ideas): 

For many protesters, the specifics of what the opposition says is not the point. “It doesn’t matter what the guy’s going to say,” said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the sociology of protest movements. “He could talk about the joys of apple-picking. What matters is that the counter-movement is trying to use the energy of the (event) to grow. This is an opportunity for them — and they are likely to seize upon it.”

And hence the conceit that any disagreement is an act of “violence,” to be repaid in kind, violently. For the hyperventilated protestors, it’s all about them and their psychodrama. Because it always is. And so we see self-styled ‘progressives’, the self-imagined woke, calling a Jewish man “Nazi scum” and a “fascist xenophobe” because he opposes racism and thuggery, and wants to have conversations in which students consider issues of basic humanity.

See also, Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Janice Fiamengo, etc., etc. 

In other news, 

Officials in Manatee County, Florida are under fire after an interpreter for the deaf warned about pizza and monsters during an emergency briefing related to Hurricane Irma… Members of the deaf community said [amateur interpreter, Marshall] Greene mostly signed gibberish, referencing “pizza,” “monsters,” and using the phrase “help you at that time to use bear big,” during the event. 

Via Popehat.