Further to the last item here, and various rumblings in the comments, here’s Nanette Asimov on The Screeching Left versus Ben Shapiro (and anyone who wants to engage him in debating ideas): 

For many protesters, the specifics of what the opposition says is not the point. “It doesn’t matter what the guy’s going to say,” said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the sociology of protest movements. “He could talk about the joys of apple-picking. What matters is that the counter-movement is trying to use the energy of the (event) to grow. This is an opportunity for them — and they are likely to seize upon it.”

And hence the conceit that any disagreement is an act of “violence,” to be repaid in kind, violently. For the hyperventilated protestors, it’s all about them and their psychodrama. Because it always is. And so we see self-styled ‘progressives’, the self-imagined woke, calling a Jewish man “Nazi scum” and a “fascist xenophobe” because he opposes racism and thuggery, and wants to have conversations in which students consider issues of basic humanity.

See also, Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Janice Fiamengo, etc., etc. 

In other news, 

Officials in Manatee County, Florida are under fire after an interpreter for the deaf warned about pizza and monsters during an emergency briefing related to Hurricane Irma… Members of the deaf community said [amateur interpreter, Marshall] Greene mostly signed gibberish, referencing “pizza,” “monsters,” and using the phrase “help you at that time to use bear big,” during the event. 

Via Popehat. 

Speaking of sociology and its clown school connotations:

I will gladly sow gender confusion in kids. It’s my duty to.

So says Colin Cremin, a sociology lecturer who uses the workplace – and his colleagues and students – in order to indulge his transvestite kink:  

While I’m delighted to contribute to the breaking down of hetero-fascist biases, this was not the principal reason I started dressing to work as a woman. No doubt to the disappointment of colleagues in sociology, I never suffered from being born into the wrong gender… I dress as a woman because I like wearing women’s clothes. I like the look of the westernised feminine aesthetic. I like the feel of the silky fabrics on my body. I like the process of selecting outfits, matching up jewellery and shoes and putting on makeup.

And apparently all that fetishistic cosplay really needs an audience, preferably an involuntary one, during office hours. How terribly selfless.

Update, via the comments:

A Harvard-educated sociology professor named Crystal Fleming – whose areas of expertise include “critical race theory” and “mindfulness and spirituality” – wishes to share her wisdom. Specifically, that we shouldn’t judge people who smash the windows of local stores and loot multiple pairs of trainers while the owners of said stores are distracted by an oncoming hurricane.

Because white people. 

And if you don’t understand why Everything Is Racist, Including You™ and why looting local stores for half a dozen pairs of expensive fashion items is therefore totes okay, it’s “very, very sad.” You see, “white supremacist racism” is all about “hoarding resources.” 

Further to this item here, on the academic heresy of affirming bourgeois values, Aryssa Damron has more: 

The National Lawyers Guild chapter at the University of Pennsylvania Law School condemned Penn professor Amy Wax’s recent op-ed, in which Wax, along with a co-author, lamented the “breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture” and declared: “All cultures are not created equal.” The members of Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote that Wax’s comments are a “textbook example of white supremacy and cultural elitism” and alleged she is a “segregationist” with “bigoted views.” “We call on the administration,” Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote, “to consider more deeply the toll that this takes on students, particularly students of colour and members of the LGBTQIA community, and to consider whether it is in the best interests of the school and its students for Professor Wax to continue to teach a required first-year class.”

When asked for evidence of Professor Wax’s supposedly “segregationist” views and her alleged endorsement of “white supremacy,” the indignant students chose not to oblige. But hey, witches must be burned.

Entirely unrelated, Pamela Paresky on things that mustn’t be thought, or at least articulated: 

Today, for what seems to be an increasing proportion of the educated left, even the mere willingness to discuss certain kinds of facts is “harmful.” The data in the [Google] memo… was beside the point. Or perhaps more accurately, the fact that [James Damore] was willing to cite it was the problem… As John McWhorter has pointed out, “certain questions are not to be asked.” And when they are, they are received “with indignation that one would even ask them.” Even more pernicious, however, they inevitably lead to the implication that not only is asking these questions a symptom of the problem, but the presence of the asker is, too… Perhaps what makes the Google scenario stand out from even the most astounding campus reactions is that Google is not a college campus, but a company. And not just any company, but one responsible for much of the scientific, historical and objective facts that many, if not most of us find online.

Charles Cooke on academia’s mental agoraphobia: 

If our colleges continue down this road, they are going to create a host of extremely weird, hyper-sensitive people who have no earthly idea how to converse and interact with the sane… Ideally, universities would be far more tolerant, open, and intellectually diverse than the “real world.” Ideally, they would host genuine and untrammelled free inquiry, and in a manner that is hard, if not impossible, to replicate elsewhere… The old archetype is of the student who leaves his stuffy parents and has his mind expanded by learning. “You don’t understand,” he says, when returning home. The new archetype, by unlovely contrast, is of the student who can only express himself when outside of his professors’ earshot. 

And Berkeley’s fainting couch has been wheeled out once again. Because apparently Ben Shapiro endorses “white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia,” and engages in “fascist intellectual thuggery.” Which I suppose means acknowledging facts. The trauma-inducing event featuring Mr Shapiro can be viewed online here on September 14.

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