More items from the archives:

She’s Seething With Empowerment.

A Guardian contributor encounters a small act of courtesy, screaming ensues.

Ms Huckeba continues, “No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” “I scowled and stormed away,” says she, “completely enraged.” You see, he’s not allowed to do that – holding open the door for her – or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And this being the Guardian, what matters is that Ms Huckeba can invoke victimhood to rationalise having behaved like a complete and utter cow.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings.

The pretentiously agonised, part 436.

When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous.

You Mustn’t Stop The Hysteria.

A Professor of Education denounces consequences for… well, pretty much anything.

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

You Look Like You Need Some Art. 

In which we thrill to the creative eruptions of Ms Sandrine Schaefer.

The pretence of intellectual heft and critical discernment is quite funny, given the unspoken rules of pretend artists and their pretend art. Like practically all of her fellow hustlers, Ms Schaefer tells us that she “investigates” and “questions” things, and presumably interrogates them; but despite this allegedly relentless curiosity, I doubt that any specific insight or profundity is ever conveyed to her audience, such as it is, via the art, such as it is. And of course, we’re not supposed to notice this, or notice the comical mismatch of arch rhetoric and inept flummery. And so, in order to feign discernment, one has to not discern any number of really obvious things.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings. 

On the woes of radical accessorising at Pitzer College, Claremont, California.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed - by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.

Fashionable Malice. 

Woke educators attempt to inculcate dishonesty, bemoan pockets of resistance. 

“White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.

Elliott Dordick reports: 

Several faculty members at Pitzer College recently discussed launching an “investigation” of a student paper for accurately reporting a student’s public comments about “cultural appropriation.”

These comments here, about the chest-crushing oppression of seeing white people wearing big hooped earrings.

Professors and administrators at the Claremont Colleges took to public Facebook posts to vent their frustrations, proposing free speech limits on campus and an “investigation” to shut down the conservative student journal.

Because that’s what grown-ups do now. At least on campus.

“We have a serious problem with the Claremont Independent bullying young women of colour and illegally posting their emails, exposing them to violence,” Suyapa Portillo, an Assistant Professor of Chicano-Latino Studies at Pitzer College, recently posted to her public Facebook page. 

Quoting verbatim public comments – comments that were directed at the entire campus via the Student Talk listserv and sprayed onto a wall - is now “bullying” and “violence,” apparently. At least on campus.

“This is dangerous, irresponsible slander and [is] unacceptable. The minute one of our women of colour students feels unsafe on campus ALL of our students of colour and faculty of colour are unsafe. #STOPBullying #TitleIX #ShutItDown #StopHate.”

“Shut it down,” she hashtags, seated proudly on a pile of non sequitur. Because accurate and undisputed quoting is, via some unspecified mental contortion, now to be regarded as slanderous and hateful, and a mortal threat to every brownish person within a ten-mile radius, and thus something to be stopped.

At least on campus.

Attention, all you white women:

If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalisation, take off those hoops[;] if your feminism isn’t intersectional, take off those hoops[;] if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops[;] if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops[;] if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it, take off those hoops.

So rants Ms Alegria Martinez, a member of the Latinx Student Union at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, in a campus-wide email. When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous, “especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”

Where students are forking out $60,000 a year in the hope of being terribly downtrodden. Possibly by the pool:

Update, via the comments:

Alice adds,

Some people want childhood to last 70 years.

Well, if you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums. But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them.

As sane people do.

And for a little perspective, it’s just occurred to me that when one of my nieces was the same age as these ladies, she was raising money for charity by trekking across the Sahara Desert. I doubt that hooped earrings and lip-liner, and who may or may not wear them, were foremost in her mind.

Commenter [+] quips,

Ain’t no privilege like victim privilege.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.