Um… // The Thingamagoop 3000. Go on, buy it for the wife. // Imperfect produce. // At last, porn studies: “In what ways do GIFs augment or displace long-form hardcore?” // Probing the mantle. // Making winter with crushed marble. // Marketing Margaret Thatcher, 1983: “The antiquated computer Labour has breaks down once a week.” // Symmetrical breakfasts. // Telescopes in motion. // Tiny tools. // A 10,000 year clock inside a mountain in Texas. // Don’t put metal objects in the MRI. // How to calm a crying baby. // Conflict resolution. // Courage and snow. // Customised, printable wrapping paper. (h/t, Things) // Racing snakes. // Hours of daylight. // The Hubble advent calendar. // “Is she with you?” // Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 16.

This week, exhausted by the news, I dragged myself out of the house to a book fair, where I came across a new collection of utopian fiction by radical women.

Yes, dear reader. Laurie Penny is searching for comfort in this cruel, cruel world: 

When basic survival seems like a stretch goal, caught as we are between the rich and the rising seas, hope feels like an unaffordable luxury. The precise words I used to the bookseller were: “Shut up and take my money.”

Currently touring the United States, after touring much of Europe and visiting Australia, Laurie is once again explaining how hard it is to be radically left-wing, to be Laurie Penny, and how exhausting she finds the news.

There has never been a more urgent time for utopian ideas, precisely because the concept of a better world has never felt further away… Utopias require that we do the difficult, necessary work of envisioning a better world. This is why imagination is the first, best weapon of radicals and progressives.

And being radical and progressive herself, and of course heroic, Laurie is doing that “difficult, necessary work” before our very eyes, at a venue near you, by railing against “late-capitalist patriarchy.”  

From the anti-war movement to Occupy Wall Street to the reimagined Corbynite Labour party, everyone on the left are [sic] used to hearing… that we cannot point out what’s wrong with politics without instantly suggesting an alternative. This is nonsensical.

Expecting moral coherence and some concession to practicality is, says Laurie, “a great way of shutting down dissent.”

If you were being beaten up by a gang of armed thugs, you would be within your rights to demand that they stop doing so without listing alternative places they might land their blows – “not in my face” is enough. It is difficult to think clearly about a better world when you’re trying to protect your soft parts from heavy boots. 

Because forcibly ‘occupying’ the entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral, as Laurie and her comrades did in 2011, and blathering about “revolution” and an unspecified “new world order” – and then being laughed at as self-flattering and pretentious – that’s exactly like “being beaten up by a gang of armed thugs.” During the commotion in question, Laurie explained that the failure to generate a coherent, remotely practical set of demands – any at all – was due to “attacks from a hostile press while surviving sub-zero temperatures in central London.” Needless to say, during the ‘occupation’ the temperature in central London was, while Autumnal, never close to sub-zero.

Avert your eyes, readers, and shove things in your ears. This cultural appropriation may corrupt your mind.

See here for more of Ms Luna Lee and her gayageum blues stylings.

George Will on the terminal stages of leftist academia: 

A Washington State University professor said she would lower the grade of any student who used the term “illegal immigrants” when referring to immigrants here illegally. Another Washington State professor warned in his syllabus that white students who want “to do well” in his “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” should show their “grasp of history and social relations” by “deferring to the experiences of people of colour.” Another Washington State teacher, in her syllabus for “Women & Popular Culture,” warned that students risk “failure for the semester” if they use “derogatory/oppressive language” such as “referring to women/men as females or males.”

Janice Fiamengo on the same:  

What we are witnessing on university campuses across North America is not by accident or incidentally about the rejection of reason and of the Western intellectual inheritance. Its central object is to destroy the past and remake the present through the practice of the raised fist.

See also this collection of “social justice” demands by suitably processed students. And remember, it isn’t a spoof.

And Jonathan Haidt on the high school roots of this Idiot Weeping Fever™: 

As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimisers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open students’ minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t share their values.

As regular readers will have noticed, “social justice” dogma leads not to moral sophistication but to a kind of mental coarsening; a mix of vanity, unrealism and an absurd reactiveness. All cultivated and indulged by so-called educators who imagine themselves as radical and enlightened. And as Glenn Reynolds notes, 

A cynic might say that academia became fiercely supportive of free speech when such a stance was useful to protect leftists within its ranks, and lost interest in free speech once the leftists took control.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Via Peter Risdon and Feminist Bullshit, here’s a little something from the fat-activist blog Fierce Fatties, “home of the nouveau-bese”:

My friend was completely oblivious to how her actions [losing weight] could affect me at all. I chalk this up to pure self-centredness. 

I believe it’s called projection.

The disgruntled author, “hlkolaya,” aka Heather, describes herself as,

Avant-garde, serial activist, political, fat model, and vegan baker extraordinaire. 

And,

I weigh almost 300lbs and I have anorexia.

A selection of Heather’s activist ruminations, and her modelling portfolio, can be found at Fat Girl Posing.