Brendan O’Neill on the madness of King George: 

Consider George Monbiot. These days he rails against austerity, especially of the Tory variety, saying it has “extended the crisis” and “hurt” ordinary people by propelling Britain into a double-dip recession. But wait – I thought he loved the idea of recession? In 2007 he wrote an article called Bring on the Recession, in which he argued that, as “unpleasant as it will be,” and yes, “some people [will] lose their jobs and homes,” a recession might at least help prevent “ecological disaster” by reining in pesky, polluting economic growth. Back then, in his book Heat, which was lapped up by leftists and praised to the hilt by that Queen of the Left, Naomi Klein, Monbiot proudly said radical environmentalism was a “campaign not for abundance but for austerity.” Got that? For austerity. He said that where the dumb, consumption-hooked masses have a tendency to “riot because they want more, not less,” it was incumbent upon enlightened radicals to “riot for less” and even to “riot for austerity.” Once again, for austerity.

The eccentricities of Mr Monbiot’s thought processes will be familiar to regular readers. 

Chris Snowdon has more on the subject, including one columnist’s belief that lowered living standards would be a “freeing” experience and result in a “more amiable atmosphere,” with the threat of poverty forcing shopkeepers and taxi drivers to be more polite: 

When the full impact of the recession hit home a few months later, these columnists had the good sense to shut up about unemployment cleansing the soul for fear of being lynched by their readers… In part, it can be attributed the demands of being a contrarian newspaper columnist with space to fill, but there is no doubt that there are many people in well-paid jobs who believe that poverty is noble and empowering… It would be nice to think that some of these miserablists have learnt a lesson from the era of alleged austerity, but I suspect that it will only take a few quarters of economic growth for the attacks on GDP to return.

And of course we mustn’t forget the glorious visions of the New Economics Foundation, whose deep thinkers want to make us “better citizens” by taking away our stuff. 

Christopher Tooky on the socialist filmmaker Ken Loach: 

Most of the domestic policies Ken favours were last presented to the British public in Michael Foot’s 1983 general election manifesto, accurately described by former Labour minister Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history.” Thirty years after that electoral catastrophe, the one reason to welcome this film is that it reveals more clearly than anything else the backward-looking, scarily obsessive, extreme political agenda of those who subsidise films in Britain — and, indeed, those who ‘criticise’ them, for I guarantee that this will receive the most respectful reviews of any release this week.

At the University of Oregon, a collision of posturing idiots takes place and a law professor loses his cool: 

It’s an unfortunate reminder that sometimes those who are supposed to be the stewards of student rights are exactly the people that these rights need protection from. 

And via Kate, a pictorial guide to the joys of public transport. This one, I think, captures the mood. 

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

Further to this unhinged drama, Glenn Reynolds ponders modern state schooling:

A seven-year-old boy was suspended because he chewed his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. Now, really, why would you suspend a kid for that? A gun-shaped Pop Tart isn’t a threat to anyone. Nor does chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun suggest violent tendencies. Meanwhile, a 5-year-old girl was charged with “terroristic threats” for talking about her pink toy gun that shoots… bubbles. The school suspended her for 10 days and required a psychological evaluation. And in Maryland, boys were suspended for playing cops and robbers and using their fingers as imaginary guns. Who is frightened by this sort of thing? People who can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. […] 

A Pop Tart gun, a finger gun, or a toy gun — even a pink one that shoots, gasp!, soap bubbles! — isn’t any danger to anyone. Nor is playing with toy guns a sign that a kid is mentally ill or dangerous. It’s a sign that a kid is a kid. When schools and teachers react hysterically to such non-threats, they’re telling us one of two things: Either that they lack the ability to respond realistically to events or that they recognise that there’s not any sort of threat, but deliberately overreact in order to stigmatise even the idea of guns. The first is educational malpractice; the second is educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power. Neither inspires confidence in the educational system in which they appear.

When I was maybe five or six years old, I took to school a Marvel comic, which, naturally, led to a playground battle of ray guns, fireballs and atomic annihilators. Oddly enough, all of my friends survived this exchange of imaginary firepower, and even the toppling of entire imaginary buildings. So far as I can recall, no-one actually bombarded themselves with gamma rays in the hope of turning green. Still, I can’t help wondering how that kind of thing would go down among teachers who hyperventilate at the thought of a single pink bubble gun. Presumably our juvenile imaginations would, for some, now be a cause for concern, possibly correction.

Related, George Will:  

Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments.

