Kevin Williamson on cultural critic Lee Siegel and other student loan deadbeats: 

The justifications are piled high: [Siegel] comes from a modest background and finds it unfair that other people have had advantages denied him. He declares it “absurd” — making no case, only the declaration — that he could “amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college.” Never mind that his borrowing and spending was, in fact, reckless, and that an Ivy League degree or three is every bit an item of conspicuous consumption and a status symbol as a Lamborghini.

To default on a loan because you do not wish to pay it back is theft, in this case theft from all of us, since the federal government is on the hook for the loans in question… We hear variations on Siegel’s argument that education is a social good, that we should be glad to have spent whatever sum we spent in order to avail ourselves of his “particular usefulness to society.” This is an example of the special-snowflake philosophy of social organisation: Yes, your feminist slam-poetry collective is very, very impressive — but even T. S. Eliot went to the office six days a week when literary life wasn’t paying the bills.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone – a grown man in his fifties, writing in the New York Times – who believes that paying his debts as agreed, as millions of others do, would entail wasting his life, due to his enormously artistic “usefulness to society,” i.e., his self-imagined talent as a profound and insightful writer. A claim somewhat undermined by his own self-flattering article and its thin rationalisations. The short version of Mr Siegel’s article would be, “Fuck you, taxpayers. I’m an artist and intellectual.” But that wouldn’t present him in the all-important and very much expected Heroic Victim Light.

On the subject of student loans and baffling choices, see also this and this. 

Ed Driscoll probes the mental fever swamp of Ms Naomi Wolf. Including her theory that American troops building field hospitals in Liberia were actually there to secretly take Ebola back to the U.S., and thereby justify “emergency measures” and “quarantining Americans.”

Theodore Dalrymple shares a tale of underclass moral squalor and the role played by the state: 

Never in the book is there any recognition that a mother whose children meant “the world” to her should not leave them in the care of an obvious psychopath or go to bed so drunk that she does not even realise that she has vomited in her sleep.

Needless to say, it’s not a happy tale and not for the squeamish.

Jim Goad on the “microaggressions” hustle: 

That’s what’s ultimately dangerous about this concept of “microaggresions” — even the demented fanatics who insist that such things actually exist will concede that the perpetrator may not harbour or exhibit any malice whatsoever… Under this framework, bigotry is solely in the eyes of the accuser. No matter how pleasant your demeanour or how generously you act, you can still be bludgeoned over the head with baseless accusations of unconscious racism, and your accuser will feel like a good person for doing it.

And no vain, vindictive soul would ever exploit that kind of leverage for purposes of their own, would they?

David French on academia’s racial quotas and ideological cleansing: 

If Americans broadly understood how the process works, support for affirmative action would diminish even further. First, few people understand how dramatic the boost is for favoured minority groups. If students were black or the ‘right’ kind of Latino, they would often receive admissions offers with test scores 20 or 30 percentile points lower than those of white or Asian students. When I expressed concern about an admissions offer to a black student with test scores in the 70th percentile — after we’d passed over white and Asian students with scores in the 98th percentile and far higher grades — I was told that we had to offer admission or we’d surely lose him to our Ivy League rivals. Second, these dramatic breaks rarely go to poor kids who are overcoming the challenges of ghetto schools.

And Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have been mining the naked cronyism and deep comedy of Australia’s taxpayer-funded art world:  

The finest grant of them all occurred in 2011, when Sydney artist Denis Beaubois received $20,000 from the Australia Council. Beaubois simply piled the cash into two stacks, put a glass box around it and called the resultant piece Currency. The arts grant and the art were one and the same. Then he put the money up for sale at an auction – where someone actually paid $21,350 to buy $20,000. ‘’The money I make will be used to finance part two of the project, which is a series of performance/video works on the division of labour, and capitalism,’’ Beaubois said. There is a much easier way for Beaubois and all Australian artists to study capitalism, and that is by participating in it. The Australia Council should be shut down, along with just about all arts funding. This would save close to $700 million per year and – absolutely guaranteed – would result in better art.

