Hubris meets nemesis. (h/t, Damian) // There’s a GoBoat with your name on it. // 12 hours of air conditioner hum. Use it wisely. // Darth by Darthwest. // Bath time. // Behold. // Do not swallow your phone. // For all your subtitled Soviet movie needs. (h/t, Tom) // “History’s most dangerous piece of intellectual malware.” // Suspiciously quiet on Mars. // Miniature nineteenth century photo studio. // Man’s besties. // The making of you. // Hardcore ivy. // Stiff breeze. // Headline of note. // Because Korean hip-hop exists. I denounce the cultural appropriation. // Corgi orgy. // And happily it’s washable. (h/t, Paul) // For the wee ones, a cuddlesome cephalopod. // Sculptural fish tanks. // And finally, thrillingly, the Great Crepitation Contest of 1946. It’s all in the knees, apparently.

Rachelle Peterson on the ugly racial dogma of Black Lives Matter: 

A major claim shared by most of the participants at Black Lives Matter 101 is that the black “lived experience” is impenetrable to non-blacks. The “narrative” is closed off and inaccessible to any who has not lived it, which means, by definition, all “whites.” According to these pronouncements, [non-black people] are inadvertent racists if they attempt to affirm black culture because they will inevitably present it as one-dimensional. And they are racists pure and simple if they do not affirm black culture in exactly the ways the Black Lives Matter activists prescribe. It is racism either way, and racism all the way down. […]

The spokesmen at Black Lives Matter 101 gave voice to what would quickly be recognised in any other context as claims of racial exclusivity. They were not shy about this or worried that it would undermine their larger claims. But, in fact, this view does undermine their larger claims. Their eagerness to take racial categorizations as fundamental, unalterable, and essentially “true,” contradicts their sense that racism is unjust and wrong. Replacing one form of racism with another takes us no closer to a fair and just society… What is the use of protesting racism by affirming an intrinsic all-powerful racial identity? 

And yes, there’s video of the gathering in question. Though to get through it, you may need a handy canister of nitrous oxide. 

Heather Mac Donald on the Great Mao-ling Psychodrama: 

My personal favourite in this tsunami of self-pity comes from Princeton’s put-upon minority students, who proclaimed that they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” a phrase first used by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who had picked cotton as a child on a Mississippi plantation and who was beaten for trying to vote. Can we have a reality check here? Every American college student today, no matter his race or gender, is among the most privileged individuals in human history. Millions of Chinese students are at this very moment studying their butts off in the hope of gaining access to the intellectual resources that American students take for granted. And being a Princeton or Yale student bears no resemblance – need I really say this? – to being a sharecropper in the Jim Crow South. 

Meanwhile, at Dartmouth College, merely suggesting that the lives of police officers matter too can result in indignation, vandalism and organised efforts to intimidate. Note which party college administrators are frightened of upsetting and willing to indulge with double standards, and note the somewhat creepy tactics of those who feel entitled to dictate the range of opinions and facts that may be expressed. Apparently, remembering police officers killed in the line of duty is nothing more than “white supremacist bullshit” and an act of “violence.”

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

Sad news, readers. The Telegraph reports that Ms Natalie Bennett will shortly be standing down as Green Party leader. Says the Great Green Articulator: 

I’m not a smooth, spin-trained, lifelong politician… It’s both my strength and my weakness that I answer the question.

Those wishing to relive Ms Bennett’s attempts to answer questions, and to recall facts and grapple with basic arithmetic, can do so here and here. And given Ms Bennett’s belief that “the world is sodden with stuff” and that therefore the people in it “cannot have more stuff,” and given her party’s commitment to economic recession and “realigning the [public’s] mind” until it embraces an overbearing state and a “new economic order,” also known as ruin, perhaps we should be thankful for her entertaining inadequacies.

Presented in full, Martin Durkin’s Brexit: The Movie: 

“It was devised to make sure that the great mass of the people could not control government… ever again.”

Doctor’s note of note. // Little Mercury, big Sun. // 200 years of U.S. immigration. // Antimatter yield calculator. // Notice of note. // At last, your very own garden igloo. // It’s a good-news-bad-news thing. // KFC edible nail polish. // For dining or ping pong, only $8,200. // Peak Waitrose. (h/t, Damian) // Honey on tap. // Hardcore icing. // For sufferers of phone battery neurosis. // Honest Trailers: Deadpool. // Juggle drumming. // The dead and deadening world of contemporary art. // Annoy your pets with the cat soundboard. // 90 episodes of Suspense (1942-1962). // 2,000 metres of fabric. // Middle-aged break-dancers. // Meanwhile, in China. // “Children make toys out of it.” // And finally, quite splendidly, the 2016 Mylapore Kapaleeswarar Temple Car Festival.

I’m an artist first. But I decided long ago that my art would be in the service of fighting oppression.

Oh dear. I think you can probably guess where this is going. The creative juggernaut in question is Hari Ziyad, “a black non-binary artist and writer whose work centres on creating through the arts alternative ways of living outside of systems of oppression.” And hence being published in Everyday Feminism, where readers and contributors are so varied and diverse, so daringly different.  

Since then, I’ve waded more deeply into social justice spaces, and I find myself surrounded more and more by people professing these same aspirations… It’s comforting not to have to constantly explain yourself and your work. It’s beautiful to learn from and be around folks who understand ideas like microaggressions, gaslighting, white fragility, and all the other odd terms that describe the myriad, important, and insidious ways oppression operates.

And being around other, eerily similar people with similar educations, all begging eerily similar questions, saves so much time and potential aggravation. Instead, the group can bask in its mutual gloriousness as it hovers high above the herd and any unsophisticated objections.

But wait, even paradise has its vipers:

Being in these spaces for a while now, I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly receiving feedback that my writing is inaccessible. I dismissed a lot of this critique on the basis that I am, at my core, a big idea and theory girl. My way of communicating isn’t supposed to be meant for everyone.

Well, obviously. After all, “social justice spaces” are for beings who are lofty and deluxe, and who, like our Everyday Feminist author, a theory girl with a beard, find “academic jargon comforting.” Which is to say, people who are enlightened, piously fretful, ostentatiously egalitarian, and therefore superior. The kinds of people who, unironically, write things like this:

I’d been frustrated by the workings of neoliberalism for the longest,

And,

When I wrote one of my first pieces on my gender journey, I naturally used a quote from Judith Butler about gender realities. Regarded as one of the foremost queer theorists, it made sense to use her words to explore my queer complexities.

Rise up, ye proletariat! Judith Butler will set you free!