The pain is real. 

Roger Kimball on “shitholes” and theatrical indignation: 

And here we come to a second curiosity in the preening and ecstatic outrage over the president’s comment. Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities. In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things — quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing — about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness. Donald Trump, of course, does this regularly, delightedly.

Tim Newman on the same: 

Trump’s comments are pretty innocuous to anyone who is not a deranged anti-Trumper or a fully paid-up member of the media or political establishments. He’s asked the question millions of people across America and Europe have been asking for years, waiting in vain for their leaders to do so. And now he has, and the reason his opponents have gone apoplectic is because they know how much this will resonate with ordinary people they wish didn’t exist. That, and they wish to virtue-signal in order to keep their places in what they think is polite society.

And Mitchell Gunter on the posturing of Antifa – and sociopathy as a lifestyle choice: 

Autocorrect of note. (h/t, dicentra) || Unwanted caller. || Oh, Waitrose, never change. || Why blue is rare in nature. || 8-bit cat. || Abandoned castles. || “What a cute little chicken.” || How to take a photo of a stealth bomber flying over the Rose Bowl, from above. || Flying bathtub. Well, a hovering bathtub, but still. || The Bourne Identity (1988), starring… er, Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Japanese people attempt to eat Marmite. || The future is now. || Pretty fish. || Action figures. || This. || They do this better than you do. (h/t, Obnoxio) || The thrill of Bismuth. || Cardboard beings. || The Great Hedge of India. || Night light. || Norwegian train-driver cam. || A holiday memory to cherish. || And finally, painstakingly, marbles, magnets and music.

Laziness, apparently, is “a political stance.” Specifically, 

As political action, laziness… provides postqualitative inquiry with an additional tool for contributing to social justice via social research. Laziness combats the neoliberal condition in which academic research is situated and might serve as a virtue of postqualitative inquiry.

Ah, yes. The neoliberal condition of modern academia.

To meet social justice commitments, postqualitative inquiry must affirmatively disavow neoliberalism and confront it with new sets of materialist-empiricist toolkits for configuring assemblages in retaliation of the reductionist economic becomings and becoming-economies. We must refute our work. We must become lazy.

The author of this unhappy word-pile, Professor Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, is the department chair of higher education at the University of Denver. To spare you needless exposure to the professor’s prose, Greg Piper of The College Fix offers a handy summary: 

Unsurprisingly, the professor says the concept of laziness is used to harm poor people, nonwhites, “overweight individuals” and women. But they can also use laziness as a weapon against “the dominant power structure” by, for example, housekeepers “completing the minimum required to keep their jobs” to protest “the subjugation of their profession and personhood.”

Not hoovering under the sofa is, it turns out, a radical act, a feat of protest and empowerment.

The full paper can be perused here. Though I feel I should point out that it’s a wearying thing and may inspire thoughts of self-harm.

When not championing the doing of things in a tardy, half-arsed way, and driving his car back and forth over the English language, Professor Gildersleeve mingles with “historically marginalised communities” and “non-dominant youth,” where his prose and searing insights will no doubt prompt much nodding and the rubbing of many chins.  

Further to the eye-widening James Damore saga of August last year, an update of possible interest: 

James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired after arguing that the gender gap in tech may be partially explained by sex differences among men and women, just filed a class-action lawsuit against Google in the Santa Clara, Calif., Superior Court. Damore came to fame after he wrote the now-infamous “Google manifesto,” where he pointed out that “differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech.” Filed Monday morning, the class-action lawsuit argues that Google discriminates against white conservative men on the basis of their “male gender” and “Caucasian race,” further alleging that there is “open hostility for conservative thought” in the Google workplace…

The lawsuit also alleges that Google employees were awarded bonuses for arguing against Damore’s views. In one example of this, a female employee was awarded a bonus for speaking out against the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” allegedly represented by Damore’s memo. Email excerpts sent among Google employees after Damore’s memo went public also illustrated pervasive hostility towards conservatives. “I intend to silence these views; they are violently offensive,” wrote senior engineer Colm Buckley in a message to his co-workers. He also wrote to co-workers that there are certain political views “which I do not want people to feel safe to share.”

