Jim Goad on the “microaggressions” hustle: 

That’s what’s ultimately dangerous about this concept of “microaggresions” — even the demented fanatics who insist that such things actually exist will concede that the perpetrator may not harbour or exhibit any malice whatsoever… Under this framework, bigotry is solely in the eyes of the accuser. No matter how pleasant your demeanour or how generously you act, you can still be bludgeoned over the head with baseless accusations of unconscious racism, and your accuser will feel like a good person for doing it.

And no vain, vindictive soul would ever exploit that kind of leverage for purposes of their own, would they?

David French on academia’s racial quotas and ideological cleansing: 

If Americans broadly understood how the process works, support for affirmative action would diminish even further. First, few people understand how dramatic the boost is for favoured minority groups. If students were black or the ‘right’ kind of Latino, they would often receive admissions offers with test scores 20 or 30 percentile points lower than those of white or Asian students. When I expressed concern about an admissions offer to a black student with test scores in the 70th percentile — after we’d passed over white and Asian students with scores in the 98th percentile and far higher grades — I was told that we had to offer admission or we’d surely lose him to our Ivy League rivals. Second, these dramatic breaks rarely go to poor kids who are overcoming the challenges of ghetto schools.

And Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have been mining the naked cronyism and deep comedy of Australia’s taxpayer-funded art world:  

The finest grant of them all occurred in 2011, when Sydney artist Denis Beaubois received $20,000 from the Australia Council. Beaubois simply piled the cash into two stacks, put a glass box around it and called the resultant piece Currency. The arts grant and the art were one and the same. Then he put the money up for sale at an auction – where someone actually paid $21,350 to buy $20,000. ‘’The money I make will be used to finance part two of the project, which is a series of performance/video works on the division of labour, and capitalism,’’ Beaubois said. There is a much easier way for Beaubois and all Australian artists to study capitalism, and that is by participating in it. The Australia Council should be shut down, along with just about all arts funding. This would save close to $700 million per year and – absolutely guaranteed – would result in better art.

Artists making things that customers might like and wish to pay for directly, voluntarily? Why, the very idea.

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

If Thomas Sowell had a Twitter account it would look something like this.

By all means share any Sowellisms that catch your eye.

Via dicentra. 

Ultrasound for the blind. // Mud brick high-rise, Yemen. // Jack Kirby spreads. See Big Barda’s giant nutcrackers. // Cubes of food. // TypeDrummer. // Jetpacks over Dubai. // A catheter’s journey. // Iron Panda. // Those floaty things in your eyes. (h/t, MeFi) // How to fold a T-shirt. // “You can actually, physically, press her breasts together.” // Bach’s crab canon on a Möbius strip. (h/t, Randall) // Lollipops of note. // Chinese crowd shots. // Sandwich knife of note. // Van Gogh, animated. // Gravity. // It’s an advert for gardening. // The chemistry of gin. // 100,000 stars. // 20. // Tornado versus rainbow. // “I was told she wouldn’t live long so I set about filming her every day.” // SwimFin. // Sky Sharks. // And finally, via Ted, an underground bee mishap of note. 

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For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last eight years, the reheated series and greatest hits are good places to start. There you’ll find coverage of the high-minded arts, along with the blistering insights of leftist intellectuals, and regular bulletins from the world of academia, where WrongThought™ is purged for a fluffier tomorrow and where lust is corrected with feminist pornography. And do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads. 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.

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Further to the second item here, a musical interlude by Oberlin College Choir.

Via College Insurrection.