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: 

And she thinks for a living: 

Douglas Murray on crime, migration and modern dishonesties: 

In Germany, friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them.

Related: “Vibrant and diverse.” And of course these items here. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” versus merit: 

Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades… The result: wasted resources, the side-lining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t — because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

And Roger Kimball on being outraged by the obvious-but-unmentionable: 

Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered. What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” […] As William Henry argued back in the 1990s… “Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal… It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” True, too true. But in a pusillanimous society terrified by its own shadow, it is one thing to know the truth, quite another to utter it in public.

And then Professor Wax mentioned other obvious things, much to the agitation of people who like to pretend.

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

They’re just for display purposes: 

David Paxton on identitarian pay complaints: 

A pay gap between two men is the product of market forces, but a pay gap between a man and a woman is attributable to either the market or to patriarchal oppression, depending on whom it favours… Pointing at specific cases, highlighting a demographic difference, and then declaring discrimination to be the sole cause without further evidence, is a tactic favoured by those who consider themselves thoroughly modern… But this thought process is pre-medieval – an unreflective instinct of pattern-seeking mammals who habitually see conspiracies in misattributions of cause and effect. Just as infant deaths were once blamed on a neighbour’s malevolent witchcraft, and crop failure on insufficient animal sacrifice, today’s hashtags blame identity-group discrimination for pay differentials when perfectly logical alternative explanations are readily available.

David Solway, husband of Janice Fiamengo, on the corrosive shakedown named “social justice”: 

My wife, who for many years donated one fifth of her salary to charity, is anything but a heartless conservative, and I have gone out of my way to help people in distress. We do not reject the social safety net intended to assist the unfortunate who have, as they say, “fallen through the cracks.” But helping measures must be closely and fairly monitored so that the indolent and inept do not gradually displace or usurp the productive and the competent, to everyone’s ultimate disadvantage. A difficult task, to be sure, but worth undertaking. “Social justice” makes no attempt to distinguish the one from the other… The old saw that development grinds to a halt when there are as many or more people riding in the wagon as pulling it applies with a vengeance.

And Toni Airaksinen on the feminist appropriation of “toxic masculinity”: 

The term may have first been popularised by early forms of the men’s advocacy movements. (Not feminist movements, as one might expect.) For example, one book that seeks to raise awareness of issues that men face, titled Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (1994), highlighted one of the earliest examples of toxic masculinity in the literature. “Without a “father in residence,” [men] may go through life striving towards an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity,” the author of the book, Frank Pittman, said on the topic of young men without fathers. But the term has recently been co-opted by the feminist establishment as a way to scapegoat, blame, and denigrate men as a whole. In the college classroom, toxic masculinity is presented to students as a reality that affects all men, and is harmful to all women.

And so we arrive at the contradiction of feminists who denounce “toxic masculinity” as both all-pervasive and a fundamental evil, at least among white people, while simultaneously endorsing fatherlessness and family instability, i.e., the most obvious causes of the behaviour they claim to dislike. 

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

Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

“Their role as social engineers.” And so, 

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

Yes, it’s faintly absurd and veering towards comedy. But if you read the whole thing, you may well be struck by the eye-widening arrogance and vanity of the educators, who, as self-appointed “social engineers,” feel entitled to “counteract” normative gender differences, along with the preferences of parents, some of whom have complained about their children’s subsequent behaviour.

Via Ben Sixsmith. 

Now hush and approach with caution: 

My magical practice is based in African Diasporic voodoo, herbology, and root-work. I came to these rituals by studying Black slave rebellions, and unearthing the ways in which enslaved folx used hexes and curses to thwart their masters.

Not entirely successfully, it seems, given the word masters.

I turned to these traditions most open-heartedly in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests circa 2014, when I started to feel hopeless and emotionally drained after regular violent confrontations with the police at demonstrations. By wielding these protective amulets, reciting these incantations, calling upon the Orishas, and working intimately with the plants, stones, roots, and bones of my environment, I began to feel more empowered.

Because when your behaviour is so appalling that you’re repeatedly getting into scuffles with the police, what you need, obviously, isn’t a rethink of your life choices, but a magical amulet.

Quickly, my focus in the Craft moved away from damning hexes against white supremacy to community care work and deep psycho-social-spiritual healing for Black and Brown people in the struggle. As a queer Black woman scientist activist, Queer Magic For The Resistance is what I’m always giving.

The lady sharing her deep, uncanny wisdom is named Iman, a sorceress of sorts, and an affiliate of Queer Magic For The Resistance, a “collective and political affinity group based in Oakland, California.” Because of course it is. Iman, whose “whole world is magical,” describes herself as a “scientist” and “emotional care provider,” a purveyor of roots, herbs and “emotional emergency response.” As when equipping the LARPing sociopaths of Antifa with herbal teas and “healing shields.” For her, she says, “magic is resistance.”

To reality, I’m guessing.

A North Carolina State University sociology instructor contends that vegan and vegetarian men are guilty of “upholding the gender binary” and perpetuating “white masculinity.”

Imagine my surprise. 

Meatless Meals and Masculinity was written by Mari Mycek, a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the NCSU sociology department, who argues that vegan and vegetarian men have reclaimed their “previously-stigmatised consumption identity” to wield power over women by framing their lifestyle as a rational, rather than emotional, choice.

It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to, personally. But as we’ve seen so many times, the contrived agonising must never end. Especially for woke sociology lecturers who wish to remind the world of their own Brahmin status in the progressive pecking order.  

Update:

According to Cheryl E. Matias and Paul T. Le, both of the University of Colorado at Denver, the belief that the apprehension of, and substance of, scientific discoveries is independent of whatever one’s skin colour may happen to be, is a problem. One that results in the spread of “whiteness ideology,” and thereby “white supremacy.”  

Nikita Vladimirov pokes through the mental wreckage: 

According to Matias and Le, “our science is out of touch with the experiences of our students of Colour and, instead, represents post-colonial discourses of White power and control.” “Whiteness embraces White ideology, and because Whites are at the apex of the racial hierarchy, whiteness becomes normalized and is invisible to those who benefit the most from it,” the scholars observe. “This is particularly troubling because the normality of whiteness means that Whites do not believe that they are actively investing in White supremacy or racism, which keeps oppression intact.”

And Kafkatrapping, apparently, is the apex of woke scholarship.

Because if you demur, or suggest that the laws of electromagnetism don’t dramatically alter depending on the melanin levels of the person doing the maths, then you just don’t care about “students of Colour” being “victims of deculturalization” and being “invalidated.” Indeed, you are “erasing the values and culture of indigenous people,” and are bolstering “post-colonial discourses of White power and control over people of Colour via forcing the internalization of Western science knowledge.” Instead, all people of pallor must denounce themselves as oppressors, embrace “other ways of knowing” and “re-imagine what science education spaces can look like.”

Sadly, however, and despite the assertions above, the aboriginal alternatives to Maxwell’s equations and commutative algebra remain oddly unspecified.

Somewhat related. 

Update: