Tim Blair brings terrifying news from the world of Australian taxpayer-funded art: 

Readers may recall the brutal warning handed down last month by journalist and tax-funded art enthusiast Ben Eltham. “The arts are a powerful latent force in Australia’s political landscape,” Eltham wrote following Arts Minister George Brandis’s rearrangement of arts funding. “George Brandis and his colleagues would be wise to reflect on this, and whether they can win a war of symbols against some of the most creative and energetic people in our society.”

We Brits have of course endured the full brunt of such a clash. The references to Derrida were particularly distressing.

There are, however, signs of low morale among the art world’s would-be storm troopers:

“Maybe the best option really is to get out of the country,” Hobart-based sculptural artist Theia Connell told Vice magazine last week. That’s Connell’s response to news that previous Arts Start grants for emerging artists have been cut. “The likelihood is that I’ll find myself in a day job,” complained Sydney’s Luke Devine.

Ah, yes. Plan B. 

When my wife told me she wanted to open our marriage and take other lovers, she wasn’t rejecting me, she was embracing herself. When I understood that, I finally became a feminist. 

Says New York magazine’s Michael Sonmore. And so, 

As I write this, my children are asleep in their room, Loretta Lynn is on the stereo, and my wife is out on a date with a man named Paulo. It’s her second date this week; her fourth this month so far. If it goes like the others, she’ll come home in the middle of the night, crawl into bed beside me, and tell me all about how she and Paulo had sex. I won’t explode with anger or seethe with resentment. I’ll tell her it’s a hot story and I’m glad she had fun. It’s hot because she’s excited, and I’m glad because I’m a feminist.

I don’t think Mr Sonmore is quite making the persuasive case he presumably hopes for. Still, his children, aged six and three, must be thrilled by their parents’ progressive, self-embracing relationship, and delighted to hear that Mommy is out all night shagging strangers again.

Via Ace, who shares a few thoughts on this. 

Franklin Einspruch on the Great Boston Kimono Outrage of 2015: 

Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants… This incident — call it Kimonogate — demonstrates just how far the new puritans are willing to reach to impose their version of politics upon all of our pleasures. Watching Chinese and South Asians lump themselves into an aggregate for the sake of claiming offence on behalf of the Japanese, when that conflation of Asian identities is an established microaggression, is weird enough. Worrying that someone might touch a robe Orientalistically is out there in tinfoil-hat territory. Is that the kind of person you want deciding which activities you’re allowed to enjoy at the art museum? 

Franklin also has a message for the modishly indignant.  

Thomas Sowell on favoured narratives and unintended consequences: 

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

And Katherine Timpf reports from the throbbing edge of academic enquiry: 

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” – so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird… Dr Williams [director of social work at Idaho State University] explained that no one should be bothered by a person wanting to drink another person’s blood because “it is generally expected within the community that vampires should act ethically and responsibly in feeding practices,” and it’s not their blood-drinking that’s the real problem here — it’s the fact that they have to worry that other people will judge them for their blood-drinking.

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

Kevin Williamson on being the wrong kind of brown person: 

For his political conservatism, Governor [Bobby] Jindal, like Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, also Republicans of Indian origin, is savaged as an Uncle Tamas — an Indian guilty of acting white. The charge has been led by the New Republic, the former political journal turned vanity press owned by Facebook millionaire Chris Hughes, one of the whitest white men in the history of whiteness, an argyle sock of a man… Jindal, D’Souza, and Haley stand accused of the worst sort of heresy: being members of an ethnic minority group who neither present nor understand themselves as the white man’s victims, whose stance toward the country in which they all reside and in which two of them were born — the country they love — is not one of opposition. The Left needs neediness, and these three aren’t offering up much of that.

Tim Blair explores the subtle, compassionate mind of Clementine Ford, a writer of “feminist social analyses” who tells us “abuse is not a joke.” 

And Brendan O’Neill on austerity and its champions: 

Before they developed their new-found emotional attachment to describing everything they don’t like as ‘austerity’, [leftist critics] were openly calling for austerity. George Monbiot is one of the Guardian’s chief complainers about Tory austerity — the same George Monbiot who in 2006 proudly described environmentalism as a “campaign not for abundance but for austerity” and who inspired the radical group Riot 4 Austerity. His colleague Zoe Williams likewise complains about “austerity” yet a few years ago she was dreaming of introducing Second World War-style food rationing, because “the lesson from the 40s is that to fix a public-health problem… you need big government.”

Yes, the chronically unhappy and tormented George Monbiot, who one week claims that austerity is crushing the poor and is “an assault on public life,” and then another week calls for his readers to “riot for austerity. Riot for less.” Because, says he, economic growth is “a political sedative,” a tool of false consciousness, “snuffing out protest” in our dulled, befuddled minds. And so Mr Monbiot denounces “the blackened waste of consumer frenzy,” by which he means shopping, and instead wants “a campaign not for more freedom but for less… a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.” “Unpleasant as it will be,” says George, and while “some people [will] lose their jobs and homes,” austerity and recession will avert “ecological collapse,” while saving us from those jet skis and diamond saucepans that we’re all intent on buying, and the mere existence of which robs him of sleep.

For more of Mr Monbiot’s strange mental adventures, see here, here and here. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Katherine Timpf on a “white privilege” conference for teachers and school administrators: 

“Many white people in Oregon have no idea that our schools and state are immersed in white culture and are uncomfortable and harmful to our students of colour, while also reinforcing the dominant nature of white culture in our white students and families,” one of the conference documents explains. The manual defines this “white culture” with a list of values, such as “promoting independence, self-expression, personal choice, individual thinking and achievement,” because apparently those are strictly “white” concepts and not emphasised in black communities.

Educators of pallor are being told, at public expense, that in order to become “anti-racist white allies,” they must first embrace the conceit that “All white people are racist. [Therefore] I am racist.” If that sounds not only absurd but a little sinister, practically Maoist, that’s because it is.

Here’s one of the many reasons why the leftist website Salon gets laughed at quite a lot. 

And Fraser Nelson agrees with Charlotte Church and Polly Toynbee, perhaps more than they would like: 

At the end of our tax returns, we declare how much tax we owe. [George] Osborne can introduce a new line in the tax return saying: if you think this isn’t enough, how much extra would you like to pay? People like Ms Toynbee and Ms Church can then fill in the extra so they can pay 50 per cent, or even 70 per cent, if they like. This ‘nudge’ tax reform would be consistent with the liberal principles of a Conservative government while allowing left-wingers to act along with their conscience and hand over more of their income to the government. So next time, rather than complain that they would be happy to pay 70 per cent tax, such people can proudly claim that they do pay 70 per cent tax. And they will have the tax return to prove it.

However, as we’ve seen, Polly is much more troubled by what you earn and keep than by what she earns and keeps – which, given her six-figure Guardian income, plus appearance fees, royalties and property portfolio, is quite a feat. Like many of her peers, Ms Toynbee thinks that voting for the state to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings is somehow an act of altruism. It’s also, conveniently, presented as an excuse for not using her own considerable resources personally, directly, to help those she deems deserving. And if a well-heeled leftist bangs on week after week about how terrible unequal incomes are and how something must be done urgently – and then says she won’t do what she insists is morally imperative unless the state forces her to do it – this isn’t a resounding affirmation of her professed principles.

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