I’m assuming the janitor was on holiday.

Via sH2.

Another illustration, I think, of leftism leading the credulous to failure and unhappiness. 

Update, via the comments: 

This letter [from the Communication Graduate Caucus and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Student Union] is a textbook illustration of the typical logical fallacies that first year university students are supposed to learn to avoid… [It] was presented as a joint effort and was presumably the result of collective deliberation, with sufficient time to craft and reconsider. That it is so muddled suggests in my opinion something about the arrested intellectual development induced by the feminist worldview.

Janice Fiamengo pokes through the mental wreckage of some standard feminist boilerplate, in which facts are either absent or inverted, questions are begged at a rate of knots, and criticism of feminist assumptions is equated with both racism and “co-ordinated campaigns of terror.” 

The smell of cat foreheads, in a spray. // Cat fight. // At last, a mind-controlled car. // The anti-earthquake bed you’ve always wanted. // Tea bag rocket. // Teaching robots. // Bluetooth talking glove. // Tiny plasters for teeny boo-boos. // Best played with headphones in a darkened room. // Over the holidays I’ll be drinking a bottle or two of this. // Header table tennis is the sport of kings. // The octopus and the coconut. // He plays the pedalboard faster than you do. // “This is not a Monty Python sketch.” // It’s not about feelings and sensitivity, they just like telling you what to do. // Sexy men of the synthesizer. For certain values of sexy. // Surf the old web. // Test tube dwellings. // The weather where you are. (h/t, Dr W) // And finally, inevitably, Star Wars minus Star Wars.

Yes, dear readers. It’s time to revisit the mental dumpster fire that is performance art. Specifically, the unliftable talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, whose piece Wandering with the Horizon – No. 1, Acclimating to Horizontal Movement was created for the 2015 Foster Prize Exhibition at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and performed in April of this year. During this six-hour performance, Ms Schaefer “investigates notions of liminality, human scale, and the impact that the external environment has on the body.” As I’m sure will become clear in this, sadly brief, video of edited highlights.

Readers left craving more of Ms Schaefer’s insights can here behold the artist standing inside some tyres, thereby inspiring deep thought on many, many levels. And here we see Ms Schaefer celebrating her weight loss (and her artistic immensity) by attempting to squeeze through a cat flap. Those with a yearning for art of an even higher intellectual gear can marvel at a piece from 2014, in which our fearless transgressor of norms “questions the role memory plays within experiential art mediums, how actions are read on different bodies, and current discource [sic] around documentation, re-performance, and authorship.” By gnawing at a lettuce while sprawling in her underpants. 

Ms Schaefer’s prize-winning artistic innovations have of course thrilled us previously. 

Because I know you hunger for a feminist poetry slam, here’s Anna Binkovitz sharing her inner being:

No, don’t thank me. All part of the service.

MSNBC’s race-hustling bedlamite Melissa Harris-Perry wants to tell you about Star Wars: 

I have a lot [of feelings] about the whole Darth Vader situation. Yeah, like, the part where he was totally a black guy whose name basically was James Earl Jones, who, and we were all, but while he was black, he was terrible and bad and awful and used to cut off white men’s hands, and didn’t, you know, actually claim his son. But as soon as he claims his son and goes over to the good, he takes off his mask and he is white. Yes, I have many, many feelings about that.

She gets quite breathless. 

Beauty water, $24. // A superconductor levitating on a Möbius strip. // ZX Spectrum emulator. // Grieg in 360 degrees. // Patriarchy caught on camera. (h/t, Liz) // “You can’t move, form memories, or – hopefully – feel pain.” // Period Jewellery. (h/t, Paul) // What does your uvula do? // His interstellar vehicle is bigger than yours. // “Penile disassembly” and other delightful mutilation. (h/t, Paul) // A fence made of bees. It deters elephants. // For detecting radar. // Photography in difficult conditions, 1914-17. // Elgar with a chicken on his head and other composers doing normal shit. // The ultimate executive desk toy is too big for your desk. // Apocalyptic commune lives in homes built from trash. // Your turn to carry the octobass. // Insert card as shown. // Now slap Kirk.

Isolation almost invariably means poverty and backwardness. You’re not aware of how the basic things of life are done differently in other parts of the world, and so people who are isolated will keep doing things the same way for centuries or thousands of years. For example, when the British landed in Australia, they found the Australian aborigines living at a Stone Age level. The aborigines had no idea of iron. Australia is one of the great sources of iron ore in the world.

Thomas Sowell discusses retrogressive culture, the importance of geography, and leftism versus success: 

Previously. And before that. And Sowell’s book The Vision of the Anointed is pretty much a must-have.  

Let’s call everyone “they”: Gender-neutral language should be the norm, not the exception.

So writes Silpa Kovvali, an exquisitely progressive she-person, in the pages of Salon:

We are forced to… give in and refer to our co-workers, students and friends as “he” or “she.” The result is that our language caps our ability to be progressive in this realm, forces us to immediately characterise people as male or female.

Which is only accurate and expected practically all of the time. And so,

We ought to revert to the gender neutral “they” whenever gender is not explicitly relevant.

You see, Ms Kovvali believes that gendered pronouns and honorifics are an “outdated linguistic tic.” And not a useful, rather concise source of information, a signal of respect, and a way of clarifying who it is we’re talking about.

The effect of elevating gender’s importance is felt by the cis-gendered as well. None of us fit neatly or entirely into a traditional gender binary, with all the expectations of masculinity and femininity that these buckets entail.

And yet despite this claim, and the somewhat random mention of buckets, almost all of us seem quite happy to be referred to as either male or female, as if it were in fact “relevant,” and the demand for gender-neutral pronouns remains, to say the least, a niche concern. I’d even venture to suggest that some of us might feel slighted by the wilful omission of – diminishing of – our respective maleness or femaleness. However, Ms Kovvali feels a need to inform those less enlightened, i.e., the rest of us, that,

The goal is greater inclusion… to be respectful to those we write about, and to be clear to our readers.

By risking affront on a daily basis and introducing a clumsy and needless ambiguity. Because vagueness is the new clarity.