The details of the lawsuit can be read here and some of the allegations are worth perusing. For instance, those regarding the widespread and enthusiastic use of “shitlists” to exclude and punish employees deemed insufficiently enthused by identity politics; and the apparent indifference of Google’s managers and HR department to harassing, demeaning or racial rhetoric when the targets of such language were white. A phenomenon illustrated by a manager, Chris Busselle, urging white employees – described as “schmucky” and “cheesy” on account of their pallor – to decline invitations to attend conferences; and by another manager, Liz Fong-Jones, who openly professed, in writing, that she “could care less about being unfair to white men.” A view she subsequently described as “absolutely reasonable.”

Update: 

For those so inclined, and via Chris, there’s a crowdfunding option to help out with legal expenses.

“I don’t want to commit to any sort of definition.”

Our betters in action.

Toni Airaksinen pokes through the scholarly journal Feminist Media Studies: 

“The purpose of including an abortion plotline is to make jokes about abortion, recognising that such satire is valuable for some people as both a means and an end,” [sociology lecturer, Gretchen] Sisson explains. “Comedy has often been used as a subversive way of challenging predominant social structures,” she adds, arguing that because comedy has a history of challenging taboo social issues, abortion “is even intuitive new ground for comedy to address.”

When not devising new realms of feminist comedy, Dr Sisson is an advocate of third-trimester abortion. And hey, destroying nascent human life – whether for health reasons, personal convenience, or as a display of feminist piety - what could be funnier?

David Solway on the comedy-cum-despair of being a college-level teacher: 

Where was one to start trying to educate an adult student who thought the Great Depression began in the 1960s; who was unable to distinguish between the First and Second World Wars; who thought that Moscow was the capital of Missouri… or who averred, in a paper on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that “George Orwin, arthur of The Animal Firm, was heavily into natur.” You can’t make this stuff up. 

And Toni Airaksinen, again, on another educational breakthrough arrived at via feminism: 

Together, [professors] Laura Parson and Casey Ozaki interviewed eight female students majoring in math or physics to learn more about why women struggle in STEM. From their interviews, the professors learned that many women feel pressure to conform to so-called “masculine” norms. According to the professors, these masculine norms include “asking good questions,” “capacity for abstract thought and rational thought processes,” “motivation,” the expectation that students would be “independent” thinkers, and a relatively low fear of failure. “This requirement that the average student asks questions and speaks in class is based on the typical undergraduate man,” they contend.

Apparently, this “masculine” ideal – of diligence, rationality and a willingness to ask questions – “is very difficult for women students to achieve,” on account of female students not possessing an “unencumbered male body.” Dr Parson has of course entertained us before with her claims that the scientific method and notions of objective reality are “masculine” conceits and therefore oppressive. Instead, says she, we should rely on “feminist critical discourse,” of which her own writing is presumably an example. Again, if you think of modern leftism as a kind of perverse counsel, an attempt to erode realism, stoicism and self-possession, along with academic standards and expectations of competence, and to ruin the lives of the vain and credulous, it can save a lot of time.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

In fashionable-dining news: 

Wooden “plates” used by restaurants pose a food poisoning risk to people eating from them, a council has warned as it issued a £50,000 fine to a steakhouse where 14 people fell ill… Birmingham City Council brought the case against Ibrahim’s Grill and Steak House because it kept using the boards to serve food. A number of issues of concern were found, including a high level reliance on the use of disposable gloves, rather than staff washing hands. In addition, wooden plates which were incapable of being cleaned were being used to serve the food, the city’s magistrates’ court heard.

