Robert Stacy McCain on bedlamite feminism: 

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, [Shulamith Firestone] declared that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” Firestone called for “an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family,” so that “sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticise our whole culture.” She flatly declared “pregnancy is barbaric,” described women as “the slave class,” and envisioned a “new society” in which “humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality — all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.” The fact that Shulamith Firestone was clinically insane (a paranoid schizophrenic who died alone in 2012 at age 67) might serve as sufficient rebuttal to her doctrine, but by the time her madness became evident — she was committed to a psychiatric unit in 1987 — the radical movement she helped launch had gained a solid foothold in academia, publishing, law and politics.

David Clemens on academia’s Clown Quarter and its self-inflicted decline: 

The Modern Language Association is the world’s largest organisation for scholars of literature and languages with about 24,000 members in over 100 countries. Like the rest of academia, the MLA leans solidly to the left, yet it still includes a “Radical Caucus” and a leftist “Politics and the Profession” subgroup. One older gent from the Radical Caucus sports a hammer-and-sickle lapel pin; another member works to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin’s reputation… Is there anything more absurd than a handful of academics retailing their revolutionary fantasies in the Grand Ballroom of a luxury hotel?

Professor Clemens was a voice of reason in the excellent documentary Indoctrinate U. 

And David Hookstead spots more campus leftists signalling their brilliance to an unworthy world: 

An upcoming workshop scheduled to take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to teach campus radicals and socialists how to manipulate campus resources to advance their agenda… One of the group’s overall goals, according to their website, is to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation.” The event includes sessions investigating what it means to be a thief, how to construct political narratives, and how to destabilise hegemonic spatial representations.

Given the costs of being a student whose time is spent engaged in pretentious Marxoid seething, and given how unlikely it is that such seething will attract employers or a salary, it may not surprise readers that the organisers are also very much opposed to “debt and hierarchies of knowledge.” Being expected to pay your bills as agreed – say, those misspent student loans – is, we learn, a “means of oppression.” Because destabilising hegemonic spatial representations is something that someone else should be forced to pay for.

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

When your mom blows your cover on Facebook. 

Via sk60. 

Dog uses human toilet better than many children. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // At last, the suppository slingshot. // Chinese art teacher builds own full-size Hulkbuster. // Incoming. // It’s all kicking off in Lego city. // Attention, sexy ladies: “For Skype date nights, I recommend going for a minimal, but semi-glam look.” (h/t, Insty) // Foetal development. // The international flag of planet Earth. // The untold story of Industrial Light & Magic. // Monsters from Mars. // The museum of pocket calculating devices. (h/t, Coudal) // A visit to a Tokyo stationery shop. // Trek gnomes. // The news, summarised in gifs. // Police sketches alongside actual mugshots. // Baby bees. // The Bluetooth-enabled KFC Tray Typer. // And finally, from sodding to bollocks, how to swear like a Brit.

Meanwhile, in criminal genius news: 

A man has been charged with stealing his own barrister’s mobile phone during an appearance at Bexley Magistrates’ Court. Bobby Heath, 25, was appearing in court to plead guilty to charges of possession of cannabis and driving without insurance… He has been bailed to appear again at Bexley Magistrates’ Court on June 2 regarding the alleged theft of the mobile phone.

Swiped from Julia, who has an eye for the adventures of our criminal classes. 

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.