At the Waltham Forest Pride March – “a celebration of diversity” in “one of London’s most diverse boroughs,” and where “London’s first rainbow bus shelter” is doubtless an object of pilgrimage – a multicultural dilemma is caught on camera.

Via Holborn.

What is masculinity? How can we challenge it?

So ask the great minds behind Earth First! UK, a “non-hierarchical organisation” that will soon be hosting a six-day series of eco-activist workshops at an undisclosed rural location in the North East of England and which employs unspecified “direct action” in order to “stop the destruction of the Earth.” It all sounds very Flash Gordon – except, I suppose, for the challenging masculinity thing. Curiously, a definition of masculinity seems to have proved elusive and no indication is given of exactly why masculinity should be challenged. It just should, apparently. They’re quite emphatic on this point. Which sounds a little like jumping the gun, but there we are.

As if to heighten the intrigue, the official tweet, linked above, links in turn to the official Earth First! UK website, which also has no information whatsoever about why challenging masculinity is a thing one ought to be doing, and doing urgently, or how one might go about this pressing task in a suitably planet-saving manner. In fact, the workshop in which these high-minded rumblings will apparently occur, thereby averting catastrophe, isn’t mentioned at all. Conceivably, the aforementioned “non-hierarchical organisation” may be a factor here.

Those untroubled by such mysteries and who wish to save the world from rampant masculinity, possibly by chaining themselves to something, are advised to bring “a tent, a sleeping bag and a torch.” Rest assured that meals will be “made vegan and collectively,” which sounds promising. And do bear in mind that “everyone is crew,” another gloriously collective sentiment, and consequently, “toilets and running water will be run by all of us.” The words foolproof and hygienic leap immediately to mind.

Via Julia, who is no doubt already airing her sleeping bag.

More feminist fun times in the pages of the Guardian, where Nicola Heath is bemoaning her womanly lot:

It feels very personal, the fight you have with your partner about who does the laundry or cleans the bathroom. But the second-wave feminists were right. The personal is political. 

“The personal is political,” says she. Well, so I hear. But it’s also worth considering just how often the political, or allegedly political, is a function of personality and a self-flattering rationalisation for personal shortcomings and sub-optimal choices. Not least among the kinds of people who loudly announce that the personal is political. In fact, hold that thought.

The unequal division of labour at home is a systemic issue that needs structural social change to solve it. 

In this instance, the claim of inequality and the case for “structural social change” are not entirely compelling:  

Like many heterosexual couples, it was the arrival of children that set my husband and me on divergent paths at home. I’ve been an avowed (and untidy) feminist since I was old enough to say the word. We were together for 10 years before the birth of our daughter – he knew his co-parent had zero aspirations to be a homemaker… Becoming a parent is… a huge transition. Your identity is reforged in the crucible of sleep deprivation and newfound responsibility. The pre-kid lifestyle of Friday night drinks, free time and sleeping in becomes a distant memory. 

Yes, in a shocking and unguessable turn of events, becoming a parent is usually a life-changing experience, a major development that entails compromise and sacrifice. A shifting of priorities. If only all of the other parents on the planet throughout human history had an inkling, some clue. Our Guardian writer is of course determined to frame the subsequent division of labour in the Heath household as a result of dark forces – including “social conditioning,” “prescribed gender roles” and the oft-invoked “gender pay gap.” An allegedly oppressive phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist. And then, inevitably, a whiff of self-pity:

When you have someone to take care of menial stuff such as running your life, there’s little incentive to change the status quo. It’s nice having someone wash your clothes and cook your food. When you don’t have to expend mental energy keeping track of grocery lists and family birthdays, you have the cognitive bandwidth to think about other things.

She’s expending mental energy on grocery lists. Someone bring medals, big ones.

“Labour Party. Socialist. Teacher.”

Put another way, “State education is generally sub-optimal and often shockingly bad. Let’s make sure that’s all there is available.”

We’ve been here before, of course. As when we heard the claim, conveniently unchallenged, that doing one’s best for one’s own children – in contravention of “social justice” – is merely a “cultural construction,” and therefore, presumably, ripe for deconstruction. By our betters.

And we’ve been here more than once.

You can tell from his outpourings:

As someone who writes about Trump and his subordinates every day, I need every reprieve I can find from the ongoing toxic demise of our country, including in my personal social media. But my decision today to unfriend this individual was no simple purge; I am significantly emotionally wounded. 

It’s all terribly dramatic. Practically a miniature opera. You see, while browsing Facebook, Mr Ford saw a photo of an old high school friend celebrating the Fourth of July with her daughter and while wearing a Make America Great Again hat. The latter detail, the hat, being, for Mr Ford, “unacceptable,” a personal violation and source of deep trauma. Naturally, and not at all oddly, Zack decided to scold his old high school friend, as was his duty as a super-woke being: 

I gave my friend an ultimatum.

