Dinnertime scenes. (h/t, Dicentra) || At last, 2-D Doom. || Cheeseburger aerodynamics. || Gives good tongue. || The tactical dad hoodie you’ve always wanted. || Hi, there. || Like many housewives, she knows the mortifying horror of hairy stairs. || Heh. || Also heh. (h/t, Dicentra) || Just how hard is magic? || Painted meat. || Privacy is “transphobic” and politely indulging transgender pronouns is “expressing transphobia.” || “Inflatable pads allow you to adjust the size of your pectorals, deltoids, biceps and triceps.” || Porthole scenes. || Improbable space suits and other things. || Space type generator. || Fashion tip. || Last meals. (h/t, Things) || No greater love. || And finally, niche satisfactions, #209.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this girthy lady and her list of complaints:

Smaller plus-size people, please check your privilege. That includes a mid-fat like me who is FAR more privileged than folks larger than me. I’m honestly so sick of people including small fats and thinking that’s enough… and I’m sick of small fats not calling out the fact that they are the biggest people at the event/shoot/meeting or whatever it is. Fat people above a 20 exist, and we fucking matter. We deserve to be included and seen. Super fat people deserve to be included. Infini-fat people deserve to be included. Fat people of colour deserve to be included. Disabled fat people deserve to be included. We all matter too. Your body positivity isn’t shit if it doesn’t include us.

Setting aside the intersectional hierarchy of fatness – small-fat, mid-fat, super-fat and infini-fat – there is, I think, something odd about the chosen language. In woke usage, the word privilege implies arbitrariness, some random quirk of life, an attribute or circumstance unrelated to one’s own efforts or choices. As if becoming sufficiently vast to engage in fat activism, and bang on about privilege, were merely a matter of the planets aligning a certain way. As if anyone might become colossally fat spontaneously, overnight, with no warning, and through no action, or inaction, of their own. Which doesn’t sound terribly plausible. In fact, it sounds like an attempt to displace responsibility and thereby deceive.

Also, open thread. 

My teeth… have written on my body and have been written on by my body. My canines speak volumes. My incisors have something to say. My bicuspids beg to be theorised. My molars desperately want to be understood. This story of my teeth is important because my straight teeth have not always been the way that they are… I realised the extent of the work that I have invested into straightening my teeth by reading Judith Butler.

In the nightmare, I’m held at gunpoint and for 24 hours am forced to read aloud works of “queer theory.” I begin with W. Benjamin Myers’ thoughts on “straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity” – and which allegedly reveal the “uninterrogated Whiteness” of routine dental hygiene and its role in maintaining “arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities.” 

Via Amir Sariaslan, who has more. Previously in hell. 

Here’s an idea! Change your parents’ bad voting habits by refusing to breed.

In the pages of Slate, Christina Cauterucci, whose enthusiasms include “gender and feminism,” wishes to share her wisdom:

The prospect of harnessing one’s sexual and reproductive powers for social good is a tempting one. So, I’d like to present what I humbly consider a much better proposal: Instead of a sex strike, let’s try a grandkid strike.

It’s a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism,” says Ms Cauterucci, and “exactly the kind of radical response today’s radical threats to equity, justice, and humanity demand.” Specifically,

It’s time to demand that baby boomers and Gen Xers decide which they’d rather have: their vague attachments to policies that have poisoned the earth and will soon make it difficult for anyone but the obscenely wealthy to live healthy, happy lives, or a pack of adorable munchkins in itty-bitty suspenders ready for unlimited tickle fights and cookie-baking sessions.

This is followed almost immediately by,

I’ve already decided that I’m not having kids,

Which, for the purposes of Ms Cauterucci’s article, is somewhat convenient. This reproductive decision was, we’re told, arrived at because,

Child care is extravagantly expensive, and paid family leave is a rare luxury. Bringing a new set of chubby cheeks and wonderfully incomprehensible babblings into the world is the most destructive thing one couple can do to the planet. It seems certain that today’s babies will be tomorrow’s survivors of famine, water shortages, unprecedented natural disasters, and refugee crises.

And furthermore,

It’s unethical, what with climate change and all. And it’s too dangerous—you’ve seen the news reports on school shootings and know how easy it is for violent men to get their hands on guns.

Um, okay then. Apparently, the thought of becoming a parent immediately conjures mental images of famine, earthquakes, shootings and death. Proof, if more were needed, that the exquisitely woke are just like thee and me. Not unhinged in any way.

