Four years ago, when art professor Elizabeth Stephens filmed the documentary Ecosexual Love Story, in which she and her partner licked trees,

I could just stop there, really.

the term “ecosexuality” was still somewhat unknown.

If, by some chance, the term is unfamiliar,

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens… authors of The Explorer’s Guide to Planet Orgasm… describe being ecosexual as this: “You don’t look at the Earth as your mother, you look at it as your lover.”

And so, inevitably,

We shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants.

Interest in this form of auto-erotic activism – a sort of frottage al fresco – has apparently been spreading:

The concept was recently featured in Teen Vogue, for example, which told its young readers about a concept called grassilingus, which was accompanied by a description of a musician laying face-down in grass and licking it. “Whether it’s masturbating with water pressure, using eco-friendly lubricant, or literally having sex with a tree — a person of any sexual proclivity who finds eroticism in nature, or believes that making environmentalism sexy will slow the planet’s destruction, can be ecosexual,” the magazine explained.

Readers are invited to ponder the question of consent, and whether the ladies are in fact advocating tree molestation.

Those whose appetite has been whetted will be thrilled to hear that the trailer for the aforementioned documentary can be viewed here. For the delicate among us, I should point out that said trailer does feature scenes of suggestive rock rubbing, references to coal mining as “a protracted form of genocide,” and free-swinging breasts being daubed with mud. A second, more recent film, on the delights of “ecosexual” weddings, complete with displays of hardcore Gaia-loving, can be savoured here.

Jonathan Haidt on the academic heresy of defending bourgeois values: 

[Law professor, Amy] Wax was correct, based on the available evidence and expert opinion, to argue that “a strong pro-marriage norm” would reduce poverty and blunt or reverse the pernicious social trends she described at the beginning of her article… Marriage, and norms promoting marriage-like behaviour, are among the most powerful known antidotes to American poverty… Now Wax is being pilloried for… saying that marriage and culture really matter, and that some norms, some cultures, are more conducive to success in modern America than others. Does anyone seriously believe that all cultures are equal – either morally or as packages of norms and practices that are likely to lead to success?

Somewhat related, this item from the archives, and this one too, and contrarily, this interview here. Readers will note which of the authors favours evidence over rhetorical breathlessness.

Bob McManus on the consequences of race and gender quotas: 

[Federal judge, Nicholas] Garaufis declared the New York Fire Department “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege.” He ordered that two of every five new city firefighters be black and one of every five be Hispanic. The jurist also ordered the FDNY to pay $129 million in retroactive salary and benefits to unsuccessful black and Hispanic recruits. The results of all this quota-setting and bean-counting were predictable. FDNY insiders say that the department struggles to fill the minority quotas despite degraded hiring standards. Standards for women have grown so lax… that one female recruit failed entrance exams six times and was hired anyway. Nine felons — each a beneficiary of Garafulis’s quotas — graduated in a class of probationary firefighters from the city’s fire academy last November.

And via Darleen, another ‘progressive’ experiment in crime prevention:  

After a violent weekend of suspected gang-related shootings, Tuesday the Sacramento City Council took action to reduce the bloodshed. It approved a controversial programme called Advance Peace, which offers cash stipends to gang members who remain peaceful… The programme targets key gang agitators, offering them cash stipends to graduate school and remain peaceful. 

We’ve been here before, of course, and claims made for the effectiveness of similar programmes – using taxpayers’ money to bribe local vermin and assorted sociopaths, with each receiving up to $1000 a month – were, shall we say, somewhat overstated. A scheme in Pittsburgh initially coincided with an increase in the murder rate; one in Chicago has been “overshadowed by escalating homicide numbers,” and a project in Boston is described as “ending disastrously.” 

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

Further to this, here’s a short but telling scene from an “anti-racist” rally in Vancouver, where young people are swollen with righteousness, and where even the most jarring irony escapes detection. Think of it as another illustration of what it’s like to be severely educated: 

You don’t have a fucking culture! We’re fucking white. We don’t have a goddamn fucking culture!

Longer video here. You may want to bite down on something.

In progressive academia, that blueprint of utopia, it appears there’s some unrest: 

Black and Latino student groups at the University of Florida recently protested a plan to house their organisations in one building, saying it would erase and marginalise their black and brown bodies and their cultures at the predominantly white institution.

The university had revealed plans for a U-shaped building that would accommodate both organisations:

The two groups would each get their own wing of the building and simply share a walkway and elevator. 

Sounds swanky.

But members of the Institute of Black Culture and the Institute of Hispanic-Latino Culture expressed fury at the plan.

You see, being so pious, and so very, very special, they mustn’t endure proximity to the wrong level of melanin, what with the risk of contagion and a loss of specialness. A student organiser of the protests, Daniel Clayton, said,

My main complaint to the University administration… is that we are not taken seriously at all. It is not appropriate to dismiss student concerns as being ludicrous.

However, inevitably, university administrators have been cowed by the usual histrionic rumblings and have agreed to build the immensely tolerant groups two entirely separate buildings. And with equal inevitability, the students are now insisting that the new buildings, the cost of which is unclear, should be “visibly distinct from the rest of campus.”

A University of Tampa professor recently suggested that Texans deserve the fallout from Hurricane Harvey because of their support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. “I don’t believe in instant Karma but this kinda feels like it for Texas,” Professor Ken Storey wrote.

Another ‘progressive’ educator swollen with compassion and floating above us on a higher moral plane. 

One of Storey’s followers responded to the tweet by noting that there are “lots of good people in Texas,” and so he “may want to rethink this one.” “Well, the good people there need to do more to stop the evil their state pushes. I’m only blaming those who support the GOP there,” Storey elaborated, to which the same commenter replied by asking if he thinks the same about Trump supporters in Florida. “Yep, those who voted for him here deserve it as well,” Storey answered, though he later deleted his Twitter account.

Because when you hear of random people trapped and terrified, or learning that their loved ones were swept away and drowned, and when the local police chief is worried about “how many bodies” they’re going to find, the first thing you want to know, the really important thing, is, obviously, how they voted.

Oh. He teaches sociology, before you ask.