This just in from academia, more words you mustn’t use: 

The words “angry,” “passive” and “exotic” are also strongly discouraged and will no doubt be tutted at. Please update your files accordingly.

Via The College Fix.

Jim Goad on when a “hate crime” can’t be called that: 

I can only guess that the reason you don’t hear much about black-versus-Hispanic violence in America is that you’re not supposed to hear much about it. It’s the sort of thing that swims upstream against the dominant narrative with the tenacity of a thuggish, heavily tattooed salmon.

Somewhat related.  

Heather Mac Donald on the clown-shoe circus of identity politics: 

The Centre for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, is presenting a talk next week on “Queering Agriculture,” dedicated to the proposition that “it is absolutely crucial queer and transgender studies begin to deal more seriously with the subject of agriculture.” […] The talk’s presenter, a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at the University of Maryland, will allegedly show that “the growing popularity of sustainable food is laden with anthroheterocentric assumptions of the ‘good life’ coupled with idealised images and ideas of the American farm, and gender, radicalised and normative standards of health, family, and nation.”

And Thomas Sowell on the peculiar impunity of self-styled campus radicals: 

An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm-trooper tactics. Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put their own desires above the rights of others.

On the contrary, these students went on to demand mandatory campus “teach-ins,” and the administration caved on that demand. Among their other demands are that courses on ethnic studies, and on gender and sexuality, be made a requirement for graduation. Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok? At a prestigious college like Swarthmore, every student who trampled on other people’s rights could be expelled and there would be plenty of prospective students available to take their places. 

As we’ve seen so many, many times, some children need to learn that this world has consequences. But apparently the Clown Quarter of academia isn’t the place for that. And if you’re still not convinced, don’t forget the third item here, in which Alice McLachlan, a professor of philosophy, insists that censorious mobs who shriek personal abuse and shut down discussion are in fact the very model of progressive debate. You see, Professor McLachlan is “warmed” by such behaviour and she “cares a lot about free speech.” Just not for people who might dare to disagree with her.

Spotted by dicentra: 

Any hint of laughter will trigger the alarm.

Update: Also, yes, I know, Captcha is still misbehaving. 

Update 2: Okay, tired of waiting, I’ve now disabled Captcha. What could possibly go wrong? 

Polly Toynbee, that is:

There is an instinctive bond between Guardian readers – we almost nod to one another as we read the paper on a train.

Yes, I bet you do, Polly. I bet you do.

Update:

In the comments we’re also discussing this, spotted by Robert. Apparently, artists and writers are being “ignored to death”:

The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty… the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy.

You see, it’s simply ghastly that craftsmen and labourers can have nicer cars than “the makers and chroniclers of our culture.”

George Monbiot is once again howling at the Moon. He reaches almost immediately for that Guardian staple, the presumptuous “we”:

We may have lost our attachments, our communities and our sense of meaning and purpose, but there will be more money and more stuff with which to replace them. Now that the promise has evaporated, the size of the void becomes intelligible.

Mr Monbiot – for whom the glass is always half-empty, and poisoned, and possibly on fire – uses the word “we” no fewer than eleven times. Like so many of his Guardian colleagues, our anhedonic columnist is infinitely modest and therefore keen to tell us how “we” feel, thereby adding gravity to his own joyless, rather marginal worldview. “We,” it turns out, have “lost our attachments… our sense of meaning and purpose,” and “we” are “lost in the 21st century, living in a state of social disaggregation.” Apparently, “our” world – in which, says he, “most forms of peaceful protest are now banned” – has been “pulled apart by consumerism and materialism.” It’s an “age of loneliness.”

Yes, dear readers. The odds are stacked against us and the situation is grim. Happily, however, “we” – that’s thee and me – now “find the glimmerings of an answer” in, among other things, “the sharing… of cars and appliances.” While yearning, as we are, for an “empathy revolution.” What, you didn’t know?

Previous visits to the Happy Land of Monbiot™ can be found here, here and here.