Always a sound opening gambit.

I told her I wouldn’t unfriend her so long as she apologised for wearing the hat and promised me I wouldn’t have to see it in my feed again. 

Terms of surrender. A bold choice.

When she claimed I was trying to police her beliefs, I corrected her, pointing out that my conditions only regarded the hat, not her position on any particular issue. 

Ooh. Terms of surrender with bonus sophistry. That’s bound to go down well. Let’s see:  

When asked to choose between a hat that embodies that evil and someone she’s known half her life,

Wait for it.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this item of possible interest:

As the fat-positivity movement has gained momentum, so, too, have debates around how fat folks should lead healthy lives. [Sonalee] Rashatwar, though, considers how sizeism is affected by racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, and she counsels people against intentional weight loss.

Well, we mustn’t be practical. That wouldn’t be woke. And regaining viable proportions, such that one’s health is not at risk and one’s lifespan needlessly shortened, sounds way too much like work and responsibility. Instead, attention is displaced to a more theoretical, and conveniently improbable, project:

Rashatwar traces contemporary fatphobia to colonial brutality and how enslaved people were treated. Citing researcher-advocate Caleb Luna, Rashatwar said curing anti-fatness would mean dismantling society’s foundation: “I love to talk about undoing Western civilisation because it’s just so romantic to me.”

Hm. Lose weight, or topple Western civilisation? It’s the fat person’s eternal dilemma.

Ms Rashatwar is a “community organiser” and “Instagram therapist,” a self-styled healer and woman of insight, and is therefore not at all grandiose, self-excusing or pathologically unrealistic. And so, her therapeutic endeavours include posting “really, really political and radical content” about how terrible capitalism is, how terrible the police are, and how righteous it is to be obese and consequently to live with needless limitations and increasing discomfort.

Ms Rashatwar has chosen to blame her own health issues, including high blood pressure, on “weight stigma” and “white supremacy,” rather than on her size and prodigious eating habits. When not equating routine health advice with eugenics and “Nazi science,” Ms Rashatwar, a self-described “donut queen,” claims that “diet culture and fat phobia are forms of sexual violence.”

The being named Caleb Luna, mentioned above, has cropped up here before. Readers are welcome to ponder said being’s credibility as a “researcher-advocate,” an authority to cite.

Somewhat related.

Via Darleen and lifted from yesterday’s comments:

What’s interesting about Antifa’s mob assault of the journalist Andy Ngo isn’t that an organisation premised on recreational thuggery has once again indulged in recreational thuggery. That’s why it exists. What’s interesting is that so many left-leaning journalists have been so eager to excuse or diminish that thuggery and to frame Mr Ngo either as the aggressor or as somehow deserving of assault by people with borderline personality disorders.

The implication being that the poor, put-upon Antifa goons, who are all terribly oppressed, felt threatened by the presence of the unimposing Mr Ngo, and therefore retaliated, albeit pre-emptively, by jumping him from behind, robbing him, and putting in the boot. That’s why they went back in time to stock up on iron bars, knuckledusters and, it seems, cement milkshakes. Obviously.

Previously in the not-at-all-sociopathic world of Antifa:

“Are you willing to die for YouTube shit? That’s what’s gonna come, man. Death is coming to you, dude. Real shit. Feel that energy? That’s why your heart’s pounding.”  

And again here:

“You’re inherently violent,” screams an unhinged blue-and-purple-haired woman named Hannah McClintock, while repeatedly spitting on people and trying to punch them in the face.

Update:

If you poke through the comments, you’ll find additional illustrations of the psychology of Antifa and their cheerleaders, including contortions by leftist educators and the morally ludicrous Laurie Penny.

Also, open thread.

Theodore Dalrymple on choice, crime and the importance of punishment:  

One of the explanations of ill behaviour, if you like, is a kind of mechanical one. People have certain experiences and they react to them in a certain self-destructive way, as if their behaviour was that of a billiard ball being impacted by another billiard ball… [But] agency is extremely important. You don’t deny that things are more difficult for some people than for others, but if you deny the agency of people, then you begin to treat them as objects rather than as subjects.

