From the archives, this:
And in the Financial Times:
Guardian Media Group hit with £173 million record loss.
When the foremost printed organ of the British left publishes so many of these things, week after week, that they’re collected and circulated as works of minor surrealism, and are then mistaken for spiteful parodies by the paper’s own contributors, this may not be an ideal business model.
Via sk60. Readers are welcome to suggest variations of their own.
Or, Feel My Pain, Now Do As I Say.
This is not a grand battle against institutionalised injustice. This is an addiction to indignation.
Below the fold, a short film by Rob Montz on the vanities, hysteria and clown-shoe politics of campus protest culture:
I need you to try to learn to love the lush overgrowth of your body. Let it grow wild and untamed as a garden you loved as a child. Love it for the way it sustains you, keeps you warm, goes to such lengths not to let you get hurt. Its only job is to care for you. I need you to try to love it if you intend to love me.
In the pages of Everyday Feminism, an anonymous woman of girth, a size 26, wants other people to stop trying to lose weight and to stop acknowledging their own fatness, except in flattering terms, as this makes her – our anonymous, rather demanding woman of girth – feel bad about herself:
Every discussion about bodies — whether in the media or amongst friends — is about how to avoid the horrible fate of looking like me… When you say that you shouldn’t have eaten that lunch or dessert, or when you announce your new year’s resolution to lose 5, 10, 25 pounds, you are saying that you don’t want your body to end up like mine.
Well, at risk of being indelicate, yes.
I know that all of us are impacted by body shaming, and that everyone has real, valid, deep, hard feelings about our bodies. I still need you to stop perpetuating it, especially when talking about yourself. No amount of caveats or prologues make it hurt me less. I need you to know that I’m taking it personally because it is personal.
So if any readers are planning to drop a few pounds by cycling, or jogging, or walking the dog, or just eating less, this makes you complicit in the sin of body shaming, and therefore an oppressor of those with surplus flesh.
Ben Shapiro on facts versus feelings:
If the political goal is to alleviate feelings of discrimination, no end point can ever be reached so long as a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison. And a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison not because of discrimination in the criminal-justice system, but because a disproportionate number of black people commit crimes… Crediting the unjustified feeling that there is pervasive bias in the criminal-justice system means making evidence secondary to perceptions. In the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo., a large majority of black Americans felt that Officer Darren Wilson was guilty of murder in August 2015. They were wrong. But according to our political leaders, such feelings ought to be granted the patina of legitimacy. This isn’t leadership. It’s moral cowardice.
It’s also, quite often, arrogance and vanity.
Thomas Sowell on egregious media bias and the war on cops:
To the race hustlers, black lives don’t really matter nearly as much as their chance to get publicity, power, money, votes or whatever else serves their own interests. The mainstream media play a large, and largely irresponsible, role in the creation and maintenance of a poisonous racial atmosphere that has claimed the lives of policemen around the country. That same poisoned atmosphere has claimed the lives of even more blacks, who have been victims of violence by thugs and criminals who have had fewer restrictions as the police have pulled back, or have been pulled back, under political pressure. The media provide the publicity on which career race hustlers thrive. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which turmoil in the streets gives the media something exciting to attract viewers. In return, the media give those behind this turmoil millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity to spread their poison.
Part 2 here. Heather Mac Donald’s book The War On Cops, which is recommended by Sowell, can be purchased here (Amazon UK) and here (Amazon US).
Speaking of media bias:
This is apparently the current state of American journalism. The newspaper printed a fact, but that fact was unacceptable based on the demographics of the people who might potentially see it.
And Franklin Einspruch on why sport remains hugely popular while art is in decline:
Baseball hasn’t spent a hundred years smashing its own conventions. Baseball players don’t endeavour to turn hitting into a critique of late capitalism. Baseball doesn’t call upon fans to comprehend discussion full of coinages by PhD students trying to impress their dissertation committees, or implicitly punish them for having bourgeois values. Audiences instinctively and rightly hate this kind of pretentiousness.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Because of my race, I can eat at a fancy restaurant without the wait staff expecting me to steal the silverware.
The psychological abuse of children by leftist educators continues:
The video of the 14-year-old student’s slam poem at his school has gone viral in the midst of heated national discussions regarding race and privilege. Performed at a slam poetry competition in May at The Paideia School in Atlanta, Royce Mann’s winning poem offers a reflection on the privilege he feels he has been automatically awarded as a result of his being white and male… Royce said that he knew about white and male privilege for most of his life, but never knew how prevalent it was in society until he attended a class called “Race, Class and Gender” that opened his eyes.
Because when a credulous 14-year-old is encouraged to declare that all white males are “scared of what it would be like if… I didn’t have my white boy privilege safety blankie,” this is now an aesthetic and political triumph. And when that same child says, “It is embarrassing that we still live in a world in which we judge another person’s character by… the colour of their skin,” while judging millions of people by the colour of their skin, and doing it proudly, this is something to applaud as both brave and insightful. Behold the makings of a morally corrected citizen.
The poem in question can be heard in full below:
Thomas Sowell on the displacement of blame:
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism. What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector…
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favourable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies. The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
Dave Huber on racial favouritism in college admissions:
Although the US Supreme Court recently upheld the legality of using race as a factor when considering college admissions, a substantial majority of Americans disagree… Perhaps the most interesting aspect of a new Gallup Poll on the topic is that a majority of black Americans believe that merit, not race, should be used for admission to a university.
And Heather Mac Donald on the escalating dysfunction of black Chicago:
Fatherlessness in the city’s black community is at a cataclysmic level — close to 80 percent of children are born to single mothers in high-crime areas. Illegitimacy is catching up fast among Hispanics, as well. Gangs have stepped in where fathers are absent. A 2012 gang audit documented 59 active street gangs with 625 factions, some controlling a single block. Schools in gang territories go on high alert at dismissal time to fend off violence. Endemic crime has prevented the commercial development and gentrification that are revitalising so many parts of Chicago closer to downtown; block after block on the South Side features a wan liquor store or cheque-cashing outlet, surrounded by empty lots and the occasional skeleton of a once-magnificent beaux-arts apartment complex or bank. Non-functioning streetlights, their fuse boxes vandalised, signal the reign of a local gang faction.
There’s more, lots more, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Farnsworth M Muldoon steers us, once again, to the pages of Everyday Feminism:
Can’t say so, no. Compulsively tearing out one’s own hair and ripping one’s own skin like an unhappy parrot, which is what we’re actually talking about here, isn’t the most common way to while away the evenings.
But a thought does occur. Given that the publication in question addresses subjects of this kind with extraordinary frequency – covering a thrilling spectrum of neuroses and personality disorders, even delusions of witchcraft and clairvoyance – it’s hard to avoid the impression that the readership of Everyday Feminism, and certainly its staff, is largely made up of people with quite serious mental health issues.
Next week, an article for readers who spend their evenings eating tissues by the fistful and then being sick behind the sofa. #GirlPower!
Kevin D Williamson on work and earnings:
The median salary for a women’s-studies professor is more than a hundred grand a year. The average hourly earnings for a graduate with a women’s-studies degree? Eleven bucks an hour, well less than you’d make working the car wash at a Buc-ee’s convenience store.
Marlo Safi on unknown history:
US history is not a staple course for history majors at most top universities, according to a new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni… Less than 20 percent of surveyed students could accurately identify in a multiple choice survey what the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation was, and one-third of college graduates were unaware that FDR introduced the New Deal.
Not entirely unrelated, Peter Wood on the fashionable conformity of student life:
Excluding people from a debate because you disagree with their views is an odd conceit, but odder still is that the practice has rapidly gained credibility on both sides of the Atlantic as morally valid.
Jonathan Haidt on the anti-rational rhetoric of “social justice” activism:
There are many beliefs [on the “social justice” left] that are so central, so foundational, that when you try to argue against them, we see students saying that this would “invalidate” their “existence.” So if you were to try to argue that some cause of prejudice or racism was not real, or that disparities by race or gender had other causes, some would take this as an existential threat, an existential attack. You would be trying to “invalidate” their “existence,” which is “an act of violence.” So your very efforts to persuade with reason are, they say, “violence.”
And Paul Sperry spots an upscale, ‘progressive’ middle school that’s probably best avoided:
For newcomers, more items from the archives:
Living in Glasgow for a year is art, says taxpayer-funded artist who lives in Glasgow.
Writing in the Guardian, Liam Hainey rushes to defend Ms Harrison’s low-effort art project, denouncing “budget butchers” and asking his readers to “look at the bigger picture.” All while carefully ignoring anything that might trouble the assumptions of the freeloading arts community. Mr Hainey, a former Green councillor, dismisses the widespread mockery of Ms Harrison’s hustle as “predictable.” But he doesn’t seem to grasp that much of the mockery occurs because hustles of this type are themselves so predictable – that what we’re seeing, yet again, is a display of arrogant presumption, one that’s routine among a socially and politically narrow subsidy-seeking caste. And so Mr Hainey tells us, triumphantly, that the money isn’t in fact being wasted because it was already earmarked for art that would probably be unpopular and which nobody asked for.
Feminist “creative” Katherine Garcia attempts to justify her sub-optimal life choices. Things go badly wrong.
In financial terms, the lifetime return on an arts degree is very often negative and there’s something to be said for practicality, especially if your background is a modest one. Social mobility presupposes a certain realism, a pragmatism, and making choices accordingly – say, with regard to the costs and benefits of tertiary education, which is for most an expensive one-time opportunity. I’m inclined to suggest that getting into further debt for a grad school degree in Women and Gender Studies, as Ms Garcia did, is possibly not an ideal way to help one’s family economically, or indeed oneself.
Riyad A Shahjahan says we must “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.” Because punctuality is racist and oppressive.
As the exact nature of Dr Shahjahan’s problem has been buried under rhetorical rubble, I’ll translate as best I can. You see, being expected to keep up with the pace of lessons and deliver course work on time can induce feelings of discomfort and inferiority in those less able and conscientious, thereby resulting in “exclusionary effects,” which, it turns out, are oppressive and unjust. However, armed with postcolonial theorising, and by stressing the mystical exoticness of people with browner skin, we shall set the people free from the “dominant culture of disembodiment” and the “temporal colonisation of our bodies” – i.e., expectations of punctuality, attentiveness and general competence. Yes, we must “contest the insertion of the body into the market.”
There’s more to poke at in the updated greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar makes my phone go ping. Which is nice.
Nicholas Casey on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism:
Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná… marched on a supermarket, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves. They showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food… Economists say years of economic mismanagement… have shattered the food supply. Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural centre lie fallow for lack of fertilisers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories…
In response, President Nicolás Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba. “They’re saying, in other words, you get food if you’re my friend, if you’re my sympathizer,” said Roberto Briceño-León, the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a human rights group.
Readers may recall this video of a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, in which shoppers are clearly both thrilled and morally elevated by the egalitarian retail experience. Taking turns to smell the one piece of grey meat available, and then leaving it where it is, was, I’m assured, a way for the proletariat to celebrate the obvious superiority of socialism.
About a third of the students who go to the farms [for a month of state-mandated rice-planting duty] get out of about half the work because they work as informers for the government.
And Douglas Murray on Europe’s migrant avalanche:
Most of the people coming to Europe who came in the last year are not refugees, they are economic migrants; they are seeking a better life. Now, Europe cannot be the place where everybody in the world who wants to seek a better life is allowed to come and settle. It’s not possible for economic reasons; it’s not possible for geographical reasons; it’s not possible for housing and welfare reasons, and it’s not possible for cultural reasons… How do we know that most of the people who are coming are not even legitimate refugees? We know it because no less a source than the European Commission itself has now told us as much. Earlier this year in an interview, Frans Timmermans, the European Commission Vice President, admitted that in his estimate at least sixty percent of the people who came to Europe last year have no more right to be here than anybody else.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
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