Human capital is the ability to create the material things that constitute wealth… A classic example: In the 1970s, Uganda decided that the Gujarati population, from India, were just too wealthy and controlled too much of the economy. The Ugandans expelled them and wouldn’t let them take their wealth with them. And so the Gujaratis arrived, mostly in England, destitute. Meanwhile, the Ugandan government had taken over all of this material stuff. A few years later, the Gujaratis were prosperous in England, and the Ugandan economy collapsed. Because they didn’t have people who knew how to do what the Gujaratis were doing. It’s also one of the problems of trying to finance things by confiscating the wealth of the wealthy. All you can confiscate is the material wealth. You cannot confiscate human capital.

Thomas Sowell on wealth, poverty and Flat Earth economics:  

Fans of car-crash interviews may enjoy these extracts from the BBC’s Today Programme, in which Ms Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, shares her deep thinking on the subject of “safe spaces” and campus censorship.

Do stay tuned for her thoughts on the University of Birmingham as “a Zionist outpost.”

Via Julia. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Well, Soil Is Sort Of Brown. 

Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”  

Ladies First. 

You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.

“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view. 

Answers On A Postcard, Please.

Squat enthusiast invites readers to “imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar,” and someone else’s property. 

Says Ms Cosslett, “Communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members.” Readers who as students shared a house and cleaning duties, in theory at least, will no doubt testify to the practicality of this approach and the lofty hygiene standards that invariably resulted. Now imagine those high standards applied to parenting and childcare.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.

Noted racist and waitress abuser Mr Ntokozo Quabe™ is in the news again:

It is NOT true that I ‘assaulted’ and ‘whipped with a stick’ a white student during our shutdown of the arrogant [University of Cape Town] Law Faculty yesterday. Although I wish I’d actually… whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard – who continued to video record us without our consent.

Well, in fairness, and as caught on video, Mr Quabe and his associates were fairly unequivocal in their demand for attention. And note the use of the word ‘arrogant’.

While word has it that the instruction to video record us came from the Dean of Law (a whole womxn of colour!), we are klear [sic] that we will not be subjected to such white violence. The violent anthropologising of articulations of black pain without black people’s consent is as old as settler colonial domination itself. We refuse to continue operating under the white gaze!

Yes, physical harassment and jabbing at strangers with a two-metre stick are actions unworthy of complaint. But the use of a smartphone to record said jabbing and harassment constitutes “white violence” and is therefore inexcusable. Potential employers, please take note.

Meanwhile, at the University of Houston, and in no way related to anything above: 

Philosophy department advisor Bobbie Sue Schindler agreed without hesitation to the idea of “emotional first-aid kits,” even offering her assistance to help assemble them. “The stress of school gets to them,” Schindler observed… regarding the emotional distress that students face, “like a bad grade, a missed class, being late, a microaggression, uh whatever…” To help students deal with such burdens, the emotional first-aid kits contain a baby blanket, chocolates, a plush kitten, a bag containing the smell of lavender, ear plugs, a genderless pastel teddy bear, hand written notes, and a pacifier. Only the pacifier gave Schindler any pause, though only out of concern that students might take them the wrong way. Instead, she suggested that the kit just contain a note encouraging students to suck their thumbs.

Says Ms Schindler, “I sucked my thumb for twenty years.”

Via the comments, AnotherFred steers us to an outpouring of note by Melissa Fabello, managing editor of Everyday Feminism. In this potentially classic piece, from September last year, Ms Fabello rails against those who presume to question her feminist gospel and its charmless lamentations:

If you’re a feminist who spends any amount of time on the internet, you know exactly what I’m talking about: You post that article about the wage gap on Facebook, and all of a sudden, all of these cis, white, straight dudes come out of the woodwork to remind you that the statistics are faulty, that women take more time off of work, that women just don’t like STEM fields.

Well, yes, that will happen if you publicly assert as fact things that aren’t true and which have been repeatedly debunked. And labelling the people who correct those zombie misconceptions, the ones that refuse to die, as “cis, white, straight dudes,” even when they’re ladies, as in the links above, is an evasion, not an argument. Curiously, Ms Fabello depicts those who dare to disagree as merely “playing devil’s advocate,” which seems just a tad presumptuous.

Whenever someone responds to my critique of the culture in which we live with what they believe to be a deep conundrum or contradiction, my first thought is, “Wow. You have absolutely no respect for me as an intellectual being.”

You see, those aren’t load-bearing arguments. They’re just for show. If you poke at those buggers the whole roof could fall in. This is followed, almost instantly, by a twitch of political self-correction:

I don’t think we should value intellect… as a trait (hi, that’s ableist)

Whew. Nice save.

but I do think that we should respect one another for whichever way our smarts show up for us.

Ms Fabello’s smarts are manifest via the medium of rhetorical dance:

When you regurgitate the status quo to us

I.e., when you point out a mistake or point of contention, this is,

interrupting our thought processes

How very dare you.