Katherine Timpf on when blue hair and facial piercings just aren’t enough to get a girl noticed: 

A Norwegian woman is claiming that she is actually a cat trapped in a woman’s body — and that the fact that she has a human body is a “genetic defect.” […] Because Nano believes that her true identity is as a feline, she sees no choice but to live her life as one, even wearing cat ears, a tail, and fluffy pink paws that she grooms herself with in order to express her true self. Nano claimed to have feline characteristics such as superior hearing, better night vision than day vision, the urge to hunt mice (although she’s never actually caught one), and a fear of water. In fact, she even said that some of her catlike behaviours are involuntary. For example, she claimed to have no real control over how she started hissing at a dog in the middle of her interview.

Happily, there’s a video. 

Kevin Williamson on the inadvertent comedy of identitarian Oscars protests: 

The protest rhetoric inevitably has been concentrated into a Twitter hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, which invites the longstanding and sometimes uncomfortable question of who is white  —  and who decides. The 88th Academy Awards are hardly an all-Anglo affair: Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico has been nominated for best director; Rosa Tran, an Asian-American, shares a nomination for Anomalisa; Gabriel Osorio Vargas and Pato Escala Pierart of Chile share a nomination for Bear Story. There are Danes and Irish and Welsh and loads of Brits, and the nominations were announced by Guillermo del Toro of Mexico and Ang Lee of Taiwan… The convolution necessary to maintain #OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial. If excessive whiteness is the offence, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart. 

And Jacob Kohlhepp on the farce and dishonesty of “diversity” classes: 

[Psychology professor Anna] Lau recalled a situation during which a foreign student asked “what if the reason black males are incarcerated more than whites is because they commit more crimes?” She said there was a total silence in the room. She then stated she wished she knew how to answer, because hard questions should be asked. Shortly after, Assistant Professor Safiya Noble stated “we cannot let unsophisticated comments stand.” She said that as a faculty in residence for the “Afrikan Disapora” dorm floor, she has learned that “those questions outside the norm make black students feel not just microaggressed, but actually aggressed.”

Yes, those unsophisticated questions can really be a bitch. By most credible estimates, black males aged 15-24 – around 2% of the U.S. population – are responsible for around 5o% of U.S. murders, and for disproportionately high rates of other violent crime, including rape, armed robbery and assault. The disparity is so great that even if one assumes police bias and differential rates of conviction, despite evidence to the contrary, one still has to wonder why the victims of such crime  - whose descriptions match rates of arrest and who are themselves very often black – would lie about the appearance of their attacker.

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

Christopher Snowdon on Tory paternalism: 

[Conservative MP, Dr Sarah] Wollaston wants the government to ‘tackle’ the alleged problem of cheap food. She also wants to tell shopkeepers where to position their goods, explaining her reasons in words so pathetic it almost makes me weep: “Do I want to have a kilogram of chocolate for almost nothing when I buy my newspaper? Of course I do but please don’t offer it to me, please don’t make me pass the chicanes of sugar at the checkout while queuing to pay for petrol.” Younger readers may not know this, but at one time the Conservatives were reputed to be the party of free markets and personal responsibility. In 2016, however, it is a party for people – grown, adult human beings, mind – begging to have sweets put out of their reach on other people’s property and pleading with petrol station attendants to put wine gums on the top shelf.

Kevin Williamson on the return of politically correct subprime mortgages: 

Under its new and cynically misnamed “HomeReady” programme, borrowers with subprime credit don’t need to show that they have enough income to qualify for the mortgage they’re after — they simply have to show that all the people residing in their household put together have enough income to qualify for that mortgage. We’re not talking just about husbands and wives here, but any group of people who happen to share a roof and a mailing address. And some non-residents can be added, too, such as your parents. That would be one thing if all these people were applying for a mortgage together, and were jointly on the hook for the mortgage payments. But that isn’t the case. HomeReady will permit borrowers to claim other people’s income for the purpose for qualifying for a mortgage, but will not give mortgage lenders any actual claim against that additional income. This is madness.

Remember, citizens. Standards must be eroded for the sake of “social justice.” 

And Toby Young on a modern heresy: 

[Dr Adam] Perkins published his findings last November in a book called The Welfare Trait, but you won’t have heard about it or seen it reviewed in any UK newspaper anywhere because his research has been judged to be off limits by the self-appointed guardians of the academic establishment and their outriders in the media. A senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as “unethical,” and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a “capitalist construct.”

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

Feminist Current is apparently “Canada’s leading feminist website.” Its editor Meghan Murphy tells us that “female students are under constant threat” and that all women everywhere live in a state of unending terror:

And who is it we fear? Is it other women? No. It is a male. A male with a penis that he may or may not use as a weapon.

Armed with a mind of infinite subtlety, Ms Murphy has more than a few ideas on how to combat this throbbing phallocratic menace:

There are solutions: a feminist revolution… an end to masculinity… all of that would help. 

An end to masculinity. Yes, I know, it’s quite a project. But first, baby steps:

It’s time to consider a curfew for men.

One more time: 

While a curfew would not resolve the problem of patriarchy and male violence against women, it does, in a way, address entitlement and privilege… The more I consider the idea of a curfew for men, the more it makes sense.

Why, it almost sounds like a gratuitous power fantasy, the product of an unwell mind. Of course a curfew will make dating rather difficult if you’re not a lesbian, and overnight motorway maintenance will have to be done exclusively by ladies. And there’ll be no more working nights to support your family, you indecently privileged patriarchal shitlord. Happily, however, our collective punishment as menfolk may not be eternal: 

Kevin D Williamson on Obama’s vanities: 

In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Heather Mac Donald on crime, policing, and the “Ferguson effect”: 

The media and many politicians decry as racist pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing — the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones. Under such conditions, it isn’t just understandable that the police would back off; it is also presumably what the activists and the media critics would want. The puzzle is why the activists are now so intent on denying that such de-policing is occurring and that it is affecting crime.

Theodore Dalrymple on pretentious outrage: 

Outrage supposedly felt on behalf of others is extremely gratifying for more than one reason. It has the appearance of selflessness, and everyone likes to feel that he is selfless. It confers moral respectability on the desire to hate or despise something or somebody, a desire never far from the human heart. It provides him who feels it the possibility of transcendent purpose, if he decides to work toward the elimination of the supposed cause of his outrage. And it may even give him a reasonably lucrative career, if he becomes a professional campaigner or politician: For there is nothing like stirring up resentment for the creation of a political clientele. Anti-racism is a perfect cause for those with free-floating outrage because it puts them automatically on the side of the angels without any need personally to sacrifice anything. You have only to accuse others of it to feel virtuous yourself.

And via Ace, a student recounts how he “de-converted” from the mentally dismal crab-bucket world of the “social justice warrior”: 

I realised it wasn’t going to get better. I was in a university class about feminism, overrun with SJWs, and they had worse arguments than I’d seen online. There was no smarter next level to feminism that I was just too stupid to see. That was it. I was at the top and our arguments still sucked.

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

Another illustration, I think, of leftism leading the credulous to failure and unhappiness. 

Update, via the comments: