Douglas Murray on mass immigration and Simon Schama’s Question Time slip-up: 

In that use of [the intended put-down] ‘suburban’, Schama showed something a lot of us had suspected – which is that for a certain type of globe-trotting international celebrity, any concern for borders, national identity and cultural continuity are not just beneath them, but actively ‘common’. Of course, like so many other advocates of mass immigration, Simon Schama can live pretty much where he wants. And if the area around him goes somewhat downhill because the neighbours all start to come from the rougher corners of Eritrea then Simon Schama can move. And he will probably move to a very nice area. But not everybody has that choice. And one thing we can all be certain of is that Simon Schama will never choose to live in Bradford, Malmo or any of the (dare I say it) ‘suburbs’ outside Paris. Yet all the time he will urge other peoples’ neighbourhoods to more closely resemble those great success stories, and look down at people from an ever-loftier height when they dare to object.

Mr Schama currently lives in Briarcliff Manor, an affluent, very white village in Westchester County, New York. The kind of neighbourhood that has genteel regulations regarding alcoholic beverages and the public use of amusement devices.

Jim Goad on the Great Rape Migration:  

In Norway, the Aftenposten newspaper once notoriously changed a headline from “Foreigners over-represented in rape statistics” to “New sexual culture shapes attacks.” And when Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, dared to note Muslims’ over-representation in rape statistics, he was convicted of “hate speech” under Denmark’s penal code rather than being cheered by the country’s rape-obsessed feminists.

And Christopher Caldwell on Angela Merkel’s colossal gamble: 

Citizens of all the tiny countries that lie between the Middle East and Germany were witnessing a migration far too big for Germany to handle. They knew Germany would eventually realise this, too. Once Germany lost its nerve, the huge human chain of testosterone and poverty would be stuck where it was. And if your country was smaller than Germany — Austria, for instance, is a tenth Germany’s size — you could wind up in a situation where the majority of fighting-age men in your country were foreigners with a grievance.

Hm. I hadn’t planned one, but it seems there’s a theme of sorts. Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments. 

This just in:

Poverty is not a naturally occurring germ or virus; it is anthropogenically created through wealth extraction.

So says the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, coughing up another entry in our series of classic sentences. 

With reckless disregard for his own mental wellbeing, Tim Worstall attempts to impart some knowledge. 

From the New York Times, Jennifer Medina on sex education for teenagers:

Consent from the person you are kissing — or more — is not merely silence or a lack of protest, Shafia Zaloom, a health educator at the Urban School of San Francisco, told the students. They listened raptly, but several did not disguise how puzzled they felt. “What does that mean — you have to say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes?” asked Aidan Ryan, 16, who sat near the front of the room. “Pretty much,” Ms. Zaloom answered. “It’s not a timing thing, but whoever initiates things to another level has to ask.

So what I’m wondering is, how do you combine “making sure each step is met” with “oral assent” in advance – a kind of self-conscious box-tickery – with a sense of, well, wild abandon? “I’m planning to reach for your bra strap, my volcanic love muffin. Is that okay?” 

Determined to be unhappy about something, the Guardian’s Michele Hanson turns her drab, sad face to the subject of superhero dolls:  

They’re bendy and athletic, rather than stiff, pointy and girly. The teenage version of superheroines. 

Not pointy. Not girly. Um, that’s good, right?

They have physical powers rather than sex appeal.

Again, I’m not quite seeing the problem here.

I suppose it’s a step in the right direction.

Heavens. Things are going suspiciously well today. Perhaps a but is coming.

But why do the new dollies have to look so odd? Why the super-long anorexia-style legs and the thigh-gap? The weeny torsos with no room for innards? The giant or robot-style heads, the big (mainly) blue eyes and formidable eyelashes? 

Um, because they’re small plastic dolls based on a cartoon about comic book characters – you know, toys, designed to amuse children? And not, therefore, geared to the preferences of a self-described “single older woman” who writes for the Guardian. And I suspect the “thigh-gap” that so offends Ms Hanson has quite a lot to do with making a small, poseable doll with legs that can actually move.

They still give me the creeps. Dolls always have.

And… well, that’s it, really. So, class. Today we’ve learned that Ms Hanson isn’t a fan of dolls with big eyelashes and insufficiently discernible internal organs. At this point, readers may detect a hint of frustration, the sense that our grievance-seeking columnist has tried very hard to find fault with an unremarkable product – some damning evidence of sexism, perhaps – and then fallen on her arse. Indeed, just days earlier, the dolls in question were hailed by the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, as “challenging sexism in the toy industry,” in part because said toys were “designed by women following creative input from girls.”

Thwarted in her fault finding, Ms Hanson concludes by sharing a childhood memory, the point of which is somewhat unclear:

I had a pram full of animals when I was little, but my auntie insisted that I have a dolly, because I was a girl, and she gave me a cloth one, with moulded cloth face and shiny, pretend hair. But I scribbled all over its blank, spooky face, pulled its hair out, and my mother had to hide it from auntie in the wardrobe. Forever.

So there’s that.

Readers may recall Ms Hanson from this earlier display of factual rigour and socialist bonhomie.

FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff talks with the Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas: 

Not only is the situation on campus bad for freedom of speech, I think we’re teaching students to engage in cognitive distortion. We’re teaching them to magnify problems, we’re teaching them to personalise problems, we’re teaching them to engage in all-or-nothing thinking. All things, research indicates, that if you adopt them as mental habits are going to make you miserable. 

“Censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. Essentially, it just makes you feel a little better, calms you down, but it sure isn’t doing anything for your disease.”