It’s a bold alternative.

Also, open thread. Share links and bicker.

This isn’t someone who barely squeaked through her degree. She was celebrated as the best there was at her school.

Janice Fiamengo ponders the mental state of a feminist and openly misandrist social worker. 

Kristina Agbebiyi, the lady in question, was hailed as “student of the year” by the University of Michigan’s social work department for her “commitment to political activities,” her embodiment of the “professional ethics of social work,” and for her “contribution to the positive image” of said field. Repeatedly boasting of a hatred of men is, we learn, not only a “commitment,” “a way of life” and a “revolutionary task,” but something to applaud. A credential of some kind. It “isn’t a game,” says Ms Agbebiyi.

Update, via the comments:

Readers may find themselves marvelling at how someone so fêted, and who evidently expects no challenging of her pronouncements by either peers or employers, nonetheless exults in theatrical victimhood and insists that she is “living oppression from the inside.” That the supposedly radical politics of which Ms Agbebiyi is so proud is usually an ostentatious leisure activity, an indulgence of the privileged, somehow passes unremarked. Though I do like the description of Ms Agbebiyi as a “narcissistic self-infatuate.”

Needless to say, the cause of this alleged “oppression” isn’t made clear, let alone persuasive. Apparently, it’s now the custom to invoke victimhood, as if it were a goal, a basis for acclaim, without actually specifying what it is that’s supposedly oppressing you. After browsing the lady’s Twitter feed, the best I can deduce is that the fact that prisons exist, at all, anywhere, is an unendurable burden on Ms Agbebiyi’s tissue-paper psyche. We should, it seems, wish for the “abolition” of prisons and “the ending of cops.” Because the world would be so much better if rapists, carjackers and sociopathic predators could act with impunity, uninhibited by even a small risk of punishment.

Some of Professor Fiamengo’s previous adventures in feminist psychology can be found here and here. 

Tinkles is a big boy. || Surprises down below. (h/t, Damian) || He does this better than you do. || Old-school bugging device. || What’s in the box? || Wobble of note. || Smart diapers detect dampness. || Critical Drinker recaps Picard. || It passes the time. || Determined soap dispenser. || Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome. || Film criticism. (h/t, Dicentra) || It’s a fixer-upper, only $495,000. (h/t, Things) || It fires toilet paper and now you want one. || Clash of the titans. || Turtle of terror. || Asteroids size comparison. || A comprehensive archive of Mark Zuckerberg’s hairstyles. || It’s all in the ankles. || He’s not sure what you are, either. || Forbidden love. || And finally, you may wince when ready.

Or, When Your Colossal Sense Of Entitlement Doesn’t Quite Pay Off.

1. A gathering of radical minds.

It’s a “people’s assembly,” you see; but with very few people. Apparently, it’s hard to do radical ecomentalism, denouncing modern life and the use of fossil fuels, when it’s cold and you have no heating.

2. A slight delay.

One of the gathered titans suggests the formation of “a learning circle on decolonising Extinction Rebellion and our minds.” To pull in the punters, no doubt.

3. Alas, the situation has not improved.

Perhaps the protestors’ appeal has become, as they say, more selective. Also, spare a thought for the local residents, the ones having their minds decolonised, whether they like it or not, thanks to the combination of amplifiers and dogmatic morony.

Via Holborn.

In the pages of Salon, where our progressive betters ruminate, Nicole Karlis ponders the latest fashionable anxiety. Specifically,

Stories of heartache, tears, stress and dehydration that people experienced after a forced separation from their water bottles.

Says Ms Karlis,

I have an irrational fear of the water bottle going missing, resulting in suddenly being thirsty and unable to access water. For the record, I did not start using a reusable water bottle until I moved to the Bay Area in 2013.

Perhaps this is one of those moments when the significance of a statement may not be fully appreciated by the person making it.

Carrying a water bottle with me everywhere I go has turned into… a form of security, one that I’ve become strangely attached to… I am not alone. Plenty of people in my orbit have expressed a similar concern — an unease, really — at the prospect of misplacing their reusable water bottle.

Now, now. We mustn’t rush to judgement.

For many, losing one’s water bottle will wreak havoc on their day, even their week.

I’m trying. I really am.

I sent out a query to the public to see if others felt what I am now calling “water-bottle separation anxiety.” I received over a dozen responses, suggesting that I may have tapped into a cultural phenomenon – one that relates as much to health and psychology as it does to our complicated personal relationship with natural resources.

What follows is a catalogue of unobvious woe and amateur dramatics. “Activist Manuela Barón” – whose area of activism is left fashionably unspecified – explains how her ancient, battered water bottle had become a “part of” her, and how the loss of it, at airport security, resulted in a swell of emotional activity:

“I cried as I went through the scanner and ran off to my gate; I didn’t realise it would be like saying goodbye to an old friend.”

At which point, it occurs to me I may be misusing the word explain.