A group of 13 “abolitionist librarians” from Ivy League universities… is demanding that their colleagues “immediately begin the work of divesting from police and prisons.” […] The group wants Ivy League librarians to “explicitly name policing itself as the problem” and take actions that will lead to the “complete abolition of law enforcement.”

Something-something “white supremacy” something-something “privilege.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. But really, it’s the same doctrinaire horseshit we’ve seen a hundred times. And according to which, the world will be enormously improved by the “abolition of policing in all its forms.” If that isn’t sufficiently unambiguous, our Ivy League librarians insist that their “ultimate goal” is, and I quote, “the complete abolition of law enforcement… everywhere.” Because “a world without policing” will somehow, rather conveniently, be a world without crime. And because helping people find the books that they’d like to borrow is just too boring and insufficiently high-status for minds such as these.

More than 700 individuals and organisations have signed the petition.

By the way, and before you ask, that sickly-sweet odour is the ongoing decay of your civilisation. A society in which the children of the elite are immersed in such dogma – and are told that their civilisation shouldn’t defend itself against sociopathy and predation – isn’t, I’d suggest, in the best of health. And when these mouthings are deemed high-status, both sophisticated and aspirational, a marker of in-group belonging, then the words preening degeneracy seem entirely apt. 

Previously in the world of uppity librarians. 

News from the world of publishing: 

“I feel it was deliberately hidden and dropped on us once it was too late to change course,” said the junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community. The employee said workers would have otherwise considered a walkout.

A walkout. One wonders what might cause such an outpouring of agitation and distress. Was it the looming publication of How to Punch Small Black Children and Get Away With It…?

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community… told VICE World News. Another employee… talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend. 

Not imaginary, non-binary.

It turns out that the hooting and chest-puffing is being caused by – or rather, is given a longed-for excuse by – the forthcoming publication of a book by Dr Jordan Peterson, a sequel to his bestseller 12 Rules for Life.

people were crying 

According to the weeping employees at Penguin Random House Canada, Dr Peterson is not only “an icon of hate speech and transphobia,” and “an icon of white supremacy,” but also “denies the existence” of “people in the LGBTQ+ community.” Like many others, this baffling claim is not expanded upon and no evidence is forthcoming. However, the implication seems to be that if you choose not to pretend certain things and would rather not lie in public, or be coerced to lie in public, this somehow constitutes a denial of the existence of “people in the LGBTQ+ community.”

“The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” the employee added.

Almost brushed against realism there, matey. Careful now.

Dr Peterson – or more specifically, the hyperventilation of his critics – has of course been mentioned here before. And while the doctor is by no means an uninteresting chap, the reactions to him are often more interesting, and quite revealing.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:  

The Cupcake Menace. 

Tiny cakes are exploitative, demeaning and emotionally crippling. You didn’t know?   

After telling us at length just how terrible and mind-warping these tiny fancies are, at least among women, Mr Seaton adds, “I don’t want to ban cupcakes.” And yet he feels it necessary to say this, as if banning miniature sponges would be an obvious thing to consider, the kind of thing one does. And after banning them in his own office.

The Humble Among Us. 

Attention, world. Novelist Brigid Delaney wants a nicer flat. 

You see, creative people, that’s people like Ms Delaney, must live in locales befitting their importance, not their budget. You, taxpayer, come hither. And bring your wallet. Creative people, being so creative, deserve nothing less than special treatment. I mean, you can’t expect a creative person to write at any old desk in any old room in any old part of town. What’s needed is a lifestyle at some other sucker’s expense. 

Monbiot And The Morlocks. 

The Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass. Things go badly wrong.

George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

There’s more, should you crave it, in the greatest hits. Also, open thread.

Matt Taibbi on Robin DiAngelo and her pernicious bestseller White Fragility:

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

As we’ve seen many times. For instance, here. And here. And here. And if that doesn’t sound quite Maoist enough, there’s more.

And Jonathan Church on the same:

[According to DiAngelo,] the two “master discourses” of Whiteness are “individualism” and “universalism.” White people have been “socialized” from the moment they were born to see themselves as individuals rather than as members of racial groups, and to believe in a universal humanity or human nature. All of this obscures the nature of “systemic racism,” making white people incapable of seeing how they constantly reinstate and reinforce white supremacy with virtually every word they say, or do not say. That’s right. Even if you remain silent in inter-racial dialogue, maybe because you want to shut up and listen or because you are shy and prefer one-on-one interactions rather than the hurly-burly of groups, you are making a “move” of Whiteness which keeps you complicit in the preservation of white supremacy.

Readers who doubt the stupefying effects of Dr DiAngelo’s racial woo should note the number of replies to Mr Church in which his article is dismissed out of hand, triumphantly, by devotees of Dr DiAngelo, as the work of a white person displaying “white fragility,” and therefore invalid by default. As noted here recently, it seems we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, Captain Nemo steers us to the Twitter feed of Library Journal, a “global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators,” and which proudly directs its readers to the mental exertions of Ms Sofia Leung:

Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks. Pause here and think about this.

Ms Leung, an academic librarian, is unhappy that public libraries in the US, a white-majority culture with a white-majority history, tend to have, among other things, lots of books by authors with pale skin. This, we’re told, is an “interesting mini-eureka moment” that our Queen of Intersectional Rumination feels compelled to share. When Ms Leung discovers that public libraries in China and South Korea have quite a few books by Chinese and Korean authors, I’m sure she’ll be equally aghast. Every bit as offended.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property… When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of colour.

At which point, things get a little breathless and intermittently grammatical. However, readers may wish to ponder how synthesising insights from around the world, and from cultures long gone, and preserving those insights, in libraries, is somehow a bad thing. Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended, something close to enraged, by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.”

As if sensing that her thoughts aren’t sufficiently lurid and unhinged, Ms Leung then shifts into higher gear: