Behold the electric dicycle (with active rotation damping). // Now this is just showing off. // Eleven hundred cars roam the Hot Wheels City. // Cat caught barking, cover blown. // A compendium of really bad records. // You don’t want to mess with Russian border guard dogs. (h/t, Herb) // Andrew Breitbart interviewed. Parts 2, 3, 4, 5. // Burnt toast, only $1. // It’s raining ice-cream. // Real headlines. // Desktop terrariums. // Parents and their children (and a transporter malfunction). // Shake. // And via The Thin Man, “Adam Curtis believes that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world.” 

Alexander Vasudevan is a lecturer in “cultural and historical geography” with an interest in “radical politics” and “cartographies of protest.” He also, naturally, writes for the Guardian. Which may help explain his belief that proposals to criminalise squatting would create “jarring archipelagos of wealth and poverty” and, more importantly, remove “a potent symbol of protest.” Squatting, see, isn’t opportunist theft, it’s a form of political protest and therefore righteous by default:

The seizure and reclamation of space (temporary or otherwise) has become a key and potent symbol of protest here in the UK, from campus occupations to the playful interventions of groups such as UK Uncut.

Yes, we’ve seen those playful interventions and the people they tend to attract, many of whom wish to play with unsuspecting members of the public. And note the word reclamation, as if what’s being taken, often forcibly, somehow already belongs to the people who’ve decided to take it. Because… well, being terribly radical, they’re entitled, obviously.

As, for instance, when squatters invaded and occupied the home of Lisa Cockin’s mother, recently deceased, then used it as a venue for some rather lively parties. When the intruders were finally evicted, the Cockin family were left with repair costs and legal bills of several thousand pounds. Or when squatters stripped the home of Denise Joannides – even ripping up its floors – in what I’m sure could be construed as an act of radical protest.

What is at stake here is the further criminalisation of occupation-based tactics, which could severely limit the ability of vulnerable communities in particular to assert and stake their own geographical “right to the city.”

Protestors – at least those of a kind congenial to Mr Vasudevan – apparently have a right to storm and occupy a private business, a private home. How liberating it must be to have such moral certainty and a convenient disregard for boundaries and reciprocation. Note too the deployment of the Vulnerability Card, thereby implying that the nation’s squats are currently heaving with the frail, the elderly and the disabled. A strange insinuation, given that squatters are very likely to be young people like these, also gorged on “radical politics,” and whose only obvious disability is a failure to perceive their own absurd double standards.

Readers who wish to reclaim the belongings of Mr Vasudevan – say, his laptop or his phone – should head for the University of Nottingham.

Update, via the comments:

Your host has an article posted over at Minding the Campus. It expands on a few themes that may be familiar to regulars here.

Natural variations in cognitive ability, unlike those in musicality or athleticism, are a thorn in the paw of devout egalitarians. Avid readers of the Guardian’s arts and music pages would no doubt feel free to delight in the prowess of, say, Helen Mirren or Pinchas Zukerman without believing that everyone they passed on the street could with training do the same. It seems that only intelligence attracts contrarian manoeuvring.

The latest example of which comes via Fabian Tassano, author of Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture. Tassano steers us to the claims of senior philosophy lecturer and Guardian contributor Dr Nina Power, who insists, apparently based on nothing, that “everyone has the potential to understand everything,” and that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – well, just because  - “everyone is equally intelligent.”

Dr Power’s assertions are bold and her reasoning unobvious, indeed difficult to detect – thus meeting the key criteria of Very Deep Thought. She refers to the French postmodernist Jacques Rancière, whose “axiomatic assertion of the equality of intelligence” is, we’re told, “one of the most important ideas of the past decade.” On what basis Rancière felt entitled to make such claims – and why Dr Power sees fit to agree with them – remains somewhat mysterious. Dr Power does, however, cite fellow philosopher Peter Hallward, who tells us, “Everyone has the same intelligence, and differences in knowledge are simply a matter of opportunity and motivation. On the basis of this assumption, superior knowledge ceases to be a necessary qualification of the teacher, just as the process of explanation… ceases to be an integral part of teaching.”  

