In case you missed it in the comments, here’s another illustration of the severely educated and their unhappy mental trajectories. In this case, Mr Anthony Oliveira, a writer and “pop culture critic,” who boasts of his PhD, in English literature, and whose pronouncements are, shall we say, very much of a type. And so we learn that, “queer people are permanently disadvantaged and marginalised by the capitalist power structure,” that, “‘the family’ as we now understand it is a capitalist invention and is specifically designed to exclude queerness,” and that, “queerness is incompatible with capitalism.”

What, you didn’t know?  

Readers may pause to wonder how the passing of time will treat those who’ve internalised such woke theatre and made it their persona, their schtick, with the inevitable declaration of pronouns (“he/them”) and equally inevitable pretensions of victimhood. Such that being gay is The Defining Feature Of One’s Life, the basis of a career, and framed by default in terms of exclusion, “oppression” and being marginalised. What happens when the professionally oppressed hit forty, or fifty? Will they still expect the world to be fascinated by their gayness, their queerness, and its supposed incompatibility with a market economy? Will they still be banging on about it?

When you’re a teenager, being gay is, understandably, a big deal. But if it’s still a big deal when you’re in your thirties, or forties or fifties – if it’s still your primary identity badge, the basis of your alleged oppression and intersectional status – as if you lived in the livelier parts of Yemen or Somalia, while actually living in Toronto, as Mr Oliveira does – then the words functional adult aren’t the ones that come to mind.

Via Tim Newman. 

I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.

In the video linked above, feminist “theorist” Sophie Lewis informs us that the foetus, a nascent human being, is “violent,” does violence to “gestators,” and that abortion is a corrective killing, an “unmaking,” a means of “going on strike against gestational work.” “We need to move away from… arguments around when human life begins,” says she.

So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.

Ms Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. When not arguing for the destruction of the unborn, and the “abolition” of the family – which is to be replaced by comradeliness, apparently – she “participates in the Out Of The Woods anti-capitalist ecological writing collective.”

Update, via the comments:

In this laughably pretentious review of Ms Lewis’ laughably pretentious book, we learn that the author wishes us to embrace the disintegration of the family – our families, all families – “until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all.” As if the “best available care” would somehow be an obvious result of family disintegration, despite decades of real-world evidence to the contrary. Supposedly, we would learn to love the “plural womb,” “radical disinheritance,” and “a world beyond propertarian kinship and work alienation.” The children we have will no longer be ours, it seems, and this will apparently make us happy. It’s a “queer, communist, speculative future.” A narcissist’s experiment. And we are to be the guinea pigs.

Via Mr Muldoon. Somewhat related.

In case you missed it in the comments:

The Secret Life of Pets 2… effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews

Woke reviewer Carlos Aguilar watches an animated film intended for children and gets terribly upset.

It occurs to me that when the reviewer of a children’s cartoon is whining at length about a lack of discernibly gay pet-owning couples and the oppressive “heteronormativity” of a character choosing to get married and have a child – an act that is “conservative” and therefore bad, apparently – then the problem isn’t the film.

In the comments, Liz adds,

Reproduction is ‘conservative’. Normality is a ‘trope’. Sounds like someone’s been severely educated…

Such that Mr Aguilar, a 30-year-old man, is seeking validation of his own niche sexual politics in a children’s cartoon about talking dogs.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this girthy lady and her list of complaints:

Smaller plus-size people, please check your privilege. That includes a mid-fat like me who is FAR more privileged than folks larger than me. I’m honestly so sick of people including small fats and thinking that’s enough… and I’m sick of small fats not calling out the fact that they are the biggest people at the event/shoot/meeting or whatever it is. Fat people above a 20 exist, and we fucking matter. We deserve to be included and seen. Super fat people deserve to be included. Infini-fat people deserve to be included. Fat people of colour deserve to be included. Disabled fat people deserve to be included. We all matter too. Your body positivity isn’t shit if it doesn’t include us.

Setting aside the intersectional hierarchy of fatness – small-fat, mid-fat, super-fat and infini-fat – there is, I think, something odd about the chosen language. In woke usage, the word privilege implies arbitrariness, some random quirk of life, an attribute or circumstance unrelated to one’s own efforts or choices. As if becoming sufficiently vast to engage in fat activism, and bang on about privilege, were merely a matter of the planets aligning a certain way. As if anyone might become colossally fat spontaneously, overnight, with no warning, and through no action, or inaction, of their own. Which doesn’t sound terribly plausible. In fact, it sounds like an attempt to displace responsibility and thereby deceive.

Also, open thread. 

My teeth… have written on my body and have been written on by my body. My canines speak volumes. My incisors have something to say. My bicuspids beg to be theorised. My molars desperately want to be understood. This story of my teeth is important because my straight teeth have not always been the way that they are… I realised the extent of the work that I have invested into straightening my teeth by reading Judith Butler.

In the nightmare, I’m held at gunpoint and for 24 hours am forced to read aloud works of “queer theory.” I begin with W. Benjamin Myers’ thoughts on “straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity” – and which allegedly reveal the “uninterrogated Whiteness” of routine dental hygiene and its role in maintaining “arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities.” 

Via Amir Sariaslan, who has more. Previously in hell. 

Here’s an idea! Change your parents’ bad voting habits by refusing to breed.

In the pages of Slate, Christina Cauterucci, whose enthusiasms include “gender and feminism,” wishes to share her wisdom:

The prospect of harnessing one’s sexual and reproductive powers for social good is a tempting one. So, I’d like to present what I humbly consider a much better proposal: Instead of a sex strike, let’s try a grandkid strike.

It’s a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism,” says Ms Cauterucci, and “exactly the kind of radical response today’s radical threats to equity, justice, and humanity demand.” Specifically,

It’s time to demand that baby boomers and Gen Xers decide which they’d rather have: their vague attachments to policies that have poisoned the earth and will soon make it difficult for anyone but the obscenely wealthy to live healthy, happy lives, or a pack of adorable munchkins in itty-bitty suspenders ready for unlimited tickle fights and cookie-baking sessions.

This is followed almost immediately by,

I’ve already decided that I’m not having kids,

Which, for the purposes of Ms Cauterucci’s article, is somewhat convenient. This reproductive decision was, we’re told, arrived at because,

Child care is extravagantly expensive, and paid family leave is a rare luxury. Bringing a new set of chubby cheeks and wonderfully incomprehensible babblings into the world is the most destructive thing one couple can do to the planet. It seems certain that today’s babies will be tomorrow’s survivors of famine, water shortages, unprecedented natural disasters, and refugee crises.

And furthermore,

It’s unethical, what with climate change and all. And it’s too dangerous—you’ve seen the news reports on school shootings and know how easy it is for violent men to get their hands on guns.

Um, okay then. Apparently, the thought of becoming a parent immediately conjures mental images of famine, earthquakes, shootings and death. Proof, if more were needed, that the exquisitely woke are just like thee and me. Not unhinged in any way.

David Solway on the feminist enthusiasm for fatness: 

In a speech on the topic of “radical fat liberation” jointly sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Centre for Equity and Inclusion at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, the prodigiously overweight Sonalee Rashatwar, a self-proclaimed Fat Sex Therapist, compared fitness trainers to Nazis, defined child dieting as sexual assault, attributed the Christchurch shooting to ‘thin” white supremacism, and condemned science as “fataphobic” for “promoting the idea that certain bodies are fit, able and desirable.” She wonders, rhetorically, “is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?” She goes on to blame the Reagan administration for having refused to provide “social supports that also help me to subsidise my food costs.” 

When not equating routine health advice with eugenics and “Nazi science,” Ms Rashatwar claims that “diet culture and fat phobia are forms of sexual violence.” Mr Solway is the husband of Janice Fiamengo, whose own probing of feminist pathology has been mentioned here before.

Heather Mac Donald on cooking the books for “diversity”: 

The average white score on the SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) is 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 1998 that white students from households with incomes of $10,000 or less score better on the SAT than black students from households with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. In 2015, students with family incomes of $20,000 or less (a category that includes all racial groups) scored higher on average on the math SAT than the average math score of black students from all income levels… 

Those who rail against “white privilege” as a determinant of academic achievement have a nagging problem: Asians. Asian students outscore white students on the SAT by 100 points; they outscore blacks by 277 points. It is not Asian families’ economic capital that vaults them to the top of the academic totem pole; it is their emphasis on scholarly effort and self-discipline. Every year in New York City, Asian elementary school students vastly outperform every other racial and ethnic group on the admissions test for the city’s competitive public high schools, even though a disproportionate number of them come from poor immigrant families.

Somewhat related, on racism as an excuse. And related to that, on the absurd and rather sinister Implicit Association Test.

With unrelenting racial divisiveness:

According to her own publicity material, Ms Rao studied law at the University of Virginia and NYU, and is “one of the country’s strongest voices for social justice, equity, and inclusion.” Which may explain the self-satisfied double standards, the paranoid hyperbole, the pronounced cognitive dissonance, and the daily epithets about “white people” and their many, many faults. And the next time you hear sweet cooings about “social justice, equity and inclusion,” you may want to bear in mind the kinds of creatures most attracted to these things. 

As noted before, many times, “social justice” is antithetical to expectations of reciprocity. And so, despite the theatrical piety, it corrodes the moral senses. Quite quickly.

Update, via Greg in the comments:

Ms Rao invites you to an evening of dinner and pretentious racial scolding. And you’re paying.

If you think of communication as an exercise in respect for the other, you don’t repeat yourself. Repeating yourself suggests that you’re either demented or that you just don’t care about the other person’s response; you’re prepared to override it and say the same thing again and again. There’s no way in which a chanted slogan invites an answer.

Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton discuss the future of conservatism, why the left wins the culture war, architecture, Twitter mobs, the importance of apologies, and the “institutionalised fraudulence” of woke academia.

Also, open thread.

Via Mr Muldoon in the comments, our betters at work:

Laughable, yes. But not harmless: