Campus Reform’s Katherine Timpf visits the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference in Arlington, Virginia. Her Contagious Moral Wrongness™ is detected almost instantly.

“You guys aren’t wanted here.” 

Chris Bing on that elite education you could be paying for: 

Skidmore College, ranked as one of the nation’s most expensive private colleges in the country, is now officially offering a course on Miley Cyrus: “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media.” The 2014 summer course will be taught by assistant visiting professor of sociology Carolyn Chernoff. “I am interested in cities, arts, and social change, particularly on the level of social interaction and the production of ‘community,’” Chernoff’s professional bio reads on the school’s website. “I investigate the role of culture in reproducing and transforming social inequality, and research conflict around diversity and difference.”

No, don’t. You mustn’t laugh at a woman in hipster glasses.  

Tim Blair goes undercover, unsuccessfully, at a Green activist training day: 

Next we were called upon to mingle with each other. “Try to find the person in the room who looks as though they hold completely different views to yours,” [anti-capitalist activist Bruce] Knobloch urged, which was an optimistic call, given that everyone at the event was of like mind. A laughing Asian woman turned to me and said: “Everyone should just line up to meet you.”

Do read Tim’s adventure in full. You’ll learn about “non-linear change strategies” and the looming “fascism” of people who aren’t anti-capitalist activists.

Jim Goad checks his “white privilege”:

According to conference founder Eddie Moore, Jr., “White supremacy, white privilege, racism and other forms of oppression are designed for your destruction – designed to kill you.” If that’s the case, privileged whites are doing a piss-poor job, seeing as how the 400,000 or so Africans who were transported to the New World in slave ships have – through the noxious evils of white privilege, white technology, and living amid a predominantly white culture – blossomed into around 40 million modern black Americans. That’s an increase of 100-1 and truly the most inept genocide in world history.

And Tom Paine bids us goodbye and good luck: 

To me, [Britain] now seems a strange, immoral place. For example, I read articles in the Guardian and the Times this week about the abolition of inherited wealth. The Economist also recently wrote about it. It did not even occur to any of these columnists that they were talking about the property of others. They did not create it. They did not inherit it. They have no just claim to it. Yet they have no moral concerns about proposing its seizure.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Roger Kimball roams the thought-corrected quarter of academia: 

Dr Miller-Young is a typical specimen of homo academicus (or perhaps I should say, mulier academica), circa 2014. The non-stop racial grievance mongering. The anaphrodisiac obsession with gutter sex. The bad prose. The cutesy nods to pop culture. The reflexive left-wing politics. The angry, intellectually nugatory posturing… Dr Miller-Young is as dreary and predictable a representative of the low-wattage, affirmative-action branch of that enterprise as any cultural pathologist could wish for. Would you let her loose on your delicately brought-up daughter? While you ponder that question, let me repeat that there is nothing out of the ordinary about Dr Miller-Young. She is exactly what you can expect when you sign up for a course in the “humanities” these days. 

Worth reading in full. And note Dr Miller-Young’s progressive approach to debate: “I’m stronger so I was able to take [and destroy] the poster.” More on the story at Ed Driscoll’s place. And somewhat related is FIRE’s latest video, in which a Dartmouth College student recounts how a fellow student destroyed his organisation’s pro-life display with a car. A car with a “Coexist” bumper sticker on the back.

KC Johnson probes the latest fashion in campus psychodrama: 

That little, if any, evidence exists to sustain either of these beliefs has not deterred the “rape culture” believers; if anything, the lack of evidence for their claims appears to have emboldened them… “Rape culture” activists generally steer clear of law enforcement, since police might demand evidence to substantiate their claims. 

And Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, wants “social justice” shoehorned into primary school maths teaching. Because who could possibly want their children to learn arithmetic without some nakedly Marxoid indoctrination? 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Robert Stacy McCain on atrocious feminist writing: 

Her paucity of ideas and her unwillingness to do actual research led Mary Daly to the crucial insight that consumers of radical feminist books didn’t really care about facts or logic or coherent argument. No, the feminist readership consists of disgruntled misfits who want someone to give voice to their inchoate rage. My theory, then, is that Daly discovered she could spend a few hours a week sitting in front of a word-processor, probably with a supply of whiskey and ice near at hand, typing any kind of stream-of-consciousness nonsense that popped into her head. So long as her rants were aimed at the phallocratic patriarchy, and invoked the celebration of radical liberated womanhood, the incoherent nature of Daly’s prose was actually a feature, not a bug. No one could refute her “arguments,” because no one could make sense of them.

Peter Risdon notes the modesty of a certain Marxoid titan: 

It’s as though each narcissistic personality disorder has its own unique signature.

And Theodore Dalrymple on assault, sentimentality and moral cowardice: 

I was alarmed but not altogether surprised to read that Marie… did not want [her assailant] to be locked up but rather that they should receive a punishment “so that they understand.” Understand what, precisely? That hitting a defenceless woman in the face ten times with a knuckleduster isn’t a nice thing to do? But they understood this already, only too well: It was precisely their understanding that impelled them to do it… Presumably Marie had in mind something such as psychoanalysis, perhaps mixed with a little compulsory social work or planting flowers in municipal flowerbeds. This is like trying to talk reason to Pol Pot at the apogee of his power, to get him to stand down by persuading him that what he was doing was wrong. 

If Miss A suddenly finds herself being beaten by Thug B – repeatedly, ostentatiously, with premeditation and knuckledusters – and then insists her assailant should face only the most mild and inconsequential punishment, this looks an awful lot like moral preening. “See how lenient and saintly I am.” The next victim of thug B – and there usually is a next victim – may not appreciate this display of moral (self-)elevation. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Cathy Young on the psychodramas of academic feminism: 

Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women's studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.” Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields. Welcome to the age of the trigger warning. […] Initially, the warnings were primarily for sexual assault and partner abuse. Eventually, they spread to just about everything that could be potentially upsetting to any person of politically correct sensitivities: sexism, racism, homophobia, “ableism,” “victim-blaming,” “slut-shaming,” “fat-shaming,” “body-shaming” and a host of other sins and oppressions. (My personal favourite is a warning for “discussion of gender policing” – that is, of norms dictating proper bounds of masculine and feminine behaviour. How startling to find such a discussion on a feminist blog.)

Christopher Snowdon parses the assumptions of “medical socialism”: 

‘Neoliberalism’ means free markets and ‘transnational forces’ means globalisation, i.e., free trade between countries. These are the main factors that have led to the extraordinary reduction in poverty in developing countries since 1980. The world suffers less from an unequal distribution of wealth than it does from an unequal distribution of capitalism. Countries which have resisted free market reforms have suffered greatly as a result.

Thomas Sowell feels the benevolence of teachers’ unions:  

The teachers’ unions see charter schools as a threat to their members’ jobs, and politicians respond to the money and the votes that teachers’ unions can provide. The net result is that public schools are often run as if their main function is to provide jobs to teachers. Whether the children get a decent education is secondary, at best.

And Dr Ben Carson, a retired black neurosurgeon, recently spoke at a conservative conference and received thunderous applause. Much to the annoyance of quite a few people on the Totally Non-Racist Left™, who denounced him as an “uncle Tom,” a “token” and a “house negro.” “He can shine my shoes,” wrote ‘progressive’ comedian Laura Levites. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.