Readers may recall our various, quite lengthy discussions regarding the desperately bohemian Laurie Penny and her enthusiasm for supposedly radical lifestyles, which often entail parasitism and tend to have ruinous effects on those born without means:

Laurie is following the standard trajectory of her type. Her status and career would have been much less likely without the very same bourgeois values she claims to despise and urges others to reject. If instead of a stable, rather comfortable middle-class upbringing she’d been raised in keeping with her own professed values – say, by a welfare-dependent single parent with multiple transient partners and no stability or commitment – I somehow doubt she’d have been able to spend time at Wadham College finding herself politically and playing “riot girl.” And I doubt she’d now be able to flit around the world while tweeting about how oppressed she is.

Likewise, her self-imagined role as a wordsmith revolutionary would be much harder to sustain without a great many other people cultivating those same bourgeois values and keeping things ticking over. A fact that Laurie counts on, despite her pretence. In effect, we, the bourgeois rubes whose values she rails against, are her safety net. The fact that few of us are credulous enough to take her at her words and follow her advice is what allows her to mouth it in relative comfort and security, knowing that the destruction of capitalism, marriage and the family unit (and all that would go with it), which she claims to want, won’t happen just yet.

Well, a self-styled bohemian type seems to agree:

I’m a Boho, and square society should indulge and appreciate Boho contributions, IMHO. But I also think that Boho values are RUINOUS for everyday people. Seriously: for 5% of us, living the Boho way is excellent, but for most people Boho values and life-techniques will wreck them. That’s where I differ hugely from my fellow Bohos: I WANT square society to prosper, to be proud, to do a good square job, etc. Bohemia (which I love and am committed to) is dependent on a vigorous, healthy conventional society. It ain’t the reverse! Don’t let me down, squares.

At least the honesty is refreshing.

Heather Mac Donald on media dishonesties and contrived definitions:  

What do you do if you are the New York Times and 20 people show up to the white-supremacist rally that you had been breathlessly billing as further proof of the normalisation of hatred in the Donald Trump era? Expand the definition of “white supremacist” to cover a large portion of the American electorate and its representatives… It turns out that if you are for “immigration restrictions,” “ending affirmative action,” or “instituting trade protections,” you have been influenced by white nationalism and are embracing “policy issues the far right has promoted.”

And again, on biology, ideology, and inconsistent feminists: 

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting… Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centred work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google). And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously. Even as the director of the Yale initiative insists that it’s time to “stop treating women as a subgroup of the human population” (because women are biologically and psychologically distinct from males), the magazine and its sources carefully follow the conventions of social constructivism.

As Ms Mac Donald points out, “For academic feminists, male and female biology is either interchangeable or immutable, depending on what complaint they need to lodge.” The James Damore saga was outlined here.

Steven Pinker on feminist utopia:  

An unnamed New York Times reader asks, “How can I cure my white guilt?”  

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of colour. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

Times contributors Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, self-styled purveyors of “radically empathic advice,” inform this unhappy, seemingly demented reader that, “We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values,” and therefore any comforts and advantages the reader might have, however they were arrived at, are “unearned, the product of corrupt systems,” for which “every white person should be ashamed.” “What you really feel,” they continue, “is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor.”

Today’s words are abuse, creepy and cult.  

Via Dicentra. 

You can’t say that. 

Footnote of note. 

Michael Jones on the Clown Quarter’s approximation of scholarship: 

In her paper, How to Write as Felt: Touching Transmaterialities and More-Than-Human Intimacies, University of Toronto scholar Stephanie Springgay suggests that felt, a “dense material of permanently interlocking fibres,” can be linked to racism and capitalism.

It’s those “cis-heteronormative White supremacist settler colonial logics,” you see. And the “queer self-touching,” obviously.  

Charles Cooke on the latest young titan of US socialism:  

Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defence spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. 

Charlotte Allen on “healthy masculinity,” as defined by campus woke-lings: 

In May, the University of Texas-Austin hastily pulled back a programme on “healthy masculinity” that its counselling staff had devised – amid a flood of ridicule over such aspects of the programme as posters depicting young men wearing pencilled-in dresses (complete with bust-lines) and encouraging UT’s male students to try nail polish and makeup. The programme, titled “MasculinUT” and devised in 2015, had been originally marketed as a means of reducing campus sexual assault and domestic violence. Instead, as even UT administrators ultimately conceded, it mainly consisted of promoting “gender fluidity” and the treatment of traditional masculine roles and goals — such as focusing on career “success,” becoming the family “breadwinner,” and being told to “act like a man” — as inherently pathological.

And Jonah Goldberg on Sarah Jeong and racism as a credential at the New York Times: