Via the pages of Everyday Feminism, Rachel Kuo instructs the dull masses on how to avoid “cultural appropriation” while eating: 

When we talk about “ethnic” food, we’re not referring to French, German, or Italian cuisine, and definitely not those Ikea Swedish meatballs.

I suspect few people think of German cuisine as particularly mysterious and alluring. There are, I fear, very few German restaurants beyond the borders of Germany. Good cars, though.

Usually, we’re talking about Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, and Mexican food – places where food is cooked by the “brownest” people.

As is the custom with articles in Everyday Feminism, the density of assumption in what follows is quite high. For instance, when my family ventures out for a meal, table for twenty, I can say with some confidence that the choice of restaurant isn’t determined by the melanin levels of the people cooking it.

What happens is that food becomes the only identifier for certain places. Japan reduced to ramen and sushi, Mexico reduced to tacos and burritos, India reduced to curry, and so on.

Again, note the loadedness, the questions begged. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten, say, chili while convinced that said meal was an adequate distillation of the entire population of Mexico and Texas, past and present. Nor can I recall “fetishizing the sustenance of another culture.” Or “subsuming histories and stories into menu items.” It’s a meal, not an attempt to absorb world history or to flirt with some notional brownness. Yet this is asserted as “what happens,” as some universal fact. And then promptly contradicted:  

Eating food from another culture in isolation from that culture’s history and also current issues mean [sic] that we’re just borrowing the pieces that are enjoyable – palatable and easily digestible. 

Um, isn’t that rather the point? You know, tastiness without baggage? Isn’t that what makes foreign cuisine commercially viable, a livelihood of millions? Or is ordering takeout only acceptable following lengthy, brow-furrowing investment in each and every vendor’s ancestral culture and current politics? Should every visit to, say, a Pakistani restaurant entail a stern lecture on the pros and cons of European colonialism and a lifetime subscription to the fever dream of Islam? Would that aid digestion? Stated plainly, it sounds a little silly. But Ms Kuo wishes to appear concerned, deeply concerned, that people of pallor might enjoy falafel and a spot of hummus “but not understand or address the ongoing Islamophobia in the US.”

More intellectual life at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire:

“Fuck you, you filthy white fucks!” “Fuck you and your comfort!” “Fuck you, you racist shits!” These shouted epithets were the first indication that many students had of the coming storm. The sign-wielding, obscenity-shouting protesters proceeded through the usually quiet backwaters of the library… and converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long march. They confronted students who bore “symbols of oppression” such as “gangster hats” and Beats-brand headphones.

The flood of demonstrators opened the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way. Students who refused to join their outbursts were shouted down: “Stand the fuck up!” “You filthy racist white piece of shit!” Men and women alike were pushed and shoved by the group. “If we can’t have it, shut it down!” they cried. Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their insults, shouting “filthy white bitch!” in her face.

Vain little monsters projecting their own vices and relishing the sensation of power over others.

Update, via the comments:

Janice Fiamengo on the neurotic malice of feminist outrage junkies:

See also Make Way for the Mao-lings, in which Dr Fiamengo vividly illustrates the tactics and effects of feminist hysteria, and the video here, in which she debates with a feminist professor of philosophy, Alice McLachlan, who insists that she “cares a lot about free speech,” but not for people who might dare to disagree with her. And remember, should you be at all sceptical of identitarian politics and tribal psychology, Your Failure to Agree Will Not Be Tolerated. 

Onwards to tomorrow, the progressive way: 

Student protesters at the University of Missouri asked white supporters to leave Wednesday night in order to create a “black only healing space.” Steve Schmidt, an activist who was at the protest, tweeted that Concerned Student 1950 group were “asking white allies to leave.”

Free from any contaminating pallor, the students claimed they would be able to “share, decompress, be vulnerable and real.”

I couldn’t swear to it, but I have a vague feeling this has been tried before.

Further to this, on women in front-line military roles, and the last item here, on attempts to attract female fire-fighters by dramatically lowering standards of competence, here’s something to feel inspired by:

Instructors reportedly ‘fudged’ the scores of Choeurlyne Doirin-Holder, allowing her to graduate the FDNY Fire Academy despite not receiving a passing score on the Functional Skills Test and the required 1.5 mile run, the New York Post reports. Doirin-Holder, 39, was a court-mandated priority hire [on grounds of “diversity”], who had previously failed out twice, and has been described by a former classmate as, “the most pathetic specimen of physical fitness I’ve ever seen.” She completed the Functional Skills Test with a time of over 24 minutes, the passing time required is 17 minutes and 50 seconds. The test requires trainees to complete a course of job-related tasks such as dragging dummies all while in full gear. According to an FDNY insider, Dorin-Holder failed to complete the required 1.5 mile run in under 12 minutes, finishing it in 12 minutes 6 seconds. This was after the start and finish lines were moved, shortening the course a quarter-mile.

