Yet again, we find that the victim group du jour’s distress is not predicated on any overt act of exclusion or discrimination, but upon the group’s own internal emotional hang-ups.

So writes R Sherman in the comments, regarding this latest fit of identitarian psychodrama, shared by Atempdog, in which implausibly delicate students and administrators rail against the “homonormative whiteness” of a campus LGBTQ centre. As commenter Farnsworth M Muldoon notes in reply, the students are, inevitably, also aggrieved, or pretending to be aggrieved, by a great many other things, including gay pride flags, which apparently perpetuate “a white gay ideal”; notions of fraternity and sorority, which are “problematic” and a cause of discomfort, albeit for reasons not entirely clear; and the campus gym, which, we’re told, reinforces “expectations of manliness” while simultaneously creating a crushing and intolerable “pressure to be fit.”

Being, as these things are, the result of pretension and personal dysfunction rather than anything approaching actual injustice, the umbrage on display is of course insatiable. There’s no way to please the compulsively, competitively, neurotically indignant, whose in-group status and sense of importance depend on disaffection and imaginary woe, and any effort to appease such creatures is likely to encourage further scolding and demands.

As illustrated, for instance, here and here.

Some Nth-level virtue-signalling:

“Come, look at the negroes, Martha.”

Via Farnsworth M Muldoon in the comments.

At Ballou High School, Washington, DC, it would appear that miracles happen:

Teachers… say they often had students on their rosters they barely knew because the students almost never attended class.

And yet, this year, every student of suitable age, including those who were absent more often than in class, has somehow graduated and been accepted by a college or university. At a school were only 3% of students were deemed proficient in reading, where the average SAT score is 782 out of 1600, and where, according to one teacher, those who do attend, in the loosest possible sense, “roam the halls with impunity.”

Of course I use the word graduated in the same entirely bogus way favoured by the school’s administrators.

Via Rafi. 

More lifting from the comments, where, following this post, we were discussing how to spot good intentions, however dire their actual consequences:

If we set aside the explicitly sadistic and murderous fantasies of Marx and Engels, and Lenin and Trotsky and all the others, I suppose we have to ask whether the claim of benevolence and altruism, or the delusion of such, signifies actual benevolence and altruism, or whether it can be used as camouflage, a fig leaf, for something else entirely.

What if someone – say, a politician and supposed intellectual – wants to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings and wants to do this regardless of whether such confiscation would have the social benefits they claimed it would have, even if it makes their stated objective impossible. Are we to trust in their self-image as a person of unassailable virtue?

And what about these guys here, the ones who want to compel us to live more simply, as they conceive it, and who claim, apparently in all seriousness, that not permitting us to own the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing,” will make us “better neighbours,” “better parents” and better people? Do you trust their stated motives – of “healing” us, and curing us of our acquisitiveness – and do you trust their self-image as benevolent and just?

And when a Guardian columnist rages against a random family in the neighbourhood, about whom she knows nothing beyond the size and amenities of their home, and then exults, proudly and in print, at the thought of that random family’s downfall and suffering, and at the thought of the “aggressive redistribution” of their belongings, and that Guardian columnist tells us how pleasing this will be and that she just “can’t wait,” are we to believe that her motives are selfless and high-minded?

Readers are invited to fathom the intentions in play behind each of the above examples.

Further to this Kafkaesque episode, Lindsay Shepherd explains the difficulties of dealing with the Mao-ling mentality:

I know absolutely nothing [about my accuser or the accusation]. I don’t know how many people complained; I don’t know if it’s something specific that I said or that was in the [Jordan Peterson] clip; or something even that someone in the class said. Currently, the Rainbow Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University is demanding an apology from me… but first I feel I need to know… what am I apologising for?

Henry George on the Clown Quarter’s pathological coddling and its strange selectivity:

King’s College London has made impressive new strides in its efforts to be crowned “social justice warrior college of the year.” As of this term, the King’s College London Student’s Union is paying what it calls ‘safe space marshals’ to attend speaking events and sit in the audience to protect the attendees from speech that might prove offensive or uncomfortable, with instructions to intervene at the first sign of wrongthink… The first speaker to enjoy this new form of policing was the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is, of course, considered a dire threat to student safety and wellbeing… This raises the question of whether or not these ‘safe space marshals’ would have intervened when the university’s Islamic Society hosted a speaker who failed to condemn stoning for adultery, calling it as merciful as euthanasia earlier this year.

And Jordan Peterson on the psychology of leftism:

Hatred turns out to be a very powerful motivation. If you think about the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union, all these places that were supposed to be workers’ paradises – if you look at the outcomes and you had to infer whether it was goodness of heart and care for the working man that produced the genocides, or outright bitter resentment and hatred, it’s a lot easier to draw a causal path from the negative emotions to the outcome than from kind-hearted benevolence. You just don’t get gulags out of benevolence.

As noted here before and illustrated at length, it’s interesting just how often “social justice” posturing entails something that looks an awful lot like spite or petty malice, or an attempt to harass and dominate, or some other obnoxious behaviour. Behaviour that, without a “social justice” pretext, might get you called a wanker or a bitch. A coincidence, I’m sure. And it seems to me that when your chosen means of expressing piety and high motives include terrorising a lone female driver, picked at random, and trying to smash her car’s windscreen into her face while videoing her distress, then some self-reflection may be in order. And likewise, when Black Lives Matter activists and “social justice” juggernauts deliberately and laughingly obstruct ambulances and other emergency vehicles, and endanger the lives of random people, while giving the ambulance drivers the finger, this doesn’t exactly indicate some lofty moral purpose.

It does, however, tell the rest of us, quite vividly, what you are.

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