Mark Steyn on the loveliness that is Obama’s Big Government:

In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus: “Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a cheque. Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name… The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.”

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labour of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente.

Worth reading in full. Some links regarding the IRS scandal can be found here, here, here and here. Somewhat related, more lovely government for your own good. And some fans of big government.

Thomas Sowell on words that replace thought:

You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodise about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid. To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labelled an incorrigible racist. Free thinking is not free.

And Cathy Young on standards of academic feminism:

No scholarly text is ever error-free. But in the case of Kimmel’s book, there is a consistent pattern of using selective evidence and even pseudo-facts to stress women’s victimisation and paint males (particularly American males) in the worst light. The fictitious claim that most boys would choose death over girlhood – which will undoubtedly live on the internet after it’s gone from future editions of the book – fits seamlessly into the big picture. Internet myths aside, The Gender Society is widely used in college courses. And if it is indeed the most balanced gender studies textbook available – which may well be true – that says a lot about the rest.

Tsk. Questioning the accuracy of feminist textbooks is like hunting blind orphans for sport. It’s frowned upon, to say the least.

Guido Fawkes and Tim Blair note the superb leftwing credentials of the BBC’s latest Newsnight editor:

Fair, balanced and impartial Ian Katz will have no trouble fitting in… He is reunited with former Guardian colleague Allegra Stratton and, in Paul Mason, he has an ex-Trotskyist Workers’ Power group member as his Economics Editor.

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

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Like Fun, But Less So.

Bonfire Night is insufficiently glum. Something must be done.

An earlier Guardian poll – Should Fireworks be Banned on Environmental Grounds? – was a close-run thing, with a narrow majority willing to permit an evening of explosive hedonism. The Guardian’s Felicity Carus suggested a possible compromise in the form of “green fireworks,” a quieter, less colourful, less explosive alternative made from sawdust and rice chaff.

Behold My Virtue.

The colossal self-awareness of Mr Sunny Hundal.

Some people weigh their activist credentials by the annoyance they arouse, often deliberately, while dismissing the irritation as symptomatic of exposure to the Daily Mail. The degree of inconvenience and subsequent hostility can then be taken as evidence of one’s own righteousness and a cause for satisfaction. As if on cue, Sunny Hundal tells us: “Environmental issues is one area where I don’t yield much, and frankly when people snort angrily about [anti-air travel activists] Plane Stupid, that gives me even more pleasure.” Though not, I suspect, quite as much pleasure as Mr Hundal’s own extensive air travel adventures, which were excitedly announced shortly before his declaration of support for Plane Stupid: “Honestly, I love these guys.” Now I’ve no objection at all to people flying halfway around the planet, twice, as Mr Hundal did, to India then California, but I’m not the one declaring my “hard-line” green credentials.

The Master’s Tools.

Marxoid lesbianism, where the party never stops.

Margaret Jamison is a lesbian feminist who defines rape as “all penile intercourse” on grounds that, “there is something wrong with this notion that a woman’s ‘consent’ is what separates a rapist from a non-rapist.” When not insisting that “all heterosex is rape,” Jamison’s thoughts turn a little too readily to the subject of harming children: “I believe male infanticide to be a better option than the current circumstances. I think it’s better than what we’ve got.”

Our Brightest Minds.

Meet Arun Smith, the ideal self-satisfied product of a leftist education.

Despite his extensive commentary on the subject, Arun Smith still hasn’t specified any actual remark that offended him sufficiently to vandalise the university’s free speech wall then boast about it online. However, he does tell us that expectations of free speech are “structurally oppressive.” Quizzed on his presumed entitlement to violence, Mr Smith replies, “You forget that writing can be violence. Resistance to violence is not violence.” And so he, being heroic, must resist and intervene to save some (again unspecified and exquisitely precious) potential victim. In this case, presumably, he’s saving them from the psychological hazard of passing by the statement “traditional marriage is awesome.” Four words that would obviously shatter the self-esteem of any vulnerable student already on the verge of weeping. Such are the dramas to be enacted in the modern Canadian university, one of the most indulgent and cossetting environments in the history of the world.

Sombre Jeans, Radical Bag.

The Guardian’s fashion guru Charlie Porter has a bag that’s much too daring for Canary Wharf security.

“I heard someone behind me. I turned and saw a man in jeans and a plain top. ‘Security,’ he said quietly but firmly, showing me some ID. ‘Can I have a word?’ He asked to see my bag. ‘Is it yours?’ I said yes, incredulous. This felt like a parallel universe. ‘It’s just that we’ve had a lot of women’s handbag thefts. You can’t be too careful.’”

For more, grab a torch and waders and explore the greatest hits. 

In today’s Guardian, George Monbiot is stressing a pressing need. Specifically,

The need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores.

And without which,

Racism, nationalism and war are only three of the many hazards to which society is exposed.

For George, these superior intellects must be free of dirty commerce, even corporate donations for new buildings and scholarships, in order to denounce – and thereby correct – the public’s general preference for free markets and lower taxes. The state may spend more of our earnings and regulate more of our affairs than at any time in living memory, but it still isn’t big enough for George. And so someone must save the lower orders from “neoliberal economists,” “imperialist historians” and “war-mongering philosophers,” all of whom would otherwise warp our tiny, undeveloped minds.

An arrangement of the kind Mr Monbiot envisions, presumably funded by the taxpayer and in which our self-anointed betters denounce “economic growth and the forces that drive it,” is a disinterested one, see, and thus pure of motive. Just like socialism. Plus, this enlightened “class of intellectuals” – which is to say, people very much like George – is all that will save us from racism, nationalism and even war.

Like his ideological peers in the world of art, Mr Monbiot regards money from companies, given freely, as a distilled wickedness that corrupts all it touches; while money extracted from taxpayers, forcibly, is morally hygienic and apparently without limit. All very humble and egalitarian. Not at all like the fantasy of yet another would-be socialist overlord.

George, after all, is known for his immense modesty, as when he expressed his contempt for those who dare to disagree with him, all of whom were waved aside as dullard conservatives struggling with racial phobias. “The other side,” he announced, is “on average more stupid than our own.” Guardian readers – known far and wide as The Great Thinkers Of Our Era™ – were told in no uncertain terms that “conservatism thrives on low intelligence” and “appeals to stupidity.” “Conservative ideology,” said George, “is the critical pathway from low intelligence to racism.” And all of this in contrast with liberals such as himself, who are apparently “self-deprecating” and “too liberal for their own good.”

Readers who wish to sup more wisdom from Mr Monbiot’s milky teats can do so here, here and here.

Kevin Williamson on innovation versus the state:

We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order. When I am speaking to students, I like to show them a still from the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street in which the masterful financier Gordon Gekko is talking on his cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The students always — always — laugh: The ridiculous thing is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds. But the revelatory fact that takes a while to sink in is this: You had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of nearly $10,000, it cost about $1,000 a month to operate, and you couldn’t text or play Angry Birds on it… By comparison, an iPhone 5 is a wonder, a commonplace miracle. 

My question for the students is: How is it that the cell phones in your pockets get better and cheaper every year, but your schools get more expensive and less effective? How is it that Gordon Gekko’s ultimate status symbol looks to our eyes as ridiculous as Molly Ringwald’s Reagan-era wardrobe and asymmetrical hairdos? That didn’t just happen.

Heather Mac Donald on the self-destruction of the humanities:

In the summer of 2012, as the University of California reeled from one piece of bad budget news to another, a veteran political columnist sounded an alarm. Cuts in state funding were jeopardising the university’s mission of preserving the “cultural legacy essential to any great society,” Peter Schrag warned in the Sacramento Bee: “Would we know who we are without knowing our common history and culture, without knowing Madison and Jefferson and Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne; without Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer; without Dante and Cervantes; without Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen; without Goethe and Molière; without Confucius, Buddha, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.; without Mozart, Rembrandt and Michelangelo; without the Old Testament; without the Gospels; without Plato and Aristotle, without Homer and Sophocles and Euripides, without Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; without Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison?”

