I have a cold and am feeling less than my usual scintillating self. I am therefore declaring an open thread. You know the drill. Share links and bicker. And send biscuits.

The reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.

Fearless masked heroes harass and berate the elderly and disabled.

For “social justice,” no doubt.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” shrieks the masked young woman, flanked by her masked comrades for intimidation purposes, and while jabbing her finger in the face of a random man and preventing his elderly, disabled mother from crossing the road.

Update, via the comments:

A longer video of the scene, featuring more of our bandana-wearing bedlamite, can be found here.

It must be strange to inhabit a social circle in which gratuitously harassing the elderly and disabled, and putting them in some fear for their safety, is regarded as a credential and proof of righteousness. To believe that such behaviour makes you look good and will earn you in-group status. It’s a pretty good measure of just how perverse, and morally demented, the Antifa mindset is.

It reminded me of a telling incident at a conservative convention during the Occupy fad of 2011, in which a mob of Occupiers, largely middle-class Clown Quarter students, amused themselves by trapping a random disabled woman – in a wheelchair and with an assistance dog – jeering at her predicament and telling her, “This is what democracy looks like.” Because nothing screams radical piety like preventing a disabled woman from getting home. And then assaulting her, while trying to steal her assistance dog. Sadly, video of the incident – complete with grinning faces – seems to have been purged from YouTube.

Update 2:

Nommy-nommy-nom. (h/t, Jeff) || Portal says no. || Night vision injections. || Incoming enrichment. || Discharges of note. || Scholarship, baby. || It has four bedrooms and a room full of sand. (h/t, Things) || Bad art, breasts and adhesive tape. || Behold young love, it’s a precious thing. || Wee things called euglenoids. || 251 words you can spell with a calculator. || Cities, accelerated. || Sisterhood. || Teaching AI to play hide-and-seek. || Doing it for science. || Odeon cinemas of the 1930s. || Does anyone here know sign language? (h/t, Darleen) || He’s making the rest of us look bad. || He does this better than you do. || Hers is bigger than yours. || And finally, as situations go, it left some room for improvement.

In the world of the woke, where all shoes are clown shoes, a little pushback: 

A teacher in Minnesota who had complained about racial quotas in school discipline has been awarded over half a million dollars in a settlement. Aaron Benner, who’s black, alleged retaliation by the St Paul Public Schools in the form of four “personnel investigations” following his criticism of discipline policies… Benner said, “We are crippling black students with racial equity plans that do a disservice. We should not be telling minority students they will not be disciplined the same as other students when their behaviour is unacceptable and sometimes even violent.”

Those ‘progressive’ discipline quotas – essentially, a racial ‘free hits’ policy – have of course been mentioned here before, along with their predictable and horrifying consequences.

As I noted at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else.

Such that seven different experiments, in seven different cities, resulted in seven dramatic surges in classroom violence, up to and including actual riots. While white teachers who found themselves being punched in the face, resulting in trips to hospital and permanent injury, were subsequently lectured on their “unconscious biases” and “white privilege,” and told to take comfort in free emergency whistles.

This, then, is “racial equity,” according to our betters. See how it shines.

Update, via the comments:

I got nuthin’. Nada. Zilch. Though I’m putting it down to my lofty standards rather than, say, a lack of mojo or imagination.

Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

Branding decision of note. (h/t, Damian) || They do this better than you do. (h/t, Dicentra) || Baby barn owl hears thunder. || Bus terminal rotation. || Abductees. || Objects in ice. || Mobile phone sales, animated. || Flat-lay inventories of emergency vehicles. || Nommy-nommy-nom. || A drone, some cheesy music and a roller-coaster. || Today’s words are impulse control issues. || Walking in the rain. || “A camera took images of a corpse every 30 minutes. The corpse showed signs of movement.” || Sanitation worker’s museum of trash. || Toilet-mirror note of note. || Heh. || Also heh. || At last, herbal tea on a lollypop stick. || And finally, when your headline includes the words “massive semen explosion.”

Matthew Continetti on the competitive pieties of woke schooling: 

Parents opted their children out of standardised tests, which they deemed “structurally biased, even racist, because non-white students had the lowest scores.” Without tests, there was no way to measure the progress of the student body. The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral. At a Parent–Teacher Association meeting, families split into warring factions. One side was furious at the school for making such an important decision arbitrarily and autonomously. “The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels — and not just on the bathroom doors — led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.”

Mr Continetti is referring to this first-hand tale of bewilderment and woe, in which there’s much to widen the eyes. Regarding the toilet drama mentioned above, this bears quoting:

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms… As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

Update, via the comments: 

We’ve been here before, of course:

Parents only discovered the campaign – which asserts that white pupils are complicit in an “invisible system of privilege” – when their children began complaining about it.

Also, open thread. 

The battle for Brexit, the nature of the struggle, has become much more clear [than it was three years ago]. Before, it was, “Ooh, should we be part of the EU? Should we not be part of the EU?” Now, I think it’s much more clearly a class struggle… On the one hand, you have people who are very much part of the establishment, people who are in the public sector, or who are members of organisations that are paid for out of taxation, whose jobs depend on regulating the lives of others… the arts establishment, the university establishment… You can tell when you go to a party, say, who’s likely to be Brexit and who’s not likely to be Brexit… The media is an utterly ‘Remain’ industry, and they’re absolutely furious.

Peter Whittle interviews filmmaker Martin Durkin.

Two of Durkin’s films – Brexit: The Movie and Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary – have been featured here before, in full, and are strongly recommended. The subsequent threads are also worth a peek.

Update: 

The old word is treason… A large part of the British political elite has deliberately gone and negotiated against their own country…. They regard [the electorate] with absolute contempt.

Via Samizdata, and very much related, David Starkey has some thoughts.  

Also, open thread.

Peeling skillz. (h/t, Dicentra) || Ink-powered leaf. || No, you first. || Can snails fart? || Does it fart? A quiz for all the family. || Infinite patterns. (h/t, Morpork) || Your children, their politics. (h/t, Darleen) || When you want your freshly squeezed in an orange-peel cup. || “Without the proper type of music your programme will be more difficult.” || I hadn’t noticed these. || What are the odds? || Whatever it is, it smells funny. || At last, a decoy keyboard for your cat. || “You’re more likely to become a Navy Seal than click a banner ad.” || “Am I being detained?” || Blind engineer invents interactive smart-cane. || Because you’ve always wanted asymmetrical jeans. || And finally, obviously, hers is bigger than yours.

Over at Vox, where leftist brains pulsate, Ms Kelsey Piper has an idea: 

The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely… There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote… I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly, and it’s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they’ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway.

I didn’t say it was a good one.

It occurs to me that if you start demanding that small children be allowed to vote in general elections – largely because you assume that their choices, their politics, will tend to mirror your own – then perhaps it’s time to ponder why your own politics correspond with the imagined preferences of children, who are, by definition, unworldly and irresponsible. Such that you grudgingly concede that, “Enfranchising everyone [i.e., including small children] will make the electorate less informed on average.” The rest of us, meanwhile, may wish to ponder whether a leftist’s desire to exploit the ignorance of small children in order to further her own socialist vanities is not only farcical, but degenerate. 

We’ve been here before, of course, when Professor David Runciman claimed that not allowing primary school children to vote alongside adults amounts to “an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.” As if small children are renowned for their selflessness and conscientious forethought. As noted at the time,

The irony being that children and teenagers tend to be quite selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree unbecoming in adults, and are accustomed to free stuff, all paid for out of sight by someone else, much to the youngsters’ indifference. It would therefore hardly be surprising if voting children tended to favour policies that pile up unsustainable debt, all left for whatever generations follow them… What comes to mind is an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, in which the boys steal Hal’s credit card and run away to start a new and grander life in a hotel room, making enthusiastic use of room service.

How this sits with Ms Piper’s claim that “Kids have… a greater stake in political issues than adults do,” I leave to the reader.