In the pages of Salon, where our progressive betters ruminate, Nicole Karlis ponders the latest fashionable anxiety. Specifically,

Stories of heartache, tears, stress and dehydration that people experienced after a forced separation from their water bottles.

Says Ms Karlis,

I have an irrational fear of the water bottle going missing, resulting in suddenly being thirsty and unable to access water. For the record, I did not start using a reusable water bottle until I moved to the Bay Area in 2013.

Perhaps this is one of those moments when the significance of a statement may not be fully appreciated by the person making it.

Carrying a water bottle with me everywhere I go has turned into… a form of security, one that I’ve become strangely attached to… I am not alone. Plenty of people in my orbit have expressed a similar concern — an unease, really — at the prospect of misplacing their reusable water bottle.

Now, now. We mustn’t rush to judgement.

For many, losing one’s water bottle will wreak havoc on their day, even their week.

I’m trying. I really am.

I sent out a query to the public to see if others felt what I am now calling “water-bottle separation anxiety.” I received over a dozen responses, suggesting that I may have tapped into a cultural phenomenon – one that relates as much to health and psychology as it does to our complicated personal relationship with natural resources.

What follows is a catalogue of unobvious woe and amateur dramatics. “Activist Manuela Barón” – whose area of activism is left fashionably unspecified – explains how her ancient, battered water bottle had become a “part of” her, and how the loss of it, at airport security, resulted in a swell of emotional activity:

“I cried as I went through the scanner and ran off to my gate; I didn’t realise it would be like saying goodbye to an old friend.”

At which point, it occurs to me I may be misusing the word explain.

The vast majority of people worldwide, as well as millions in the UK, do not have their needs met – let alone live lives of luxury from which air travel and weekly shopping sprees could be painlessly stripped out and replaced for example with dance lessons. 

Why, yes, I am reading the Guardian. How could you tell?

The paper’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

When so many of the pleasures that we take for granted in the west, and that are desired by billions of people who do not yet have them, are so carbon-intensive, it is surely incumbent upon us to think very hard about the things in which we take joy and meaning that are less demanding of energy and resources.

Because “dancing and singing could be part of the solution to the climate emergency.” It says so here.

If capitalists, politicians and scientists have so far not found the answers – and the global mass movement of people called for by Greta Thunberg and others is, despite recent progress, still proving elusive – could the creative arts possibly provide one means to break the impasse? If the climate emergency is seen as the consequence of a failure of imagination, then this would seem to make sense.

We will save the planet with our expertise in jive, quickstep and Viennese waltz.

this would seem to make sense.

Though presumably we may have to gyrate without shoes.

In racial-dominatrix news:

Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they’re racist.

Says the Guardian,

A growing number of women are paying to confront their privilege – and racism – at dinners that cost $2,500… A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious.

“However subconscious.” Pretentious guilt is, one suspects, billable too.

The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist. They are well-read and well-meaning. They are mostly Democrats. Some have adopted black children, many have partners who are people of colour, some have been doing work towards inclusivity and diversity for decades. 

Which, on reflection, might explain quite a lot.

Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behaviour. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause.

Those doubting, damnable souls. The ones who can’t be hustled.

Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.

It turns out that quite a few well-heeled ladies of the left are keen to be denounced over dinner as “part of the problem,” warned against having “unmonitored thoughts,” and told to “own their racism,” whether real or imagined, in what amounts to a niche, and rather perverse, status game. If it sounds self-preoccupied and a tad neurotic, that’s because it is:

Steven Malanga on question-begging “equity” and its corrosive effects:  

The equity movement presumes that any unequal results in society reflect structural or institutional racism, even when officials can’t identify any actual discrimination. To redress these purported inequities, the movement demands that every city department’s mission, and every major decision in local government, be looked at from a racial-equity perspective. In practice, this has meant mandatory bias training for municipal and school employees, in order to root out “policies that work better for white people,” in the words of one advocacy group, and laws passed in a number of cities that limit what employers can ask job applicants (about any past criminal history, especially), as well as other measures. […] The basic, but highly dubious, assumption behind these reports, and the equity movement generally, is that no possible behavioural differences among ethnic or racial groups might account for different life outcomes. 

Some of the examples of “equity” education are rather boggling in their evasions. Mr Malanga also discusses the “equity” approach to school discipline, which was predictably disastrous, and mentioned here and here. As I said at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. 

And – not entirely unrelated – Lee Jussim on the dysfunctions of academia – in neologism form:

Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal in all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous.

Emotional imperialism: The strange belief that your feelings should dictate someone else’s behaviour.

See also the subsequent comments, in which Quillette readers suggest additions. For instance,

Ovaryaction: the compulsion to create neologisms such as manspreading, mansplaining, and himpediment, attributing flaws by individual men as representative of all men to buttress the assertion of systemic, institutional oppression of modern, Western women by the bogeyman known as patriarchy.

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

Time for another tug on the teats of super-woke theorising:

White people ‘can’t dance’ because white-ness is a traumatized state that is disconnected from the body.

Set aside those thoughts of ballet, Footloose and MGM musicals. We must press on.

Colonization/Westernization has profoundly impacted the way we move our bodies. Just think about even this little fact: most non-European people didn’t wear pants before colonization, and if they did, they were not tight.

Tight pants. The obvious tool with which to oppress the Brown-And-Noble-By-Default.

We also generally didn’t sit on chairs. We squatted or sat on the ground. Many of our cultures didn’t glorify tight muscular abs.

Damn you, White Devil, conquering the world with chairs. And defined abdominals.

Our bodies ‘moved’ completely differently before colonization/Westernization. We had a much greater sense of the lower body and abdomen.

In short, the Brown-And-Noble-By-Default “have been white-ified,” which is “trauma.” You see,

White-ness… is an energetic imbalance caused by a loss of spinal fluidity and awareness of the lower body. Emotional energy becomes concentrated in the upper body, particularly gathering in the mind. To live in a world dominated by white-ness is to live in an environment that denies and protects white-ness as embodied trauma.

If that’s insufficiently persuasive,

White-ness is traumatization itself.

The “white body,” it turns out, is a “state of disconnection between mind and body. It is ungrounded and cannot feel the earth.” And which therefore has to be corrected, by an expert, a healer, for $200 an hour.