So, physically incompetent and therefore a danger to both the public and her colleagues.

Ms Doirin-Holder is, however, female and black. So full marks there.

In other Earth-rumbling news,

Twitter is struggling. Its disappointing financial results, mass layoffs and declining user experience show things aren’t well for the little blue bird. And now this: the replacement of the beloved “fav” star with a heart.

Dark days.

The hearts are the final straw: it’s time to nationalise Twitter.

Yes, it’s the Guardian. How did you guess? Specifically, the musings of Mr Osman Faruqi, a “Sydney-based writer and activist” who wants someone else – apparently, taxpayers on the other side of the world – to pay for his leisure activities.

It’s infrastructure for basic communication, which is why people are so upset over the change to hearts: imagine if, instead of saying “OK” on the phone to a relative stranger, you were forced to say “I love you.” It’s that basic.

Such are the horrors facing today’s Twitter user. It’s New Coke all over again.

So how do you monetise an intangible combination of excitement and trepidation sparked by the overwhelming awe of talking to the whole world?

Or perhaps more likely, a vanishingly tiny part of it. With almost half of “users” having never sent a Tweet, and the overwhelming majority of those who have boasting fewer than 200 followers, with the majority of their tweets, around 70%, attracting no acknowledgment whatsoever. However, the stakes are high and according to Mr Faruqi, “casual social interaction,” which is good, is “anathema to the desire for profit,” which is bad, obviously. This is, after all, the Guardian. And as Twitter’s modishness is, it seems, fading, it therefore must be nationalised and paid for by the taxpayer. To keep it hip and happening, and to prevent more icon changes. Until the next thing comes along. And then, presumably, we must nationalise that too.

On Twitter, Mr Faruqi is currently struggling with the news that many readers had assumed his article was “taking the piss.” Apparently, this failure to appreciate his seriousness and insight merely “shows how right-wing our political debate has become.”

Update, via the comments:

Why I call my son ‘he’, against my better judgement. 

Yes, it’s a parenting column in the pages of the Independent, care of “non-binary” parent and pronoun contester, Dorian Stripe: 

It’s a question I’m asked occasionally: “why do you use gendered pronouns for your son?” It’s no surprise, as I move entirely in queer circles, and am a non-binary person who uses “they” pronouns for myself instead of “he” or “she.” So naturally people wonder why I’m not allowing my son that neutrality.

I’m not sure that wilfully disregarding your son’s biological sex, and actively challenging it with a hint of self-congratulation, is actually neutrality.

My son was born with a penis and testes. They were identified five months before he was born. Everyone around me had started to ask the fatal question, “boy or girl?” every time they saw my bump. My brain screamed “neither” – it’s nothing! It’s a bundle of cells that doesn’t even have fingers yet! 

Here’s a typical foetus at four months, a nascent human being. Or as Dorian puts it, “nothing… a bundle of cells.” Note the fingers. 

My employer bought me a weird, cutesy towel-tree in a pastel blue, with little cars and aeroplanes on it. I shudder to think what the girl towel-tree looked like.

Isn’t it just terrible when people buy you gendered baby gifts? The unenlightened fuckers.

I have a large, supportive biological family, who are (as the vast majority of people are) uneducated on trans issues and the nature of pronouns. While the majority of them support my right to parent how I wish, very few of them would respect “non-standard” pronouns – they would revert to using whichever pronoun they think matches his genitalia whenever I’m not in the room, and even when present, they would need constant correction.

Pronoun correction, it’s what brings a family together. Though when relatives do this kind of thing during pregnancy, I suspect they’re not cooing about foetal genitals as such, so much as the psychology, the maleness or femaleness, that they generally signify and prefigure. Those cooing relatives may be affectionately anticipating what kind of person that little “nothing” may become.

This gets to the heart of why I made this decision: using non-binary pronouns is exhausting. 

Well, quite. And at this stage of the game, it does look like an affectation that’s more about the parent than the child. After all, gendered pronouns are only apt almost all of the time.

