Note to ten-year-olds. If you’re in a school cafeteria queue and pretend your hand is a laser blaster – and worse, go pew, pew, pew – you will be suspended and labelled as a “threat.” No disintegrations were reported.

See also this.

Linked in the comments earlier but worth wider attention, here’s Heather Mac Donald’s latest essay on the academic cultivation of pretentious victimhood: 

The pattern would repeat itself twice more at the UCLA that fall: students would allege that they were victimised by racism, and the administration, rather than correcting the students’ misapprehension, penitently acceded to it. Colleges across the country behave no differently. As student claims of racial and gender mistreatment grow ever more unmoored from reality, campus grown-ups have abdicated their responsibility to cultivate an adult sense of perspective and common sense in their students. Instead, they are creating what tort law calls “eggshell plaintiffs” — preternaturally fragile individuals injured by the slightest collisions with life. The consequences will affect us for years to come.

One of the incidents mentioned, in which students claimed to be oppressed by corrected grammar and any public questioning of their far-left politics, will be familiar to regular readers.

Other debates centred on the political implications of punctuation. [Professor] Rust had changed a student’s capitalisation of the word “indigenous” in her dissertation proposal to the lowercase, thus allegedly showing disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view… During one of these heated discussions, Rust reached over and patted the arm of the class’s most vociferous critical race–theory advocate to try to calm him down — a gesture typical of the physically demonstrative Rust, who is prone to hugs. The student, Kenjus Watson, dramatically jerked his arm away, as a burst of nervous energy coursed through the room. […] The student, a large and robust young man… eventually filed a criminal charge of battery against the 79-year-old professor.

Mr Watson has subsequently been awarded academic credit for instructing other “Students of Colour” – a tribe that excludes students from East Asia – in the subtleties of “constructive intergroup relations” at Penn State, St. Louis University, and the University of Michigan. Mr Watson describes his fellow grievance-seekers – and of course himself – as “courageous.”

Ms Mac Donald discusses the vanities and dysfunction of modern academia in this 90-minute video. 

At DePauw University, Indiana, someone may have said something unkind to a student with brownish skin. And so, inevitably, 

Professor of Sociology David Newman stated, “I’m a white man. I’m a white middle-class man. I’m a white middle-class heterosexual man… This is my fault. I didn’t do anything directly, but this is my fault. My silence makes this my fault.”

Because what’s education without a little Maoist pantomime? 

Susan Kruth and Harvey Silverglate on educational environments and the things you can’t say in them: 

On campuses across the country, hostility toward unpopular ideas has become so irrational that many students, and some faculty members, now openly oppose freedom of speech. The hypersensitive consider the mere discussion of the topic of censorship to be potentially traumatic. Those who try to protect academic freedom and the ability of the academy to discuss the world as it is are swimming against the current… Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement — a disorder whose spread in academia grows by the day.

Note how the code words and euphemisms that have replaced salty language have become so numerous that readers now struggle to guess what the offending word was. See also this. 

Thomas Sowell on the current occupant of the White House: 

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do. When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

And Peter Suderman reminds us why tar and feathers should never be out of fashion: 

Professor Jonathan Gruber was, by most accounts, one of the key figures in constructing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He helped design the Massachusetts health care law on which it was modelled, assisted the White House in laying out the foundation of the law, and, according to the New York Times, was eventually sent to Capitol Hill “to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.” Jonathan Gruber, in other words, knows exactly what it took to get [Obama’s] health care law passed. And that’s why you should take him seriously when he says, in the following video, that it was critical to not be transparent about the law’s costs and true effects, and to take advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter” in order to get it passed.

Note that our progressive Professor Gruber is happy to admit deceiving the electorate – deliberately, at length and on a grand scale – in order to get his own way. Along with $400,000 in consultancy fees.  

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

Via Mr X, Charles Cooke is entertained by a circus of competitive indignation: 

As it has grown in popularity, the [anti-catcalling] video has been transformed into a blank canvas, onto which America’s brave advocates of hyphenated-justice have sought to project their favoured social theories. Evidently unwilling to let the spot stand on its own, Purdue’s Roxanne Gay wrote sadly that “it’s difficult and uncomfortable to admit that we have to talk about race / class / gender / sexuality / ability / etc., all at once.” Alas, she was not alone. Soon, the claims of “sexism” had been joined by accusations of “racism” and of “classism,” Hollaback had been forced to acknowledge that it had upset the more delicate among us, and those who had celebrated the video [for its feminist stance] had been denounced as unreconstructed bigots.

Jim Goad on the same: 

A video that shows a Jewish woman being sexually harassed while walking on New York City streets has engendered tremendous outrage — not so much for the fact that she was sexually harassed, but because there weren’t enough white guys doing it.

Statistics ensue.

Lenore Skenazy notes an everyday hazard of modern schooling: 

Da’von Shaw, a Bedford, Ohio high school student, brought apples and craisins to school for a “healthy eating” presentation he was giving to his speech class. He took out a knife to slice an apple, and I’m sure you can all guess what happened next.

And Ed Driscoll reflects on how the New York Times became a (bad) student newspaper: 

In the summer of 1992, the Times published a piece co-written by two seniors at Columbia who claimed to find all sorts of “disturbing” anti-Semitic allegories in the Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer film Batman Returns. “The biblical allusions and historical references woven into the plot of Batman Returns betray a hidden conflict between gentile and Jew,” they wrote. “Denied his own birthright, the Penguin intends to obliterate the Christian birth, and eventually the whole town. His army of mindless followers, a flock of ineffectual birds who cannot fly, is eventually converted to the side of Christian morality.” It’s some piece of work, and a reminder that calling for the banning of elections might actually not be the craziest thing that the Times has published by a college journalist eager for his first national byline.

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

For newcomers, more items from the archives. 

Something About the Tone.

Urban Studies lecturer Peter Matthews worries about the unequal distribution of litter and suggests bulldozing Belgravia. For the poor.

Our postcode class warrior links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.” But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”

Please Don’t Dump Your Garbage on the Roadside. 

Performance artists Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton hit each other with pillows, thereby sharing their radicalism with the unthinking proles.

One has to wonder what our creative betters’ long-term plan is. How, exactly, were they hoping to entice employers and repay the cost of their extensive education? Is incongruous pillow flailing – sorry, “strategic refraction” – a skill in demand? Is it something the public cries out for and will rush to throw money at? What do the ladies plan to do when they’re, say, forty, or fifty? Given the improbability of such people being self-supporting in later life – at least in their chosen line, the one for which they’ve studied – do they have wealthy parents who will indulge them indefinitely? Or do they expect their talents, such as they are, to be rewarded with other people’s earnings, confiscated forcibly by the state and redistributed as artistic subsidy? And is self-inflicted dependency a thing to encourage and applaud? I ask because the ladies say they want us to “think critically.”

The Cupcake Menace. 

The Guardian’s Matt Seaton rages against tiny cakes, which are apparently exploitative and mentally debilitating, at least to womenfolk.

After telling us at length just how terrible and mind-warping these tiny fancies are, Mr Seaton adds, “I don’t want to ban cupcakes.” And yet he feels it necessary to say this, as if banning miniature sponges would be an obvious thing to consider, the kind of thing one does. And after banning them in his own office. An accomplishment that a fellow Guardianista, the daughter of the paper’s editor no less, regards as confirming Mr Seaton’s moral credentials: “I used to bring cakes into the office a lot, and Matt put a ban on it because he was worried about how much sugar we all ate. Practises what he preaches this man.” Come work at the Guardian, where the party never stops.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat. 

Charles Murray reflects on his book The Bell Curve, and its reception, twenty years on: 

The reaction to The Bell Curve exposed a profound corruption of the social sciences that has prevailed since the 1960s. The Bell Curve is a relentlessly moderate book — both in its use of evidence and in its tone — and yet it was excoriated in remarkably personal and vicious ways, sometimes by eminent academicians who knew very well they were lying. Why? Because the social sciences have been in the grip of a political orthodoxy that has had only the most tenuous connection with empirical reality, and too many social scientists think that threats to the orthodoxy should be suppressed by any means necessary. Corruption is the only word for it.

Russell Nieli on grade inflation: 

Another factor furthering grade inflation has been the self-esteem movement and the belief that having a high opinion of oneself is a prerequisite to self-confidence and high achievement. The fact that… feeling good about oneself unconnected with one’s actual striving or achievement is usually a formula for indolence and lethargy — if not actual narcissism — hasn’t diminished the appeal of the movement to many university administrators… It is also a major reason, I believe, why American students, who in international comparisons have the highest self-esteem, lag so far behind those in many Asian countries in becoming top flight engineers and scientists.

When I was a teenager taking A-levels, my class was told – ominously, several times – that the minimum grades for acceptance at university were two ‘A’s and a ‘B’. More recently, in 2011, while listening to Radio 4’s rural soap The Archers, I heard Ambridge’s teen eco-warrior Pip excitedly announce her A-level results – “a ‘B’ and two ‘C’s.” She was therefore, naturally, going to university.

Sarah Knapton on vegetarians and sperm: 

Vegetarians and vegans had significantly lower sperm counts compared with meat eaters, 50 million sperm per ml compared with 70 million per ml. They also had lower average sperm motility – the number of sperm which are active. Only one third of sperm were active for vegetarians and vegans compared with nearly 60 per cent for meat eaters.

And Amy Powell relays a tale of stalking gone awry: 

A 28-year-old woman rescued from a chimney at a Thousand Oaks home was allegedly trying to break into the home of a man she had met online. Residents reported hearing the sound of a woman crying in the area at about 5:45 am. Deputies found Genoveva Nunez-Figueroa trapped inside the chimney. Ventura County Fire Department and Urban Search and Rescue members had to dismantle the chimney in order to get Nunez-Figueroa out. She was lubricated with dish soap prior to being hoisted out… This is the second time Nunez-Figueroa was found on [the homeowner’s] roof. Two weeks ago, he spotted her and called police, but she disappeared.

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

Speaking as we were of the urge to mythologise, here’s Ron Radosh on the fantasies and inversions of progressive academia: 

Look whose photo graces the campus of UCLA, meant to be an inspiration to incoming students. The woman in the photo is standing above the slogan: “We Question.” For those who can’t identify her, the photo depicts Angela Davis, the notorious former Communist Party USA leader who, beginning in the ‘60s, moulded together black nationalism with Marxism-Leninism… For her loyalty to the Soviet Union and its foreign policies, in 1972 she was awarded a Lenin Centenary Medal in the Soviet Union, after which she spoke to thousands at an outdoor rally in Moscow… As she left Moscow and went up the stairs to enter her plane, she yelled out with a clenched fist: “Long live the science of Marxism-Leninism.” There is not an iota of evidence that she questioned anything about the dreary reality in the Soviet Union and their Eastern European client states.

Davis also received the International Lenin Peace Prize — formerly called the Stalin Peace Prize — from the STASI state of East Germany in 1979. She was awarded it for supposedly strengthening “peace among peoples,” but it was actually for her continued fidelity to the Soviet bloc, which to her represented the future of humanity. Not only did she not “question” authority, Davis openly defended the repressive measures of the Communist states by endorsing their imprisonment of dissident intellectuals.

I think that’s what’s called exquisite irony. 

Of course Ms Davis has groupies over here too, at Birkbeck, for instance, where the credulous and dyspeptic scrawled the words “Fuck rich white men.” While the woman they so admire, this self-styled “political prisoner,” charges $20,000 an hour. Details of Ms Davis’s extra-legal activities can be found in the book Radicals by David Horowitz, while his earlier book One-Party Classroom outlines the practised hagiography that surrounds this Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies.

Cathy Young on academic standards and “masculinity studies”: 

When Michael Kimmel talks about men and boys – at least ones unreconstructed by feminism – it is often in a tone that ranges from ironic condescension to scolding rebuke and outright antipathy… He waxes enthusiastic about “rape awareness” measures that treat all men as potential rapists – such as “splash guards” on a college’s public urinals with the slogan, “You hold the power to stop rape in your hand.” Tackiness aside, such a stunt directed at any other group would be readily seen as “hate.” Imagine proposing that “You are looking at someone who can stop terrorism” be inscribed on bathroom mirrors at a campus Islamic centre.

Heather Mac Donald on the Ferguson riots and the ‘racism’ media narrative: 

The only reason that blacks are subject to fines and warrants [for traffic violations], according to the media, is that they are being hounded by a racist police force. “A mostly white police force has targeted blacks for a disproportionate number of stops and searches,” declared Time on September 1. What is the evidence for such “targeting”? Time provides none. Might blacks be getting traffic fines for the same reason that whites get traffic fines — because they broke the law? The possibility is never contemplated. The most frequently summonsed traffic offence is driving without insurance, according to the New York Times’s “exposé” of Ferguson’s traffic-fine system. Perhaps the Times’s editors would be blasé about being hit by an uninsured driver, but most drivers would be grateful that the insurance requirement is being enforced. Might poor blacks have a higher rate of driving without insurance than other drivers? Not relevant to know, apparently.

And again, here: 

The only way to avoid what the protesters label as “racial profiling” is to stop proactive policing entirely… But if the police back off from proactive policing, law-abiding residents of minority neighbourhoods are going to be hurt the most.

And don’t forget there are those who insist we must have racial quotas in school discipline to avoid any impression of racism, regardless of who’s actually misbehaving or how often and violently they’re doing it.

And Theodore Dalrymple on bizarre dictators and related paraphernalia: 

I learned that there was a company in Paris that specialised in strip-cartoon propaganda on behalf of dictators. It was called ABC Groupe Média International, and it had published such propaganda on behalf of Siaka Stevens — the first dictator of Sierra Leone, from whose rule the country has never since recovered — and El Hadj Omar (formerly Albert-Bernard) Bongo of Gabon, father of the present president, and ruler and looter for 41 years. When I was in Paris one day, I visited the company’s headquarters, which, if I remember correctly, were in the rue du Cherche-Midi. Suffice it to say that they were not pleased to see me there, and said that since the publication of these immortal works the company had changed its business model.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets. It’s what these posts are for.

Yes, I know, we’re all missing this blog’s unofficial mascot, Ms Laurie Penny. What with her recent elevation to loftier moral planes in the bosom of academia, where she will soon be anointed a “leader in journalism.” Luckily, over the weekend, commenter svh spotted a review of Ms Penny’s latest book – this one – in the hallowed pages of the New York Times. Given the radical chest-puffing, there’s much to ponder. For instance,

But beyond the politics of the (white) body, Penny is an elegant writer, and she deconstructs the issues of the day with an eye to how neoliberalism has filtered into our intimate relationships (“Under late capitalism, love has become like everything else: a prize to be won, an object to be attained, a commodity to be hoarded until it loses value or can be traded up for a better bargain”).

Apparently, an unsupported, question-begging claim is what now passes for elegant deconstruction. But such is Laurie’s world. She asserts so much and substantiates so little. A talent evidently shared by the reviewer, Latoya Peterson, a self-described “hip-hop feminist” and Guardian contributor, whose opening paragraph offers a shred of comfort to those missing Ms Penny’s signature hyperbole and disregard for reality:

The feminist scholar Donna Haraway defined cyborg writing as “the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.” That term describes so much digital scrawl on the Internet today — voices screaming from the margins, searching for connection. The British journalist Laurie Penny’s words seem to have secured her just that; she has found a devoted audience for her blog and three previous books.

By all means take a moment to realign your mind with the notion of Ms Penny as a “cyborg” writer and in some way marginalised – “marked as other” – and struggling against the pressures of not being heard. Except of course when she’s on TV, or Five Live, or Radio 4, or when airing her various and bewildering concerns in the pages of the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent.

Yes, this privately educated middle-class leftist, lectured at Wadham by other middle-class leftists and steeped in all of the “privilege” she so readily denounces in others, is “screaming from the margins, searching for connection.” A woman who was all but waved through the doors of Channel 4 and the BBC, our nation’s state broadcaster, by people who find her mouthings either titillating or congenial.

A woman who is currently boosting her social status with a year at Harvard, studying journalism free of charge (thanks largely to petitioning by those same middle-class leftists in the establishment media), and is now sitting through lectures on “economic justice” given by middle-class leftists, while surrounded in large part by middle-class leftists. Oh yes, she’s such an outsider.

As commenter Nikw211 points out, Ms Penny is so marginalised, so suppressed by The Hegemon, a massively enlarged projection of her face currently graces the walls of the Victoria & Albert Museum, barking revolutionary instructions to the little people below.

So, no establishment penetration there.