Artists making things that customers might like and wish to pay for directly, voluntarily? Why, the very idea.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Via Thomas Pauli, Brendan O’Neill on post-election bewilderment: 

The Twitterati — the time-rich, mostly left-leaning set, consisting of cultural entrepreneurs, commentators and other people who don’t work with their hands and can therefore tweet all day — were especially dumbfounded by the results. Boiled down, their pained cry was: “But everyone I know voted Labour.” […] The real Two Britains… is, on one side, the Britain of the moral clerisy, which is pro-EU, multicultural, anti-tabloid, politically correct and devoted to welfarism and paternalism… and, on the other side, the Britain of the rest of the us, of the masses, of those people increasingly viewed by the cultural elite as inscrutable, incomprehensible, and in need of nudging, social re-engineering and behaviour modification. […] 

The more Labour comes to be occupied by influential but unrepresentative middle-class professionals, the more contemptuous it becomes of the Other Britain, the lesser Britain, the stupid Britain that won’t obediently vote Labour… We have seen this already in the few hours since the results started coming in: Neil Kinnock musing over the “self-delusion” of the electorate; Polly Toynbee, grand dame of knackered Labourism, speaking of the “mind-blowing ignorance” of some of the electorate, who are “weak readers” and don’t know what is in their best interests (which is Labour, obviously).

Ace of Spades takes a big lens to “microaggressions”: 

Now I know it’s the Worst Thing Ever to try to find out if the person you’re speaking to is of Korean or Chinese, or Korean or Japanese, extraction, because, like, You Should Just Know Or Something. These questions are said to be “microaggressing” or “othering” or “exoticizing.” One could also call them a stranger taking an interest in you and your culture… Like most SJW microkvetches, this one is a bit incoherent, insisting, as it does, that Anglos should simultaneously take no interest in Asians’ heritage and also have perfect native-level fluency in cultural differences between Asian cohorts.

And Franklin Einspruch on the virtues of “cultural appropriation”: 

Akira Kurosawa studied American pulp novels, and George Lucas studied Kurosawa. Elvis is unimaginable without black-gospel music, and Jimi Hendrix is unimaginable without Elvis. I could go on. Forever. Where does new culture come from? It is copied, with alterations, from existing culture. The process is reproductive. Sexy, even. So of course, the outrage-as-a-lifestyle wing of the progressive Left wants to dictate rules for its proper enjoyment. 

Demanding constraints on such an ancient and universal process is like trying to turn the tides by yelling at them, but these particular scolds seem unaware of the folly. They have complained about straight women appropriating lesbian fashion, art students appropriating Native American dwellings, couture houses appropriating Native American garb and Latina hairstyles, a Canadian post-punk band appropriating the name “Viet Cong,” non-Asian pop singers looking too Japanese or too Hindu, and white models looking too black. […] As is the case in all examples of political correctness, it is an attempt at control masquerading as an appeal for justice.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of Social Justice. 

Or, “If you expose our student indoctrination policy we will punish you.”

According to numerous students, the course’s instructor demanded that they recognise “white English” as the “oppressors’ language.” Without explanation, the class spent its session before Election Day screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. When several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicised content, they were informed that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice.

Crotch Funk as Art. 

In which I hammer culture into your tiny minds.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by fellow Belgian Jan Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat. If that’s not a good night out, I don’t know what is.

The Sound of Wringing. 

To show how virtuous they are, and therefore superior, Guardian columnists stick pins into their eyes.

One needn’t be a cartoon Tory to marvel at Decca Aitkenhead’s classic piece, Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, sympathetic readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits. 

And so we turn our attention to Santa Barbara City College, where creatively-inclined students have been “exploring issues and practices of… interactive and chance-derived work.” Specifically, 

Students harnessed complicated architectural designs and intricate woodworking to create an artistic teepee, which they set up on one of the quad’s grassy knolls earlier this month. As the student newspaper reports, the four art students who built the teepee saw it as “a place of positive vibes and community engagement.”

See? Positive vibes.

Assembled from “upcycled and reclaimed material from an old farm house,” and “lined with pillows and rugs,” the students’ vibe-enhancing structure “provides a comfy, squishy environment” for music and conversation. Also included in the experience is “a shelf of blank books for people to express themselves in written word.” Engorged with positivity, the students posted an invitation for others to partake in their creation: 

Join us to support the opening day of an amazing art event and large scale installation… The piece harks back to ways of the past in American history while juxtaposing current counter culture with futuristic elements that bring it to life.  

It even glows in the dark. 

We want to provide you with an experience out of the mundane – right here on campus! Celebrate our labour of love with live music, refreshments and a trading post! That’s right, bring something to trade and become part of the installation.

Oh, come on. Who could resist so much switched-on grooviness? Surely what followed was a day of vibrant self-expression and communal hugging?

Alas, no.