Chap rotates his own feet 157 degrees. // More tongue than is decent. // “Mr Estala appeared to be intoxicated.” // Libation station. // Oil-absorbent material of note. // Organ relocation during pregnancy. // Globe-making of yore. // Smart glasses with liquid lenses. // Starfleet spacecraft comparison. His looks bigger than yours. // At last, an assault trombone. // Robot pianist. I said pianist. // 3D-printed housing. (h/t, Dr W) // Corked honey. // Headline of note. // “Antarctica’s best cuisine, with fine wines and seven-course lunches on Sundays.” // Frankly, I’ve been to worse gigs. // Phones from antiquity. // If you get pulled over, this will be the new sobriety test. // Doctor Strange reversed. In which time takes one for the team. // And finally, reassuringly, a bedtime tale.

Attention, all you white women:

If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalisation, take off those hoops[;] if your feminism isn’t intersectional, take off those hoops[;] if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops[;] if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops[;] if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it, take off those hoops.

So rants Ms Alegria Martinez, a member of the Latinx Student Union at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, in a campus-wide email. When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous, “especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”

Where students are forking out $60,000 a year in the hope of being terribly downtrodden. Possibly by the pool:

Update, via the comments:

Alice adds,

Some people want childhood to last 70 years.

Well, if you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums. But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them.

As sane people do.

And for a little perspective, it’s just occurred to me that when one of my nieces was the same age as these ladies, she was raising money for charity by trekking across the Sahara Desert. I doubt that hooped earrings and lip-liner, and who may or may not wear them, were foremost in her mind.

Commenter [+] quips,

Ain’t no privilege like victim privilege.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.

Dave Huber reports from the other side of the looking glass, where wide-eyed students are told,

A degree in Women’s and Gender Studies prepares you for almost anything.

“I do have skills,” says one graduate, rather defensively, “I do have a college degree that is meaningful.” I do, I do, I do.

Readers are invited to listen attentively for the imminent economic boom triggered by the ongoing oversupply of gender studies graduates. 

Lifted from the comments, more progressive intellectualism at Middlebury College, where female staff get assaulted by students wearing masks, and elderly scholars get chased off campus: 

College public safety officers managed to get Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and trying to prevent it from leaving campus,” said Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus,” said Burger. “During this confrontation, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”

Note that the rather animated protestors don’t seem too familiar with Dr Murray’s research and commentary, and as one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)

Regular readers will no doubt register the irony that, if you wanted to witness some overt racial zealotry, you’d be much more likely to find it among supposedly ‘progressive’ students – say, the ones assaulting their peers or obstructing their path and making them walk through mud for the sin of being white, or grabbing women’s hair and yanking really hard.

I see no reason to suppose that the mob delinquency illustrated above, examples of which seem to be escalating in frequency and vehemence, will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure. Those directly responsible, and their faculty cheerleaders, show no sign of becoming ashamed any time soon. If their behaviour and assumptions are to change, I suspect it will have to cost them, dearly. And whether there are arrests and/or expulsions following this latest thuggish farce will tell us quite a bit about academia’s ongoing decay.

Update:

And here’s an extract from Dr Murray’s own account of what happened at Middlebury: 

We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting.

Meanwhile, at Scripps College – a liberal arts college for young ladies, in Claremont, California, and where annual tuition is close to $50,000 – you must also pay to be scolded as racist and oppressive, by dint of having questions and simply being white:

Campus resident assistants at the school are hanging up two sets of posters titled “Emotional Labour 101”: one for whites, and another for minorities, whom the posters dub as “victims of emotional labour.” Both posters define “emotional labour” as having to exert energy “for the purpose of addressing people’s feelings, educating, making people comfortable, or living up to ‘social expectations.’”

You see, inculcating pretentious guilt, and then exploiting it, is terribly exhausting. And having to deal with “microaggressions,” like being disagreed with, or being asked questions you can’t answer in a sufficiently self-flattering manner, is way too much like hard work. And so, students with That Magic Brown Skin™ are encouraged to demand compensation from their paler peers for the “mental toll” of having to explain why everyone else is racist and should shut the hell up:

“Charge for your services,” the poster suggests. “If you’ve decided you’re going to do it, at least get paid.”

Those deemed sufficiently brown – and therefore by default morally superior and emotionally fragile – are cautioned to “avoid overexertion” when “educating” their paler, less enlightened classmates. “The burden does not rest on your shoulders,” declares the poster. “You don’t owe anyone anything at the expense of your mental health.” The instructional posters are, however, rather less indulgent of students of pallor, who are warned to consider how “people of colour” – who, despite such pampering are apparently “a marginalised group” – are being fatigued by any questioning of their claims. “Be mindful of your place and position,” reads the Guide For White Students, before suggesting that the melanin-deficient should offer financial compensation, “take ownership for the harm you caused” and “think about social justice issues.” 

Sadly, there’s no mention of any financial compensation for white students who are continually being told, by so-called educators, that they’re inherently oppressive and therefore bad people who should feel ashamed. It seems that this ‘microaggression’ business only works one way.  

Previously. Related. 

Bloody typical. // That’s a big one. // One sweaty fingertip. // That one-hour-ten-minute Phil Collins drum fill you’ve always wanted. // Ten hours of Arctic ambience. // This used to be a cement factory. // A Canadian imam shares his piety. // Causality is a game. // US presidents and their legacies of debt. // On the origins of cutlery. // Could a single marine unit destroy the Roman Empire? // Cars that never made it. // Multitasking. // So just how strong is Captain America? // Thomas Sowell on Marxism and its defects. // And on achievement and its particulars as mere “privilege.” // A pinhole camera made from drinking straws. // A mugshot of the inventor of the mugshot. // Thing is, Ridley, I think we’ve seen it all before. // All bark. // And finally, “Nobody was injured.”

I’ve been in and out of higher education for over seven years now.

Well, there’s your problem.

I feel more comfortable there than I do in the workforce,

And there it is again.

but there are still many issues with academia that make me uncomfortable.

But of course. The author of this piece, Everyday Feminism’s Celia Edell, a “feminist philosopher interested in social justice,” wants to reveal to us the pressures of unrelenting sexism in higher education: 

I know I’m making my way into a field that is, as a whole, less than welcoming to gender minorities like women.

Women are apparently a gender minority. I’ll give you a second to chew on that one. We’ll just skip over the preferential hiring of women across much of academia, including in departments of philosophy, and the fact that women earn a majority of both Bachelors and Masters degrees. 

My experience with sexism in academia has been that I am more often questioned about my knowledge and ability by male peers and, now that I am TAing [i.e., a teaching assistant], by my male students too.

If true, this may not be entirely unrelated to the fact that Ms Edell’s article contains so many statements of the bizarre – such as women constituting a “gender minority” in an environment where female students typically outnumber male students by quite some margin – along with numerous falsehoods, including the assertion that women “make 78 cents for every dollar a man makes.” A claim that has been debunked repeatedly and at length. 

I still feel silenced in a class of men. I feel like the boys I teach don’t take me as seriously as they would a male TA.

As ladies on the right report such difficulties much less often, perhaps the issue is not that Ms Edell is a woman being assailed by The Patriarchy and its all-pervasive sexism, even in one of the most scrupulously PC environments on Earth. Maybe it’s just the kind of woman she is. One who, in the very same article, tells us that she suffers from “imposter syndrome” and struggles to sound confident and knowledgeable when voicing her thoughts in public. And at risk of sounding shallow, I doubt that her retro-ironic Far Side glasses and randomly changing hair colour convey much in the way of gravitas. And referring to “white men” as inherently privileged or in some way problematic – no fewer than three times – probably isn’t helping on that front either.

Ms Edell’s ruminations have entertained us before. 

Social psychologist Clay Routledge on the tragedy and farce of identity politics:

Identity politics, especially what is going on within the academic left, is strange because it is at odds with much of what we know about inter-group relations. Decades ago, psychological scientists established that dividing people into groups and highlighting group differences leads to in-group bias. It also leads to hostility if the groups perceive themselves as fighting over scarce resources… Experimental research also shows that making people feel like victims, which is common in identity politics and on college campuses, increases feelings of entitlement and reduces pro-social behaviour… The postmodern fields that promote identity politics ignore decades of good research on both what creates conflict and the best ways to reduce it.

Why, it’s almost as if the point of the exercise were to cultivate lots of pretentious guilt and exploitable animosity. 

Jack F Mourouzis interviews Christina Hoff Sommers: 

For activists committed to the doctrine of intersectionality, universities have to be seen as racist, sexist, violent institutions. The theory demands it. In fact, our institutions of higher learning are among the least bigoted or violent places on Earth. To maintain the theory, activists stretch the meanings of words beyond comprehension. When I politely challenged fainting-couch feminism at Oberlin and Georgetown, protestors accused me of “violence.” According to diversity officials at Berkeley and UCLA, anyone who suggests that “men and women have equal opportunities for achievement” or refers to the US as “a land of opportunity” is creating a “hostile” environment and “targeting” marginalised people.

And Roger Kimball on news, fake news and very fake news: 

The motor of fake news is not inaccuracy. It’s malice. I had an insight into this important truth a couple weeks back when I was at a swank New York club for an evening event. The establishment in question is overwhelmingly conventional, i.e., leftish, in that smug sort of way that publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times, along with CNN and MSNBC, exude. I ran into an acquaintance, a female journalist I hadn’t seen in years. I knew that her politics were conventional in the above sense, but I had also found her an amusing and lively person. We were chatting when someone she knew from the Times joined in. I then overheard him explain to her that she had to be careful about what she posted on Facebook, Twitter, etc., because anything too explicitly anti-Trump could be used against her when that glorious day came and “they” – the conventional fraternity of groupthink scribblers – finally took down that horrible, despicable man. “We’ve got dozens of people working on it all the time,” he explained, adding that it was only a matter of time before they got the goods on Trump and destroyed him.

At which point, inexplicably, this sprang to mind. 

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

Dennis Prager on attempts to hide classroom indoctrination:

The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists… Universities differ in only one respect: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs. Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicised their classroom lectures are.

But there is another reason. Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights. Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”

See, for instance, this first day of a creative writing class, and the examples that follow it, in which attempts to circumvent normal proprieties are passionately endorsed by leftist educators. The subject of some educators’ disdain for students – say, by conspiring to rob them of a chance to hear an alternative view – was touched on here. And for an illustration of just how vigorous and successful those efforts to indoctrinate can be, see also this. 

Update: 

And here’s a footnote to the Caleb O’Neil case mentioned in Prager’s article.

Meanwhile, in the world of the well-adjusted Guardian columnist: 

It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.

This latest admission of derangement is by Stacie Huckeba, a photographer and video-maker. She continues,

“No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” I scowled and stormed away, completely enraged.

You see, he’s not allowed to do that – holding open the door for her – or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And then, inadvertently, a punchline of sorts:

It was the third time that week that a man had done something polite for me.

Damn the patriarchy and all its works.

First a man had bought me a drink at a concert, and then there was the nice man who had helped me scoop up my groceries after I dropped my bag, and now this man with the door.

At this point, thankfully, Ms Huckeba offers an explanation, and justification, for her erratic, rather alarming mood swings:

Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult. But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board. And, I am happy to report, I am also a fairly happy, confident person.

Yes, of course. That would explain all the random screaming.