“Your future’s gone. How old are you?”

Members of Extinction Rebellion block a bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A lively discussion ensues.

Also, open thread.

Via Mr Muldoon, a peek into the comment pages of the Guardian, where Ms Ngaree Blow attempts to sell the merits of prehistoric healing:

Healthcare systems in Australia that are considered “mainstream” are fundamentally colonial organisations: designed, established and informed by Western paradigms and biomedical models of care.

Going with what works and works reliably. How very dare those damned colonials. With their Western paradigms.

At present, the norm is those who will fit within the constraints of the Western worldview of health… Ultimately, this results in a health system which is not fit for purpose,

The term fit for purpose is one to keep in mind. But first, some self-flattery – the urge to self-inflate being a Guardian staple:

First Peoples are the antithesis of colonial; we are inherently disruptive to how the healthcare system (and many other systems in fact) operate in Australia… As a doctor, I have embraced disruption and have chosen to reject conventional medical training pathways.

How terribly daring. With other people’s wellbeing.

Our disruption has historically been, and continues to be, rejected by the mainstream.

Intimations of victimhood being another Guardian staple. Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.”

Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior, as evidenced by a lack of traditional practices in these services.

Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.

Fearless masked heroes harass and berate the elderly and disabled.

For “social justice,” no doubt.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” shrieks the masked young woman, flanked by her masked comrades for intimidation purposes, and while jabbing her finger in the face of a random man and preventing his elderly, disabled mother from crossing the road.

Update, via the comments:

A longer video of the scene, featuring more of our bandana-wearing bedlamite, can be found here.

It must be strange to inhabit a social circle in which gratuitously harassing the elderly and disabled, and putting them in some fear for their safety, is regarded as a credential and proof of righteousness. To believe that such behaviour makes you look good and will earn you in-group status. It’s a pretty good measure of just how perverse, and morally demented, the Antifa mindset is.

It reminded me of a telling incident at a conservative convention during the Occupy fad of 2011, in which a mob of Occupiers, largely middle-class Clown Quarter students, amused themselves by trapping a random disabled woman – in a wheelchair and with an assistance dog – jeering at her predicament and telling her, “This is what democracy looks like.” Because nothing screams radical piety like preventing a disabled woman from getting home. And then assaulting her, while trying to steal her assistance dog. Sadly, video of the incident – complete with grinning faces – seems to have been purged from YouTube.

Update 2:

In the world of the woke, where all shoes are clown shoes, a little pushback: 

A teacher in Minnesota who had complained about racial quotas in school discipline has been awarded over half a million dollars in a settlement. Aaron Benner, who’s black, alleged retaliation by the St Paul Public Schools in the form of four “personnel investigations” following his criticism of discipline policies… Benner said, “We are crippling black students with racial equity plans that do a disservice. We should not be telling minority students they will not be disciplined the same as other students when their behaviour is unacceptable and sometimes even violent.”

Those ‘progressive’ discipline quotas – essentially, a racial ‘free hits’ policy – have of course been mentioned here before, along with their predictable and horrifying consequences.

As I noted at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else.

Such that seven different experiments, in seven different cities, resulted in seven dramatic surges in classroom violence, up to and including actual riots. While white teachers who found themselves being punched in the face, resulting in trips to hospital and permanent injury, were subsequently lectured on their “unconscious biases” and “white privilege,” and told to take comfort in free emergency whistles.

This, then, is “racial equity,” according to our betters. See how it shines.

Update, via the comments:

Matthew Continetti on the competitive pieties of woke schooling: 

Parents opted their children out of standardised tests, which they deemed “structurally biased, even racist, because non-white students had the lowest scores.” Without tests, there was no way to measure the progress of the student body. The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral. At a Parent–Teacher Association meeting, families split into warring factions. One side was furious at the school for making such an important decision arbitrarily and autonomously. “The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels — and not just on the bathroom doors — led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.”

Mr Continetti is referring to this first-hand tale of bewilderment and woe, in which there’s much to widen the eyes. Regarding the toilet drama mentioned above, this bears quoting:

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms… As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

Update, via the comments: 

We’ve been here before, of course:

Parents only discovered the campaign – which asserts that white pupils are complicit in an “invisible system of privilege” – when their children began complaining about it.

Also, open thread. 

The battle for Brexit, the nature of the struggle, has become much more clear [than it was three years ago]. Before, it was, “Ooh, should we be part of the EU? Should we not be part of the EU?” Now, I think it’s much more clearly a class struggle… On the one hand, you have people who are very much part of the establishment, people who are in the public sector, or who are members of organisations that are paid for out of taxation, whose jobs depend on regulating the lives of others… the arts establishment, the university establishment… You can tell when you go to a party, say, who’s likely to be Brexit and who’s not likely to be Brexit… The media is an utterly ‘Remain’ industry, and they’re absolutely furious.

Peter Whittle interviews filmmaker Martin Durkin.

Two of Durkin’s films – Brexit: The Movie and Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary – have been featured here before, in full, and are strongly recommended. The subsequent threads are also worth a peek.

Update: 

The old word is treason… A large part of the British political elite has deliberately gone and negotiated against their own country…. They regard [the electorate] with absolute contempt.

Via Samizdata, and very much related, David Starkey has some thoughts.  

Also, open thread.

Over at Vox, where leftist brains pulsate, Ms Kelsey Piper has an idea: 

The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely… There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote… I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly, and it’s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they’ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway.

I didn’t say it was a good one.

