Farewell, old friend. (h/t, Damian) || High-speed fabulousness is now a thing. || Lifestyle choice. Choose wisely, children. || A compendium of skillz. (h/t, Obnoxio) || The interactive Bluetooth mood-light salt dispenser you’ve all been waiting for. || Today’s word is tonguebath. || Best done outdoors. || He does this better than you do. || Today’s other word is busted. (h/t, Tim) || Bond title sequences. || At last, a sweat towel for your ta-tas. || Illusion of note. || Kayaking through a cargo ship. || Ye internet of yore. || Voyage ongoing. || Grievance is easy. || The swinging Sixties. || Wardrobe solutions. || Something error happen. || Tiny desktop dramas. || Masculine Women and Feminine Men, 1932. || And finally, the absurd tragedy of the Great London Beer Flood of 1814.

Princeton University is offering a course this fall that will “examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness” through dance and performance art.

Yes, fat feminist dance therapy is a thing that exists. Needless to say, “intersectional dimensions of the fat body” will be thoroughly explored.

“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion. I just hope he gets fired for it.”

Regarding the ongoing ‘Google memo’ saga, I thought I’d lift the following from yesterday’s comments:

To recap. A Google software developer with a PhD in biology writes a polite, conciliatory and politically centrist memo suggesting that there’s a leftist groupthink problem in the company that inhibits open discussion; that men and women on average have differing preferences and abilities, albeit with a large overlap, and so “diversity” policies might benefit from bearing that in mind; and that perhaps people should be treated as individuals rather than as mascots of allegedly oppressed identity groups.

This is immediately met with ludicrous and wilful mischaracterisation by “social justice” Twitter and the ‘progressive’ media, including deliberately deleting the memo’s links to supporting data; a general refusal to engage honestly with the author’s points, or in many cases even to read them; baseless accusations of every ‘ism’ going; personal doxxing; boasts of blacklisting; and demands that the author of the memo be fired for his heresy and never employed again.

On grounds that his arguments are “violently offensive” and in need of being “silenced.” He is, you see, “committing violence” with his statistics. All of which rather proves the author’s point about leftist groupthink and its reliance on distortion, intimidation and outright hysteria.

The employee in question has of course now been fired. Readers who wish to be violently offended can read the memo here.

Update:

Jordan Peterson interviews James Damore, author of the supposedly scandalous and “fascist” memo. Skip forward to 5’10: 

Ian Miles Cheong pokes through the literature of Antifa affiliate Redneck Revolt: 

Much of the group’s official website includes rhetoric pulled straight out of Marxist publications, echoing various talking points about the evils of capitalism, property ownership, “artificial borders,” and basic systems of social order, including police, prisons, and courts. Redneck Revolt refers to these public institutions as “systems of social control [that] only exist to serve the rich,” and calls for the end of the “nation-state project.” It lists the US Armed Forces alongside the Ku Klux Klan as having “undermined the struggle for freedom among all people.” The “Resources” page of the group’s website offers a number of publications that promote violence, including a 36-page manual called the “Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla,” which advises readers on how to conduct urban warfare, with sections on “sabotage,” “kidnapping,” “executions,” and “terrorism.”

Related: “Violence can and should be… made commonplace.” And previously. 

Ed Driscoll on Lena Dunham’s latest gratuitous attempt to signal her piety: 

Dunham is now babbling “I live for my truth,” in response to being described, yet again, as a fabulist. In any case, as Ace of Spades writes of the above incident, the SJW crowd “are militant, they are dogmatic, they are intolerant, and they are vicious… They have convinced themselves that their Pleasurable Cruelty to people is justified because they act to vindicate the Righteousness of Strange Gods.” The incident may or may not have happened, but Dunham has chosen to position herself, as veteran journalist Kurt Loder tweeted, as “Lena Dunham, millionaire scourge of working-class women.”

Related, Iowahawk has an idea. 

Toni Airaksinen on complaints that women are being held back in class by “white” and “heteronormative” mathematics:

In a recent article titled Unpacking the Male Superiority Myth and Masculinization of Mathematics at the Intersection, Professor Luis A Leyva argues that factors such as teacher expectations and cultural norms “serve as gendering mechanisms that give rise to sex-based achievement differences.” Citing the “masculinization of mathematics,” Leyva then suggests that the apparent “gender gap” in mathematical ability is socially constructed (as opposed to arising from inherently different cognitive abilities) and therefore a “myth of male superiority.” 

Apparently, it’s “unfair” to hold all students to the same standards of proficiency, as this oppresses women. Or at least it oppresses feminists. And so mathematics must be corrected with “intersectionality theory” and lots of fretting about “whiteness” and “identity.” And very much related, this. Because the best way to teach engineering is to waste class time with lots of “social justice” hokum.

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

As time was short this week, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I will, however, set the ball rolling with, via Obnoxio, some classy signage; a collection of people posing for photographs with their television sets; a map showing the concentration of metal bands in Europe per million residents; some more Korean rap care of Elephants Gerald; and a reminder that among this world’s wonders are amateur video guides to public lavatories.

Oh, and this.