How dare you want a say in what we, your betters, do to your children?

Previously. Via Damian Counsell. 

Colleges to avoid, #124:

New students at Pomona College, Claremont, California, were welcomed to campus with posters in their dorms… stating that all white people are racist. The signs state white people should “acknowledge your privilege” and “apologise if you’ve offended someone,” adding that offensive language includes words like “sassy” and “riot,” which are “racially coded.” “Understand that you are white, so it is inevitable that you have unconsciously learned racism,” it asserts. “Your unearned advantage must be acknowledged and your racism unlearned.” Further, the poster claims that white people should “just listen!” rather than explaining their own perspective.

Don’t talk back. Dialogue is oppressive. Unilateral racial scolding is where it’s at. Because, for people of pallor, your very existence is something to atone for – and no-one would ever take advantage of free hits. After much “unlearning,” and suitably chastened and humiliated, you will then take your place in the new and glorious progressive pecking order.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, here’s Jeff Goldstein on the ‘alt-right’ manifesto:

This counter-trend [to the identity politics of the left], make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimises individualism. As with much of the left, the alt-right remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent. […] 

It is an identity movement on a par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other tribal products of the kernel assumptions that inform cultural Marxism. That it pretends to throw off some of those trappings — it enforces an anti-PC ethos in a way that creates yet another tenor of the same PC, this time attached to white nationalism instead of multiculturalism — is but camouflage.

Worth reading in full. In the comments at the Federalist and on Twitter, things get lively, and a little strange.  

Heather Mac Donald on the world’s real unsafe spaces: 

Because Albinos’ body parts are believed to carry magical powers, their limbs are highly marketable — once obtained, of course, through mutilation or murder. Attending school for sisters Bibiana and Tindi Mashamba was a nightmare; not only did other children throw rocks and spit on them and teachers beat them, but the threat of murder was ever-present. So, like many Third World girls, they simply stayed home. But even such a retreat from the public realm couldn’t protect them. The day after their father’s funeral, Bibiana’s leg and two fingers were hacked off in the hope of a lucrative sale.

Good Samaritans brought the girls to the Orthopaedic Institute for Children in Los Angeles so as to provide Bibiana with a new prosthetic leg. And then students from USC’s law school started an asylum appeal for them. Did those law students seek to get them asylum in Nigeria, say, or Haiti, so that they wouldn’t be oppressed by white privilege? No, oddly, they targeted their asylum petition at the U.S. government, the place where victims of the brutality, superstition, and hatred that characterise so many Third World countries flee to (along with equally reviled Western Europe). The petition was successful, and now Bibiana and Tindi are students in Ojai, California, where they are eager to catch up on their lost schooling and go on to college. There are no reports as of yet of the girls being stoned in Ojai.

Seth Barron on the unmentionable costs of illegal immigration: 

New York’s Health + Hospitals Corporation, which runs the city’s massive public health infrastructure, takes it as its mission to provide care to anyone who needs it, without regard for immigration status. This policy is a major reason why HHC is on constant verge of financial collapse. During the last fiscal year, HHC needed an emergency allocation of $337 million from the city [i.e., taxpayers] just to keep its doors open, and the prognosis for the future is even worse. At an April press conference, Dr Ram Raju, president of HHC, said that caring for illegals consumes about one-third of his $7.6 billion annual budget. Rounding down, that means that $2.5 billion — of which the city is picking up an increasingly large chunk every year, as state and federal aid dries up — goes toward providing health care to illegal aliens in New York.

And Cathy Young on the alleged gender politics of headphone use:  

Back in 2013, Dan Bacon posted a piece titled “How to Talk to a Woman Who Is Wearing Headphones.” This three-year-old blogpost was dug up and pilloried by a Twitter activist named Brandon Evers, whose Twitter bio states, “I support intersectional feminism, but only women can decide if I’m a feminist” and helpfully clarifies that his personal pronouns are “he/him,” and whose Twitter feed is mostly one long exercise in ‘look how progressive and pro-feminist I am’ moral posturing. Brandon’s tweet quickly went viral with 18,000 retweets, and the outrage machine kicked in, with Bustle, Slate, and numerous other sites denouncing [Bacon’s] post as a creepy and misogynistic call to sexual harassment and boundary violation. Revelist, a publication for millennial women, compared Dan Bacon to mass murderer Elliott Rodger, who killed six people (four of them men) in 2014 because he was mad about being rejected by women.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Katherine Timpf:

Rachel Dolezal, the white lady who got busted pretending to be a black lady, has somehow managed to get herself invited to be a feature at a rally for natural black hair.

But of course there’s a rally for natural black hair. And of course the star turn is a blackface enthusiast who, being white, doesn’t have any.

