Behold the modern campus, home of deep thought and cool intellects: 

The incident happened Tuesday night, when students thought they found several nooses hanging from a tree. Word quickly spread as campus officials swiftly released a statement condemning the foul hate crime. But come morning, police said a short investigation had led them to conclude the “nooses” were really just the remnants of paper lanterns from an event held all the way back in June. 

In the video linked here police chief Patrick Ogden calmly explains what a paper lantern looks like, and the fact that a paper lantern isn’t actually a symbol of racial hatred. 

Yes, I know. It’s almost funny. But then,

Unperturbed by the truth, students launched an assembly following the incident to speak as though the hate crime really did happen. According to the News Journal, a local paper, the assembly was held “to find ways to change the campus climate” in the wake of the bad atmosphere apparently exposed by a fictional hate crime… One administrator said the climate of hate at Delaware was exposed by the mere fact he could even believe the alleged hate crime occurred.

And so,

The University of Delaware’s vice provost for diversity Carol Henderson… said the college is planning to launch a new “diversity action plan” as soon as it’s approved by school officials.

With so many witch finders now in business, witches will be found. 

For newcomers, three items from the archives:  

Feel the Racial Healing. 

The Guardian’s Aisha Mirza bemoans the “psychic burden” of living among white people, which is worse than being mugged.

The more I think about it, the more this may exemplify a near-perfect Guardian article, the ideal to which all other Guardian columnists should aspire. It’s haughty and obnoxious, is ignorant of relevant subject matter, is frequently question-begging, and its imagined piety is premised on a rather obvious double standard. Specifically, Ms Mirza’s belief that people who leave London do so, secretly, because they don’t feel comfortable living among people with skin of a darker hue, which is racist and therefore bad, and her own simultaneous preference not to live among people whose skin is paler than hers, which is somehow not racist at all, and is in fact aired as the last word in righteousness.

Aesthetes, Take Heed. 

Brace yourselves for some taxpayer-funded cultural improvement.

Those with a taste for even more daring and challenging work may prefer the theatrical stylings of Mr Ivo Dimchev, a “radical performer” acclaimed for his “gripping sensitivity” and whose performance piece I-ON “explores” the “provoking functionlessness” of various objects, before showing us “how to make contact with something that has no function.” Readers are advised that the aforementioned contact-making, which was performed as part of the 2011 Vienna International Dance Festival and is shown below, inevitably includes vigorous self-pleasure with what appears to be a wig.

Strange Construal. 

In which socialists misremember a 1970s sitcom.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions. And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits. 

Janice Fiamengo on feminist narratives and unmentioned history: 

After 1832, about one in five men had the right to vote. Almost half of adult males, though, were still not eligible to vote when they accepted the call to fight and die for their country in the First World War. It wasn’t until 1918 that the right to vote was extended, not only to women – which of course we hear a great deal about – but to all men. So how can this be – that this part of the story is almost completely unknown? How come when we celebrate the extension of the franchise to women, we don’t talk about its extension to poor and working class men?

Via sk60, Jonathan Foreman on the Tim Hunt “sexism” drama and the dishonesty and malevolence of certain key players: 

The most generous interpretation of Connie St Louis’s bizarre behaviour is that she was too intellectually limited to recognise irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

And Peter Hasson on ‘progressive’ educators and predetermined conclusions: 

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” “male,” and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students. According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.” […] Students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.[…] White students in Professor John Streamas’s “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” class are expected to “defer” to non-white students, among other community guidelines, if they want “to do well in this class.”

Imagine what such ‘thinkers’ might do if granted real power. 

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

Picture the scene.

