Daniel Hannan on poverty and its alternatives: 

“Like slavery and apartheid,” Nelson Mandela told 20,000 people in Trafalgar Square ten years ago, “poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” They were inspiring words, and the crowd duly went wild. But the old man was talking utter, unadulterated bilge. Poverty is not “man-made”: it is the primordial condition of all living organisms, including humans. It is wealth that is “man-made.”

John Leo on the latest campus fundamentalism: 

The National Association of Scholars released a 260-page report on how far the new [definition] of “sustainability” has spread, particularly on campuses. Credentials can be earned in 1,438 distinct college programmes and its message now extends to such unlikely subjects as English composition, mathematics, art history and psychology… Under the argument that true sustainability requires an end to social oppression, the report says, the movement embraces identity politics, calls for the overthrow of patriarchal systems and misogynist bias, the virtual elimination of extraction of energy from fossil fuels, an end to industrial development in the underdeveloped world and a return to subsistence or near subsistence standards of living. The need to overthrow capitalism, though not supported by all, is a common and much discussed theme in the movement.

And Bill Whittle on 16-year-olds and voting: 

Teen voters, the younger the better, are exactly what the left is looking for. They know no history; they base all of their decisions on emotion; they have no real world experience in terms of what works and what does not. They haven’t the slightest idea of discipline or delayed gratification. They live in a world of fantasy and wish fulfilment; they make demands that cannot be met but they’re willing to settle for an ice-cream cone. They are utterly dependent on others; they’re desperate to conform to the cultural norm, and in general they are the perfect, pliable, ignorant, utterly emotional, reason-free, easily-manipulated vote farm that the progressives need for their power grab.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

And so we turn our attention to Santa Barbara City College, where creatively-inclined students have been “exploring issues and practices of… interactive and chance-derived work.” Specifically, 

Students harnessed complicated architectural designs and intricate woodworking to create an artistic teepee, which they set up on one of the quad’s grassy knolls earlier this month. As the student newspaper reports, the four art students who built the teepee saw it as “a place of positive vibes and community engagement.”

See? Positive vibes.

Assembled from “upcycled and reclaimed material from an old farm house,” and “lined with pillows and rugs,” the students’ vibe-enhancing structure “provides a comfy, squishy environment” for music and conversation. Also included in the experience is “a shelf of blank books for people to express themselves in written word.” Engorged with positivity, the students posted an invitation for others to partake in their creation: 

Join us to support the opening day of an amazing art event and large scale installation… The piece harks back to ways of the past in American history while juxtaposing current counter culture with futuristic elements that bring it to life.  

It even glows in the dark. 

We want to provide you with an experience out of the mundane – right here on campus! Celebrate our labour of love with live music, refreshments and a trading post! That’s right, bring something to trade and become part of the installation.

Oh, come on. Who could resist so much switched-on grooviness? Surely what followed was a day of vibrant self-expression and communal hugging?

Alas, no. 

Via ac1, a little something from the Independent: 

“Oh but, it’s racist to ban someone on the basis of their skin colour, and sexist to ban them on their gender,” cry the assembly chorus of confused souls trying to turn the language of progress into a weapon to further entrench the establishment. It’s not. You’re at university, go and ask a humanities professor. Learn something. 

The anonymous author, described only as a “British journalist,” imagines that “people don’t give a toss about their student unions” because they’re “too stunted by white men.” White men who should therefore be “banned” from student politics, forever, in favour of “powerful women and minority ethnic people.” Actually, I suspect the chief repellent is the fact that student union politics attracts so many people who are eerily like the author of the above article. But hey, don’t listen to me, ask a humanities professor. 

And then radically repeat whatever you’ve been told. 

An agony of sorts, spotted by Julia and several others during the National Union of Students’ currently ongoing Women’s Conference: 

No, you mustn’t laugh, says the Independent’s Andrew Griffin. Because clapping in support can break a woman in half: 

Madsen Pirie on the power of our fluffy and benign state broadcaster: 

The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine. Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.

Related. 

Heather Mac Donald on “rape culture” hysteria: 

The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers. Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies — that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery — is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of… And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in. […] If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed… there would be no more campuses. You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning. Why hasn’t that happened? Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

And Steven Hayward quotes several academics who tire of feminist melodrama and the politics of the mob: 

Personally, liberal [i.e., leftist] students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a Facebook page calling me a communist… the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican… The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip — not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery — and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a Twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

But remember, you mustn’t say no to them. Because that one tiny word is now “violent language,” for which you will be “held accountable.” 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

In an eye-widening article that I recommend reading in full, Paul Sperry takes a look at ‘progressive’ education policy and its consequences: 

Thanks to talking circles and peer juries, “young people are now taking control of the environment,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan gushed in a 2014 speech to black students at Howard University. “It’s sort of a counter-intuitive thing for many of us as adults, but the more we give up power, the more we empower others, often the better things are,” Duncan added. “And empowering teenagers to be part of the solution, having them control the [classroom] environment, control the culture, be the leaders, listening to them, respecting them — when we do that, wonderful things happen for kids in communities that didn’t happen historically.”

Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.

A development repeated elsewhere, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, Santa Ana and Syracuse, and all of which is no doubt bewildering to such educators as Eric Butler, a “restorative justice co-ordinator,” whose prideful mantra is “I don’t blame, I don’t punish.” 

How very generous of him.  

After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack…

A white sixth-grade teacher at a mostly black Washington, DC, school told the US Commission on Civil Rights she had similar “conversations” in which she was told that the bad behaviour of black boys is mainly the teacher’s fault. “I have been encouraged to examine and question how my own racial dispositions affect my teaching and my students,” Andrea Smith testified. During cultural sensitivity training required of school districts under restorative justice programmes, teachers are told they are largely to blame for bad behaviour of black students because they “misinterpret” African-American culture.

Via Darleen Click, who asks, 

I’m sorry, but exactly how does one misinterpret a punch to the face?

Answers on a postcard, please. 

Kevin D Williamson on fellating dictators: 

Celebrities came to sit at [Hugo Chávez’s] feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, and Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic programme “basically terrific.” Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic voiced concern about Venezuela’s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government’s perpetrating violence inside polling places — but Myerson insisted that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject shame.” Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids.

The ludicrous Mr Myerson has been mentioned here before. 

From the comments following this: 

In another world she would be a feminist icon. Instead we have Lena Dunham.

Franklin Einspruch implores his fellow artists to try a little maths: 

This article is my call for artists, art writers, and the like, to the extent that they feel inclined to comment upon capitalism and related economic phenomena, to either learn how these things work or do the rest of us a mercy and zip it… If you can’t explain how prices are determined then you have no business complaining about neoliberalism.

And Jim Goad on “social justice education” and the shaping of young minds: 

I’ve looked over the [dictionary] definition [of racism] many times and still haven’t seen an addendum that says, “….but only when white people are doing it.” So for the time being, the official definition of racism does not contain any such “whites only” clause. But according to Luke Visconti, a white man who is the CEO of something called Diversity Inc, such dictionary definitions of racism are indeed “too white.” From a cursory glance of his website, I suspect that everything may be “too white” for Visconti — possibly even himself. If he were offered the magical ability to moult his skin like a snake and emerge as a coal-black Haitian, I tend to believe he’d accept the offer, provided there was no salary cut.

Regarding Mr Visconti’s conceit that only white people can be racist (and always, always are), don’t forget the moral boneyard to which such posturing leads. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Students at the University of California, Irvine have denounced exposure to the American flag as potentially inflicting “hate speech” on passers-by. Indeed, the mere sight of it could make young intellectuals burst into tears and feel terribly unsafe. The potential emotional terrors of the national flag are articulated at length, and with great expenditure of gas, in a bill calling for the removal and banning of said items in the name of inclusivity:  

Flags not only serve as symbols of patriotism or weapons for nationalism, but also construct cultural mythologies and narratives that in turn charge nationalistic sentiments… Flags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenised standards for others to obtain which in this country typically are idolised as freedom, equality, and democracy… Freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible[,] can be interpreted as hate speech… No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.

Despite their no doubt acute acute political consciousness, and references to constructed paradigms and “deep knowledge,” it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading. Or basic grammar. 

Heather Mac Donald on pretentious students and their enablers: 

This proliferation of in-your-face sexual identities [among students] is all posturing, just part of the dance between students desperate to find one last means of being transgressive and college bureaucrats eager to show their sensitivity and to justify their six-figure salaries. Students who should be studying European history and the roots of the novel — would that such subjects were still taught — are instead combing the farthest reaches of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual for ways to distinguish themselves. By posing what they hope will be rejected demands on their administrations, they seek only to prove that they are living a life of oppression.

And on the remarkable elasticity of “queer theory”: 

Today’s identity-based theorising represents a worldview and righteous self-definition that precede facts and analysis.

Not entirely unrelated, Kevin D Williamson on the misplaced moral glamour of defaulting on student loans: 

The students… took out loans and used their credit to purchase a defective product, no different from putting a bucket of magic beans on a MasterCard. They made poor decisions with other people’s money, which is not entirely surprising: Access to other people’s money is an invitation to making poor decisions… But just as MasterCard is not responsible if you put a lemon on your credit card (you’d be shocked how many people purchase cars with credit cards), Bank of McNasty and Uncle Stupid are not responsible for legal adults who borrow money to buy sub-par educational services.

Somewhat related. 

And don’t forget the self-described “bacon-eating vegan” who was left shocked and tearful upon discovering that her degrees in “social justice studies” and “gender studies” have zero value in the job market. “My degrees mean NOTHING,” tweeted she. “I don’t even know how to process the reality that is my life now.” 

Good news, dear reader. You too can learn to be a performance artist and thereby make the world tremble. You could, for instance, attend Sandrine Schaefer’s course in Durational Performance Art, which is run by the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art. The ripened fruits of this intense and demanding study can be witnessed in the video below. Among its gems are the vigorous crayoning works of Nicole Dube, complete with off-camera grunting and sounds of exertion; a 90-minute display of marker pen misuse and poorly choreographed wrestling by Ambar Janual and Luke Ryba; and Darien Stankowski’s haphazard scraping of a wooden door, the purpose of which remains stubbornly unobvious and hard to care about.

However, the video begins with the colossal radicalism of Elaine Thap, a woman who refers to herself as “they,” “their” and “them,” and whose talents are described thusly, if only by herself – sorry, themself:

Elaine Thap uses identity in their work to convey layers of being and relationships… Taking the form of social constructs and the irony of it, they are asking for critical communication and concocting the politics of identity. Performance allows them to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility. They seek intersectional meaning and memory in others by the act of othering.

Ah yes, the politics of identity, intersectional meaning and of course othering. How terribly non-conformist. Now brace yourselves, people. I don’t want anyone fainting from the daring of it all: