Attention, all readers.

Laurie Penny, she of the uneven mind, is no longer an anarcho-communist. 

Now she’s an anarcha-feminist. Which is, like, totally different. 

Please update your files accordingly.

Lionel Shriver on recreational outrage and the corresponding theatre of atonement:

The defence of an infinitely multiplying list of ‘marginalised groups’ is a predatory movement… and its pleasures are those of hunting: spotting your prey, stalking, going in for the kill. Any source of umbrage thus presents an exulting opportunity to score a trophy, stuff it, and hang it on your (Facebook) wall. Mainstream institutions straining to be with-it give credence to this pretence of injury and vulnerability, when no one’s feelings actually have been hurt. So the victory is two-pronged. You take down the sinner, and you humiliate the editors of the Nation by forcing them to participate in an emotional theatre that every-one knows is fake…

When, during that Evergreen foofaraw, a rabid convocation of students cowed the college president into lowering his arms at the podium because they found his hand gestures ‘threatening’, those students didn’t feel jeopardised; they were dominating and emasculating a man supposedly in authority. The students cowering in ‘safe spaces’ don’t feel endangered; they’re claiming territory… Progressives seem especially prone to disguise one feeling as another. Reliably entwined with self-deceit, the problem isn’t solely among the young.

William Ray on the pernicious hokum of “white privilege” guru Peggy McIntosh:

Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite and has remained ensconced there ever since. Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy. Many of her points are demonstrably economic. One is left to wonder why, given her stated conviction that she has unfairly benefited from her skin colour, there seems to be no record of her involvement in any charity or civil rights work…

[McIntosh] simply reclassified her manifest economic advantage as racial privilege and then dumped this newly discovered original sin onto every person who happens to share her skin colour. Without, of course, actually redistributing any of the wealth that, by her own account, she had done nothing to deserve. All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefited from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever.

And Heather Mac Donald on Clown Quarter credentials and keeping out the riff-raff:

In the video below, Janice Fiamengo reports on recent events at the University of Chicago, where Rachel Fulton Brown, a professor of Medieval history, dared to suggest, briefly, that, as a notional group, white men aren’t entirely awful, and that Western civilisation isn’t wholly without merit. The professor has consequently been denounced by her peers as a “fascist white supremacist” and a “violent” menace to the wellbeing of anyone whose skin is heroically brown. And do note the number – 1,300, cited towards the end of the video – the significance of which will, I think, become apparent.

The idea that nobody thought any of this through is an extraordinary admission… If you are having problems integrating people when immigration is at a relative historic low, why would you think you could do it better when it’s at an all-time high? […] It’s an odd thing to do, societally and culturally – to, for instance, without any mandate from the general public, decide to become something totally different… It’s an odd thing – for a society to effectively decide to abolish what it has been hitherto, and to become something totally new.

Douglas Murray, speaking recently in Norway. The talk begins around one hour seven minutes in. Via Simen Thoresen in the comments.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Helen Dale on the massive oversupply of negligibly-talented artists and writers: 

There are too many artists, too many people who want to be artists, and most of them aren’t very good… Meanwhile, universities (yes, you can go to university, rack up student debt, and ‘learn’ to be a writer) tell some people – depending on skin tone, sex, orientation, or something else – that as a matter of routine they have an important and luminous story to tell because of what they are… These people are everywhere in the economy, living hand-to-mouth and doing idiot things like demanding “luxury communism now.”  

Via Tim, James Delingpole and David Craig on low standards in higher education: 

When we were at university, probably one out of six school-leavers went to university. Now it’s about one out of every two. The number of people going to university has gone up from about 700,000 thirty years ago to over 2.3 million now… The way we’ve achieved that is not by increasing the intellectual capacity of British youth. For example, now, around 51% of all people going to university are getting in on three ‘D’s at A-level, or worse. Leeds Metropolitan University during one year had 97 courses for which you only needed two ‘E’s at A-level… We’ve increased the number of students with a huge drop in the bar you need to get over to get a place at university, and to be able to borrow up to £50,000 of taxpayers’ money.

There are currently around £100bn in outstanding student loans, of which, according to some estimates, 83% are expected to be in default to varying degrees.