David Paxton on identitarian pay complaints: 

A pay gap between two men is the product of market forces, but a pay gap between a man and a woman is attributable to either the market or to patriarchal oppression, depending on whom it favours… Pointing at specific cases, highlighting a demographic difference, and then declaring discrimination to be the sole cause without further evidence, is a tactic favoured by those who consider themselves thoroughly modern… But this thought process is pre-medieval – an unreflective instinct of pattern-seeking mammals who habitually see conspiracies in misattributions of cause and effect. Just as infant deaths were once blamed on a neighbour’s malevolent witchcraft, and crop failure on insufficient animal sacrifice, today’s hashtags blame identity-group discrimination for pay differentials when perfectly logical alternative explanations are readily available.

David Solway, husband of Janice Fiamengo, on the corrosive shakedown named “social justice”: 

My wife, who for many years donated one fifth of her salary to charity, is anything but a heartless conservative, and I have gone out of my way to help people in distress. We do not reject the social safety net intended to assist the unfortunate who have, as they say, “fallen through the cracks.” But helping measures must be closely and fairly monitored so that the indolent and inept do not gradually displace or usurp the productive and the competent, to everyone’s ultimate disadvantage. A difficult task, to be sure, but worth undertaking. “Social justice” makes no attempt to distinguish the one from the other… The old saw that development grinds to a halt when there are as many or more people riding in the wagon as pulling it applies with a vengeance.

And Toni Airaksinen on the feminist appropriation of “toxic masculinity”: 

The term may have first been popularised by early forms of the men’s advocacy movements. (Not feminist movements, as one might expect.) For example, one book that seeks to raise awareness of issues that men face, titled Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (1994), highlighted one of the earliest examples of toxic masculinity in the literature. “Without a “father in residence,” [men] may go through life striving towards an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity,” the author of the book, Frank Pittman, said on the topic of young men without fathers. But the term has recently been co-opted by the feminist establishment as a way to scapegoat, blame, and denigrate men as a whole. In the college classroom, toxic masculinity is presented to students as a reality that affects all men, and is harmful to all women.

And so we arrive at the contradiction of feminists who denounce “toxic masculinity” as both all-pervasive and a fundamental evil, at least among white people, while simultaneously endorsing fatherlessness and family instability, i.e., the most obvious causes of the behaviour they claim to dislike. 

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

Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

“Their role as social engineers.” And so, 

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

Yes, it’s faintly absurd and veering towards comedy. But if you read the whole thing, you may well be struck by the eye-widening arrogance and vanity of the educators, who, as self-appointed “social engineers,” feel entitled to “counteract” normative gender differences, along with the preferences of parents, some of whom have complained about their children’s subsequent behaviour.

Via Ben Sixsmith. 

If you missed it in the comments, here’s a little creepiness from schools in British Columbia:

When [parent] Kansas Field Allen heard about the posters, she was shocked. She asked her son to take photos of them so she could post about it on social media and get feedback from her peers. “I’d say 95 per cent of the people are in favour of having the posters taken down, and that’s from all races,” Field Allen said.

The posters in question, which appear across the school district, include this one:

The pain is real. 

Ed West on the ghosts of Christmas yet to come: 

I’ve noticed these ‘diversity bollards’ popping up everywhere, without a word spoken about it… Does anyone in a position of power believe this is going to get better and these security measures will ever be taken down? If not, perhaps they should explain to us why, how they led us down this route, and what they intend to do about it… No free society can maintain its liberal traditions with that sort of internal [terrorist] threat, so as the problem deteriorates the surveillance state will expand. We will be faced with the decision about whether to allow the government to monitor people’s internet activity, because the alternative would be asking serious questions about immigration and multiculturalism.

Heather Mac Donald and Mark Bauerlein on the fallout of absent fathers: 

One of the fallacies of leftwing ideology is to insist that differences between males and females are socially constructed, at the same times as females are demanding all sorts of privileges and quotas on the basis that, well, you’ve got to have a female there because apparently there’s something essentially different about her. But when it comes to acknowledging the unique and complementary roles of a father in raising a child, that’s all just out the window. Everything is interchangeable, and males are an afterthought. The tragic thing is the kids themselves understand this.

And Bruce Bawer on the demands and evasions of the Swedish Clown Quarter: 

Erik Ringmar, a 56-year-old political scientist at Lund University, had a problem. At Lund, he explained, it’s strongly recommended that 40% of the readings for every course be written by women. There’s a certain flexibility, but if your reading list contains no women at all, your chance of approval is near zero. Ringmar had wanted to teach a course on “the rise of right-wing ideas, and eventually fascism, at the turn of the twentieth century”… and wanted his students to read original texts by fascists themselves. The problem was that during the period in question, there were virtually no female fascist writers of consequence. Ringmar did manage to find one woman who, with a bit of a stretch, could be included on the course list, but that was it. It wasn’t enough. His department head told him so.

Accordingly, Ringmar expanded his course topic to include anarchists as well as fascists. Fortunately for his purposes, there’d been plenty of female anarchist authors back in the day. With this change, Ringmar’s course plan was approved – but just barely, and only on the condition that he also adds Judith Butler. Judith Butler, of course, was not a pre-World War I fascist or anarchist. Born in 1956, she’s a founder of Queer Studies and a propagator of the notion that gender is a social construction. By conventional standards, there was no sensible rationale for putting Butler on Ringmar’s reading list. But Ringmar agreed.

Needless to say, Dr Ringmar’s accommodation of such irrelevance proved insufficient and a campaign of slander and harassment ensued, led by leftist students, with the educator being denounced for his “insufficient focus on gender.” 

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