As some of you may be interested in this kind of thing, I now have a Gab account. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it as yet, but there we are.

Joy Pullmann on when feminist feelings collide with science: 

Throughout her dissertation, [doctoral candidate, Laura] Parson asserts that women and minorities are uniquely challenged by the idea that science can provide objective information about the natural world. This is an unfair assumption, she says, because the concept of objectivity is too hard for women and minorities to understand. “Notions of absolute truth and a single reality” are “masculine,” she says, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory… Rather than rejecting this insulting view of women and minorities’ intellectual capacities, Parson uses it as a pretext to advocate that science classes abandon the scientific method itself… and all other “male” forms of oppression, such as “weed-out courses, courses that grade on a curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, an individualistic culture, and comprehensive exams.”

Feminism is of course famed for its intellectual rigour. 

And in other, utterly unrelated news: 

Many elite universities relegate Women’s Studies degree programmes to second-class status.

Nick Gillespie interviews Instapundit himself, Professor Glenn Reynolds:  

It’s a small number of companies that really control almost all social media, and they all kind of lean left. Facebook has been accused, and I think credibly, of a lot of political bias, and there are experiments that suggest they could swing an election by manipulating their flow of news and views. At some level, you say that’s just private enterprise and they can do what they want, but at another level, it’s a little more troubling that they are kind of a monopoly and they’re politically in the tank with an administration that is doing them a lot of favours… I’m not so sure we aren’t approaching the point where people might want to think about anti-trust. And I know we’re past the point where, if these were companies that operated with a slant towards Republicans, everyone would be calling for anti-trust regulation right away.

And at Claremont College, your “extremely toxic” masculinity is being discussed:  

Miles Robinson, who attended the event, told the Claremont Independent that among attendees there was “a common consensus that masculinity is harmful both to those who express it and those affected by it.” Robinson added that all of the organisers, as well most of the attendees, are female.

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

In the interests of furthering public awareness, here’s an extensive list of potentially offensive words and expressions that you probably shouldn’t use on pre-watershed television. Oh, don’t pretend you’re not curious. There are at least a couple on there I wasn’t previously familiar with. And no Googling.

Via the invariably genteel Mr Tim Worstall.

Fans of car-crash interviews may enjoy these extracts from the BBC’s Today Programme, in which Ms Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, shares her deep thinking on the subject of “safe spaces” and campus censorship.

Do stay tuned for her thoughts on the University of Birmingham as “a Zionist outpost.”

Via Julia. 

Via dicentra, the Z-Man on the ongoing disappearance of mainstream media comment sections: 

The reason news sites are killing off comment sections is two-fold. One, it is usually where you get the bits of the news story our betters edited out in order to maintain the narrative. The “Minnesota man” in the story is identified in the comments as Jorge Gonzalez, an illegal from Guadalajara. It’s where the “suspect wearing a red shirt” is identified as a black guy named T’Q’ull Ferguson with a Facebook page full of pics of him holding a handgun and a bong. The comment sections have become a leak in the system. The other problem, especially for opinion sites like the Spectator, is the comments have become the place that makes the writers cry. Sure, there’s lots of inane chatter, but it is also where some smart people post corrections and point out the many glaring logical errors. [Opinion writers] have fragile psyches, so seeing their mistakes highlighted for everyone to see, right under their posts, is a source of constant distress.

Ed Driscoll has more. See also this. 

Somewhat related, Christopher Snowdon on Oxfam’s dishonesties: 

If you look at the BBC’s inequality report you will find no challenge, no rebuttal and no response from anybody who disagrees with Oxfam’s warped interpretation of the data. Whether it knows it or not, the BBC is complicit in the fabrication.

Thomas Sowell suggests some election year reading: 

If you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and insightful books is Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. What makes Life at the Bottom especially relevant and valuable is that it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States. Many Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that their behaviour cannot be explained away by “a legacy of slavery” or “institutional racism,” or other such evasions of facts in the United States. As Dr Dalrymple says: “It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America — for very similar reasons, of course.” That reason is the welfare state, and the attitudes and behaviour it promotes and subsidises.

From the archives, this:

And in the Financial Times:

Guardian Media Group hit with £173 million record loss. 

When the foremost printed organ of the British left publishes so many of these things, week after week, that they’re collected and circulated as works of minor surrealism, and are then mistaken for spiteful parodies by the paper’s own contributors, this may not be an ideal business model.

Via sk60. Readers are welcome to suggest variations of their own.

Ben Shapiro on facts versus feelings: 

If the political goal is to alleviate feelings of discrimination, no end point can ever be reached so long as a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison. And a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison not because of discrimination in the criminal-justice system, but because a disproportionate number of black people commit crimes… Crediting the unjustified feeling that there is pervasive bias in the criminal-justice system means making evidence secondary to perceptions. In the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo., a large majority of black Americans felt that Officer Darren Wilson was guilty of murder in August 2015. They were wrong. But according to our political leaders, such feelings ought to be granted the patina of legitimacy. This isn’t leadership. It’s moral cowardice.

It’s also, quite often, arrogance and vanity. 

Thomas Sowell on egregious media bias and the war on cops: 

To the race hustlers, black lives don’t really matter nearly as much as their chance to get publicity, power, money, votes or whatever else serves their own interests. The mainstream media play a large, and largely irresponsible, role in the creation and maintenance of a poisonous racial atmosphere that has claimed the lives of policemen around the country. That same poisoned atmosphere has claimed the lives of even more blacks, who have been victims of violence by thugs and criminals who have had fewer restrictions as the police have pulled back, or have been pulled back, under political pressure. The media provide the publicity on which career race hustlers thrive. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which turmoil in the streets gives the media something exciting to attract viewers. In return, the media give those behind this turmoil millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity to spread their poison.

Part 2 here. Heather Mac Donald’s book The War On Cops, which is recommended by Sowell, can be purchased here (Amazon UK) and here (Amazon US).

Speaking of media bias: 

This is apparently the current state of American journalism. The newspaper printed a fact, but that fact was unacceptable based on the demographics of the people who might potentially see it.

And Franklin Einspruch on why sport remains hugely popular while art is in decline: 

Baseball hasn’t spent a hundred years smashing its own conventions. Baseball players don’t endeavour to turn hitting into a critique of late capitalism. Baseball doesn’t call upon fans to comprehend discussion full of coinages by PhD students trying to impress their dissertation committees, or implicitly punish them for having bourgeois values. Audiences instinctively and rightly hate this kind of pretentiousness.

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

BBC Radio 4 veers into Alan Partridge territory: 

Can you ever trust a gorilla with a child?

Answers on a postcard, please.

Via Bobby in the comments, Michael Wolff on the visions and follies of former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger: 

If selling had been part of his job description, Rusbridger, who never met a pound he had to earn that didn’t disgust him in some visceral way, would have been disqualified long ago. Indeed, his early enthusiasm for the internet – and a continuing principle of faith for him – was that it was free. The corollary, that free had to be supported by advertising, was one of those cause-and-effects that it was Rusbridger’s unique gift to be able to wholly ignore… Having made a personal and moral commitment to free – both as a political principle and as a way to advance the scope of the Guardian’s message – he was confronted, and confounded, by the reality that he had no way to monetise his business.

Readers may recall the Guardian’s short-lived brand expansion into the world of trendy Shoreditch coffee shops, which the paper styled as “the future of open journalism,” a supposedly “data-driven” hub of Fair Trade beverages and online journalistic collaboration, and which was opened without Wi-Fi. 

Blake Neff on destroying children’s futures in the name of “social justice”: 

While the traits listed [being rigorous and punctual, speaking grammatical English] may simply be regarded as positive traits for success in the modern world, Dr Heather Hackman described them as traits chosen and emphasised to favour whites to the detriment of non-white groups, who are forced to assimilate ‘white’ traits such as good discipline and goal orientation or else be left behind. Hackman’s solution, then, is to train teachers to move away from all these aspects of ‘white privilege’ in education. She routinely touted the benefits of collective assessments (measuring student learning at the class level instead of determining whether each student knows the material), as well as eliminating all school grades entirely.

I share the above in case any readers had assumed that Dr Caprice Hollins, who dismisses foresight, diligence and punctuality as “white values,” must be a one-off absurdity. Alas, no.

In other Earth-rumbling news,

Twitter is struggling. Its disappointing financial results, mass layoffs and declining user experience show things aren’t well for the little blue bird. And now this: the replacement of the beloved “fav” star with a heart.

Dark days.

The hearts are the final straw: it’s time to nationalise Twitter.

Yes, it’s the Guardian. How did you guess? Specifically, the musings of Mr Osman Faruqi, a “Sydney-based writer and activist” who wants someone else – apparently, taxpayers on the other side of the world – to pay for his leisure activities.

It’s infrastructure for basic communication, which is why people are so upset over the change to hearts: imagine if, instead of saying “OK” on the phone to a relative stranger, you were forced to say “I love you.” It’s that basic.

Such are the horrors facing today’s Twitter user. It’s New Coke all over again.

So how do you monetise an intangible combination of excitement and trepidation sparked by the overwhelming awe of talking to the whole world?

Or perhaps more likely, a vanishingly tiny part of it. With almost half of “users” having never sent a Tweet, and the overwhelming majority of those who have boasting fewer than 200 followers, with the majority of their tweets, around 70%, attracting no acknowledgment whatsoever. However, the stakes are high and according to Mr Faruqi, “casual social interaction,” which is good, is “anathema to the desire for profit,” which is bad, obviously. This is, after all, the Guardian. And as Twitter’s modishness is, it seems, fading, it therefore must be nationalised and paid for by the taxpayer. To keep it hip and happening, and to prevent more icon changes. Until the next thing comes along. And then, presumably, we must nationalise that too.

On Twitter, Mr Faruqi is currently struggling with the news that many readers had assumed his article was “taking the piss.” Apparently, this failure to appreciate his seriousness and insight merely “shows how right-wing our political debate has become.”

Update, via the comments: