Let’s say I assess your ‘unconscious bias’ and give you a diagnosis. Well, there’s no evidence that it predicts your behaviour. So what good is it? Well, it’s good if you want people to send you to ‘retraining’ exercises so that you can have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organisation thinks is proper. And that’s happening. It’s becoming mandatory… But there’s no evidence whatsoever that ‘unconscious bias’ retraining programmes have the effect they’re supposed to have, and there’s some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect. And maybe that’s because people don’t really like being marched off to re-education by their employers after they’ve been ‘diagnosed’ as racist, even if there’s no evidence that they in fact are. It’s an absolute misuse of psychology. It’s an assault on freedom.

Dr Jordan Peterson, filmed at Ryerson University, chats about the ideological corruption of social psychology. 

Note that Dr Peterson’s talks are being denounced in advance - as “dangerous,” “hateful” and “white male arrogance” – by left-leaning umbrage-takers, most of whom claim, piously and repeatedly, to value “diversity” and “alternative views,” while trying to get Peterson’s talks cancelled or forcibly disrupted.

Attention, all you white women:

If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalisation, take off those hoops[;] if your feminism isn’t intersectional, take off those hoops[;] if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops[;] if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops[;] if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it, take off those hoops.

So rants Ms Alegria Martinez, a member of the Latinx Student Union at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, in a campus-wide email. When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous, “especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”

Where students are forking out $60,000 a year in the hope of being terribly downtrodden. Possibly by the pool:

Update, via the comments:

Alice adds,

Some people want childhood to last 70 years.

Well, if you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums. But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them.

As sane people do.

And for a little perspective, it’s just occurred to me that when one of my nieces was the same age as these ladies, she was raising money for charity by trekking across the Sahara Desert. I doubt that hooped earrings and lip-liner, and who may or may not wear them, were foremost in her mind.

Commenter [+] quips,

Ain’t no privilege like victim privilege.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.

Lifted from the comments, more progressive intellectualism at Middlebury College, where female staff get assaulted by students wearing masks, and elderly scholars get chased off campus: 

College public safety officers managed to get Professor Allison Stanger and Charles Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and trying to prevent it from leaving campus,” said Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus,” said Burger. “During this confrontation, one of the demonstrators pulled Professor Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”

Note that the rather animated protestors don’t seem too familiar with Dr Murray’s research and commentary, and as one of Middlebury’s sociology professors noted, “few, if any” of the protestors had ever read Murray’s books. Evidently, he’s nonetheless someone to be ‘othered’ and to whom the students can attach the usual out-group labels – denouncing him as “sexist,” “racist,” “anti-gay” and a “white nationalist.” (As even the briefest use of Google would reveal, Murray married a Thai woman while in the Peace Corps, has mixed-race children, has tutored inner-city black children for free, and was an early advocate of gay marriage – hardly the most obvious markers of a supposedly anti-gay white nationalist.)

Regular readers will no doubt register the irony that, if you wanted to witness some overt racial zealotry, you’d be much more likely to find it among supposedly ‘progressive’ students – say, the ones assaulting their peers or obstructing their path and making them walk through mud for the sin of being white, or grabbing women’s hair and yanking really hard.

I see no reason to suppose that the mob delinquency illustrated above, examples of which seem to be escalating in frequency and vehemence, will spontaneously improve or cease to be fashionable without some quite significant external pressure. Those directly responsible, and their faculty cheerleaders, show no sign of becoming ashamed any time soon. If their behaviour and assumptions are to change, I suspect it will have to cost them, dearly. And whether there are arrests and/or expulsions following this latest thuggish farce will tell us quite a bit about academia’s ongoing decay.

Update:

And here’s an extract from Dr Murray’s own account of what happened at Middlebury: 

We walked out the door and into the middle of a mob. I have read that they numbered about twenty. It seemed like a lot more than that to me, maybe fifty or so, but I was not in a position to get a good count. I registered that several of them were wearing ski masks. That was disquieting.

Meanwhile, at Scripps College – a liberal arts college for young ladies, in Claremont, California, and where annual tuition is close to $50,000 – you must also pay to be scolded as racist and oppressive, by dint of having questions and simply being white:

Campus resident assistants at the school are hanging up two sets of posters titled “Emotional Labour 101”: one for whites, and another for minorities, whom the posters dub as “victims of emotional labour.” Both posters define “emotional labour” as having to exert energy “for the purpose of addressing people’s feelings, educating, making people comfortable, or living up to ‘social expectations.’”

You see, inculcating pretentious guilt, and then exploiting it, is terribly exhausting. And having to deal with “microaggressions,” like being disagreed with, or being asked questions you can’t answer in a sufficiently self-flattering manner, is way too much like hard work. And so, students with That Magic Brown Skin™ are encouraged to demand compensation from their paler peers for the “mental toll” of having to explain why everyone else is racist and should shut the hell up:

“Charge for your services,” the poster suggests. “If you’ve decided you’re going to do it, at least get paid.”

Those deemed sufficiently brown – and therefore by default morally superior and emotionally fragile – are cautioned to “avoid overexertion” when “educating” their paler, less enlightened classmates. “The burden does not rest on your shoulders,” declares the poster. “You don’t owe anyone anything at the expense of your mental health.” The instructional posters are, however, rather less indulgent of students of pallor, who are warned to consider how “people of colour” – who, despite such pampering are apparently “a marginalised group” – are being fatigued by any questioning of their claims. “Be mindful of your place and position,” reads the Guide For White Students, before suggesting that the melanin-deficient should offer financial compensation, “take ownership for the harm you caused” and “think about social justice issues.” 

Sadly, there’s no mention of any financial compensation for white students who are continually being told, by so-called educators, that they’re inherently oppressive and therefore bad people who should feel ashamed. It seems that this ‘microaggression’ business only works one way.  

Previously. Related. 

Meanwhile, in the world of the well-adjusted Guardian columnist: 

It was July 2014, Nashville Tennessee. I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.

This latest admission of derangement is by Stacie Huckeba, a photographer and video-maker. She continues,

“No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” I scowled and stormed away, completely enraged.

You see, he’s not allowed to do that – holding open the door for her – or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And then, inadvertently, a punchline of sorts:

It was the third time that week that a man had done something polite for me.

Damn the patriarchy and all its works.

First a man had bought me a drink at a concert, and then there was the nice man who had helped me scoop up my groceries after I dropped my bag, and now this man with the door.

At this point, thankfully, Ms Huckeba offers an explanation, and justification, for her erratic, rather alarming mood swings:

Two years before this, in July 2012, I weighed 365lb, which roughly translates into 26 stone. I was enormous, and had been my entire life. I grew up an obese kid, was an obese teenager, an obese young adult, and by my mid-40s I had ballooned into a hugely obese adult. But that summer I started a massive journey to lose 220lb, or almost 16 stone, over the course of four and a half years. As I sit here today, I’m literally a third of the body mass I used to be. I am an average-sized woman who wears a size medium pretty much across the board. And, I am happy to report, I am also a fairly happy, confident person.

Yes, of course. That would explain all the random screaming.