Brad Polumbo on cultivated irresponsibility: 

During my final semester in college, I intentionally took a course focused on race, gender, and the history of oppression in the United States… The most jarring realisation: liberal academics define “oppression” so loosely that their victimhood narrative can never end… Each criterion is defined loosely enough to lend themselves to a kind of subjective self-victimisation. This is convincing a generation of young people that their life trajectories are beyond their control.

As noted here previously, woke piety is a kind of positional good, jealously defended and forever in peril. It’s a competitive gig and so the goal-posts have to move, generally by veering further into absurdity. And so we end up with agonised Guardian articles about being oppressed by free cake, and the menace posed by heteronormative pastries and spellcheck software, and about how men discussing barbecues is not only “oppressively penetrating,” but about as “oppressively penetrating” as a thing can be. And students with the moral wherewithal to resist this narrative may find themselves being denounced by their so-called educators.

Victor Davis Hanson on the social corrosive called “diversity”: 

For history’s rare multiracial and multi-ethnic republics, an e pluribus unum cohesion is essential. Each particular tribe must owe greater allegiance to the commonwealth than to those who superficially look or worship alike. Yet over the last 20 years we have deprecated “unity” and championed “diversity.” Americans are being urged by popular culture, universities, schools and government to emphasise their innate differences rather than their common similarities… Some hyphenate or add accents or foreign pronunciations to their names. Others fabricate phony ethnic pedigrees in hopes of gaining an edge in job-seeking or admissions. The common theme is to be anything other than just normal Americans for whom race, gender and ethnicity are incidental rather than essential to their character.

Taken at face value, “diversity” is the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be.

Professor Child’s presentation was not explicitly concerned with space exploration or Mars, which is not surprising since her area of expertise is indigenous education and history. She told us that indigenous people have travelled extensively – specifically, by canoe – and mentioned some indigenous people who travelled to Europe in earlier eras, though not by canoe.

A panel of woke scolds share their thoughts on space travel – which turn out to be rather limited and not of obvious use. They do, however, have thoughts, many thoughts, on how terrible able-bodied white men are.

Janice Fiamengo takes notes:

Via Dicentra, a tale of the severely educated. Screengrab here. 

Down-thread of which, I spotted this:

Something to ponder.

Added via the comments, a possible explanation. And a footnote of sorts.

Also, open thread.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Captain Nemo steers us to the Twitter feed of Library Journal, a “global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators,” and which proudly directs its readers to the mental exertions of Ms Sofia Leung:

Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks. Pause here and think about this.

Ms Leung, an academic librarian, is unhappy that public libraries in the US, a white-majority culture with a white-majority history, tend to have, among other things, lots of books by authors with pale skin. This, we’re told, is an “interesting mini-eureka moment” that our Queen of Intersectional Rumination feels compelled to share. When Ms Leung discovers that public libraries in China and South Korea have quite a few books by Chinese and Korean authors, I’m sure she’ll be equally aghast. Every bit as offended.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property… When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of colour.

At which point, things get a little breathless and intermittently grammatical. However, readers may wish to ponder how synthesising insights from around the world, and from cultures long gone, and preserving those insights, in libraries, is somehow a bad thing. Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended, something close to enraged, by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.”

As if sensing that her thoughts aren’t sufficiently lurid and unhinged, Ms Leung then shifts into higher gear:

Dave Huber reports from the bleeding edge of intersectional scholarship:

Rutgers University’s Brittney Cooper… an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies… says that the very concept of time itself is racially biased. In an interview with NPR last week, Cooper said that the way we “position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought”; in other words, “white people own time.”

According to our feminist educator, time “doesn’t feel linear” for black people – all of them, presumably – because, she says, they live with “the residue of past historical trauma.” You see, for “African-American folks,” the present “feels like the past” – specifically, “narratives of race that are rooted in violence and a lack of freedom” – i.e., slavery – “can become our reality again at any moment.”

Somewhat related. 

And John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi ponder leftist theories of crime: 

Criminologists’ lack of direct contact with subjects, situations, and neighbourhoods—their propensity to abstraction—invites misunderstandings about the reality of crime… The gulf between numbers on a spreadsheet and the harsh realities of the world sometimes fosters a romanticised view of criminals as victims, making it easier for criminologists to overlook the damage that lawbreakers cause—and to advocate for more lenient policies and treatment. Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences.

At which point, readers may recall a Guardian interview with lawyer and activist Clive Stafford Smith, who airily dismissed burglary as “really quite inconsequential,” thereby implying that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous, often very poor, victims. Especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” According to Mr Stafford Smith and Guardian columnist Decca Aitkenhead – for whom, such things are largely theoretical and not a routine fact of life – anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation are somehow trivial, plebeian and unsophisticated. And so, these enlightened creatures pretend to feel sympathy for career criminals who may prey on their neighbours for years, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of lawfulness, and justice, as “idiotic attitudes.”

Update, via the comments: