Jonah Goldberg on “cultural appropriation” and pretentious outrage: 

Nearly every meal you’ve ever eaten is the by-product of centuries of cultural appropriation, to one extent or another. This column is written in English, a language that contains hundreds of thousands of words appropriated from other tongues. Just under two-thirds of our language derives from Latin or French. About a quarter is Germanic in origin. And about a sixth comes from Greek, Arabic and other languages… We are living through the greatest period of poverty alleviation in all of human history right now because countries in Asia and Africa have appropriated many economic policies and practices — free markets, property rights, etc. — that began as quirky artefacts of English and Dutch culture.

Douglas Murray on race and casting: 

In an era that is witnessing the politicisation and polarisation of absolutely everything, the realm of fiction and art – one of the great barrier-breakers we have – is also becoming a battle-ground for racial exclusivity and racial exclusion… Perhaps those who are attempting to push such agendas will at some point wake up to the fact that they are heading towards an almighty logical crash. For the same logic that saw Sierra Boggess [hounded] off West Side Story [for not being Puerto Rican] can just as easily be used to insist that all future Prince Hals or Isoldes should be white. Casting can either be colour blind or colour-obsessed. It cannot be both.

Kristian Niemietz on the media’s tongue-bathing of Marxism: 

If your ideas require impossible standards of purity in implementation in order to work, then maybe your ideas are not as great as you think they are. A good idea will still work out okay even in a distorted and poorly implemented version. That, arguably, is a big part of what makes a good idea good… Political and economic theories are never implemented in pure form, and their adherents are rarely impressed by politicians who claim to be inspired by them. That’s just par for the course. Marxists, however, are pretty much the only thinkers who accept no responsibility whatsoever for real-world approximations of their ideas. 

And the late Leszek Kolakowski on Marx’s knack for being wrong: 

What in the twentieth century perhaps comes closest to the working class revolution [predicted by Marx] were the events in Poland of 1980-81: the revolutionary movement of industrial workers (very strongly supported by the intelligentsia) against the exploiters, that is to say, the state. And this solitary example of a working class revolution (if even this may be counted) was directed against a socialist state, and carried out under the sign of the cross, with the blessing of the Pope. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

From Wesley Yang’s Esquire profile of Jordan Peterson: 

Peterson is an apologist for a set of beliefs that we once took for granted but now require an articulate defence, such as: Free speech is an essential value; perfect equality inevitably conflicts with individual freedom; one should be cautious before attempting to reengineer social institutions that appear to be working; men and women are, in certain quantifiable respects, different. His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.

Maybe it’s a measure of the left’s influence and dysfunction.

Via Samizdata. 

For newcomers, some items from the archives:

Do Not Feed The Narcissists.

“Social justice” howler monkeys prove difficult to please.

So, to recap. Forty or so “social justice” activists disrupt a keynote address at DePauw University, holding signs that scold the audience for being insufficiently deferential to the protestors’ racial fixations and delusions of being oppressed. Being schooled in “privilege and identity,” and therefore suitably cowed and pretentious, the audience starts applauding the disruption, and applauding the scolding being aimed at them. And then those applauding are promptly scolded for doing so.

But I Am Not Androgynous. 

Salon’s Silpa Kovvali insists that gendered pronouns must be abolished. Everyone, she says, is a “they.”

Ms Kovvali believes that gendered pronouns and honorifics are an “outdated linguistic tic.” And not a useful, rather concise source of information, a signal of respect, and a way of clarifying who it is we’re talking about. Despite her claims, almost all of us seem quite happy to be referred to as either male or female, as if it were in fact “relevant,” and the demand for gender-neutral pronouns remains, to say the least, a niche concern. I’d even venture to suggest that some of us might feel slighted by the wilful omission of – diminishing of – our respective maleness or femaleness. However, Ms Kovvali feels a need to inform those less enlightened, i.e., the rest of us, that, “The goal is greater inclusion… to be respectful to those we write about, and to be clear to our readers.” By risking affront on a daily basis and introducing a clumsy and needless ambiguity. Because vagueness is the new clarity.

It’s A Fascist Groove Thang. 

Leftist students indulge in thuggery. Laurie Penny lies about it.

John Leo on standards versus appearances: 

The nation’s public schools are a mess. Only 37 percent of 12th graders tested proficient in reading and only 25 percent in maths. Yet the inability to read or do maths seems to be no barrier to college. Unprepared students are flooding into college in record numbers. The Bureau of Labour Statistics says 70 percent of white high-school graduates and 58 percent of black graduates in 2016 enrolled in college. In his syndicated column, Walter E. Williams asks, “If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them? It’s inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level.”

From the Walter Williams article quoted above: 

College professors dumb down their courses so that ill-prepared students can get passing grades. Colleges also set up majors with little analytical demands so as to accommodate students with analytical deficits. Such majors often include the term “studies,” such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender studies… The major for the most ill-prepared students, sadly enough, is education. When students’ SAT scores are ranked by intended major, education majors place 26th on a list of 38.

With that in mind, readers may wish to revisit this tale of modern educational wonders. As I said at the time, a school that has no discernible standards, academic or behavioural, and which makes no distinction between those who study and those who don’t even turn up, is in no meaningful sense a school.

And speaking of analytical deficits: 

A member of the pro-abortion club at the University of Minnesota-Duluth compared pro-life students to white supremacists during an open mic event last week. Throughout his [poetry] performance at the “Speak Out for Justice” event on April 21, Student Advocates for Choice member Reilly Manzer condemned the “pale faces” of the pro-life movement for criticising abortion.

Bear in mind that Mr Manzer – whose woke poetry is the obligatory feat of teetering pretension and outright psychodrama, and therefore loudly applauded – is, for many educators, an exemplary product of modern academia.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Brace yourselves for crushing news: 

A radical socialist group at Indiana University-Bloomington is disbanding itself after realising that its efforts only reinforced the “bourgeois” nature of the institution.

Apparently, these tireless enemies of “patriarchy, white supremacy, socioeconomic inequality, and imperialism,” are outraged by “whiteness,” by “colonialism,” by “rape culture,” and by the cost of the campus policing that their own actions have made necessary. The group is also fatigued by the fact that bourgeois life has somehow resisted their full-spectrum onslaught. Specifically,

The radical group has been an active promoter of anti-capitalist vandalism on campus, and has distributed pamphlets that urged students to destroy the property of right-leaning organisations. In its lengthy public statement, the group goes on to argue that the university is indoctrinating students with neoliberal ideologies and is training the campus police, who they refer to as “slave catchers,” to detain and “murder” people of colour.

The campus environment, we’re told, “keeps bourgeois students in the bourgeoisie,” “reproduces class” – and worse, enables tomorrow’s “small business owners.” And so, the mighty Mao-lings will now direct their heroic and selfless efforts to “the larger community,” while plotting to “dismantle the capitalist settler-state of the USA.”

And remember, running a small, successful business is a sign of “domination” and therefore obscene. According to Oakland’s Mao-ling contingent.

“The installation is intended to spark dialogue,” said Communications Professor Alison Trope.

At the University of Southern California, the word dialogue appears to have a somewhat rarefied meaning. 

Douglas Murray on utopian thinking and ineradicable vices: 

To ‘destroy’ misogyny (or, for that matter, its opposite – misandry) you would have to arrive at a time when nobody of either sex… felt any need to seize on a secondary characteristic as a way to push their primary dislike. All divorces would have to go swimmingly. Men would pay alimony only with pleasure and enthusiasm. Conversely, any woman who caught their husband cheating would have to say: “Well that was just my husband: I wouldn’t want to express any conclusions about men in general.” Perhaps this is desirable. But achievable? Hardly. The trouble is some people – including some of the most powerful people on the planet – seem to believe otherwise.

Madison Breshears on overlooked gender gaps: 

What, if anything, do ballet and tech have in common? The obvious answer is that both fields show highly disproportionate gender distributions. Less acknowledged but no less relevant is this uncomfortable commonality: Both are industries where it pays to be in the sexual minority. I know, because I was a ballet dancer for 16 years. In the ballet world, men’s unfair advantage in hiring and casting is as widely understood and as rarely acknowledged as is the rampant anorexia. A less skilled male dancer is more likely to land a role or get a job than a female dancer of comparable skill. Due to the scarcity of men, the hurdles to a professional career are distinctly lower than they are for most women. Anyone who says something similar about women in the tech industry does so at their own peril.

Duke Pesta and Dave Huber on “white privilege” shaming rituals: 

There was a case at San Diego State University, where students were given extra credit for determining their level of “white privilege.” This was part of my own experience. We did a thing called a “privilege walk,” where you’re asked a bunch of questions designed to give the result the creators’ wanted. It gets a little ridiculous, in that one of the questions says, “I grew up in a two-parent household,” as if that’s some kind of inherent [white] privilege, doing the right thing.

And Jordan Peterson on IQ and its distribution: 

At the Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where annual tuition is north of $50,000, education is under way:

“Why is it okay to bring people to talk against their own people?” the student finally asked, though when [invited speaker, Burgess] Owens attempted to answer, the student again began complaining about the “structural racism” he has experienced. “Please let him answer the question,” the moderator interjected. “Let me finish talking!” the student shouted back. As Owens once again attempted to answer, the student reiterated that he was “not finished talking,” and continued to interrupt Owens. The moderator was eventually forced to shut down the question-and-answer portion of the talk, prompting cries of “white fragility!” from the audience.

You see, in the Clown Quarter, black people are only allowed to have one point of view. 

And note the woke student, here, who refers to Mr Owens as an “Uncle Tom,” before hurrying away with a self-satisfied grin. Moments later, just after Mr Owens mentions the importance of debate and showing each other respect, things go downhill. 

Rafi steers us to this article by Charlotte Allen on the ever-narrowing parameters of leftist tolerance. The following extract, on her attempts to cover a “white privilege” conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, may be of particular interest:

I had already covered the White Privilege Conference for the Weekly Standard in 2013, when it had met at a Seattle airport hotel. Back then, the conference had struck me strictly as a subject for laughs… So my story had highlighted the conference’s most salient feature: that although minority-group victimologists were robustly represented, many of the speakers, and certainly most of the audience, consisted of white people feeling guilty for being white.

I gently poked fun at the George Mason University professor who got up onstage to apologise that his pants had been stitched in a sweatshop in Bangladesh; the soi-disant American Indian activist who had been ousted as tribal chief for financial mismanagement after a large sum of money went missing; and the large percentage of conference workshop leaders who seemed actually to be flogging their books and hustling for participants to sign up as paying customers for their own white-privilege conferences elsewhere. […]

I returned to the scene in 2018 because during the intervening five years “white privilege” seemed to have mushroomed from a zany preoccupation of far-left professors into a mainstream pedagogical trend. Just a few days ago elementary-school teachers in Raleigh, N.C., sent second-graders home with a sheet for their parents titled “11-Step Guide to Race, Racism, and White Privilege.” The sheet proffered such injunctions as “Drop ‘colourblindedness’ (which is arguably an ableist term anyway)” and “Only white people can be racist.” The white-privilege movement had become serious — and a serious threat to those who declined to be indoctrinated or to have their children indoctrinated.

Do read the whole thing.

Previously on the Planet of the Bedlamites.

Will Gu on the deep and worldly wisdom on offer at Scripps College: 

The college will be hosting two Venezuelan officials next week at a three-day speaker series praising the “grassroots initiatives” of the country’s totalitarian government. The officials, Venezuelan Consul-Generals Antonio Cordero and Jesús Chucho García, will be speaking to students on “African solidarities,” “coups and imperial wars,” and the country’s vision for “a new society rooted in political participation, communal economies and democracy.” The description adds that the event is “for all who are interested in economics that serve people not profits.” Venezuela is still facing mass food shortages as a result of its government’s economic illiteracy. People in Venezuela have lost an average of 19 pounds from recent food shortages… The event description does not mention whether the two Venezuelan officials will discuss their country’s rampant corruption problem, the government’s dire financial situation, or the rapid devaluation of Venezuela’s currency to the extent that the government cannot afford to pay for money printing services.

Related: this, and, rather tellingly, the first item here. 

Cathy Young on debate and its enemies: 

When about 30% of college students favour censorship, it should be a cause for alarm — especially because that’s up from 22% two years ago. Moreover, 53% of students believe “promoting an inclusive society” is a higher priority than protecting free speech rights. Over a third say it is sometimes acceptable to shout a speaker down, and one in 10 approve of violent disruption. The last figure may seem small, but it means some 2 million collegians in the United States believe it can be okay to use violence to stop speech they don’t like. That’s not good news.

Gail Heriot on racial discipline quotas and perverse media narratives: