When job and employee don’t quite gel. 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

A left-leaning management consultant recently asked his left-leaning Twitter followers for their thoughts on the insufficiently left-leaning working class. The replies – from self-declared socialists, Guardian readers, “woke remainers,” and assorted “social justice advocates” – are, shall we say, of a type, but may nonetheless be of interest. 

Via Damian Counsell, who adds, “If you want to know why the Conservatives have an 80-seat majority…”

Also, open thread. 

She’s tired of catering to your feelings. 

You see, when you appear to be female, and sound female, and are objectively female, and you visit a restaurant with a group of women, and the stranger taking your order fails to pre-emptively ask, as one does, whether anyone present has serious mental health issues, and instead simply says, “Hi, ladies”… Well, clearly, this is an outrage. 

Update, via the comments: 

Nikw211 adds,

I am not responsible for the state of someone else’s mental health. This is not because I lack compassion, but because anyone who makes the state of their confidence and sanity dependent on random strangers is going to be forever disappointed. It would be like bursting into tears every time you buy a lottery ticket and find your numbers didn’t come up.

It does seem an unpromising path to contentment. As noted here recently, 

This, I think, is what makes trans activism different from that of other groups with which transgender people are often equated. Someone being gay, for instance, doesn’t generally entail a demand that everyone else either hallucinate or pretend to hallucinate. Which is to say, trans activism often includes a belief that the rest of us should pretend that the physical reality we can see is somehow not the case. And unsurprisingly, people may object to being told that they should lie on demand.

A concession that would leave those so inclined at the mercy of any poseur, or prankster, or unpleasable neurotic.

Some will likewise not welcome being told to indulge, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of neurological anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to. 

Update 2:

For newcomers and the nostalgic, more items from the archives:

Loving Themselves.

Fat feminist students fight the patriarchy by gorging on doughnuts and thick, liquid pudding.

Yes, students with weight issues – issues of such magnitude that they have anger to release – will be encouraged to gorge on doughnuts and thick sugary drinks requiring an extra-wide straw, before hating themselves all over again, while pretending to be empowered and totally okay with it. You see, the way to help overweight people is to encourage the kind of high-sugar consumption that results in weight gain and inviting them to smash objects that remind them of how unhappy they are about being fat. A situation that they’ve just made slightly worse. 

One For The Ladies.

A Guardian writer tries his hand at saucy celebrity news. Things take a strange turn.

Apparently, “gay twink culture” is feeding into straight desire, albeit in ways never specified; and yet, complains our columnist, these ephebophile appetites are “nowhere to be seen in the People [Sexiest Man Alive] list.” Readers will doubtless be shocked by the revelation that the middle-aged ladies who buy People magazine, many of whom have children of their own, aren’t overwhelmingly aroused by the kind of skinny young men whose fame is based on playing skinny 17-year-old boys who get seduced by older men in the kind of art-house films loved by Guardian columnists.

The Psychology Of “Social Justice” Is A Thing To Behold.

Leftist professor advises students to say “fuck you” to potential employers. 

Readers with an academic bent will be thrilled to hear that Dr Strouse’s dissertation is titled Literary Theories of the Foreskin. This work of tremendous cultural and intellectual heft “investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organises literary experience.” It also, apparently, “demonstrates that, within the school of preputial poetics, the male anatomy queerly embodies the plasticity and multiplicity of rhetoric.”

Should you want more, by all means click here. Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. 

Applause would surely follow. 

I am a polyamorous, pansexual, lesbian and nonbinary transwoman. I’m also a furry. 

As someone quips in reply to this, “When you give yourself all the roles in the Discord server.” 

When not discussing his mental health issues – a go-to and seemingly inexhaustible topic – or deploying niche hashtags by the dozen, or modelling his assorted looks, from “hot girl summer” to “basic bitch autumn,” Mr Wildcat, quoted above, likes to remind viewers of how startlingly original he – sorry, e/er – is:

I realise my neo-pronouns are a little unique, mostly because… I came up with them. 

Readers will note that Mr Wildcat apparently finds it bewildering that someone – specifically, a female colleague – might not be entirely convinced by his supposedly unassailable womanly status:

She struggled with identifying my gender and it’s like… what? I wear low-cut tops to work.

“It was confusing. It confuses me.”

Update, via the comments:

My daughter’s father called her “princess” yesterday and I had to lecture him… again.

It’s a short video, but quite a lot is implied. Not all of it, I think, intentionally.

Update, via the comments, where Burnsie adds,

Watching that, I can certainly understand why her “daughter’s father” is not her daughter’s mother’s husband.

Well, quite. “We do not use that term in this house,” says our Queen of Indignation and Overreach. It’s a “harmful word,” we’re told. Though I’d imagine rather more harm is being done to said daughter by her having the kind of mother she apparently has.

Also, open thread. Have at it, me hearties.

Time for a few days off, I think. A long weekend. Play nicely. Use coasters.

Update: Above, Derwent Dam, as seen by your host and photographed by The Other Half. 

It’s a bank holiday hereabouts, so before doing other things, I thought I’d share this guide to online advertising.

Provenance unknown. Also, open thread.

Heard in class: 

“Can everybody look up from their phones? Hello, you guys, look at me.”

As someone quips in the replies, “Is this on the test?”

Mr Zoa is a “performer and educator” who uses the word black as if it were a credential, an obvious accomplishment. Preferred pronouns, because of course, are “she/they/he,” and areas of expertise, of which there are so many, include “loving myself,” “hair micro-aggressions,” and gyrating in heels like a stripper. Readers may note how these daringly individual people – the ones so busily, and so loudly, being themselves – so often default to the same tedious cartoon.

Update, via the comments:

Mr Zoa also thinks that employers shouldn’t object to him going backless at work, on account of his non-binary fabulousness. Which, it has to be said, doesn’t suggest an encouraging set of priorities, or a mind focussed on the task for which said person is being employed. The imagined right to parade around the workplace in a cloud of self-absorption, forever on the cusp of voguing, in some backless, strapless ensemble is a strange hill to die on. For a high-school teacher.

But Mr Zoa seems to regard his hashtags – #lgbt #nonbinary #gay – as amulets of some kind, as protections against criticism, while seeking ever-greater indulgence.

Also, open thread.

The University of Utah has formed an “Anti-Racism” committee which will be tasked with “improv[ing] the overall campus climate regarding issues and events of racism across all intersections of identity.” The video, however, only mentions one race. 

It’s an “intergroup dialogue,” you see, spanning “all intersections of identity and bias.” And in which only one notional group is implied as by default chronically victimised, albeit in ways that are somewhat mysterious. The term “anti-Blackness” is deployed many times. Though particulars of this alleged oppression are not immediately forthcoming, indeed entirely absent, as if such details were unnecessary – possibly on account of the time spent needlessly declaring pronouns, and repeating the words “equity,” “diversity” and “folx.” Students are, however, steered towards a course on “whiteness privilege,” during which people of pallor can feel suitably ashamed for their collective skin – sorry, sin.

We are told, 

The Anti-Racism Committee recommends and evaluates measures to ensure that everyone enjoys a campus free of racism and hate. 

And this feat will apparently be achieved by singling out The White Devil as uniquely defective and deserving of correction.

Update, via the comments:

Given the supposed gravity of the supposed problem, such that it requires committees and an ever-expanding infrastructure, you’d think these keen, colossal minds might share at least a hint of what it is they’re planning to “interrogate” and purge from the Earth. Alas, in page after page, we get only airy waffle about “systems… policies and processes,” none of which are specified, even in broad terms. The university itself is mentioned as allegedly a venue of seething racial bigotry, but again, no particulars are offered – none whatsoever. The claim, and what it implies about students and staff – which is to say, the insult - is simply presented as in no need of explanation, or examples, or any supporting evidence.

The video features Dr Bryan Hubain, the associate vice-president of student development and inclusion – a man who boasts of being a “black, gay immigrant” as if this were a credential, an accomplishment, a triple whammy – and a reason for our eternal fascination – and whose LinkedIn profile tells us he is schooled in “critical race theory.” So, no reasons for suspicion there.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.