Razib Khan reviews Charles Murray’s Facing Reality: 

Comfortable white people—“nice white parents” in affluent neighbourhoods who support efforts to “defund the police”—can refuse to look into the data or insist that those data are the product of racist systems and structures. They can “interrogate their privilege” and “confront their white supremacy,” or better yet, demand that others do so. But they won’t be any closer to understanding why poor African Americans and Latinos in inner-city neighbourhoods want more police officers in their neighbourhoods and not fewer, nor why poor African American parents clamour for access to strict charter schools that activists condemn for being “anti-black.” Principled ignorance might be a costless gesture for affluent progressives, but they’re heaping additional injustice onto the backs of those who can least afford the wages of social signalling.

Ben Sixsmith on when paedophilia was avant-garde: 

The German Green party was especially notable for its enablement of child abuse. As the Times of London reported in 2015, “a paedophile network was active in the Berlin branch of the Green party until the mid-1990s, with potentially hundreds of victims.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading student activist in the 1968 unrest and a prominent member of the Greens, wrote fantasies about sexual contact with children which he later awkwardly described as “irresponsible” and “a type of manifesto against the bourgeois society.” Cohn-Bendit was not, as you might assume, a hair-brained student when he wrote that filth, but 30 years old. Perhaps the bourgeois society had something — at least something — to be said for it.

Hans Bader on woke bigotry and a dishonest news media:

Stanley Kurtz on tantrums, vanity, and woke pseudo-history:

[Peter] Wood gives us a portrait of 1619’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones. A woman who styles herself “the Beyoncé of journalism” acts the part of a diva, and more. Treated by the New York Times, according to Wood, as “exempt from ordinary forms of accountability,” Hannah-Jones didn’t deign to reply to even the most respectful and serious scholarly criticism of her project. She booked herself instead into speaking venues where she was greeted as hero, prophet, or genius. And of course, Hannah-Jones was showered with accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Rudely putting down critics, falsely denying that she’d said things she had demonstrably said, deleting tweets that showed her in a bad light, the behavior that eventually destroyed Hannah-Jones’s credibility was in evidence well before the final collapse. And it was all encouraged by the Times, which treated Hannah-Jones with kid gloves and ignored her critics until its hand was forced. Even when Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein finally answered a critical letter from twelve historians (not the first such letter), that letter’s text was never printed in the magazine.

And Christopher F Rufo on Seattle’s ‘progressive’ alternative to policing and prison:

Though these programmes are ideologically aligned with revolutionary goals, they have failed to serve as practical replacements for the “formal justice system.” In one high-profile case, prosecutors diverted a youth offender named Diego Carballo-Oliveros into a “peace circle” programme, in which non-profit leaders burned sage, passed around a talking feather, and led Carballo-Oliveros through “months of self-reflection.” According to one corrections official, prosecutors and activists paraded Carballo-Oliveros around the city as the “shining example” of their approach. However, two weeks after completing the peace circle programme, Carballo-Oliveros and two accomplices lured a 15-year-old boy into the woods, robbed him, and slashed open his abdomen, chest, and head with a retractable knife.

You see, predatory sociopaths with histories of violence and robbery will be “liberated” by “healing circles” and “narrative storytelling.” Because, we’re assured, these things, when combined with burning sage, will “increase empathy.”

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Theodore Dalrymple on pretentious guilt and moral grandiosity: 

But posing and posturing have become a mass phenomenon, the tattooing of our time. Of nothing is this more true than contemporary Woke morality. Whereas not long ago young people of the middle classes sought to express their sympathy for the lower and supposedly oppressed orders by imitating their tattoos and way of dress, imitation being the highest form of empathy available to egotists, they now express the same desire by making Wokeness the touchstone of their morality. They think they are rebelling when, of course, they are conforming. They do not realise that it is more difficult, and more courageous, to contradict a friend than to criticise a society.

Douglas Murray on denunciation hysteria and societal malware: 

It is unsustainable that we are held hostage as a nation by a minority of fanatics, who have fanatical views that we have never voted in… You do not have to pay your tithes to Black Lives Matter; you do not have to pay your Danegeld to the latest LGBT thing. You don’t have to do any of this. […]  

I don’t care if [the media] say [Tony Abbott] is a misogynist. I don’t care if they say he’s a homophobe. I don’t care about any of it now and nor should anybody else. They’ve overused their currency. They’ve hyperinflated – we’re in Zimbabwean situation. And it’s time that we say, ‘We don’t care. Your magic spell-words don’t work anymore.’ […] By the way, it has to be said, if you are Kay Burley and watching this, I’ll play that game back to her. 2009, she throttled a female reporter round the neck until the woman was bruised. Okay? Fine, Kay Burley, want to play that game? ‘No-one should appear in a studio with Kay Burley because she’s someone who throttles women ‘til they’re bruised. And if you appear in a studio with her, you approve of the throttling of women.’

And G. Thomas Burgess on the perverse, dystopian outpourings of Ibram X. Kendi:

Heather Mac Donald on post-watershed facts: 

YouTube’s age-restriction policy lists vulgar language, violence and disturbing imagery, nudity and sexually suggestive content, and portrayal of harmful or dangerous ­activities as factors that could lead to an age restriction. None of those categories has any bearing on my talk. I used federal data to show that the claim that police are wantonly killing black men is a product of selective coverage by a politicised press and an elite establishment dedicated to the idea that racism is America’s defining trait. There was nothing racy or ­incendiary about the talk — unless you find criminological ­research titillating — unlike the soft-pornographic and anarchist videos that YouTube allows on its site without age restriction.

Ms Mac Donald’s apparently scandalous video – which was promptly deleted by YouTube and only restored, for consenting adults, following appeals by the talk’s organisers – can be viewed in full here. As Larry Elder adds, 

Not only does [your evidence] give perspective, it’s uplifting. Isn’t it good to know that whatever is going on is nothing to do with “institutional, systemic, structural” racism? Isn’t that good news?

And not entirely unrelated, Coleman Hughes on the life and work of Thomas Sowell: 

Sowell has encountered countless smears, though the usual avenues of attack—accusations of racism, privilege, and all the rest—have not been available. Someone should have told Aidan Byrne, who reviewed one of Sowell’s books for the London School of Economics blog. Doubtless convinced that he was delivering a devastating blow, Byrne quipped: “easy for a rich white man to say.” It’s hard not to laugh at this hapless reviewer’s expense, but many mainstream commentators differ from Byrne only in that they usually remember to check Google Images before launching their ad hominems. The prevailing notion today is that your skin colour, your chromosomes, your sexual orientation, and other markers of identity determine how you think. And it is generally those who see themselves as the most freethinking—“woke,” while the rest of us are asleep—who apply the strictest and most backward formulas.

A selection of videos featuring Dr Sowell can be found here, here, here, and here. 

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

The last person I had to correct for the misspelling of my name was someone from my own employer, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

So writes journalist – and, it seems, attention-seeker – Tahlea Aualiitia:  

I was invited to join a panel on representation in pop culture by the ABC News Channel earlier this month, and because the name super (the strap with my name at the bottom of the screen) was added during production, I wasn’t aware my name was spelled incorrectly until after the interview had finished and I was informed by my family and friends.

Faintly ironic, perhaps, at least if you squint. But as claims of victimhood go, and as a basis for an article on how terribly oppressed one is, it needs a little work.

Typos happen and I understand how a slip of the finger on the keyboard turned my surname from Aualiitia into Auakiitia.

Ah, forgiveness. How refreshing. An apology was forthcoming, too, so I’m sure we’re all ready to move on.

But while it was the first time I had done a TV interview, it wasn’t the first time I had seen my name spelled wrong in the media.

Scratch that. Incoming.

Just a month ago, my name was spelled incorrectly by a producer in my own department, the Asia Pacific Newsroom.

Yes, another misspelling of a phonetically unobvious Samoan name. That’s two whole times. A scarring experience, it would seem, one that “can have big impacts among communities that often don’t see themselves reflected in the media.” “I knew I had to call them out,” says Ms Aualiitia, rather proudly.

The next morning, I sent an email to my manager asking to write this piece.

Selflessly, of course, for the greater good.