Apparently, we live in post-satirical times:

According to [Rochester City Court Judge, Leticia] Astacio, the raise was deserved and the media are “biased” in their reporting on her because they are “racist.” “Why’s my name in the headlines?” she asked via Facebook. “You’re mad because I’m a young minority getting paid.”

While poking through the news coverage, readers may entertain other, perhaps more obvious reasons for interest in Ms Astacio’s career and taxpayer-funded compensation, as when the words “parole violations” and “alcohol ankle monitor” make an appearance. And do watch Ms Astacio’s Facebook video, in which she mentions, at some length, how “inspirational” she is to those less statusful than herself, while applying generous amounts of lip balm, before asking her critics, “What makes you feel so entitled?”

Meanwhile, in the Clown Quarter of academia, things rumble on as normal: 

An anthropology professor at a community college in California has instructed her students that stereotyping someone in class is a punishable offence — on the same day that she handed out a four-page “white privilege” checklist listing common generalisations about white people.

Only four pages? It must’ve been very small print.

“Identity-based stereotypes will be considered an interruption,” reads the syllabus, and students voicing such assumptions will, we learn, “(a) be barred from participating in class, (b) lose all participation points for the day, and (c) [be] referred to the Dean of Students.” The educator in question, Amanda Zunner-Keating, is, however, keen to impress on those same students the numerous failings of All White People™, whose “privileges” include being able to go shopping without being “followed or harassed,” and the ability to find a bandage or adhesive plaster that “more or less matches” their skin colour. Such are the “unearned benefits,” the smug luxuriations, of the melanin-deficient.

And remember, making cartoonish assumptions about other students, based solely on their pigmentation, is an act of wickedness.

Further to this item, here’s more news of diversity down under:

“I’m sorry, you can’t come here. It’s a multicultural playgroup.”

And so it’s not for the likes of you. 

Spotted by dicentra: 

Any hint of laughter will trigger the alarm.

Update: Also, yes, I know, Captcha is still misbehaving. 

Update 2: Okay, tired of waiting, I’ve now disabled Captcha. What could possibly go wrong? 

Speaking as we were of the urge to mythologise, here’s Ron Radosh on the fantasies and inversions of progressive academia: 

Look whose photo graces the campus of UCLA, meant to be an inspiration to incoming students. The woman in the photo is standing above the slogan: “We Question.” For those who can’t identify her, the photo depicts Angela Davis, the notorious former Communist Party USA leader who, beginning in the ‘60s, moulded together black nationalism with Marxism-Leninism… For her loyalty to the Soviet Union and its foreign policies, in 1972 she was awarded a Lenin Centenary Medal in the Soviet Union, after which she spoke to thousands at an outdoor rally in Moscow… As she left Moscow and went up the stairs to enter her plane, she yelled out with a clenched fist: “Long live the science of Marxism-Leninism.” There is not an iota of evidence that she questioned anything about the dreary reality in the Soviet Union and their Eastern European client states.

Davis also received the International Lenin Peace Prize — formerly called the Stalin Peace Prize — from the STASI state of East Germany in 1979. She was awarded it for supposedly strengthening “peace among peoples,” but it was actually for her continued fidelity to the Soviet bloc, which to her represented the future of humanity. Not only did she not “question” authority, Davis openly defended the repressive measures of the Communist states by endorsing their imprisonment of dissident intellectuals.

I think that’s what’s called exquisite irony. 

Of course Ms Davis has groupies over here too, at Birkbeck, for instance, where the credulous and dyspeptic scrawled the words “Fuck rich white men.” While the woman they so admire, this self-styled “political prisoner,” charges $20,000 an hour. Details of Ms Davis’s extra-legal activities can be found in the book Radicals by David Horowitz, while his earlier book One-Party Classroom outlines the practised hagiography that surrounds this Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies.