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.

Janice Fiamengo continues her series on feminism and its fictions, this time on women in the military:  

Why are women so poorly represented on the front lines? Because most women can’t do the job, don’t want to do the job, and in cases where they can do it, can’t do it as well as men… A recent study has demonstrated a big disparity in women’s and men’s battlefield ability. The US Marine Corps examined over a year the impact of female integration on combat readiness and found conclusively that women cannot match male performance. Male units were faster, more effective and able to evacuate casualties in less time. Overall, the study concluded, all-male squads performed better than mixed groups in 69% of the tasks evaluated. Women performed notably less well in their use of every individual weapons system, and in addition women had higher injury rates than men. So in terms of women’s own well-being as well as the overall effectiveness of the fighting force, its ability to kill enemies and save wounded comrades, the study showed that the presence of women in combat units has a negative impact.  

See also the last item here, on “progressive” priorities and attracting female fire-fighters by dramatically lowering standards of competence.

And Roger Kimball on the Idiot Weeping Fever™ currently sweeping academia: 

[The protesting student] had put up about ten signs before a security guard asked him to leave. Nothing doing. The guard asked again. Nada. So he grabbed the student and dragged him, kicking and screaming, from the room. What was he screaming? The chief burden of his plaint revolved around that Indian village. Greg Lukianoff had said that the response to Erika Christakis’s email was so violent that you would have thought someone had destroyed an Indian Village. He didn’t advocate destroying an Indian Village. No villages of any sort were despoiled in the conduct of his remarks. He merely suggested that the response to an email treating students as responsible adults (first mistake!) was wildly disproportionate. 

That bit of hermeneutical reasoning was beyond the distraught, poster-wielding student. And not only him. Soon there was a crowd of twenty students demanding to get into the attendance-by-reservation only event. Then there were fifty or more. Soon they were chanting loudly outside the hall. “Genocide is not a joke” was one of the little ditties with which they entertained us. By the time the last session began, word came that they intended to bar the exits. More security was marshalled and when the proceedings came to an end the speakers and the audience were escorted out of the room. A cordon of enraged students holding signs and yelling “Genocide is not a joke” greeted us. Another fifty or so lined the sidewalk outside.

Kimball refers to the fevered protestors as “snowflakes,” which sounds much too innocuous and misleading. Given the students’ dogmatism, hair-trigger intolerance and eagerness to shut down and punish any speech with which they disagree, the term Mao-lings seems more apt.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Of that “oppressive document,” the United States Constitution:  

When this idea came up in our newsroom about campus administrators shredding the Constitution because it’s a trigger against students, we didn’t think people would actually fall for it. We underestimated just how stupid and politically correct these people are.

The impossibly fretful and neurotic student featured in the video is actually a journalist playing a role. The obliging administrators, including an Assistant Director of Equal Opportunity at Vassar College and a Director of Feminist Studies at Oberlin College, are quite real. 

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.