Schrag’s appeal to the value of humanistic study was unimpeachable. It just happened to be laughably ignorant about the condition of such study at the University of California. Stingy state taxpayers aren’t endangering the transmission of great literature, philosophy, and art; the university itself is. No UC administrator would dare to invoke Schrag’s list of mostly white, mostly male thinkers as an essential element of a UC education; no UC campus has sought to ensure that its undergraduates get any exposure to even one of Schrag’s seminal thinkers (with the possible exception of Toni Morrison), much less to America’s founding ideas or history.

Related to the above, Jennifer Kabbany on not taking notice:

Leaders of the University of California system have agreed to disagree with – and outright dismiss without discussion – a lengthy report that details examples of leftist bias by professors and within social science curriculums throughout the 10-campus system.

John Murtagh on when terrorism is a credential among leftist academics:

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age. Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family was, presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston. One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails.

Given recent events in Boston, this may not have been the best time for Robert Redford to release his film hagiography of that same leftwing terrorist group. And it may surprise readers to learn just how many former terrorists have been beckoned to the bosom of academia. Must be all that “social justice” and “speaking truth to power” we hear so much about.

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

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Spanking One’s Own Arse. 

The woes of being leftwing and insufficiently black.

One needn’t be a cartoon Tory to marvel at Decca Aitkenhead’s classic Guardian piece Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, sympathetic readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame. It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.”

On Fungal Matters.

A black man buys truffles. The Guardian is thrilled.

This “new kind of spending” – buying overpriced fungus – is much more radical than buying Rolex watches, ostentatious cars or cases of Cristal champagne. It’s a thrilling development in “black identity.”

Dealing with Impurities.

Academic Wrongthought™ and the narrowing of minds.

A study of 24,000 students conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2010 revealed that only 30.3% of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement that, “It is safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus”… The students were downright optimistic compared to the 9,000 campus professionals surveyed. Only 18.8% strongly agreed that it was safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus… As the sociologist Diana C. Mutz discovered in her 2006 book Hearing the Other Side, those with the highest levels of education had the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view, while those who have not graduated from high school can claim the most diverse discussion mates. In other words, the most educated among us are also the most likely to live in the tightest echo chambers.

It’s Politically Radical Sex, Not Ordinary Mortal Sex.

Meet Ms Nadio Cho: student, titan, radical shagger.

“It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up.”

Just Don’t Call It a Hustle.  

Know your place, peasants.

My local publicly-funded galleries of contemporary work, one of which is a glorified coffee shop for two dozen middle-class lefties, can be relied on to disappoint – and to go on disappointing – precisely because there’s no obvious mechanism for correction. No box office takings to fret about, no bums on seats, no ghastly commercial metrics need be considered. And so the featured artists, or pseudo-artists, can expect taxpayers to serve as patrons, whether they wish to or not, while being immune to the patron’s customary discrimination between promising art and opportunist flim-flam. The expectation that one must be exempt from base commerce, and by extension the preferences of one’s supposed audience and customers, is an arrangement that rewards and encourages the peddling of drek. Yet Liz Forgan and her Arts Council associates would have us believe that an interest in visual culture, music, etc., should coincide with an urge to make others pay for whatever it is that tickles you, or for whatever is deemed to improve the species by Liz Forgan and her colleagues, i.e., People Loftier Than Us.

Update: In light of today’s news, this seems relevant:

Wounds Sustained, Oblivion Avoided. 

Claire Berlinski on Margaret Thatcher and her loftier enemies. 

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

There’s more, so much more, in the greatest hits. And patrons are reminded that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers.