Morning, all.  

Melissa Fabello, the managing editor of Everyday Feminism, the one who told her readers that feminism is a Joy-Bringing Total Explanation For Everything In The World, is once again unhappy: 

When you’re a human being of any combination of marginalised identities making your way through the world, a funny thing happens: People want to fight with you a lot. And I don’t necessarily mean physical fights… but rather, the seemingly innocuous form of fighting known as “debating.”

Yes, Ms Fabello, our graduate, educator and publishing powerhouse, is also “a combination of marginalised identities” – all sadly unspecified – and is continually assailed by the life-threatening outrage that is People Who Disagree With Her. Specifically, people who don’t regard Ms Fabello’s “lived experience,” i.e., her pantomime of victimhood, as the rhetorical full stop, the decisive hand of cards, that she wishes it to be. Put another way, if Ms Fabello says she’s oppressed, then you mustn’t talk back or offer facts to the contrary. Because claims of “lived experience,” however theatrical, embellished or self-flattering they may be, are The Last Word, a triumphant “End Of,” to which no reply is welcome, or decent, or permitted.

If you’ve ever been a marginalised person on the internet, you may recognise this phenomenon as “The Facebook Comment Thread Effect” – and it’s the reason why so many people choose to bow out of these arguments entirely: not because they can’t defend themselves, but because they shouldn’t have to.

Note the conflation of defending a stated position – a not unreasonable expectation, even today, even on Facebook – with defending oneself, and the implication of an assault on one’s very being, or at least one’s ego, which is apparently unfair. This, remember, is a woman paid to edit feminist polemic in order to make it more convincing.

But these absurd arguments happen because there’s always at least one person who just can’t admit that they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

It’s most frequently the people with the most privilege in any given situation who want to engage in “debate” with me and others. And that’s not because I expect more of, say, straight, white, cis men – because I most certainly do not.  

See, that wholesale embrace of “social justice” really does swell the heart and sharpen the mind, making it nimble, attuned to nuance. Not at all stiffened by presumption and the casual dismissal of entire notional categories of humankind.  

To the contrary, I expect this desperate attempt at domination because that’s how oppression works on an individual level.

Ah, so let’s be clear. When straight, white, cis men disagree with feminists and those who imagine themselves “marginalised,” and therefore pious, this is an evil act, a “desperate attempt at domination.” 

But they don’t want to pay for any of it: 

Students at the University of California, Berkeley held a violent protest on campus Friday to demand additional segregated “spaces of colour” for non-white students. A video of the protest shows demonstrators repeatedly heckling white passers-by, barring them entry to a key bridge on campus by forming a human chain while simultaneously allowing students of colour to pass unmolested. Time and again, white students and professors were denied entry to the bridge as they were surrounded by aggressive protesters shouting “go around!” At one point, the video shows a protester refusing to allow an older white man to cross the bridge, eventually directing him to cross by way of a creek that flows underneath the bridge.

Because what could be sweeter than forcing people deemed too pale to literally walk through dirt?

But why such high passion, you ask?

When protesters were asked about the motive for their demonstration, they refused to be recorded, leaving little to no explanation for the rationale behind such an aggressive protest.

If you can endure this five-minute video of the protesters being theatrical and unpleasant, you may discern the usual inchoate rumblings of oppression, and outrage at the unfairness of being expected to pay one’s bills as agreed in writing. Apparently, the entire campus and surrounding streets now belong to them, i.e., a tiny subset of leftwing students, which conveniently excuses all manner of exciting behaviour, including harassing other students, to whom the campus presumably doesn’t belong. There’s also some anti-capitalist fervour aimed at local businesses and the on-campus student store, the mere existence of which is deemed an affront to socialist piety, prompting threats of further disruption, escalating in vehemence, “with the goal of eliminating any revenue generation.”

Such kind and lovely creatures. Not narcissistic at all.

However, the heaviest, most pressing grievance appears to be this:

Protesters were angered because one of their “safe spaces” was relocated to the basement of a building where it had previously occupied the fifth floor.

If, being sane, that doesn’t sound like something that could credibly justify two hours of shouting, shoving and screaming, let alone the obstruction of traffic, both on campus and at a nearby public intersection, to say nothing of thuggish behaviour and blatantly racist harassment, then you may be missing the point. Which is, that these things allow vain, vindictive mediocrities to exert power over others. All while cloaked by the moral anonymity of the mob dynamic, which allows those so inclined to behave in antisocial ways and get away with stuff. Everything else is window dressing. Including the protestors’ claims that the failure to provide a “safe space” of suitable commodiousness, befitting their self-imagined importance, is “part of the structural racism of UC Berkeley.”

And that word you’re looking for is “expel.”

Niall Gooch on free speech and its enemies: 

Free speech, like the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence, is a procedural virtue, which is why fanatics and revolutionaries hate it… Defenders of free speech are arguing not only for free speech as an abstraction, but a wider culture of honest debate, factual argument, respectful disagreement, and civilised co-existence with people who see the world very differently from us. Complaints about attacks on free speech can be seen as proxies for concerns about the maintenance of this culture, particularly in the context of the university. So in a sense, free speech isn’t one thing. It’s many things. It’s a whole network of overlapping norms about the exchange of ideas. One thing that people commonly mean when they say “free speech” is “if I’m invited to give a talk somewhere I should be allowed to do so without intimidation, interruption or threat, and people who want to come and listen to me should be able to do so.”

Well, obviously, we can’t have that. 

Ed West on things you mustn’t laugh about: 

There are plenty of subjects that merit satire today – the diversity industry, with its shakedowns and professional bullshit artists is a rich seam, as is the transgender movement. But these areas really are too edgy for satirists, most of whom – like the vast majority of influential people in the arts – hold quite uncontroversial (left-liberal) political views and also fear the next wave of revolutionaries more than they do the ancien régime. That’s why they make jokes about the ancien régime. In fact there is plenty of edgy comedy these days – but it tends to be told in private.

Jonah Goldberg on the leftist leanings of the establishment media: 

According to a just-released study [by the Centre for Public Integrity], more than 96 percent of donations from media figures to either of the two major-party presidential candidates went to Hillary Clinton… Anyone who has spent a moment around elite reporters or studied their output knows that they tend to be left of centre. In 1981, S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman surveyed 240 leading journalists and found that 94 percent of them voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, 81 percent voted for George McGovern in 1972, and 81 percent voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Only 19 percent placed themselves on the right side of the political spectrum. Does anyone think the media have become less liberal since then? None of this means liberals — or conservatives — can’t be good reporters, but the idea that media bias is non-existent is ludicrous.

In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies.

He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. Repeated cowed apologies ensue. The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.”

There being no other, perhaps more obvious, reason.