I’m not entirely sure what it is, but you should buy some anyway. (h/t, Damian) || Cardboard piano. || Pretty good fingering. || Classical musicians react to K-Pop. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || At all times, dignity. || The eternal struggle. || Ordia is a game. || Signs of cultural decline, #3,004. || Always respect the media. || They have bodies. || He has a business card. (h/t, Holborn) || Miracle breakthrough. || He was embarrassed, you see. (h/t, Dicentra) || Magnetic construction kit of note. || Question answered. (h/t, Orwell) || With nails and a single thread. || OK Soda was not a success. || Amplified cat. || Honey, Queen and Bumble are here to help. || And finally, the faces of dogs after eating bees.

David Solway on the feminist enthusiasm for fatness: 

In a speech on the topic of “radical fat liberation” jointly sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Centre for Equity and Inclusion at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, the prodigiously overweight Sonalee Rashatwar, a self-proclaimed Fat Sex Therapist, compared fitness trainers to Nazis, defined child dieting as sexual assault, attributed the Christchurch shooting to ‘thin” white supremacism, and condemned science as “fataphobic” for “promoting the idea that certain bodies are fit, able and desirable.” She wonders, rhetorically, “is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?” She goes on to blame the Reagan administration for having refused to provide “social supports that also help me to subsidise my food costs.” 

When not equating routine health advice with eugenics and “Nazi science,” Ms Rashatwar claims that “diet culture and fat phobia are forms of sexual violence.” Mr Solway is the husband of Janice Fiamengo, whose own probing of feminist pathology has been mentioned here before.

Heather Mac Donald on cooking the books for “diversity”: 

The average white score on the SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) is 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 1998 that white students from households with incomes of $10,000 or less score better on the SAT than black students from households with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. In 2015, students with family incomes of $20,000 or less (a category that includes all racial groups) scored higher on average on the math SAT than the average math score of black students from all income levels… 

Those who rail against “white privilege” as a determinant of academic achievement have a nagging problem: Asians. Asian students outscore white students on the SAT by 100 points; they outscore blacks by 277 points. It is not Asian families’ economic capital that vaults them to the top of the academic totem pole; it is their emphasis on scholarly effort and self-discipline. Every year in New York City, Asian elementary school students vastly outperform every other racial and ethnic group on the admissions test for the city’s competitive public high schools, even though a disproportionate number of them come from poor immigrant families.

Somewhat related, on racism as an excuse. And related to that, on the absurd and rather sinister Implicit Association Test.

With unrelenting racial divisiveness:

According to her own publicity material, Ms Rao studied law at the University of Virginia and NYU, and is “one of the country’s strongest voices for social justice, equity, and inclusion.” Which may explain the self-satisfied double standards, the paranoid hyperbole, the pronounced cognitive dissonance, and the daily epithets about “white people” and their many, many faults. And the next time you hear sweet cooings about “social justice, equity and inclusion,” you may want to bear in mind the kinds of creatures most attracted to these things. 

As noted before, many times, “social justice” is antithetical to expectations of reciprocity. And so, despite the theatrical piety, it corrodes the moral senses. Quite quickly.

Update, via Greg in the comments:

Ms Rao invites you to an evening of dinner and pretentious racial scolding. And you’re paying.

Woman versus tentacles. What could possibly go wrong? || Cross-cultural scenes. (h/t, Dicentra) || Ancient prophesy of note. || New York in the rain. || Kansas tornado. || On everything and nothing. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Moveable concrete. || Sugar cloud coffee. || The complicated contraptions of William Heath Robinson. || Bolts. || Bit steep. || “The balls are going to be a little lopsided.” || Life in Paris, in colour, circa 1890. || Designer inhalers, with healing power and herbal hemp extract. || The tactical backpack you’ve always wanted. || Scooters. || Some cornering. || Assorted charts. (h/t, Damian) || Tiny drama. || His skills were enhanced by nudity. || And finally, via Obnoxio, a conspiracy is revealed.

If you think of communication as an exercise in respect for the other, you don’t repeat yourself. Repeating yourself suggests that you’re either demented or that you just don’t care about the other person’s response; you’re prepared to override it and say the same thing again and again. There’s no way in which a chanted slogan invites an answer.

Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton discuss the future of conservatism, why the left wins the culture war, architecture, Twitter mobs, the importance of apologies, and the “institutionalised fraudulence” of woke academia.

Also, open thread.

Or, A Little Something To Cover The Emotional Wear And Tear.

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