It occurs to me that if you start demanding that small children be allowed to vote in general elections – largely because you assume that their choices, their politics, will tend to mirror your own – then perhaps it’s time to ponder why your own politics correspond with the imagined preferences of children, who are, by definition, unworldly and irresponsible. Such that you grudgingly concede that, “Enfranchising everyone [i.e., including small children] will make the electorate less informed on average.” The rest of us, meanwhile, may wish to ponder whether a leftist’s desire to exploit the ignorance of small children in order to further her own socialist vanities is not only farcical, but degenerate. 

We’ve been here before, of course, when Professor David Runciman claimed that not allowing primary school children to vote alongside adults amounts to “an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.” As if small children are renowned for their selflessness and conscientious forethought. As noted at the time,

The irony being that children and teenagers tend to be quite selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree unbecoming in adults, and are accustomed to free stuff, all paid for out of sight by someone else, much to the youngsters’ indifference. It would therefore hardly be surprising if voting children tended to favour policies that pile up unsustainable debt, all left for whatever generations follow them… What comes to mind is an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, in which the boys steal Hal’s credit card and run away to start a new and grander life in a hotel room, making enthusiastic use of room service.

How this sits with Ms Piper’s claim that “Kids have… a greater stake in political issues than adults do,” I leave to the reader.

Neo notes a phenomenon that may be familiar to some of you:

We’ve previously mentioned bizarrely emphatic and incongruous outbursts, the relevance of which to ongoing, often mundane conversations was hard to fathom, and which seemed driven by a compulsion to signal some imagined piety or status. A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit – implicitly very bad – and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.

At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree – that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common. That the poem’s sentiment of friendship and community was being soured by divisive smugness escaped our local academic, whose need to let us know how leftwing he is was apparently paramount. The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.

It wouldn’t generally occur to me to shoehorn politics into an otherwise routine exchange, or into a gathering with strangers, or to presume the emphatic political agreement of random restaurant customers. It seems… rude. By which I mean parochial, selfish and an imposition – insofar as others may feel obliged to quietly endure irritating sermons, insults and condescension in order to avoid causing a scene and derailing the entire evening. The analogy that comes to mind is of inviting the new neighbours round for coffee and then, just before you hand over the cups to these people you’ve only just met, issuing a lengthy, self-satisfied proclamation on the merits of mass immigration, high taxes and lenient sentencing. And then expecting nodding and applause, rather than polite bewilderment.

Update, via the comments. Two additional illustrations of the same phenomenon:

More fun times in the Clown Quarter, where our betters display their plumage:

The head of Western Connecticut State University’s psychology department shared his own qualms about being white on Tuesday, claiming that “whiteness needs to go away.” Daniel Barrett… goes on to muse about his personal tumultuous relationship with his identity… [and] proclaims that he is “blinded” by his own “whiteness.”

“Whiteness,” an allegedly deplorable yet oddly nebulous phenomenon, is apparently rooted in the “destruction of the environment” and the “total demolition of value,” including, we’re told, the destruction of “integrity, honesty… common sense.” Our theatrically agonised academic insists that “whiteness” has “no nature, no culture, no essence… no value or intrinsic meaning,” and yet it supposedly corrupts and befouls everything it touches and must therefore “dissolve into oblivion.”

Despite the author’s breathlessness and the list of physical and moral catastrophes supposedly caused by “whiteness,” and by “whiteness” alone, an actual definition of this uniquely malign phenomenon – which is simultaneously invisible yet blinding, intangible yet all-powerful – is left to the imagination. The nearest we get is a fleeting reference to the “concept of a white race,” which is bad, and the “power and privilege associated with being white,” also bad. Though details of the latter remain unspecified and mysterious. A vagueness that suggests no grasping of facts or ambition to explain, merely an airing of in-group credentials.

It scarcely needs saying that allowing one’s children to be exposed to the unhappy mental contortions of Professor Barrett would not be the wisest way to spend tens of thousands of dollars. Though conceivably one might use him as an illustration of how minds can come undone.

Update:

It’s worth pondering, for instance, what kind of adult might feel a need to signal their virtue, or what they imagine as virtue, habitually, and in such ostentatious ways. I mean, if you’re about as virtuous as you think you ought to be, given whatever circumstances, why would you spend time and effort putting on a show? What kind of person feels compelled to seem virtuous – to pretend to be more pious than they actually are – and to a degree that involves contortions like those above? At risk of sounding ungenerous, I think it’s a telling activity. A warning of sorts.

And lest we forget, unwittingly comical virtue-signalling also afflicts professors of philosophy.

At Indiana University Southeast, young adult intellectuals are being bathed in deep knowledge:

The university publishes and maintains a guide instructing students on how to “reduce bias in language” and offers some tactics for responding to others who use language they find offensive. One of these tactics is to “say ‘ouch!’” to others who utter “stereotypes, offensive or biased comments.” The university asserts that saying “ouch!” in these situations is an effective tool “simply to convey what was said had a negative impact on you, regardless if it was directed toward you.”

Presumably, saying “Ow, my status-seeking pretensions!” would be too on-the-nose.

The university offered examples of language that may require such a response, including phrases like “man and wife” or simply “wives,” as well as “mothering.” These phrases can supposedly “imply one group dominating over another group.” The university suggests instead that students use phrases like “husband and wife,” “spouses,” and “parenting.”

The terms mankind and man-made are also deemed outdated and upsetting, and therefore to be avoided, or at least met with sounds of feigned injury. The language guide, published by the university’s “diversity” department, is promoted as a way for students to “gain credibility.”