Or, A Little Something To Cover The Emotional Wear And Tear.

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For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last twelve years, in over 2,600 posts and close to 100,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries. There you’ll find bulletins from the bleeding edge of academia; thrilling adventures in the world of art; the strange mental contortions of Laurie Penny; and tales of how the great outdoors – fresh air itself – is crushingly oppressive to intersectional feminists.

If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Also, open thread. 

Wing man. || “Hingst told the court that Short would enter Hingst’s small, windowless office several times a day and break wind.” || The complete North Bergen High School performance of Alien. || Our betters reminisce. || Eminently binge-able. || Salt mining. (h/t, Pogonip) || Skills. || Signage of note. (h/t, Dicentra) || 23 caves. || Mr Yoshimoto has a curry vending machine. || Crows bearing gifts. || Hand-cranked rhythm generator. || Hooters Air. || A feminist is corrected. (h/t, Darleen) || That’s exactly how I would do it. || The question you’ve always wanted to ask. || Tools of wooing. || Shopping mall ceiling of note. || And finally, the boys’ home-made flame-thrower was a partial success.

Via Mr Muldoon in the comments, our betters at work:

Laughable, yes. But not harmless:

Brad Polumbo on cultivated irresponsibility: 

During my final semester in college, I intentionally took a course focused on race, gender, and the history of oppression in the United States… The most jarring realisation: liberal academics define “oppression” so loosely that their victimhood narrative can never end… Each criterion is defined loosely enough to lend themselves to a kind of subjective self-victimisation. This is convincing a generation of young people that their life trajectories are beyond their control.

As noted here previously, woke piety is a kind of positional good, jealously defended and forever in peril. It’s a competitive gig and so the goal-posts have to move, generally by veering further into absurdity. And so we end up with agonised Guardian articles about being oppressed by free cake, and the menace posed by heteronormative pastries and spellcheck software, and about how men discussing barbecues is not only “oppressively penetrating,” but about as “oppressively penetrating” as a thing can be. And students with the moral wherewithal to resist this narrative may find themselves being denounced by their so-called educators.

Victor Davis Hanson on the social corrosive called “diversity”: 

For history’s rare multiracial and multi-ethnic republics, an e pluribus unum cohesion is essential. Each particular tribe must owe greater allegiance to the commonwealth than to those who superficially look or worship alike. Yet over the last 20 years we have deprecated “unity” and championed “diversity.” Americans are being urged by popular culture, universities, schools and government to emphasise their innate differences rather than their common similarities… Some hyphenate or add accents or foreign pronunciations to their names. Others fabricate phony ethnic pedigrees in hopes of gaining an edge in job-seeking or admissions. The common theme is to be anything other than just normal Americans for whom race, gender and ethnicity are incidental rather than essential to their character.

Taken at face value, “diversity” is the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be.

Professor Child’s presentation was not explicitly concerned with space exploration or Mars, which is not surprising since her area of expertise is indigenous education and history. She told us that indigenous people have travelled extensively – specifically, by canoe – and mentioned some indigenous people who travelled to Europe in earlier eras, though not by canoe.

A panel of woke scolds share their thoughts on space travel – which turn out to be rather limited and not of obvious use. They do, however, have thoughts, many thoughts, on how terrible able-bodied white men are.

Janice Fiamengo takes notes:

When not rambling about canoes, seemingly in search of a point, the five panellists – billed as a “diverse group of thought leaders” – inform us of the apparent need for deaf and disabled astronauts, in the name of “social justice,” and ask whether a mission to Mars would benefit Black Lives Matter.

No, really.

Lucianne Walcowicz, who appears in the video, complete with septum piercing and adolescent blue ‘do, has been mentioned here before. Readers may recall her insistence that the words frontier and unmanned are morally corrupting and should therefore be purged, along with any trace of gendered language.

And let’s not forget Marcie Bianco, whose ruminations on the subject of interplanetary travel also entertained us. Not least her claim that sending spacecraft to Mars is an act of “male entitlement” and akin to grabbing ladies’ genitals.

Oh, and do watch to the end. The closing exchange, around 20:40, is somewhat telling.

Update, via the comments:

Readers with even minimal knowledge of the topic may have noted that the contemporary space industry is hardly an exclusive domain of white men, able-bodied or otherwise. The head of SpaceX is female, and the last time I checked around half of NASA’s astronauts are female and of various colours. Female astronomers and planetary scientists are too numerous to list.

The panellists’ implicit conceit – that women and minority “folks” are somehow being excluded from space-related industries and subsequent discussions – is about as convincing as Dr Nord’s hair, or Ms Walkowicz’s unattractively incongruous shoes.

Dr Nord doesn’t seem remotely interested in the kinds of competence required to become an astronaut or astronomer, or engineer or whatever. Instead, he waffles about “power,” and speaks of being brown as if it were a credential in and of itself.

When pressed for particulars, he doesn’t appear to have any thoughts, beyond skin colour, on what attributes might be desirable among candidates for space exploration – a subject that doesn’t enthuse him. Which is a little odd, given that it’s the ostensible premise of the discussion. The reason for his presence.

Perhaps the doctor’s energies were directed to more pressing matters. Hairstyling, one assumes.

Given their alleged expertise, the panellists don’t seem very clear on what it is they want, beyond disdaining white men, the subject foremost on their minds, or how whatever it is that they want would improve space travel – the actual topic at hand – the practicalities of which appear to them entirely alien and boring.

The postscript to the video, with its awkward silence, is quite instructive in this regard and does rather reveal the panellists’ priorities. Despite the topic supposedly being discussed and despite their supposed expertise, the five panellists – this “diverse group of thought leaders” – have no response, nothing at all to contribute, and they seem to regard even the asking of the question with a kind of smug disdain.

As if it were unsophisticated. Terribly déclassé.

We are, however, told that we need more deaf and disabled people in space. Because space exploration just isn’t difficult enough and dangerous enough as it is. And choosing astronauts with hearing problems, poor eyesight and motor-control issues will make things much more exciting.

And frankly. when you’re asking, apparently in all seriousness, how a mission to Mars would benefit Black Lives Matter, as if it somehow should, I think we can say that the foolishness in the room has risen to hazardous levels.