Setting aside the hygiene issues of abandoning ceramics in favour of grooved wooden chopping boards, there’s also the matter of presentational flair, which, as we’ve seen, ranges from the merely bizarre to the nakedly perverse. At a recent family lunch at an upscale village pub, the food and service were excellent but the dining was somewhat complicated by modish presentation. Specifically, a 30cm wide ‘plate’ that was about 70% rim, with a deep indentation in the centre, roughly the size of a coffee mug, into which the entire meal had been stacked, vertically. Imagine a layer cake of pork, potatoes and spinach. All tasty, certainly, but just a tad inaccessible.

I’m easing into the new year much as one might lower one’s buttocks into an overly warm bath. Which, for you, means another thrilling opportunity to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with an extensive archive of Sherlock Holmes radio shows, over 500 of them; a jellyfish of note; a superhydrophobic surface; The Art of Ornamental Orange Peeling, circa 1905; a nineteenth century spy camera; and, via Elephants Gerald, “Black Man Super Bikini” and other sub-optimal translations. 

Oh, and a reminder that snow makes people stupid.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with searing insights from the world of academia. Specifically, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where black student activists denounced objectivity as an “alienating” concept, and issued numerous demands, allegedly to challenge stereotypes of student laziness and inadequacy. It turns out that the way to avoid any appearance of such things is to complain about the “stress and anxiety” of being corrected, or disagreed with, especially by people who are insufficiently brown and deferential. Elsewhere, the psychological reverberations of Donald Trump’s election victory continued to be felt, as when a charmingly progressive lady sensed a fellow plane passenger’s failure to vote as she did and promptly threatened to vomit on him. Other pious lefties signalled their moral superiority by planning to sabotage transport infrastructure, stranding and distressing countless random people, and thereby reminding us that “social justice” posturing is often difficult to distinguish from petty malice or outright sociopathy. Meanwhile, Laurie Penny preferred to advocate “spite” as a guiding progressive principal, as if this were a new and novel development.

February provided further illustrations of this fashionable malice, as when educators at the University of Cincinnati bemoaned the fact that their attempts to inculcate unrealism, dishonesty and pretentious racial guilt were still being met with pockets of resistance. Objecting to slander and brow-beating by bigoted mediocrities is, we learned, merely “white fragility” and therefore, somehow, damning proof of racism. Racial fixations were also in play at the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma, the stated goal of which is to “help writers succeed in a racist society,” a goal to be achieved by denouncing grammar as “an unjust language structure,” and the correction of punctuation as “an oppressive practice.” Because those ungrammatical job applications, the ones enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. We also learned of the steep price to be paid for small acts of courtesy – namely, holding open a door for a Guardian contributor with weight issues and a gift for hysterical screaming.

Accessorising was an unexpected topic of discussion in March, when the crushingly put-upon students at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, informed the world that “winged eyeliner and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance,” and should therefore be the exclusive ornamentation of the slightly brown and radical. Elsewhere, at Middlebury College, Dr Charles Murray attempted to give a lecture on, among other things, the dangers of tribalism and social fragmentation, only to be met with tribal hysteria and an actual riot, complete with slanderous chants, hospitalised staff and students wearing ski masks.

In April, the immense, frustrated love machine Caleb Luna wondered why his Grindr profile attracts so little interest. Carefully sidestepping the possibility of weight loss, Mr Luna decided that the rest of us must “interrogate” our “phobias,” which is to say our preferences, and consequently start lusting after “alternative bodies.” Specifically, bodies like Mr Luna’s. Avoiding the obvious was also a theme in the world of performance art, where Shannon Cochrane and Márcio Carvalho unwittingly entertained us with their deep thoughts, shifting paradigms and heads wrapped in meat. Another highlight of the month came via Everyday Feminism’s Emily Zak, who wanted us to know that the allure of fresh air is, like everything else, terribly oppressive, due to the “painfully heteronormative” nature of wildland firefighting, and a shortage of adverts featuring gay people kayaking in a suitably gay-affirming manner.