Douglas Murray on crime, migration and modern dishonesties: 

In Germany, friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them.

Related: “Vibrant and diverse.” And of course these items here. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” versus merit: 

Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades… The result: wasted resources, the side-lining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t — because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

And Roger Kimball on being outraged by the obvious-but-unmentionable: 

Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered. What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” […] As William Henry argued back in the 1990s… “Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal… It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” True, too true. But in a pusillanimous society terrified by its own shadow, it is one thing to know the truth, quite another to utter it in public.

And then Professor Wax mentioned other obvious things, much to the agitation of people who like to pretend.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

They’re just for display purposes: 

David Paxton on identitarian pay complaints: 

A pay gap between two men is the product of market forces, but a pay gap between a man and a woman is attributable to either the market or to patriarchal oppression, depending on whom it favours… Pointing at specific cases, highlighting a demographic difference, and then declaring discrimination to be the sole cause without further evidence, is a tactic favoured by those who consider themselves thoroughly modern… But this thought process is pre-medieval – an unreflective instinct of pattern-seeking mammals who habitually see conspiracies in misattributions of cause and effect. Just as infant deaths were once blamed on a neighbour’s malevolent witchcraft, and crop failure on insufficient animal sacrifice, today’s hashtags blame identity-group discrimination for pay differentials when perfectly logical alternative explanations are readily available.

David Solway, husband of Janice Fiamengo, on the corrosive shakedown named “social justice”: 

My wife, who for many years donated one fifth of her salary to charity, is anything but a heartless conservative, and I have gone out of my way to help people in distress. We do not reject the social safety net intended to assist the unfortunate who have, as they say, “fallen through the cracks.” But helping measures must be closely and fairly monitored so that the indolent and inept do not gradually displace or usurp the productive and the competent, to everyone’s ultimate disadvantage. A difficult task, to be sure, but worth undertaking. “Social justice” makes no attempt to distinguish the one from the other… The old saw that development grinds to a halt when there are as many or more people riding in the wagon as pulling it applies with a vengeance.

And Toni Airaksinen on the feminist appropriation of “toxic masculinity”: 

The term may have first been popularised by early forms of the men’s advocacy movements. (Not feminist movements, as one might expect.) For example, one book that seeks to raise awareness of issues that men face, titled Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (1994), highlighted one of the earliest examples of toxic masculinity in the literature. “Without a “father in residence,” [men] may go through life striving towards an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity,” the author of the book, Frank Pittman, said on the topic of young men without fathers. But the term has recently been co-opted by the feminist establishment as a way to scapegoat, blame, and denigrate men as a whole. In the college classroom, toxic masculinity is presented to students as a reality that affects all men, and is harmful to all women.

And so we arrive at the contradiction of feminists who denounce “toxic masculinity” as both all-pervasive and a fundamental evil, at least among white people, while simultaneously endorsing fatherlessness and family instability, i.e., the most obvious causes of the behaviour they claim to dislike. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

“Their role as social engineers.” And so, 

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

Yes, it’s faintly absurd and veering towards comedy. But if you read the whole thing, you may well be struck by the eye-widening arrogance and vanity of the educators, who, as self-appointed “social engineers,” feel entitled to “counteract” normative gender differences, along with the preferences of parents, some of whom have complained about their children’s subsequent behaviour.

Via Ben Sixsmith. 

A North Carolina State University sociology instructor contends that vegan and vegetarian men are guilty of “upholding the gender binary” and perpetuating “white masculinity.”

Imagine my surprise. 

Meatless Meals and Masculinity was written by Mari Mycek, a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the NCSU sociology department, who argues that vegan and vegetarian men have reclaimed their “previously-stigmatised consumption identity” to wield power over women by framing their lifestyle as a rational, rather than emotional, choice.

It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to, personally. But as we’ve seen so many times, the contrived agonising must never end. Especially for woke sociology lecturers who wish to remind the world of their own Brahmin status in the progressive pecking order.  

Update: