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.