Naturally Isis is a black hair salon founded by Isis Brantley, a “natural hair stylist” who, according to the description on her salon’s website, “has been a vibrant spokeswoman for black ancestral culture for over thirty years” and has been “actively involved in the fight for preserving cultural identity for African Americans.”

Says Ms Dolezal, 

It’s a justice issue and I’ve been a social justice activist for years. It’s really that simple.

That is all. Carry on.

At last, pre-distressed sneakers, only $590. // One for the high-culture cineastes among you. // Oh, the humanities. // The soft, autonomous robots are coming. // Sir Anthony Hopkins is having a spot of bother with his legions of pleasure-giving robots. // It’s a bourbon-chocolate sauce, obviously. // Blank windows. // The many pauses of Gene Wilder. // First woman on the Moon. (h/t, dicentra) // A little project for the weekend. // Always clean things with lasers. Except, perhaps, your face. // A dog’s life. // A well done burger drop. // You goat mail. // For making things. // On radiation dosage. // This. // “Social justice” in action. // It’s meatier than the average slug. // On stop-motion. // If you think you’ve had a rough day. // And finally, a personal one-seat anti-insect tent.

Ashe Schow on the dishonesties of “social justice” warriors:

A group allegedly dedicated to stopping online harassment and abuse used the same tactics it claimed to abhor to harass those it disagreed with politically. Crash Override Network, founded by Zoe Quinn… used tactics such as doxing (by which a person’s private contact information is published online in order to intimidate them) to harass people… For example, the group discussed trying to contact the superior officer of a Purple Heart recipient who had expressed support of Gamergate to try to silence him. The group also discussed contacting Google in an attempt to get an employee, Justine Tunney, fired after she also voiced support for Gamergate… Members of CON, including Quinn, have spoken out against online bullying before the United Nations, and have also worked with Google and Twitter allegedly to stop online harassment, all while engaging in the very same harassment.

The predictably sordid details can be found here. 

And – this is a good one – Brandon Morse and Lauren Southern on when “social justice” scolding is caught on camera, in all its glory: 

A social justice warrior named Annaliese Nielsen got into a Lyft car, spotted a Hawaiian bobblehead doll on the dashboard, and began to berate and threaten the driver unless he took the bobblehead doll down. According to her, it was offensive to Hawaiian people, and thus this man was in clear violation of her made-up social justice laws.

Comedy of a sort ensues, followed by threats, projection and abuse, and – outrageously – the polite driver’s sacking. This in turn is followed by his vindication and reinstatement, and then, for dear sweet Annaliese, a kind of payback. If, on watching the video, the word bitch comes to mind, I won’t be at all surprised.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

For me, my menstrual cycle is my portal to the blessedness of life… It’s like magic.

Here we go again: 

A woman by the name of Iris Josephina Verstappen decided it was imperative she smear her own menstrual blood under her eyes and on her hands while letting the blood flow freely down her legs for a nude photoshoot to stop so-called “period-shaming.”

There are photos at the link showing Ms Verstappen in full flow, as it were, so readers can determine for themselves just how uplifting and empowering it is to bleed all over yourself, and the floor, while waiting to be applauded. When not bleeding on things in a terribly radical fashion, Ms Verstappen is a “cycle awareness educator, doula, anthropologist” and, in her words, “an endlessly creative soul.” She offers “body friendly options for menstrual management.”

Whether she gets kickbacks from the local dry-cleaner is, as yet, unclear.

Previously, vaginal knitting.

Lifted from the comments yesterday, Class War unveil their latest triumph of radical activism. Because, according to one class warrior,

It’s our job for the rich to fear us. 

When not waging a “decisive battle against gentrification” by smashing the windows of an estate agent, the Class War Massive declare their ambition to “get rid of the rich” – by as yet unspecified but apparently terminal means. This heady intellectual broth has inevitably attracted our finest minds, among them, the self-styled “rebel ethnographer” Dr Lisa Mckenzie, whose mental adventures have previously entertained us. 

At last, a paper calculator. // Starring the computer. As seen in film and television. // Fun with grammar. // Flexils, like pencils but flexible. // Hippo table of note. // Hamster Mario. // The horsemen of Semonkong. (h/t, Coudal) // On the origins of Dick. // Arthur C Clarke reads extracts from 2001: A Space Odyssey. // Ruben really likes his job. // No, you fool. The other red one. // At last, your very own remote-controlled tugboat. // In 120 years, sprinters have gotten faster. (h/t, Things) // Tall and twisted buildings. // Well, it’s one way to do it, I suppose. // Umwelt. // Visiting cousin. // Shadow sculptures of note. // Sshh. Don’t tell them. (h/t, Ace) // Hornet turban. // Sliding doors of note. // Caterpillar excursion, Perth. // And finally, a near-perfect display of crashing very slowly.