Thomas Sowell on tax and false promises: 

A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top one percent of income earners to 40 percent would generate “about $157 billion” a year in additional tax revenue for the government. This ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues — and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues fell by $257 million.

There was a similar reaction in Oregon and in Britain. Rich people do not simply stand still to be sheared like sheep. They can either send their money somewhere else or they can leave themselves. Currently, there are trillions of dollars of American money creating jobs overseas, in places where tax rates are lower. It is easy to transfer money electronically from country to country. But it is not nearly so easy for unemployed American workers to transfer themselves to where the jobs have been driven by high tax rates.

Heather Mac Donald on the “campus rape” pantomime: 

The mother of all campus rape surveys, conducted by feminist researcher Mary Koss and written up in Ms. magazine in 1985, found that 73 percent of respondents whom the study characterised as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped when asked the question directly. (Not surprisingly, campus rape researchers stopped asking that question. Campus rape researchers also quickly shelved an equally deflating question from the Koss survey: whether the victim had sex with her alleged rapist again. Forty-two percent of Koss’s alleged rape victims said that they had, another inconceivable outcome in the case of actual rape.)

And again, on crime and incarceration: 

Writing in the Independent, consultant psychologist Glenn Wilson reminds us of the benefits of, er, paedophilia:

In my studies of the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1980s, many members admitted sexual feelings for children which they had been able to contain or turn to social good. Some gravitated toward occupations such as schoolteacher or social worker, where they could enjoy the company of children without plotting abuse. This fitted with personality profiles indicating that they were gentle, rational and not disposed to harm anybody.

It is, I think, commonly understood that people who fantasise about having sex with children who cannot legally consent – which is to say, who fantasise about raping children – often gravitate to jobs which place them in regular and intimate contact with their potential prey. And this, apparently, is a “social good.” Because every parent wants their child to have a teacher who harbours fantasies of molesting them.

Update:

In the comments, David Gillies adds,

People who have a yen for shagging kids but no wish to act on it do not join an organisation called Paedophile Information Exchange. We know that PIE was not a support group to help people to control and overcome their urges but to actively enable them and even normalise them.

And likewise, if a person bedevilled by fantasies of child molestation seeks out employment among children, this doesn’t exactly signal the best of intentions or a basis for applause. And yet Dr Wilson thinks we should approve of paedophiles who claim to remain celibate yet seek out employment in positions of authority over children, and intimate contact with children, where temptation will be concentrated, routine, and much easier to act on, should one be so inclined. Supposedly, we should regard this as a “social good.” As if we’d struggle to find enough teachers without this selfless contribution.

Peter Hasson discovers that questioning the premise of microaggressions is itself now deemed a microaggression and therefore impermissible: 

The phrase “politically correct” is now a microaggression according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The university’s “Just Words” campaign is the work of UWM’s “Inclusive Excellence Centre” and aims to “raise awareness of microaggressions and their impact” — microaggressions like “politically correct” or “PC.”

According to its mission statement, the Inclusive Excellence Centre “invests time, energy and resources to create a socially just campus in order to include different perspectives, engage in authentic and challenging dialogue, and build connections with vibrant and global communities.” And therefore, obviously, students are warned to avoid such emotionally crushing terms as “crazy,” “trash” and “thug.” The latter being particularly heinous because it “assumes that violence is the sole motivating factor in an action. Ignores issues of poverty, education and other institutional barriers. Used as synonym for Nigga/er.”

Regarding the offensive term “politically correct,” the centre’s website says, 

I’d like to add Politically Correct (PC) to [sic] program… and seek a way to succinctly outline/define PC for its basis, purpose [sic] especially how its [sic] used now to let people hide their bias but also minimize the pushback they received after contributing aggressive [sic].

As I said, excellence. 

But setting aside the intriguing prose, it’s all feelings, sensitivity and fluffy goodness. Good people with high minds and good hearts, doing good, good things. 

Interestingly enough, while the university’s Inclusive Excellence Centre has labelled several common-use adjectives harmful, the man running the campaign, Warren Scherer, the director of the university’s Inclusive Excellence Centre, has taken to Twitter to express his displeasure with Republican presidential candidates in a non-inclusive manner. Scherer tweeted “fuck every fibre of your being” to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and also accused him of “pandering to Republican Jews.” Scherer, who identifies himself as an UWM employee on his twitter profile, also accused presidential candidate Rand Paul of courting “rich Jews.”

I know. You’re shocked. 

Mr Scherer also shares his wisdom via YouTube. 

Update, via the comments: