Meanwhile, in academia – specifically, the University of Southern California – it’s “Sex Week,” and so:

“Exploring Sensuality and Herbalism,” slated for Tuesday, will be a “virtual evening of plant-play and exploring pleasure, sensuality, and herbalism.”

If you feel an urge to make your own body oil, or herbal tea, or erotic pottery, or should you be in urgent need of a “sexuality doula” and a workshop on “pleasure and identities,” hosted by Ev’yan Whitney, an apparently famed “facilitator and sensualist”… well, your diaries should be updated.

But if anyone here starts fumbling in their pockets longer than is strictly necessary, I’m fetching the hose.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Some items from the archives:

How Dare You Not Pretend.

On pronouns, politeness, and the strange mental rumblings of Ms Laurie Penny.  

Regarding rudeness, I’m generally polite by default, at least in person, and don’t go out of my way to needlessly put a kink in someone else’s day. I’ve had perfectly civil chats with people who regard themselves as transgender or gender-non-conforming or whatever. Nobody got upset. But what is often being asked – or demanded – is not a small thing, not in its implications.

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, 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, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

Turf War.

At Middlebury College, woke piety erupts. A 74-year-old scholar is quite literally chased off campus.

One for our ongoing series on the progressive retail experience. I believe this is part 445:

A young woman asks in a brazen voice as the destruction and theft rages behind her, “Are y’all gonna make the sandwiches or are ya’ll just gonna keep recording?” The Wawa employee responded, “Uh, it’s going to be a while.”

“No arrests were made.”

Update, via the comments:

The celebratory twerking seen in the background is, you’ll agree, a charming touch. Presumably done on grounds that trashing someone’s business and stealing their property, while exulting in mob intimidation and giving two fingers to the idea of civilisation, is all so jolly. Perhaps we can look forward to another Vice article telling us how looting is a good thing when black people do it.

After all, self-styled progressives – the people who loudly announce their supposed compassion and altruism – are famed for making weirdly contrived excuses for pathological selfishness. Say, the kind of pathological selfishness seen above and throughout the progressive retail series. Indeed, excuses for sociopathic behaviour are a staple of progressive posturing, appearing all but weekly, and with increasing moral convolution and outright perversity.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Number four. The discovery of fire.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Some items from the archives:

No Black Lights Were Available.

New York Times contributor is oppressed by pedestrian-crossing traffic lights.

Mr Kaufman – who can doubtless detect racism in the motions of subatomic particles – would have us believe that his friend was using the word white as a racial descriptor, rather than, as seems more likely, an unremarkable acknowledgement of a traffic light’s colour when talking to a child. In light of which, Mr Kaufman’s claims of being “bombarded” with racism – daily, everywhere – become at least explicable, if not convincing. 

The pedestrian crossing signal that so distresses Mr Kaufman – a rudimentary humanoid figure, made of white lights on a black background – can be seen here, from a safe distance. You may want to steady yourselves. It’s all very upsetting, at least for the exquisitely sensitive. Mr Kaufman then goes on an investigative journey, in which he learns why, in a society with lots of non-English speakers, crossing signals with words are being replaced by simple, universal graphics, calibrated to capture attention – say, by using lights of a certain hue. Which all sounds quite sensible. Rather than, say, a nefarious racial conspiracy intended to break the will of the negro.

You May Clap When Moved.  

Mr Reed Altemus rubs his trousers, awaits applause.