We’re nearly all vegan now.

Yes, you guessed, it’s a Guardian headline. For an article in which an oddly confident Barbara Ellen asks,

Who isn’t vegan in some way these days?

Ms Ellen describes herself as a “dairy-dabbling vegetarian.”

Update:

In the comments, Rafi reminds us that, even according to the Vegan Society, vegans make up barely 1% of the UK population.

Which is practically all of us, if you’re using Guardian maths.

Let’s turn to the pages of Slate, where left-leaning sophisticates mull the issues of the day. Among which, an obvious question for the woke and well-adjusted:

I (35, male) started dating someone (33, female) recently that I’ve really enjoyed connecting with and have found a higher level of chemistry with than anyone else I’ve dated. It’s exciting and has given me a chance to imagine a stable future with someone, something I’ve struggled to imagine in the past.

Ah, bless. And just in time for the holidays. Brings a tear to the eye.

But there’s something else that’s new for me this year that complicates things: I’ve started seeing sex workers.

At risk of seeming drearily conventional, the words stable future have suddenly taken on an ironic tinge. Still, the headline is memorable:

Do I Have to Tell My New Girlfriend I’m Going to Keep Seeing Sex Workers?

And hey, give the guy credit. He does a pretty good rhetorical dance:

To be clear, I’ve attempted to pursue it in the most ethical manner possible, being careful to consider everyone’s safety and consent. The moral issue of sex buying is a serious one for me, but one that I’ve ultimately come to believe can be ethical in the right context.

How immensely surprising.

I believe seeing a sex worker can make me a better partner. Not unlike seeing a therapist.

Because,

seeing a sex worker allows me to focus on myself.

Which, to date, has apparently been a struggle.

Via Holborn, and from the pages of the communist Morning Star, a headline of crushing cultural import: 

115 Poets Back Labour.

Yes, with an election looming, the full weight of the nation’s leftwing “poetry community” is being brought to bear, no doubt decisively. Inspired and uplifted by these leftwing poets and their immense cultural gravity, “our austerity-scarred society” will be “healed” with the balm of “social justice.” Being leftwing poets, there are of course demands attached, including an entirely selfless call for even more “state support for… producers of the arts and culture” – half a billion or so a year being deemed insufficient, you see – along with a “universal basic income pilot,” and “an end to the political scapegoating of the unemployed.”

No tittering at the back.

Readers who can recall a line of verse by any of the signatories will receive a drinks voucher.

And if searing leftwing poetry is your thing, you may wish to gargle the radical outpourings of Mr Roy G Guzmán.

The ideal of social justice does not complement the ideal of education. The ideal of social justice replaces the ideal of education.

Lifted from the comments, David Randall on academia’s “social justice” infestation:

“Social justice” was everywhere in higher education. It was the slogan of student activists, the raison d’etre of many academic programmes, the research focus of scholars in many fields, part of the formal mission statements of many colleges, and a phrase that rolled off the tongues of sophomores as the smug answer to virtually any question about public policy. Looking for a definition of the term that fit its ten thousand applications proved futile. “Social justice” may have meant particular things to particular people, but in general it signified only an emotional disposition… When someone says “social justice,” he need not spell out the underlying propositions. The ideas and the temperament are taken for granted. By contrast, any critique of the social justice ideology will be familiar to hardly any students and very few faculty members.

It’s a long read, but one with much to chew.

My own attempt to define “social justice,” the contortions it entails, and the kinds of behaviour to which it gives license, is reposted below:

“Social justice” entails treating people not as individuals but as mascots and categories. And judging a person and their actions based on which Designated Victim Group they supposedly belong to and then assigning various exemptions and indulgences depending on that notional group identity and whatever presumptuous baggage can be attached to it, with varying degrees of perversity. And conversely, assigning imaginary sins and “privilege” to someone else based on whatever Designated Oppressor Group they can be said to belong to, however fatuously, and regardless of the particulars of the actual person.

Which is to say, “social justice” is largely about judging people tribally, cartoonishly, and by different and contradictory standards, based on some supposed group identity, which apparently – and conveniently – overrides all else. It’s glib, question-begging and pernicious. Cargo-cult morality. Viewed with a cool eye, it’s something close to the opposite of justice. And yet, among our self-imagined betters, it’s the latest must-have.

I think it’s time we elevated the tone with some coverage of the arts. Beginning with the colossal creative talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, whose collected Goose Studies are presented below. The opening extract, a site-specific installation, was performed in New York in October. The organisers of the event, titled Performance Is Alive, tell us that in order to avoid being “vapid,” they curate only “the best projects based on the merits of the work.” They are, we learn, presenting “art that’s critical and progressive and transgressive.” 

For those prone to erotic inflammation, a word of caution. The following video does contain traces of obligatory boobage.