There’s been a very strong current in British intellectual circles that criminality is akin to an illness, and therefore it’s wrong to treat it as something that people have any control over. And of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In England, the leniency of our criminal justice system – precisely, I think, because of our tendency to sociologise everything, to say that people are not agents… this actually promotes criminality… It’s as if criminals didn’t have thought processes like us, [as if] they’re completely different from people like us. But they’re not different from people like us, on the whole…  

It’s very curious how people say that prison doesn’t work because a high proportion of prisoners when they come out commit offences again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere in a British publication that this might indicate that actually they should be in prison for longer. Another very obvious consideration, which is completely beyond the British intellectual class, is that the number of victims of crime is very much greater than the number of perpetrators. So each perpetrator actually creates large numbers of victims, and therefore it’s not kind to people who live in areas where there’s a lot of criminality not to deal properly with the criminals. We deal with criminality as if it is a benefit received by the poor, instead of what it is, one of the great hardships of being poor.

Mr Dalrymple’s views are somewhat at odds with those found in the pages of the Guardian, where readers are told with great certainty that burglary is “really quite inconsequential,” unworthy of punishment, and that anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation are somehow trivial, plebeian and unsophisticated. Such that expectations of lawfulness and justice – and not being preyed upon, repeatedly, with impunity – are airily dismissed as “idiotic attitudes.”

Would a future women-only space colony have to live with that same fear? Would the very idea of a self-sufficient community of women so infuriate and threaten men that they would take it as a challenge to seek out and invade any feminist planet? And what about the frozen sperm?

I’m sorry. I’m reading the Guardian. Perhaps things will settle down.

If our future colony is reliant on what it can transport from Earth, stocks will eventually run out unless they can be replenished, which means giving birth to at least a few male children. Whether, in a matriarchal society without examples of male aggression, those boys would grow up to be the kind of man who grabs a peaceful protester by the back of her neck remains one of the great unknowns.

Or not. Never mind.

Readers may be tickled by the conceit that men would be infuriated and threatened by the departure from Earth of the planet’s feminists. And not, say, delighted. In fact, given recent trends, it seems more likely that feminists would be the ones determined to sabotage and eliminate any all-male spaces, while exempting themselves from comparable restrictions. 

The rest is fairly predictable, the standard template, with jabs at “jowly white men in positions of power,” and inspirational rumblings in which women “just take the sperm and leave the men behind.” This bold vision of tomorrow is then traded for a more modest scenario, a compromise of sorts, in which, rather than being “redundant” and eliminated entirely, men are merely “educated… out of bullying and aggressive attitudes towards women” – an education that entails “putting women in positions of power on this planet before we think about how to populate others.”

We await the Guardian article in which a male columnist, perhaps white and somewhat jowly, ponders the appalling nature of women and how they require correction lest they contaminate the heavens with their inherent awfulness.

Via Guardian Science.

Daniel McGraw on the self-inflicted sorrows of Oberlin College:

Activists on campus immediately concluded the arrest of the three students was evidence of racial profiling, which suggests an assumption that either the students were falsely accused on account of their race, or that Gibson’s [Bakery and Market] was happy to allow whites to shoplift but drew the line at blacks. I heard versions of these two theories during interviews I conducted with dozens of the student protesters. But, despite the students’ claims and the vehemence of the language with which they were made, police and others testified that there had been no complaints or allegations of racism made against the family business since it opened in 1885. Not one. […]

As the protests continued, Gibson’s annual revenue almost halved… Eight full-time employees were reduced to one, and family members have had to forego their salaries (and still do, pending the receipt of damages) since the protests began. The Gibson family testified that all they wanted was for Oberlin College to send an email to the community affirming that Gibson’s was not racist and to move on. But the school refused and doubled down on its support for the protesters and their defamatory allegations.

Oberlin’s decision to double-down seems in part an attempt to deflect Mao-ling discontent at the college’s own supposed sins of “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.” Having encouraged students to cultivate woke psychodramas at every turn, the ensuing hostility had to be pointed somewhere. Which rather speaks to the character of those involved.

David Gibson, owner of the besieged bakery, shares his account of events here:

Police arrested the student. But the next day, hundreds of people gathered in protest. From bullhorns they called for a boycott. The sidewalk and park across the street from our store were filled with protesters holding signs labelling us racists and white supremacists. The arrest, they said, was the result of racial profiling. The narrative was set and there was no combating it… The shoplifter confessed to his crime and said the arrest wasn’t racially motivated. But Oberlin College refused to help set the record straight by issuing a public statement that our family is not racist and does not have a history of racial profiling or discrimination. The damage had been done. And the truth seemed irrelevant.

Inevitably, Oberlin’s student newspaper lays blame elsewhere, denouncing the media and an “increasingly authoritarian country” – one in which “sustained and brave student activism” – i.e., vindictive hysteria and attempting to destroy the livelihoods of entirely innocent people – might become more difficult and even have consequences. At which point, the words that come to mind are lefties project.