Theodore Dalrymple on pretentious guilt and moral grandiosity: 

But posing and posturing have become a mass phenomenon, the tattooing of our time. Of nothing is this more true than contemporary Woke morality. Whereas not long ago young people of the middle classes sought to express their sympathy for the lower and supposedly oppressed orders by imitating their tattoos and way of dress, imitation being the highest form of empathy available to egotists, they now express the same desire by making Wokeness the touchstone of their morality. They think they are rebelling when, of course, they are conforming. They do not realise that it is more difficult, and more courageous, to contradict a friend than to criticise a society.

Douglas Murray on denunciation hysteria and societal malware: 

It is unsustainable that we are held hostage as a nation by a minority of fanatics, who have fanatical views that we have never voted in… You do not have to pay your tithes to Black Lives Matter; you do not have to pay your Danegeld to the latest LGBT thing. You don’t have to do any of this. […]  

I don’t care if [the media] say [Tony Abbott] is a misogynist. I don’t care if they say he’s a homophobe. I don’t care about any of it now and nor should anybody else. They’ve overused their currency. They’ve hyperinflated – we’re in Zimbabwean situation. And it’s time that we say, ‘We don’t care. Your magic spell-words don’t work anymore.’ […] By the way, it has to be said, if you are Kay Burley and watching this, I’ll play that game back to her. 2009, she throttled a female reporter round the neck until the woman was bruised. Okay? Fine, Kay Burley, want to play that game? ‘No-one should appear in a studio with Kay Burley because she’s someone who throttles women ‘til they’re bruised. And if you appear in a studio with her, you approve of the throttling of women.’

And G. Thomas Burgess on the perverse, dystopian outpourings of Ibram X. Kendi:

I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here. || Plaything of note. || Today’s word is ambition. || A searchable archive of old book illustrations. (h/t, Things) || The village of upside-down boat houses. (h/t, PiperPaul) || Premature greeting. || Snout patting of note. || “Something needed to be done.” || Scenes. || No, don’t thank me. || You’d never tire of this. || Continue the research. || The thrill of the circus. || The thrill of Tesco. || The thrill of mould. || Sounds of the forest and a nature sound map. (h/t, Things) || Struggle session detected. || When the circus comes to town. || Self-censoring font. || Found reading the book laborious, but anyway, this is coming. || Flamingos feed. || And finally, in fly-related news.

Time for an open thread, I think. In which to share links and bicker. 

Oh, and I’ll leave this here.

“I have a gender studies degree.”

So boasts Ms Kyl Myers in the pages of Time magazine. I’ll give you a moment to experience the inevitable hushed awe.

Having, as she does, a degree in gender studies, Ms Myers is vexed by many things. Such as being asked, kindly, while pregnant, whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. This, we’re informed, is not “a simple question with a simple answer.”

My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. 

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

The only things we really knew about our baby is that they were human, breech and going to be named Zoomer.

Being enlightened and conscientious parents, Ms Myers and her partner Brent have chosen for their child the name Zoomer. Readers may wonder whether that detail tells us something too. Other fruits of this “gender-creative parenting” include pointedly not “assigning” a gender to their child – though experiments of this kind tend to be inflicted on boys – and instead insisting on “the gender-neutral pronouns they, them and their.” A contrivance whose modishness we’ve touched on before. 

We were committed to raising our child without the expectations or restrictions of the gender binary.

And as trans activists keep telling us, continually interacting with people who aren’t sure what gender you are – in this case, thanks to mommy’s niche fixations – is in no way stressful or aggravating, and could never, ever result in demoralisation and psychological problems. And pretending that your son or daughter isn’t actually a boy or girl will, somehow, in ways never quite specified, “eliminate gender-based oppression, disparities and violence.” It’s “preventative care,” we’re told.

Video here, via Darleen. Because recreational sociopathy is very in right now. 

Anything else is an excuse, of course, a lie. The rationalisation – that trashing another random restaurant and menacing its customers, people about whom the aggressors know nothing, will somehow usher in a brighter, more fragrant tomorrow – can be dismissed as ludicrous and self-flattering, a moral non sequitur. But look carefully at what these self-imagined warriors for “social justice” choose to do – repeatedly, by default. See their go-to solution, their way to fix the world.

See how they enjoy it.

Because that’s what it’s about.

Update, via the comments:

As noted before, if someone’s preferred form of activism is to harass and bully random strangers, while feeling enormously self-satisfied about their own imagined radicalism – and while clearly exulting in mob domination – then this tells us very little about any issue supposedly animating them. Again, it’s a moral non sequitur and rather like saying, “I’m troubled by the plight of the Javan rhinoceros, so I’m going to start spitting at the elderly and keying random cars.”

It does, however, tell us just how narcissistic and spiteful these creatures are. And how low a priority their wellbeing should be.