Mr Eugenides feels the pain of the Chavistas: 

The Guardian has this week been a newspaper in mourning. The death of Hugo Chavez has hit morale hard, with the newspaper all but running a black band around its website in deference to the passing of the man it clearly regarded as the leader of all progressive forces south of the Equator, if not the Watford Gap. […] Tariq Ali’s piece… was a masterpiece of its kind, a full-throated encomium of praise that made Chavez sound like a world-historical colossus, a one-in-a-million fusion of two parts Gandhi, one part Bolivar and a dash of Han Solo, instead of the vaudevillian punchline that he was by the end. No mention was made of the gigantic failures, the petty thuggery and intimidation of opponents, the contempt for the constitution or the rule of law. Why should there have been? To these people, everything is about speaking so-called truth to power, even if it means singing the praises of dickheads like Chavez one week and then with a straight face labelling Rupert Murdoch a horrifying threat to democracy the next.

And Heather Mac Donald on teen pregnancy and what mustn’t be said about it: 

Less predictable was the charge… that the [teen pregnancy] posters “perpetuate gender stereotypes.” Even the most seasoned observers of the academic-advocacy-victimology axis might not have seen this one coming. Presumably, the ads “perpetuate gender stereotypes” by pointing out to “Dad” the costs of child support and to “Mom” that when the father takes off, as he likely will, she’ll be left holding the diaper bag. It appears that we have a new politically correct fantasy: unwed teen fathers are as likely to be the sole provider for their child as teen moms.

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

Steel yourselves, readers, for a shocking report of psychological brutality inflicted on wee ones during a terrifying rampage:

If your children express that they are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share their feelings. Our school counsellor is available to meet with any students who have the need to do so next week.

So reads the letter sent to parents in the aftermath of the incident by Myrna Phillips, assistant principal of Park Elementary School, Baltimore. Clearly, the school’s second-grade 7-year-olds were at risk of being emotionally scarred by the incident, which was classified as a “level 3” violation of the school’s code of conduct. 

Oh, yes. The incident: 

Josh was munching on a strawberry Pop-Tart, when his creativity got the better of him, and he decided to reshape his breakfast by nibbling on its edges. “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t,” he said. But his teacher thought it definitely looked like a gun, and, what’s more, she claims she saw Josh hold on to his food and utter the words “bang bang.” 

Of course such evil must be punished and bleached from tiny minds.

His Pop-Tart was confiscated and he was immediately suspended for two days.

Regarding Ms Phillips’ letter to parents, Reason’s Jesse Walker adds this:

To be fair, the phrasing leaves open the possibility that the students would be “troubled” not by the imaginary gun but by the suspension, and by the ensuing realisation that they’re powerless pawns in a vast, incomprehensible game run by madmen.

Any readers distressed by these events and who find themselves in need of mental correction should report to our in-house nurse.

Via Brain Terminal. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

All Pop Music Will Henceforth Be Terrible.  

The government is “waging naked class war,” says the Guardian’s Owen Hatherley. Can leftwing pop music avert catastrophe? 

Making vaguely alternative pop music is, it seems, all but impossible without indefinite subsidy, an Arts Council grant, a subsidised spell at art school and a bohemian squat to call your own. Yes, these young titans of the left need the state to make them edgy and countercultural. And there can be no better use for taxpayers’ money than indulging would-be pop stars while they become “class conscious” and find themselves, musically. However long it takes. 

Rebellion, Revisited.  

If what these educators want sounds a bit like grooming, a little predatory, that’s because it is. 

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Furr and Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.

Which may explain the doublethink of Mr Arun Smith. 

You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.

San Francisco’s radical nudists are remarkably needy. Your children must, simply must, see their genitals.

Imagine you’re out shopping with the kids in tow and having to weave your way through large groups of unattractive men waving their tackle at you. One doesn’t have to have “unrealistic issues of body shame” to find the exhibitionism tiresome or inappropriate. And the denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s ‘protest’ claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

Monbiot and the Morlocks.

George Monbiot encounters the exotic underclass. Things go badly wrong.

Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

There’s a world of wonder in the greatest hits. 

A mistake that the Institute for Centrifugal Research works tirelessly to correct. The ICR’s “pioneering achievements in the realms of brain manipulation, excessive G-Force and prenatal simulations” are illustrated, quite vividly, in Till Nowak’s short documentary, presented below. I beg you, please, wait for the ‘wedding cake’ amusement ride.

Via Things, a site you may want to bookmark.