Richard Vedder on a ratio of note:

Ah, but once you’ve conjured into being an Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, for instance, someone – most likely several someones – will have to run it, or at least sit around in a designated office while waiting to be paid.

Robert J Morris on race and medicine:

Where, for instance, pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.

Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.

No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction,

Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million.

Time to dip a toe in the world of Clown Quarter poetry. Specifically, a colossal work titled Everyone Is A Little Trans, by the University of Connecticut’s visiting assistant professor, Trace Peterson:

No, wait – don’t go. There’s more.

The full, four-minute version can be experienced here.

The author of the above has “been working at the forefront of trans poetry & poetics (and queer poetry & poetics) for the past two decades.” As will doubtless be apparent.

Via Christopher Rufo.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Further to this recent drama, more overseas toilet-dispute news:

It turns out that a summer dress doesn’t make you a lady.

A female student at the University of Brasilia, the one being harangued and threatened, was seemingly unaware that the university has organised its bathrooms by “gender identity, not sex,” and so lively scenes are to be expected. The gentleman in question, Tulio Henrique Carvalho dos Santos, has, we learn, a history of difficult behaviour. Including hair-trigger aggression and denouncing any interruption of his loud and lengthy pronouncements as “transphobia,” akin to “racism,” and therefore a basis for legal action.

The University of Brasilia has subsequently issued a statement declaring the campus a “tolerant and plural place that values the richness and potential of diversity and respect for differences.” Which would presumably explain all the shoving, screaming and threats of violence.

Update, via the comments:

Lifted from the comments, Elizabeth Weiss attends the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association:

What she finds, it turns out, is in large part a gathering of the pretentious and neurotic, the casually incompetent, and the ideologically addled. Among whom, audio recordings of interviews are equated with colonialism and strip-mining, and therefore neglected in order to disavow an “extraction mindset,” and for whom “scepticism is violence” and “asking for evidence… plays to ‘right-wing pundits.’” Oh, and among whom, “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Yes, these titans of rigour and fearless enquiry.

Via Darleen.