An agony of sorts, spotted by Julia and several others during the National Union of Students’ currently ongoing Women’s Conference: 

No, you mustn’t laugh, says the Independent’s Andrew Griffin. Because clapping in support can break a woman in half: 

Madsen Pirie on the power of our fluffy and benign state broadcaster: 

The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine. Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.

Related. 

Heather Mac Donald on “rape culture” hysteria: 

The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers. Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies — that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery — is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of… And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in. […] If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed… there would be no more campuses. You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning. Why hasn’t that happened? Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

And Steven Hayward quotes several academics who tire of feminist melodrama and the politics of the mob: 

Personally, liberal [i.e., leftist] students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a Facebook page calling me a communist… the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican… The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip — not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery — and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a Twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

But remember, you mustn’t say no to them. Because that one tiny word is now “violent language,” for which you will be “held accountable.” 

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

In an eye-widening article that I recommend reading in full, Paul Sperry takes a look at ‘progressive’ education policy and its consequences: 

Thanks to talking circles and peer juries, “young people are now taking control of the environment,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan gushed in a 2014 speech to black students at Howard University. “It’s sort of a counter-intuitive thing for many of us as adults, but the more we give up power, the more we empower others, often the better things are,” Duncan added. “And empowering teenagers to be part of the solution, having them control the [classroom] environment, control the culture, be the leaders, listening to them, respecting them — when we do that, wonderful things happen for kids in communities that didn’t happen historically.”

Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.

A development repeated elsewhere, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, Santa Ana and Syracuse, and all of which is no doubt bewildering to such educators as Eric Butler, a “restorative justice co-ordinator,” whose prideful mantra is “I don’t blame, I don’t punish.” 

How very generous of him.  

After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack…

A white sixth-grade teacher at a mostly black Washington, DC, school told the US Commission on Civil Rights she had similar “conversations” in which she was told that the bad behaviour of black boys is mainly the teacher’s fault. “I have been encouraged to examine and question how my own racial dispositions affect my teaching and my students,” Andrea Smith testified. During cultural sensitivity training required of school districts under restorative justice programmes, teachers are told they are largely to blame for bad behaviour of black students because they “misinterpret” African-American culture.

Via Darleen Click, who asks, 

I’m sorry, but exactly how does one misinterpret a punch to the face?

Answers on a postcard, please. 

Kevin D Williamson on fellating dictators: 

Celebrities came to sit at [Hugo Chávez’s] feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, and Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic programme “basically terrific.” Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic voiced concern about Venezuela’s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government’s perpetrating violence inside polling places — but Myerson insisted that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject shame.” Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids.

The ludicrous Mr Myerson has been mentioned here before. 

From the comments following this: 

In another world she would be a feminist icon. Instead we have Lena Dunham.

Franklin Einspruch implores his fellow artists to try a little maths: 

This article is my call for artists, art writers, and the like, to the extent that they feel inclined to comment upon capitalism and related economic phenomena, to either learn how these things work or do the rest of us a mercy and zip it… If you can’t explain how prices are determined then you have no business complaining about neoliberalism.

And Jim Goad on “social justice education” and the shaping of young minds: 

I’ve looked over the [dictionary] definition [of racism] many times and still haven’t seen an addendum that says, “….but only when white people are doing it.” So for the time being, the official definition of racism does not contain any such “whites only” clause. But according to Luke Visconti, a white man who is the CEO of something called Diversity Inc, such dictionary definitions of racism are indeed “too white.” From a cursory glance of his website, I suspect that everything may be “too white” for Visconti — possibly even himself. If he were offered the magical ability to moult his skin like a snake and emerge as a coal-black Haitian, I tend to believe he’d accept the offer, provided there was no salary cut.

Regarding Mr Visconti’s conceit that only white people can be racist (and always, always are), don’t forget the moral boneyard to which such posturing leads. 

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

Students at the University of California, Irvine have denounced exposure to the American flag as potentially inflicting “hate speech” on passers-by. Indeed, the mere sight of it could make young intellectuals burst into tears and feel terribly unsafe. The potential emotional terrors of the national flag are articulated at length, and with great expenditure of gas, in a bill calling for the removal and banning of said items in the name of inclusivity:  

Flags not only serve as symbols of patriotism or weapons for nationalism, but also construct cultural mythologies and narratives that in turn charge nationalistic sentiments… Flags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenised standards for others to obtain which in this country typically are idolised as freedom, equality, and democracy… Freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible[,] can be interpreted as hate speech… No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.

Despite their no doubt acute acute political consciousness, and references to constructed paradigms and “deep knowledge,” it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading. Or basic grammar.