As some of you may be interested in this kind of thing, I now have a Gab account. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it as yet, but there we are.

Micro-actuators of note. (h/t, Damian) // Maslow 2.0 // The cunning stunts of Buster Keaton. // Attention, barren women. Prepare to be overjoyed. // Yes, it’s big and pink. What are you going to do about it? // Sketching perspective with the help of elastic. // The trees of Slope Point, New Zealand. // Arrange your succulents pleasingly. // Why voices squeak during puberty. // How to look punk, 1977. // A brief geographical history of the Roman Empire. // 80s knitwear of note. Avert your eyes. // No, like this. // “Notice that wall.”// Coral, accelerated. // Hummingbird courtship. // Aerodynamic cycling. // Things old people do. // Somewhat imperfect designs. // Drops of water. // The perils of self-service checkouts. // And finally, forgetfully, it’s a good job his wife has skillz.

Joy Pullmann on when feminist feelings collide with science: 

Throughout her dissertation, [doctoral candidate, Laura] Parson asserts that women and minorities are uniquely challenged by the idea that science can provide objective information about the natural world. This is an unfair assumption, she says, because the concept of objectivity is too hard for women and minorities to understand. “Notions of absolute truth and a single reality” are “masculine,” she says, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory… Rather than rejecting this insulting view of women and minorities’ intellectual capacities, Parson uses it as a pretext to advocate that science classes abandon the scientific method itself… and all other “male” forms of oppression, such as “weed-out courses, courses that grade on a curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, an individualistic culture, and comprehensive exams.”

Feminism is of course famed for its intellectual rigour. 

And in other, utterly unrelated news: 

Many elite universities relegate Women’s Studies degree programmes to second-class status.

Nick Gillespie interviews Instapundit himself, Professor Glenn Reynolds:  

It’s a small number of companies that really control almost all social media, and they all kind of lean left. Facebook has been accused, and I think credibly, of a lot of political bias, and there are experiments that suggest they could swing an election by manipulating their flow of news and views. At some level, you say that’s just private enterprise and they can do what they want, but at another level, it’s a little more troubling that they are kind of a monopoly and they’re politically in the tank with an administration that is doing them a lot of favours… I’m not so sure we aren’t approaching the point where people might want to think about anti-trust. And I know we’re past the point where, if these were companies that operated with a slant towards Republicans, everyone would be calling for anti-trust regulation right away.

And at Claremont College, your “extremely toxic” masculinity is being discussed:  

Miles Robinson, who attended the event, told the Claremont Independent that among attendees there was “a common consensus that masculinity is harmful both to those who express it and those affected by it.” Robinson added that all of the organisers, as well most of the attendees, are female.

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

In the interests of furthering public awareness, here’s an extensive list of potentially offensive words and expressions that you probably shouldn’t use on pre-watershed television. Oh, don’t pretend you’re not curious. There are at least a couple on there I wasn’t previously familiar with. And no Googling.

Via the invariably genteel Mr Tim Worstall.

From Columbia University, a tale of classroom “gender misconduct”: 

I met with my dean the next afternoon. She told me the same thing my professor had: I had called myself handsome and this was unacceptable. My dean tried to make me agree that I would never do this again.

Describing oneself as handsome – jokingly, in Chinese, in Chinese class – is a sign of “white privilege.” And will get you reported to the Gender-Based Misconduct Office by an anonymous classmate.

She told me if I want to make those jokes, I should come to her [during] office hours to do so.

Parents and alumni, please take note.

Some people are just really hard to please: 

When they showed up carrying racial protest signs to the university’s annual DePauw Dialogue on Wednesday, the audience started applauding. “Stop fucking clapping!” some protesters yelled, a student who was near the commotion told The College Fix. They later complained about the applause on social media. The protesters’ irritation with the spotlight didn’t end there. At the end of their campus march, they “asked a photographer to stop taking pictures and confronted him when he refused,” The DePauw student newspaper reported.

So, to recap. Forty or so “social justice” protestors disrupt a keynote address at DePauw University, holding signs that scold the audience for being insufficiently deferential to the protestors’ racial fixations and delusions of being oppressed. Being schooled in “privilege and identity,” and therefore suitably cowed and pretentious, the audience starts applauding the disruption, and applauding the scolding being aimed at them. And then those applauding are promptly scolded for doing so.

After the event, protestor Justin Collado announced via Facebook:

It was very shocking and upsetting when the student body and faculty… decided to clap at our struggle, our voices. It felt as if we were not taken seriously. We are here, as a community, to make a change and see difference on this campus. We will not be looked as a joke [sic].

Approval is oppressive. Also grammar. But for God’s sake, don’t laugh.

Another protestor, resident assistant Amata Giramata, denounced the applause as a display of “white sympathy,” which is apparently the wrong kind of sympathy, and is therefore offensive:

Dear DePauw, why is your first reaction to my protests, clapping? My activism is not a show.

Oh madam, I beg to differ.

Update, via the comments:

They strike when you’re asleep. (h/t, Damian) // Geometric cakes. // Size comparisons. // A brief history of curry. // Could you flush 240lbs of mercury down a toilet? If you’re going to try this, use the neighbour’s toilet. // How to build a human heart. // What happened to the flags on the Moon? // Nightsatan and the Loops of Doom is a post-apocalyptic synthesizer film. // Orson Welles does Dickens. // “Mister Doctor?” Oh Mads. // Dog and friend. // Four strings. // Outfolded is a game. // When you’re hungry but not that hungry. // Trash birds and other beasts. // The thrill of male baldness: “My hair is like another appendage.” // “An Australian tradesman has been bitten by a venomous spider on the penis for a second time.” // And then, mid-air, his propeller fell off.

Human capital is the ability to create the material things that constitute wealth… A classic example: In the 1970s, Uganda decided that the Gujarati population, from India, were just too wealthy and controlled too much of the economy. The Ugandans expelled them and wouldn’t let them take their wealth with them. And so the Gujaratis arrived, mostly in England, destitute. Meanwhile, the Ugandan government had taken over all of this material stuff. A few years later, the Gujaratis were prosperous in England, and the Ugandan economy collapsed. Because they didn’t have people who knew how to do what the Gujaratis were doing. It’s also one of the problems of trying to finance things by confiscating the wealth of the wealthy. All you can confiscate is the material wealth. You cannot confiscate human capital.

Thomas Sowell on wealth, poverty and Flat Earth economics:  

Fans of car-crash interviews may enjoy these extracts from the BBC’s Today Programme, in which Ms Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, shares her deep thinking on the subject of “safe spaces” and campus censorship.

Do stay tuned for her thoughts on the University of Birmingham as “a Zionist outpost.”

Via Julia. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Well, Soil Is Sort Of Brown. 

Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”  

Ladies First. 

You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.

“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view. 

Answers On A Postcard, Please.

Squat enthusiast invites readers to “imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar,” and someone else’s property. 

Says Ms Cosslett, “Communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members.” Readers who as students shared a house and cleaning duties, in theory at least, will no doubt testify to the practicality of this approach and the lofty hygiene standards that invariably resulted. Now imagine those high standards applied to parenting and childcare.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.