On this, Dr Power elaborates, highlighting another benefit of the egalitarian ideal: “In principle then, there is no reason why a teacher is smarter than his or her student, or why educators shouldn’t be able to learn alongside pupils in a shared ignorance.” 

Knowledge, competence and the ability to explain – none of these things will be needed in our socialist utopia. Children will simply inhale education or absorb it through osmosis. On reflection, a couple of the teachers at my old comprehensive were particularly unskilled at explaining their thinking and struggled to remember facts. At the time I had no idea this would soon be regarded as a cutting-edge educational strategy.

Readers may recall Priyamvada Gopal and her efforts to redefine violence so as to include anything to which she and her peers take political exception, thereby elevating actual thuggery to the status of retaliation. For Ms Gopal, setting fire to occupied buildings isn’t “real” violence and is no more objectionable than “hypocritical language.” This bold and convenient philosophy appears to have been embraced by other Guardian contributors – among them, chronic confabulator Laurie Penny, whose recent pronouncements on Twitter included the following (now deleted):

I have no problem with principled, thought-through political ‘violence.’

Note Ms Penny’s daring use of the inverted comma.

Smashing windows is property damage. That’s not the same thing as violence.

The term criminal damage is harder to diminish and smashing windows with bricks in a non-violent manner is not an easy thing to do on the streets of central London. Needless to say, it takes a fair amount of effort to heave larger, heavier objects through someone else’s windows. Just as it takes a certain disposition not to care particularly about where, or on whom, those objects may land along with shards of flying glass. And perhaps we should assume that Laurie has no objection to her belongings being destroyed by those who disagree with her, provided they feel sufficiently righteous and entitled.

Elsewhere, Leah Borromeo pursues a similar theme in a piece titled Protesters Can’t Disown the ‘Violent Minority’. She tells us, apparently in all seriousness,

There are no “good” protesters and no “bad” protesters. The state sees anyone who publicly declares their dissent to its laws and policies as one thing – a threat. When a state is threatened, it sends its henchmen out to quell it.

Yes, I know. Henchmen. All things considered, there’s a distinct whiff of projection. Another contender, I think, for our series of classic sentences.

The henchmen are the police. And you – student or teacher, patient or nurse – are that threat.

No doubt the state’s “henchmen” will be raiding the offices of the Guardian as I type and Polly Toynbee will soon be hauled away, hooded and in chains.

You can’t balance the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed.

Sadly, Ms Borromeo doesn’t pause to explain exactly how she and her peers are being violently oppressed. Perhaps she’s referring to the government’s modest reduction in the growth of public spending. We do, though, get plenty of self-flattering assertion:

To try to make distinctions between a “peaceful” and a “violent” protester is inherently flawed. Dissent is a violent reaction. Saying “no” is resistance… So – many apologies to those who wish to distance themselves from the “violent minority.” But we’re in this together. You may not like having to share a boat, but it’s a lot better than drowning.

Those who attended Saturday’s protest untroubled by violent urges, possibly with children in tow, may take exception to this casual flattening of distinctions. But people who managed to walk through central London without smashing windows, trashing cash machines or hurling projectiles at the police are, according to Ms Borromeo, no better than those who did.

Play with the solar system. // A digitised collection of handheld electronic games. // Get a six-pack in seconds. // Tornado meets hardware store. // A brief guide to space junk. // Man builds own scanning electron microscope. // Edible biro. // Modern-day Kyrgyzstan. // Unmelting. // Music and emotion. // Chicks plus webcam. // Tweaking James’ face. // The tax wedge. // For those who miss the shutdown of tube televisions. // The dark(er) side of socialism: “How do we bring down the stock markets?” // Photographs of frontier life, 1887-1892. (h/t, Peter Risdon) // Girls making gun sounds. // Why frogs are awesome.