Niall Gooch on free speech and its enemies: 

Free speech, like the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence, is a procedural virtue, which is why fanatics and revolutionaries hate it… Defenders of free speech are arguing not only for free speech as an abstraction, but a wider culture of honest debate, factual argument, respectful disagreement, and civilised co-existence with people who see the world very differently from us. Complaints about attacks on free speech can be seen as proxies for concerns about the maintenance of this culture, particularly in the context of the university. So in a sense, free speech isn’t one thing. It’s many things. It’s a whole network of overlapping norms about the exchange of ideas. One thing that people commonly mean when they say “free speech” is “if I’m invited to give a talk somewhere I should be allowed to do so without intimidation, interruption or threat, and people who want to come and listen to me should be able to do so.”

Well, obviously, we can’t have that. 

Ed West on things you mustn’t laugh about: 

There are plenty of subjects that merit satire today – the diversity industry, with its shakedowns and professional bullshit artists is a rich seam, as is the transgender movement. But these areas really are too edgy for satirists, most of whom – like the vast majority of influential people in the arts – hold quite uncontroversial (left-liberal) political views and also fear the next wave of revolutionaries more than they do the ancien régime. That’s why they make jokes about the ancien régime. In fact there is plenty of edgy comedy these days – but it tends to be told in private.

Jonah Goldberg on the leftist leanings of the establishment media: 

According to a just-released study [by the Centre for Public Integrity], more than 96 percent of donations from media figures to either of the two major-party presidential candidates went to Hillary Clinton… Anyone who has spent a moment around elite reporters or studied their output knows that they tend to be left of centre. In 1981, S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman surveyed 240 leading journalists and found that 94 percent of them voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, 81 percent voted for George McGovern in 1972, and 81 percent voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Only 19 percent placed themselves on the right side of the political spectrum. Does anyone think the media have become less liberal since then? None of this means liberals — or conservatives — can’t be good reporters, but the idea that media bias is non-existent is ludicrous.

Via Franklin, Jamie Palmer and Sohrab Ahmari on the art world’s deadening ideological lockstep:

Patriarchy — that impregnable citadel of male privilege and the object of so much feminist anger and hatred — turned out to be a paper tiger, after all. Feminists discovered that in liberal democracies, radical activism can quickly become a casualty of its own success. Those for whom the attainment of political goals is less important than the romance of resistance itself, perversely require an immovable antagonist against which to hurl themselves. “Perhaps to their own disappointment,” Ahmari observes, “the identitarians today find that the liberal order has given in to most of their demands.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley on things you mustn’t notice or say out loud: 

Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam [a son of Indian immigrants] wanted to become a doctor like his mother. But upon realising how hard it was, he tried another route. He saw that a friend of his from a similar ethnic and educational background did not get into a single medical school. So he decided to pretend he was African-American. Despite mediocre grades and board scores, he was interviewed by 11 of the 14 elite medical schools he applied to and was admitted to one. Though he made no claim to be disadvantaged — admissions committees were aware that his parents were well-off professionals, that he went to expensive schools and that he needed no financial aid — he was treated like someone who needed a leg up in life merely because he was ‘black’.

And in three parts, Thomas Sowell on the left and the masses: 

One of the most recent efforts of the left is the spread of laws and policies that forbid employers from asking job applicants whether they have been arrested or imprisoned. This is said to be to help ex-cons get a job after they have served their time, and ex-cons are often either poor or black, or both. First of all, many of the left’s policies to help black people are disproportionately aimed at helping those blacks who have done the wrong thing – and whose victims are disproportionately those blacks who have been trying to do the right thing. In the case of this ban on asking job applicants whether they have criminal backgrounds, the only criterion seems to be whether it sounds good or makes the left feel good about themselves.

An empirical study some years ago examined the hiring practices of companies that did a background check on all the employees they hired. It found that such companies hired more black people than companies which did not. Why? Many employers, aware of higher rates of imprisonment among blacks, are less likely to hire blacks whose individual backgrounds are unknown to them. But those employers who investigate everyone’s background before hiring them do not have to rely on such generalisations. The fact that these latter kinds of employers hired more black people suggests that racial animosity is not the key factor, since blacks are still blacks, whether they have a criminal past or not. But the political left is so heavily invested in blaming racism that mere facts are unlikely to change their minds.

Parts two and three. 

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

In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies.

He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. Repeated cowed apologies ensue. The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.”

There being no other, perhaps more obvious, reason.

Dave Huber at The College Fix reports: 

The University of Michigan unveiled a five-year Diversity, Equity and Inclusion plan on Thursday to which the school will commit $125 million.

All other possible uses of said money having been exhausted, presumably. What with the investment in a $13,000 vibrating nap machine for the soothing of emotionally fatigued students. And the $400,000 spent on relocating one tree. 

According to the Michigan Daily: 

The university is piloting a culture training programme for students that will ultimately include the entire freshman class in five years. The training will require a preliminary assessment to evaluate the students’ cultural sensitivity levels.

WrongThought™ will be detected. Worldviews will be harmonised. Intrusive condescension will be the norm.

Participants will receive a unique training programme based on assessment results targeting specific areas for cultural development. At the end, students must take a follow-up assessment and receive a certificate for completion.

The university’s “strategic plan” for “diversity, equity and inclusion” tells us that the political correction on offer is “increasingly in demand… among employers,” and that “the ultimate goal” is to subject “all incoming students” to this or similar corrective processing. The document also boasts of encouraging “many voices.” Though as the stated object is to “shift cultural perspectives” and to “adapt” any behaviour deemed insufficiently sensitive and therefore improper, readers may wonder whether diversity of opinion will be the ultimate result.

Joy Pullmann on when feminist feelings collide with science: 

Throughout her dissertation, [doctoral candidate, Laura] Parson asserts that women and minorities are uniquely challenged by the idea that science can provide objective information about the natural world. This is an unfair assumption, she says, because the concept of objectivity is too hard for women and minorities to understand. “Notions of absolute truth and a single reality” are “masculine,” she says, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory… Rather than rejecting this insulting view of women and minorities’ intellectual capacities, Parson uses it as a pretext to advocate that science classes abandon the scientific method itself… and all other “male” forms of oppression, such as “weed-out courses, courses that grade on a curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, an individualistic culture, and comprehensive exams.”

Feminism is of course famed for its intellectual rigour. 

And in other, utterly unrelated news: 

Many elite universities relegate Women’s Studies degree programmes to second-class status.

Nick Gillespie interviews Instapundit himself, Professor Glenn Reynolds:  

It’s a small number of companies that really control almost all social media, and they all kind of lean left. Facebook has been accused, and I think credibly, of a lot of political bias, and there are experiments that suggest they could swing an election by manipulating their flow of news and views. At some level, you say that’s just private enterprise and they can do what they want, but at another level, it’s a little more troubling that they are kind of a monopoly and they’re politically in the tank with an administration that is doing them a lot of favours… I’m not so sure we aren’t approaching the point where people might want to think about anti-trust. And I know we’re past the point where, if these were companies that operated with a slant towards Republicans, everyone would be calling for anti-trust regulation right away.

And at Claremont College, your “extremely toxic” masculinity is being discussed:  

Miles Robinson, who attended the event, told the Claremont Independent that among attendees there was “a common consensus that masculinity is harmful both to those who express it and those affected by it.” Robinson added that all of the organisers, as well most of the attendees, are female.

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