Last weekend, I camped with my family at a barn-raising party on the western foot of the Quantock hills, in Somerset. On Saturday I crept out of the tent at 5am, when the faintest skein of red cloud netted the sky. Below me, mist filled the valley floor. I slipped through the sagging fence at the top of the field and found myself in a steep, broad coomb, covered in bracken. I climbed for a while, as quietly as I could, until a frightful wail shattered my thoughts. I crouched and listened. I could see nothing on the dark hillside. It came again, from about 50 metres to my right, half-shriek, half-bleat, a wild, wrenching, desolate cry, a cry that the Earth might make in mourning for itself.

Yes, dear reader, we’re visiting the pages of the Guardian. Specifically, the latest transmission from the strange, anguished mind of Mr George Monbiot:  

Walking without a map, I reached the valley floor too soon and found myself on the main road. In some places there were no verges and I had to press myself into the hedge as cars passed. But on such early walks, almost regardless of where you are, there are rewards.

Wait for it.

Just as I was about to turn off the road, on to the track that would take me back to the barn, I found a squirrel hit by a car that must have just passed me, dead but still twitching. It was a male, one of this year’s brood but fully grown. Blood seeped from a wound to the head. I picked it up by its hind feet, and though I had played no part in its death, I was immediately gripped by a sensation so discrete, so distinct from all else we feel, that I believe it requires its own label: hunter’s pride.

Gasp ye at the dark, animal side of a Guardian columnist:

It’s the raw, feral thrill I have experienced only on the occasions when I have picked up a fresh dead animal I intend to eat. It feels to me like the opening of a hidden door, a rent in the mind through which you can glimpse a ghost psyche: vestigial emotional faculties that once helped us to survive.

Ah, the savage romance. Of roadkill. 

I showed the squirrel to the small tribe of children that had formed in the campsite, girls and boys between the ages of three and nine, and asked them if they’d like to watch me prepare it.

Creepy man waves dead, twitching squirrel at bewildered children.

Melissa Fabello shares her interracial dating advice with the chronically fretful readers of Everyday Feminism:

While interracial dynamics always add a layer of work to romance, it’s important to note that I’m white. Because when you’re a white person in an interracial relationship, there’s this whole – ohhh, ya know – white supremacy thing hanging in the air. And that has to be acknowledged – and dealt with – constantly.

At this point, the opening paragraph, we could probably cut things short. I mean, if you’re considering dating someone who thinks it important to mention their melanin levels and thinks that “white supremacy” is a feature of any future relationship, something to “acknowledge constantly,” you should probably walk away, quite briskly. Seriously, just get the hell out of there. However, for the morbidly curious among you, Ms Fabello has a list of “things to remember as a white person involved with a person of colour.” It begins thusly:

As a feminist and a woman, I could never be in a relationship with someone who didn’t feel comfortable talking about patriarchy.

Hey, baby. Wanna talk about patriarchy?

Gender (and the social dynamics therein) is a part of my everyday life, both in how I’m perceived by the world and in the work that I do. So if I tried to date someone who felt discomfort to the point of clamming up every time I brought gender into the conversation, that “It’s not you, it’s me” discussion would come up quick.

Note the words “every time.”

The same goes for race… While it’s okay for conversations about white supremacy to make you uncomfortable (hey, we should be uncomfortable with that shit), being generally aware of how race plays out and feeling fairly well versed in racial justice issues is important.

And feeling mutually awkward while sharing identitarian dogma and confessions of “white supremacy” is what binds lovers together, surely? Sadly, these moments of shared discomfort, however frequent and interminable, may not suffice:

While it’s important to be willing to talk to your partner about race and to feel comfortable bringing it up, it’s just as important to be willing to step back and recognise when your whiteness is intrusive… Not all family structures operate the same way… Maybe it isn’t appropriate for your partner to take you home to meet their parents.

Apparently, the thing to take away from this is that if your partner-of-colour’s family-of-colour don’t want to meet you, a person of pallor, or have you in their home, then, obviously, it’s your fault. Because “you represent an oppressive system” by “virtue of your privileges.”

Because as white people, we’ve been socialised racist.

In short, honkie germs. And for the excruciatingly pious, further complications can loom in the bedroom: