Christina Hoff Sommers on the fantasies and evasions of hashtag feminism: 

Someone needs to tell [campus feminists] that most of [their] statistics are specious and that… they are among the most liberated and privileged — and safest — people on earth. Because their professors would not tell them, that someone turned out to be me; for this I was furnished with a police escort on more than one occasion… Too often, today’s gender activists are not fighting injustice, but fighting phantom epidemics and nursing petty grievances. Two leading feminist hashtags of 2015 are #FreeTheNipples and #LovetheLines. The former is a campaign to desexualise women’s breasts; the latter promotes stretch-mark acceptance. If the imprisoned women of Iran and Afghanistan were free to tweet, what would they say about these struggles?

Ah, but in terms of “oppression” and “patriarchal assumptions” – according to feminist scholarship – the average American campus is indistinguishable from Uganda and Somalia. What, you didn’t know?

John Leo shares a list of things that are apparently racist, including hoop skirts, raised eyebrows and Christmas dinner: 

Writer Ron Rosenbaum said in Slate that racism accounts for the popularity of white-meat turkey over more flavourful dark meat. “White meat turkey has no taste,” he explained. “Despite its superior taste, dark meat has dark undertones for some. Dark meat seems to summon up ancient fears of contamination and miscegenation as opposed to the supposed superior purity of white meat.”

And Peter Fricke notes a progressive approach to shoplifting: 

Everett Mitchell, a former assistant district attorney, suggested that communities of colour may prefer that police refrain from enforcing laws against theft from large retail chains because responding to such crimes leads to an increased police presence in neighbourhoods where shoplifting is prevalent.

Apparently Mr Mitchell prefers “restorative justice” and “community service” for non-violent offenders under the age of 25. Though one wonders how justice of any kind is to be achieved if criminals with brown skin mustn’t be apprehended.

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

Janice Fiamengo explains why she’s happy to be called an “anti-feminist”:  

If further explanation is required, it may be worth revisiting this video here, which offers vivid illustrations of the behaviour Fiamengo describes, including harassment, thuggery, and the spectacle of supposedly empowered feminists getting quite literally hysterical. See also this related video, in which a feminist professor of philosophy, Alice McLachlan, tells us that she’s “warmed” by the sight of students – self-imagined intellectuals – congratulating themselves for making discussion impossible. Apparently Ms McLachlan, whose gift for dishonesty is something to behold, “cares a lot about free speech.” Just not for people who might dare to disagree with her. But then we mustn’t expect consistency and logic from a professor of philosophy.

Paul Joseph Watson on people who like the idea of a “white privilege” tax: 

Asked to sign the petition to support a 1% income tax on all white Americans in order to “even out the playing field” and redistribute the wealth amongst minority communities, the first man in the clip is incredulous that such a policy would pass but signs his name to it anyway. After a Puerto Rican man signs the petition, another individual who admits he is a non-resident asks for clarification, remarking, “so in other words, tax the white man?” before signing the paper. “We’re gonna take the silver spoon out of the white people’s mouths and put it back into yours,” [prankster Mike] Dice tells an African American man who enthusiastically signs the petition before stating, “appreciate it, man!”

Somewhat related and somewhat less funny. 

Heather Mac Donald on women in science: 

The myth of a sexist science hiring process has persisted, even though it is contradicted every day by the observable characteristics of faculty searches. And that myth has given rise to a stupendously expensive campus bureaucracy tasked with increasing diversity and combating alleged faculty bias. Last month, the University of California at Los Angeles hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the jaw-dropping salary of $354,900 — enough to cover the tuition of nearly 30 underprivileged students a year.

And again, on the University of California’s plan to extinguish WrongThought™: 

The “message” conveyed by this particular microaggression, according to the university’s “Recognising Microaggressions Tool,” is that “people of colour are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” Now where would anyone get that idea? Well, you might ask any high school senior, steeped in his class’s SAT rankings, if it’s true that “people of colour” are given “extra benefits” in college admissions. He will laugh at your naïveté. A 2004 study of three top-tier universities, published in Social Science Quarterly, found that black students were favoured over whites by a factor of 5.5 and that being black got students an extra 230 SAT points on a 1,600-point scale. Such massive preferences for “under-represented minorities” are found at every selective college and graduate school. Every student knows this, and yet diversity protocol requires pretending that preferences don’t exist.

Regular readers will be familiar with ‘progressive’ interference in school discipline policies and the emergence of punishment quotas based on race. And familiar, too, with the grotesque consequences. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Franklin Einspruch on the Great Boston Kimono Outrage of 2015: 

Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants… This incident — call it Kimonogate — demonstrates just how far the new puritans are willing to reach to impose their version of politics upon all of our pleasures. Watching Chinese and South Asians lump themselves into an aggregate for the sake of claiming offence on behalf of the Japanese, when that conflation of Asian identities is an established microaggression, is weird enough. Worrying that someone might touch a robe Orientalistically is out there in tinfoil-hat territory. Is that the kind of person you want deciding which activities you’re allowed to enjoy at the art museum? 

Franklin also has a message for the modishly indignant.  

Thomas Sowell on favoured narratives and unintended consequences: 

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

And Katherine Timpf reports from the throbbing edge of academic enquiry: 

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” – so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird… Dr Williams [director of social work at Idaho State University] explained that no one should be bothered by a person wanting to drink another person’s blood because “it is generally expected within the community that vampires should act ethically and responsibly in feeding practices,” and it’s not their blood-drinking that’s the real problem here — it’s the fact that they have to worry that other people will judge them for their blood-drinking.

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

Kristian Niemietz is upsetting readers of the Independent: 

I am amazed by how the British left has managed to convince themselves that Syriza somehow represented a break with “neoliberal politics” in Greece… After three and a half decades of economic statism and hyperinterventionism, how exactly is a party that stands for economic statism and hyperinterventionism a “break” with anything? […] The Greek economy had become a rent-seeking economy, in which economic activity is not about creating wealth, but about extracting wealth from others through the political process. If you’re afraid of dog-eat-dog capitalism, you haven’t seen dog-eat-dog socialism yet.

So far in the comments, Mr Niemietz has been called a “sadist,” a “little shit” and “one of Thatcher’s odious children.” Commenters slightly more supportive of Mr Niemietz are also being denounced as “fascists, xenophobes, bigots and racists.”

Tim Blair on the same.  

Ashe Schow on joke degrees: 

“Of those that graduate, some will have degrees that prepare them for nothing that is highly valued by society,” [parent, Anne] Gassel wrote. “I remember last year at a college open house hearing from a young woman who had a degree in women’s studies. She told the parents sitting in the room that she was lucky to get a job with the university. I don’t think she realised how that sounded.” She added: “Apparently the only thing a women’s studies degree prepares one for is working for a university admissions office to promote that degree to other gullible students.” 

And via TDK, Robert Tracinski on the shifting pieties of the left: 

Now a major portion of the left has stopped even pretending that they value work. Hence the growing support for a guaranteed minimum income, a lifetime handout large enough to provide everyone with a comfortable existence. The goal, according to one supporter of this idea, is precisely to allow people not to work… [But] the evidence suggests that when people are paid just for breathing, when they lose the basic habit of working, they don’t spend their time writing symphonies. They sit on the couch smoking pot and watching bad TV.

We’ve been here before, of course. 

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