Ian Miles Cheong on the mob thuggery at UC Berkeley and its ‘progressive’ cheerleaders: 

Vocal members of the progressive left took to social media to voice their support for the riot, dubbing it a legitimate resistance movement against the Trump administration. Feminist film director Lexi Alexander, who has directed episodes of Arrow, Supergirl and American Gothic, encouraged rioters to set the campus on fire. Her calls to “join the resistance” were echoed by comedian and actress Sarah Silverman, whose outspoken calls for violent insurrection have only escalated with each passing day… Polygon senior editor Ben Kuchera expressed support for the violence, saying it was okay to punch anyone who mocked safe spaces. And Arthur Chu, the perpetually “woke” male feminist ally, invited his followers to cheer about the brutalisation of a young woman who was assaulted as she conducted an interview.

See also this thread from yesterday.

Somewhat related, this screeching creature – apparently a professor – was rendered outraged and hysterical when some of her leftist associates were arrested following an unprovoked assault on the writer Gavin McInnes. She seems to believe that she and her comrades should be able to assault people, as they deem fit, with impunity.

Also related: Laurie Penny, who has yet to comment on the UC Berkeley thuggery despite being at the scene, is now letting her followers know just how brave she is – for – wait for it – mixing with conservative students. Because unlike masked far-left rioters who are armed with iron bars and who smash windows and punch women, conservative students and Trump supporters are “vicious and vengeful.” And she’s “fucking terrified of them.” *

As noted here recently, it’s remarkable just how often “social justice” activism is difficult to distinguish from spite and petty malice. If another example is needed, here’s how some educators at Marquette University plan to cope with a visit from Ben Shapiro: 

Chrissy Nelson, the programme assistant at the Centre for Gender and Sexualities Studies, claimed that she “just got off the phone with one of the directors of diversity on campus” and received a suggestion to reserve a seat as a student to “take a seat away from someone who would actually go” and then not attend the event. “This is what I will be advising students to do,” she adds. “Take a seat away from a student that would be interested in going.”

Remember, this isn’t the plotting of a moody and vindictive teenager. It’s a supposedly adult member of staff. One employed by the university’s Centre for Gender and Sexualities Studies, the stated goal of which is “the pursuit of knowledge and dialogue.” And hence the attempt to ensure that no-one gets to hear a speaker with whom Ms Nelson disagrees. Before devoting her energies to sabotaging other people’s evenings, Ms Nelson majored in “sociology and social justice,” which may explain her enacting of that great egalitarian maxim, “I don’t like, so you can’t have.”

Note the unspoken but blatant disdain for any students who might wish to hear Shapiro speak and ask him questions, or who might want to challenge him on some point – an activity he encourages with lengthy Q&A sessions. Ms Nelson is quite happy to deny all of those students that chance, by overriding their preferences in an underhand manner and imposing her own, selfish will. It’s the antithesis of what a university is supposed to be about, and yet it’s an attitude that’s increasingly come to define what that institution now is.

Ben Shapiro on abortion and evasion: 

Today, The Atlantic ran a bizarre piece by Moira Weigel titled, in Orwellian fashion, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Foetus Is a Person.” Which is somewhat like saying, “How the Microscope Pushed the Idea That Cells Exist,” or “How the Hubble Telescope Pushed the Idea That There Are Stars Outside Our Solar System.” […] But Weigel goes even further, assuring readers that ultrasounds were primarily a form of warfare against women rather than a tool allowing doctors to identify problems with foetal development as early as possible.  

“What is a foetal heartbeat?” asks Ms Weigel. “And why does it matter?” As we’ve seen, pregnancy is a subject that leaves some feminists looking not only disingenuous but actually monstrous. 

Roger Kimball on academia’s inauguration meltdown: 

Academia has an infantilising effect. I understand that. Many professors dress and act like adolescents right up to the time they are ready to hand in their tenure and live off their generous pensions. The Peter-Pan aspect of academia is not entirely the professors’ fault. After all, the points at which the real world intrudes upon academia are so few and so tenuous that academics may be forgiven for some of their hyperbole and inadvertently comic displays of self-importance. They exist, like kept women of yore, entirely at the pleasure of an affluent society they despise. So in a way it is not surprising that they endeavour to transform their entire campus into a sort of existential boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”

Peter Wood on attempts to make ‘progressive’ activism mandatory for students:

New Civics has appropriated the name of an older subject, but not the content of that subject or its basic orientation to the world. Instead of trying to prepare students for adult participation in the self-governance of the nation, the New Civics tries to prepare students to become social and political activists who are grounded in broad antagonism towards America’s founding principles and its republican ethos.

And Malhar Mali interviews the people behind the excellent Real Peer Review:  

@RealPeerReview is a Twitter account that has steadily gained popularity and fans by exposing the humorous, nonsensical, and absurd trends in scholarship that are sometimes found in academic research. From Ph.D. theses, M.A. theses, to articles in disciplinary journals, the account highlights laughable “scholarship” such as exploring the black anus, how pumpkins and pumpkin spice lattes are oppressive and symbols of white privilege, a paper on a researcher’s experience of completing jigsaw puzzles, and how a scholar felt while drinking coffee and reading the Guardian.  

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

Speaking of selfishness:

Alas, the fatuous grandstanding and self-congratulation was halted for all of five seconds.

TomJ steers us to another of academia’s identitarian dramas:

Black students’ progress is being stalled by university tutors who are “60-year-old white men” and “potentially racist,” according to students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London. In a report called Degrees of Racism, the student union demands that “all academics must be prepared to acknowledge that they are capable of racism.” It claims unconscious bias is rife at the school — part of the University of London — and that white tutors allow white male students to dominate class discussions and have lower expectations of black and ethnic minority (BME) students because of “racist stereotypes of people of colour as less capable, or lazy.”

Alongside the usual demands for double standards and racial favouritism in hiring, and “compulsory classes for academics to combat unconscious bias,” the students want “all staff [to] feel able to confront each other’s racism.” The report, they say, is intended to address the “significant gap in attainment” between white and ethnic minority students.

[The report] quotes black undergraduates who say their academic progress is being hampered by older white professors who cannot relate to them. “Both of my tutors are white men. How can I have a rapport and feel comfortable talking to a 60-year-old white man?” asks one. “Our experiences of life are so different and you’re coming from completely different places.”

Readers will note that the students, these avowed opponents of racism, refer to themselves, and by extension all black students, as if they were some ancient and unfathomable offshoot of humanity, for whom rapport with outsiders is impossible. And who are supposedly oppressed by the unremarkable fact that, in a white-majority country, their professors will often be white and – as seems unavoidable – older than the students. Readers may also wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.

In short, the students are admitting, albeit unwittingly, that in fact they are the inflexible and bigoted ones, the ones preoccupied with racist and ageist stereotypes, and are incapable of feeling “comfortable” with people whose appearance differs from their own. Apparently, for them, learning is next to impossible unless they are being taught by people who look just like them, are of a similar age, and who share the assumptions of a subset of nineteen-year-olds who are very much accustomed to flattery and indulgence.

Perhaps the students are too busy issuing grandiose demands to consider the humdrum fact that a person’s knowledge, perspective and experience, from which one hopes to benefit, necessarily take time to accumulate. Or to consider the possibility that stretching oneself beyond the familiar and comfortable is the general idea of education. And so it seems to me that the “significant gap in attainment” that the student union bemoans may have more to do with the limited abilities, and even more limited horizons, of the students in question.

Update, via the comments: