Zareer Masani on artefacts, treasures and preservation: 

Before the British came [to India], there was no indigenous tradition of exploring or conserving antiquity. The wonderful Buddhist stupas of the Mauryan empire (circa 2nd century BC) were destroyed, abandoned and forgotten during the Hindu revival, and then many Hindu temples met a similar fate during Muslim invasions from the 12th century… The fact is that we have no idea what would have become of the world’s ‘looted’ antiquities if they hadn’t been preserved in Western collections. Would the treasures of Beijing’s Summer Palace have survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Would the Elgin marbles have survived Turkish tour guides chopping off chunks to sell as souvenirs? Would ISIS have spared those Middle Eastern artefacts that survive in European museums?

Readers may care to speculate as to whether, for instance, the Natural History Museum of Berlin’s famous Brachiosaurus, the tallest mounted skeleton in the world, which was discovered and excavated by German palaeontologists in 1909 and is currently maintained by German taxpayers, would have fared better had it remained in Tanzania. 

Jonah Goldberg on “affirmative action” and its victims: 

If Harvard lifted its anti-Asian [admissions] criteria, Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research said the share of Asian students at Harvard would more than double, from 19 percent to 43 percent. But that 43 percent wouldn’t be distributed equally among all courses and disciplines. It would be a boon for computer-science and biology classes, but even more seats would go empty in women’s history or poetry courses. And I can’t help but think that the faculties in the humanities and the softer social sciences have disproportionate sway on the cultural and political assumptions of the school’s administration. They are, after all, the talkers.

Related: Law professor Gail Heriot on the same, and on other campus dramas: 

Via Tim Newman and lifted from the comments, a tale of  metropolitan woe: 

A common enough occurrence, especially in London. But Laurie has assured us, repeatedly and emphatically, that opportunist theft – of trainers, phones, laptops and such – is a sign of “desperation” and “a political statement.” Of which she approves. Are thieves, then, only “dickheads” when they steal from her?

I’m so confused.

Further to the first item here, on the academic taboo of affirming bourgeois values, Ben Weingarten interviews the woman at the heart of that particular storm, law professor Amy Wax:

Ben Weingarten: There was controversy over your first piece and maybe it’s in part because, while many of your critics would say that every culture is different and who are we to judge which one is superior… they would also say the bourgeois culture that you support is actually inferior and retrograde and regressive — something interesting, I think, in their position.

Amy Wax: Except that they exemplify many of the bourgeois values themselves. And as I point out to them – which only infuriates them more – they try to inculcate those values into their own children. I’m not sure why they do that if they think those values are worthless… They practice what they preach against in many instances.

The whole thing is worth a listen.

To get a sense of the pretension Professor Wax is describing – the laughable perversity of it – try to imagine some of those pretenders – say, tenured academics at Harvard and Yale – aping underclass chav culture in their own comfortable, middle-class homes, with their own comfortable, middle-class children. Apparently, we’re expected to believe that these Woke Denouncers Of Bourgeois Values would be thrilled by their own offspring being involved in burglary or getting pregnant at 15.

You almost have to admire the gall of these clowns.

Time, I think, for a visit to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where Ms Ixty Quintanilla is turning her mind to matters ectoplasmic:

I spoke with several individuals who each channel their ancestral spirituality in different ways and asked them how to use spiritual practice as a form of healing and resistance, now during this difficult Trump era and beyond.

You see, when your preferred candidate loses an election, what you really need is some channelling of ancestral spirituality. As opposed to say, a sense of proportion. And so Ms Quintanilla lists some “spiritual practices” in order to enable fellow feminists to cope with the unutterable trauma that is their lives.

Suggestions include Call On Ancestors – which is to say, the dead – and Burn Herbs Mindfully. The latter is surprisingly fraught with complication, as we’re told, emphatically, that we must avoid setting fire to white sage and various endangered plants, and that it is “vital to recognise and respect the ancestors of the land you stand on.” Exactly how one fathoms the particulars of these things, at any given point in history, and how one should respect the relevant no-longer-living parties, assuming one has been able to identify them, is not made clear.

Other recommendations are more prosaic – feeling the breeze, watching trees grow, and, er, pushing up against said trees. No, I don’t know either. But apparently, if your psyche has been exploded and rendered unto dust by the election of someone other than Hillary Clinton, you should immediately find a tree and push up against it. It’s the feminist way.

Heather Mac Donald on leftist contradictions: 

The same left-wing establishment that in the morning rails against American oppression of an ever-expanding number of victim groups in the afternoon denounces the U.S. for not giving unlimited access to foreign members of those same victim groups. In their open-borders afternoon mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the only source of hope and opportunity for low-skilled, low-social-capital Third Worlders; a place obligated by its immigration history to take in all comers, forever. In their America-as-the-font-of-all-evil-against-females-and-persons-of-colour morning mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the place where hope and opportunity die under a tsunami of misogyny and racism… In pressing for an immigration policy determined by the desire of hundreds of millions of foreigners to enter the U.S., progressives implicitly acknowledge that the left-wing narrative about America is false.

Toni Airaksinen on feminist nutrition: 

Two professors argue in a newly published anthology on “feminist nutrition” that “athletic performance” and “longevity” are simply “Western values.” 

The authors, Allison Hayes-Conroy and her sister, Jessica Hayes-Conroy, are unhappy that dietary literature, which they wish to “decolonise,” rarely devotes space to activist issues such as “strikes and boycotts,” knowledge of which is apparently essential to any attempt to lose weight or correct a vitamin D deficiency. The ladies are also unhappy that farmers markets are “spaces of whiteness” and therefore oppressive.   

And via R. Sherman, Bret Weinstein describes his career-changing encounter with the Mao-lings at Evergreen: