In dangers-of-the-workplace news:

The grown adult quoted above is Professor Susan Jebb, employed by the University of Oxford to think deeply on matters of diet, and current chair of the Food Standards Agency. For our disapproving academic, the workplace is akin to a “smoky pub,” due to the occasional presence of cake, and therefore conjures – in her mind, at least – notions of “passive smoking.” Being offered a slice of cake during one’s coffee break is, it turns out, grounds for invoking victimhood. And because struggling with even the most routine self-possession has to be blamed on something:

Cauliflower enthusiasts will no doubt be gutted.

Professor Jebb insists that her desire to make workplace cake-bringing taboo – and seen as something harmful and antisocial – is “not about the nanny state,” or, dare I suggest, some personal inadequacy. You see, the advertising of cakes and other confections – and the fact that they may be accessible in the workplace – is “undermining people’s free will.” Free will being demonstrated only by compliance with Professor Jebb’s New Rules Of Cake-Eating. And which is why, one assumes, this grown woman, a professional intellectual, can’t say no to a bit of sponge.

Cakes in the workplace – and their allegedly unhinging effects on women – have, of course, been mentioned here before.

Via Christopher Snowdon, who, as you might imagine, has some thoughts.

For newcomers and the nostalgic, some items from the archives:

Via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I bring you bondage news:

The bondage of glitter, I mean.

And the mass-produced plastic trees.

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.

Or, Grifters Gonna Grift.

At Montreal’s Concordia University, even light is being “decolonised.” Because “colonialism in contemporary physics” is a thing, you see. No, really, it is. A thing that must be “countered” in the name of piety. By people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy:

The project occupies the time of “equity, diversity and inclusion advisor” Tanja Tajmel and Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies Louellyn White, and draws on the magical almost-brownness of Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, a member of the Turtle Clan from Kahnawà:ke, and who was hired by Concordia to “facilitate anti-colonial training.” Combined, their efforts will be,

I suspect this is where the words bad whitey will be inserted. After all, there ain’t no grift in a context that isn’t heaving with pretentious guilt.

Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work, the important stuff, the thing that pays the bills, in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. 

At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities. 

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here. 

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.