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.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Repent at Leisure. 

Graduate job-seeker is shocked to discover that choices have consequences.  

And so we’re expected to believe that Mr Clark – who chose to make a bold statement by deliberately stretching and deforming his earlobes, to the extent that a jar of instant coffee could almost fit through the holes – is somehow being wronged, indeed oppressed, when, during job interviews, potential employers notice – and find inappropriate – the bold statement he’s chosen to make. Having decided at university to scandalise the less daring whenever in public, he now seems surprised when those same less daring people make choices of their own, i.e., not to hire him. But aren’t their raised eyebrows and looks of disgust what he wanted all along?

Comedy Economics. 

Improving the species through enforced poverty.

The New Economics Foundation is convinced that, once implemented, its recommendations would “heal the rifts in a divided Britain” and leave the population “satisfied.” That’s satisfied with less of course, and the authors make clear their disdain for the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.”

Scenes of Extended Fretting. 

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman discovers how competitive piety can be.  

Mr Hickman, whose ten years of struggling with ethical purity will be known to long-term readers, believes that the way to make poor people rich is to not buy their goods. 

Just Surrender to the Will of Clever People. 

Private education must be banned, says leftist academic. And reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage.”

Sadly, Dr Swift doesn’t say whether he has any personal experience of the state education system that he thinks the rest of us should make do with in the name of “social justice.” But perhaps he could share his comforting words with some of the children left at the mercy of such schools, where, as one national survey of teaching staff puts it, “a climate of violence” and “malicious disruption” is the norm, the assaulting of staff and pupils is commonplace, with almost half of those surveyed witnessing such behaviour “on a weekly basis,” and where vandalism of personal property is “part of the routine working environment.”

I’ve hidden free puppies in the greatest hits. 

Katherine Timpf on a “white privilege” conference for teachers and school administrators: 

“Many white people in Oregon have no idea that our schools and state are immersed in white culture and are uncomfortable and harmful to our students of colour, while also reinforcing the dominant nature of white culture in our white students and families,” one of the conference documents explains. The manual defines this “white culture” with a list of values, such as “promoting independence, self-expression, personal choice, individual thinking and achievement,” because apparently those are strictly “white” concepts and not emphasised in black communities.

Educators of pallor are being told, at public expense, that in order to become “anti-racist white allies,” they must first embrace the conceit that “All white people are racist. [Therefore] I am racist.” If that sounds not only absurd but a little sinister, practically Maoist, that’s because it is.

Here’s one of the many reasons why the leftist website Salon gets laughed at quite a lot. 

And Fraser Nelson agrees with Charlotte Church and Polly Toynbee, perhaps more than they would like: 

At the end of our tax returns, we declare how much tax we owe. [George] Osborne can introduce a new line in the tax return saying: if you think this isn’t enough, how much extra would you like to pay? People like Ms Toynbee and Ms Church can then fill in the extra so they can pay 50 per cent, or even 70 per cent, if they like. This ‘nudge’ tax reform would be consistent with the liberal principles of a Conservative government while allowing left-wingers to act along with their conscience and hand over more of their income to the government. So next time, rather than complain that they would be happy to pay 70 per cent tax, such people can proudly claim that they do pay 70 per cent tax. And they will have the tax return to prove it.

However, as we’ve seen, Polly is much more troubled by what you earn and keep than by what she earns and keeps – which, given her six-figure Guardian income, plus appearance fees, royalties and property portfolio, is quite a feat. Like many of her peers, Ms Toynbee thinks that voting for the state to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings is somehow an act of altruism. It’s also, conveniently, presented as an excuse for not using her own considerable resources personally, directly, to help those she deems deserving. And if a well-heeled leftist bangs on week after week about how terrible unequal incomes are and how something must be done urgently – and then says she won’t do what she insists is morally imperative unless the state forces her to do it – this isn’t a resounding affirmation of her professed principles.

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

Eugene Volokh on the now-official “microaggression” of criticising leftist assumptions:  

I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing. I like to think that I’m generally polite, so I won’t express these views rudely. And I try not to inject my own irrelevant opinions into classes I teach, so there are many situations in which I won’t bring up these views simply because it’s not my job to express my views in those contexts. But the document that I quote isn’t about keeping classes on-topic or preventing personal insults — it’s about suppressing particular viewpoints. And what’s tenure for, if not to resist these attempts to stop the expression of unpopular views?

If, for example, you don’t regard a person’s melanin level as both a fascinating detail of their being and an inexhaustible license to invoke victimhood and deference, then you’re probably committing a microaggression. And the publicly-funded University of California thinks you may be “sending denigrating messages” and “creating a hostile learning environment” because you aren’t awed and enthralled by how brown a person is.

Charles C W Cooke finds a modern echo of an old George Orwell quote: 

“We don’t want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare,” says [Californian school teacher, Dana] Disbiber. “Worry not, teaching him helps the progressive cause,” replies [New Republic columnist, Elizabeth Stoker] Bruenig… When politics is everything and everything is politics, nothing escapes the commissar’s judgment. It is one thing to analyse art for its political content — critically necessary even – but it is quite another to subjugate one’s view of that art to one’s politics.

Of course Orwell, like Shakespeare, is – to use Disbiber’s parlance – a dead white male, and worse, a critic of piously narrow attitudes like those of Dana Disbiber. We must therefore regard both authors as insufficiently progressive and entirely devoid of relevance.  

And in other thrilling academic news: 

Utah Valley University, with an enrolment of about 34,000 students, is trying out a staircase with lanes. Lane one is for walkers, two for runners and three for texters.

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