Being, as you obviously are, a crowd with your boots on, and all collaring the jive, you’ll want to lamp Cab Calloway’s 1939 Hepster Dictionary. 

By all means slide your jib in the comments.

Via Obnoxio. 

Oh yeah, “That wasn’t real communism.” We’ve seen a great example of that in Venezuela, where they put everybody on a kind of weight-loss plan that’s made the average citizen lose 20 lbs. Everyone’s starving in Venezuela. It’s like, “Hey, look – another example of what wasn’t real communism.” When someone says, “That wasn’t real communism,” here’s what it means: “I am so narcissistic and arrogant, and so convinced of the rightness of my ideology and my moral purity, that if I was the dictator of a communist state, the utopia would have come in as promised.” That’s what it means. So whenever anyone says that, you think, “Oh boy, I’ve got your number now. I know what you think of yourself.”  

Jordan Peterson.

Update:

And let’s not forget this:

A couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.

As noted previously, the left’s self-imagined radicals have little to gain from successful, independent people. Because success and independence – independence of them – makes you the enemy.  

Joe Simonson on the latest innovation in anti-Trump “resistance”: 

Just Nips [are] the “official nipples of The Resistance movement,” according to founder Molly Borman. Started last January in time for the Women’s March, Just Nips provides synthetic nipples that you can wear over your bra or over your nipples. The product “cements the idea that women can and should do whatever they want,” Borman told me over the phone. In this case, “whatever they want” means making random people in public think you’re not wearing a bra — for empowerment or something. Just Nips’ release date is no coincidence. Borman sees her product as a direct challenge to President Trump’s administration. According to Borman, “a lot of women feel unsafe” under Trump, and her product helps provide comfort and “a safe space.”

Apparently, they’re “the WMDs of nipple erectors.” 

Sarah Hoyt on processed youth:

I don’t know who coined “Reeeee” for the sound progressives make when in the middle of a scream fest about some – mostly imaginary and unintended – offence. I know that for several months now my friends have been using it, usually when just having dealt with some idiot who keeps yammering on about moon ferrets. Or patriarchy. Or white supremacy… Thing is, if you’ve read about the Cultural Revolution… those too were a bunch of ignorant kids, taught only Maoism, and completely ignorant of what the peasants needed to do to survive and grow food. Their advice, their demands, their theories, were not only stupid but actually life-threatening. But people had to follow it because otherwise they’d be denounced and held up before revolutionary tribunals… The people who destroyed Chinese culture and productivity in the Cultural Revolution, and who filled the Yellow River with so many bodies that they washed up en masse on the shores of Macao (where my dad saw them), were nothing more and nothing less than weaponised Reeeee brigades.

Ordinary people are perfectly comfortable with the idea that some people are smarter than others. They’re perfectly comfortable [with the idea] that what we call smart gets you kinds of jobs that you can’t get otherwise, all that kind of stuff. It’s the elites who are under the impression that “Oh, IQ tests only measure what IQ tests measure, and nobody is really able to define intelligence,” and this and that, “it’s culturally biased,” and on and on. And all of these things are the equivalent of saying the Earth is flat. These are not opinions that you can hold in contest with the scientific literature.

Sam Harris has a long and wide-ranging discussion with Charles Murray, spanning the taboos of IQ, social stratification, the poisonous effects of identity politics, the pros and cons of a universal basic income, and how Donald Trump became a weapon against a disdainful establishment.

Dr Murray’s adventures among the campus Mao-lings have been noted here previously. 

Via Jeff Wood, Robert Stacy McCain pokes through the feminist memoir of Jessica Valenti: 

The question raised by Sex Object, if read with a critical eye, is whether Jessica Valenti has ever been a victim of anything except her own bad judgment… What kind of fool would major in Women’s Studies? The kind of fool who loses her virginity at 14, goes off to Tulane, sleeps with her ex-boyfriend’s roommate, flunks out and then transfers to SUNY-Albany, that’s who. The only career possible for a Women’s Studies major is as a professional feminist, and there are only so many full-time gigs at non-profit “pro-choice” organisations to go around. However, the Feminist-Industrial Complex  —  the departments of Women’s Studies on some 700 college and university campuses across the United States  —  has a rent-seeking interest in promoting the metastatic growth of feminism, so the fact that many of their alumnae are quite nearly unemployable isn’t mentioned in the course catalogue.

See also this sorry but instructive tale. And Ms Valenti’s mental contortions have been noted here previously. 

Michael J Totten on the joys of feminist Shakespeare: 

The Globe Theatre’s new director, Emma Rice, detests the original Shakespeare. The Bard’s plays, she says, are “tedious” and “inaccessible.” Perhaps, with such a dim view of the source material and its creator, she should have taken a different job, but instead she chose to make Shakespeare more “relevant.” For instance, [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] “Away, you Ethiope,” was changed to, “Get away from me, you ugly bitch.” Rice knew that plenty of Shakespeare purists would find her coarse edits appalling, so she had an actor walk on stage in a spacesuit and say, “Why this obsession with text?” She also placed identity politics front and centre. She mandated, for instance, that 50 percent of the cast be female regardless of the gender of the characters. “It’s the next step for feminism,” she said, “and it’s the next stage for society to smash down the last pillars that are against us.”

And David Kukoff on an alternative educational model of the 1970s that wasn’t altogether successful: 

Following a meeting with progressive-minded parents, [educator and drug counsellor Caldwell Williams] teamed up with English teacher Fred Holtby to create a curriculum that would channel the pop-psych teachings of the time. They wanted students to guide their own learning, focus on their feelings, and engage in raw dialogue about sex, drugs, and all the other topics that animated their lives. The teachings incorporated principles of the popular self-help movement known as est, then shifted to those of Scientology.

Shockingly, it turns out that hugging lessons, watching porn and choosing your own grades has its limitations.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Human capital is the ability to create the material things that constitute wealth… A classic example: In the 1970s, Uganda decided that the Gujarati population, from India, were just too wealthy and controlled too much of the economy. The Ugandans expelled them and wouldn’t let them take their wealth with them. And so the Gujaratis arrived, mostly in England, destitute. Meanwhile, the Ugandan government had taken over all of this material stuff. A few years later, the Gujaratis were prosperous in England, and the Ugandan economy collapsed. Because they didn’t have people who knew how to do what the Gujaratis were doing. It’s also one of the problems of trying to finance things by confiscating the wealth of the wealthy. All you can confiscate is the material wealth. You cannot confiscate human capital.

Thomas Sowell on wealth, poverty and Flat Earth economics:  

In academia, the past will be remembered by erasing any unflattering reference to it:

Yale University has established a new committee dedicated to deciding when and how the school should rename buildings, monuments, and other campus features it believes are too offensive for a modern university.

And over at Columbia University (and Bowdoin, and Barnard, and Wesleyan, and NYU):

Behind these moves away from [admissions] testing is another phenomenon that schools do not appear to have stated explicitly.

But coyness aside, deliberately lowering standards is apparently a good thing.   

And lifted from the comments, meet Olivia Legaspi, a young woman with sense:  

Here’s what I was told during my freshman orientation at Haverford College: “Speak up when you feel uncomfortable. Place your own wellbeing above all other concerns.” In short, the school was ready to protect me from any personal slights or hurt feelings I might suffer. What counted as a personal slight or similar offence was up to me to define. This surprised me. It surprised me because at McDonald’s, where I worked before I started school, acting in this way would have probably cost me my job, a job I needed in order to go to college.

Among other things, Ms Legaspi notes that expecting your own feelings to always be indulged and prioritised, however inconvenient to others and however small the slight, sounds an awful lot like “privilege.”

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Christina Hoff Sommers on feminism, facts and philosophy: 

The [feminist philosophy] movement also ignores the finding — consistently documented by a large empirical literature — that, on average, men have stronger interests in investigative and theoretical pursuits and women stronger preferences for social and artistic pursuits… These are just group tendencies of course, and we should be careful not to over-generalise, but they are pronounced and persistent… Yet when the New York Times invited five feminist philosophers to discuss the gender gap [in philosophy] in 2013, not one even entertained the possibility that women might tend to find other subjects more interesting. Instead, the group talked exclusively about things like male privilege, harassment, and stereotypes…

Philosophy departments are not biased against women in hiring. There may be fewer women interested enough in philosophy to pursue it as a career, but those who do are more likely to get hired. According to a study by the American Philosophical Association, between 2012 and 2015, other things being equal, female PhDs were 65% more likely than men to find a permanent academic job within two years of graduating. And look at the APA itself. Over the past 5 years, more than half of its divisional presidents have been women. For 2016, women hold all the top positions. It is difficult to see how a profession that hires women at a higher rate than men and awards them its top leadership positions is rigged against women.

On a similar theme, this item from the archives. And also this one. 

Michael Poliakoff and Drew Lakin on unknown history: 

The overwhelming majority of America’s most prestigious institutions do not require even the students who major in history to take a single course on United States history or government. Disregard for the importance of United States history in the undergraduate history major is matched by the overall disappearance of United States history requirements from general education, the core curriculum that should be part of every student’s education… [A] survey of seniors at the “Top 50” colleges and universities, those holding the most prestigious positions in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, found that only 22% could match the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” with the Gettysburg Address.  

And somewhat related, Duke Pesta on the left’s choke-hold on higher education – and its consequences:

I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors. I gave them a ten-question American history test… just to see where they are. The vast majority of my students – I’m talking nine out of ten, in every single class, for seven consecutive years – they have no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world before the United States. Moses, Pharaoh, they know none of it. They’re 100% convinced that slavery is a uniquely American invention… How do you give an adequate view of history and culture to kids when that’s what they think of their own country – that America invented slavery? That’s all they know.

Worth watching in full. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim on the fundamental defects of “diversity” ideology: 

As practised in most of the top American universities, affirmative action involves using different admissions standards for applicants of different races, which automatically creates differences in academic readiness and achievement… These differences are large, and they matter… As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers. People notice useful social cues, and one of the strongest causes of stereotypes is exposure to real group differences. If a school commits to doubling the number of black students, it will have to reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other schools are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of colour find when they arrive on campus.

Do read the whole thing. See also this by Heather Mac Donald.

Gad Saad chats with Janice Fiamengo about the dishonesties and conspiracy theories of campus feminists: 

[Among campus feminists,] men are expected to constantly apologise for their maleness… I’ve seen that at the talks I’ve given, where men will stand up and before they even speak they have to “check their privilege” and talk about how they’re white and they’re male, and how that means that therefore they can’t really understand the experience of victimisation, and they have to apologise for that, and erase themselves in some way, and acknowledge how terrible they are, and then they might be allowed to speak… as long as it’s in favour of feminism.

See, for instance, these pious confessions of default male wrongness. 

And Theodore Dalrymple ponders the strange, changing fortunes of the Pacific island of Nauru: 

The diet that the Nauruans favoured was not refined from the gastronomic point of view. They ate huge mounds of rice and drank vast quantities of Fanta. For those who preferred something stronger, there was Château d’Yquem in the island’s one supermarket. At the time, Nauru must have had the highest per-capita consumption of Château d’Yquem in the world.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Mark Steyn on the power and indecency of the ‘progressive’ narrative: 

It is remarkable how easily vast numbers of people now accept that truth is subordinate to the needs of ideological conformity – as we saw in Europe on New Year’s Eve, when politicians, police and press colluded to cover up mass sexual assault – and, as their cover-up unravelled, self-described progressives and feminists indignantly insisted that the cover-up had been the correct call. In the end, the official lies will cost you your world.

Janice Fiamengo on mythical “privilege” and its mandatory confession: 

The idea of a bunch of PhDs in astronomy having to publicly confess their sinful [male] “privilege” at the opening session of a radio astronomy research conference is shockingly indicative of ideological totalitarianism.

Related: Daphne Patai on the normalisation of bad ideas.  

Josh Gelernter follows the twisted logic of “cultural appropriation”: 

History’s first recorded sandwich was invented by the Jewish sage Hillel, who proposed celebrating Passover by eating the commemorative sacrifice of lamb sandwiched between two soft pieces of matzoh — which reminded Jews of the exodus — along with bitter herbs, to remind them of slavery. Jews [should therefore] demand that non-Jews renounce sandwiches… Of course, it was a Christian — Newton — who discovered Newtonian physics, and a Jew — Einstein — who discovered relativistic physics. Jews and Christians invented the majority of modern medicine and the majority of advanced mathematics. The automobile was invented by the Jew Siegfried Marcus, and the airplane by the Christian Wright brothers, who were the sons of an Evangelical bishop. Christians and Jews [should therefore] demand that young leftists renounce science, medicine and transportation.

And further to the Great Kimono Outrage of 2015, Franklin Einspruch mingles with the cultural authoritarians: 

The goal of Decolonise Our Museums and related efforts is not to end prejudice. It is to remain in a permanent state of antagonism around issues of identity. [Protestor, Xtina] Wang essentially admitted this when she said that it was an American thing to want to come up with a “final solution” to these problems. 

On Twitter, Franklin has been attempting a civil debate with the authoritarians in question. So far, I can’t say the exchange has been mutually enlightening, but you do have to admire his patience. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.