Or, A Demonstration Of Patience.

“You’re saying we should organise our societies along the lines of the lobsters…”

In this largely unedited video, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman interviews Jordan Peterson.

I use the word interview quite loosely. In fact, I propose a drinking game, in which you take a shot of tequila every time Ms Newman somehow misses the point entirely and interrupts with the words, “You’re saying…”

The pain is real. 

Roger Kimball on “shitholes” and theatrical indignation: 

And here we come to a second curiosity in the preening and ecstatic outrage over the president’s comment. Everyone, near enough, knows that he was telling a home truth. It was outrageous not because he said something crude that was untrue. Quite the contrary: it was outrageous precisely because it was true but intolerable to progressive sensitivities. In other words, the potency of taboo is still strong in our superficially rational culture. There are some things — quite a few, actually, and the list keeps growing — about which one cannot speak the truth or, in many cases, even raise as a subject for discussion without violating the unspoken pact of liberal sanctimoniousness. Donald Trump, of course, does this regularly, delightedly.

Tim Newman on the same: 

Trump’s comments are pretty innocuous to anyone who is not a deranged anti-Trumper or a fully paid-up member of the media or political establishments. He’s asked the question millions of people across America and Europe have been asking for years, waiting in vain for their leaders to do so. And now he has, and the reason his opponents have gone apoplectic is because they know how much this will resonate with ordinary people they wish didn’t exist. That, and they wish to virtue-signal in order to keep their places in what they think is polite society.

And Mitchell Gunter on the posturing of Antifa – and sociopathy as a lifestyle choice: 

Autocorrect of note. (h/t, dicentra) || Unwanted caller. || Oh, Waitrose, never change. || Why blue is rare in nature. || 8-bit cat. || Abandoned castles. || “What a cute little chicken.” || How to take a photo of a stealth bomber flying over the Rose Bowl, from above. || Flying bathtub. Well, a hovering bathtub, but still. || The Bourne Identity (1988), starring… er, Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Japanese people attempt to eat Marmite. || The future is now. || Pretty fish. || Action figures. || This. || They do this better than you do. (h/t, Obnoxio) || The thrill of Bismuth. || Cardboard beings. || The Great Hedge of India. || Night light. || Norwegian train-driver cam. || A holiday memory to cherish. || And finally, painstakingly, marbles, magnets and music.

Laziness, apparently, is “a political stance.” Specifically, 

As political action, laziness… provides postqualitative inquiry with an additional tool for contributing to social justice via social research. Laziness combats the neoliberal condition in which academic research is situated and might serve as a virtue of postqualitative inquiry.

Ah, yes. The neoliberal condition of modern academia.

To meet social justice commitments, postqualitative inquiry must affirmatively disavow neoliberalism and confront it with new sets of materialist-empiricist toolkits for configuring assemblages in retaliation of the reductionist economic becomings and becoming-economies. We must refute our work. We must become lazy.

The author of this unhappy word-pile, Professor Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, is the department chair of higher education at the University of Denver. To spare you needless exposure to the professor’s prose, Greg Piper of The College Fix offers a handy summary: 

Unsurprisingly, the professor says the concept of laziness is used to harm poor people, nonwhites, “overweight individuals” and women. But they can also use laziness as a weapon against “the dominant power structure” by, for example, housekeepers “completing the minimum required to keep their jobs” to protest “the subjugation of their profession and personhood.”

Not hoovering under the sofa is, it turns out, a radical act, a feat of protest and empowerment.

The full paper can be perused here. Though I feel I should point out that it’s a wearying thing and may inspire thoughts of self-harm.

When not championing the doing of things in a tardy, half-arsed way, and driving his car back and forth over the English language, Professor Gildersleeve mingles with “historically marginalised communities” and “non-dominant youth,” where his prose and searing insights will no doubt prompt much nodding and the rubbing of many chins.