This Scientology promo video – complete with “floating tone arms” and wildly upbeat mad people – may not be online for long, so watch it while you can. 

Via MeFi, via Anna. 

Christina Hoff Sommers on feminist scholarship: 

The problem with a lot of research on women is not so much that the authors make mistakes — we all make mistakes — the problem is that the mistakes are impervious to criticism.

For a flavour of that imperviousness and some feminist reactions to being corrected, see also this. 

Glenn Reynolds on unsustainable ideologies: 

I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein said about hippies: “Hippydom is not itself a culture (as the hippies seem to think) as it has no economic foundation; it can exist only as a parasitic excrescence to the ‘square’ culture.” So too with the academic humanities, which have largely squandered the moral and intellectual capital they once possessed by adopting the roles of adversaries to, rather than preservers of, the larger culture. This, too, turns out not to be sustainable.

That adversarial role-play has been discussed here many times, along with its descent into psychodrama. 

And Ed Driscoll discovers there are no socialists in divorce court: 

Michael Moore, who has spent his entire career attacking capitalism, wealth, and Wall Street, is suddenly very protective concerning the capital, wealth and investments he has amassed over the years. As Christian Toto writes at Big Hollywood, “Far-left filmmaker Michael Moore is divorcing his wife, and the looming court battle looks ugly already.” Christian links to this Smoking Gun report, which notes that “the couple’s combined assets are likely worth tens of millions of dollars,” including “multiple substantial residences and multiple companies.”

But America’s most outspoken socialist, being an outspoken socialist, deserves nine properties, including an agreeable Upper West Side apartment valued at $1.27 million and, naturally, a mansion. This, remember, is a self-described multimillionaire who told the world, quite boldly, “Capitalism did nothing for me.” 

As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Some of you may remember Ms Lierre Keith, a former radical vegan activist turned radical advocate of a return to subsistence farming. Ms Keith has long been a vocal champion of vandalism, harassment and “militant action,” and taken at their own words, she and her colleagues would like to see those they deem “associated” with environmental accidents being killed by the state. They also like the idea of “sabotaging infrastructure” and cutting power lines, thereby leaving tens of thousands of people without light and heat, as this would somehow encourage “class consciousness.” Elderly people in remote locations would presumably embrace the finer points of revolutionary eco-socialism as they shivered in the dark and the feeling left their limbs.

In March 2010 Ms Keith was herself targeted for “militant action” by disgruntled vegans even more radical and pious than she, and who disrupted her lecture at an anarchist book fair by pelting Ms Keith with chili-flavoured cream pies. An experience our fearless titan found both bewildering and outrageous. “The whole thing was designed for social humiliation,” Ms Keith told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me.” Unfortunately, the Chronicle didn’t ask Ms Keith whether this small taste of her own medicine, her own methods, had altered her position on changing the views of others by means of “militant action.”

Having since recovered from this traumatic encounter with slapstick protest, and armed only with an anatomical slideshow of male genitalia, Ms Keith has resumed her attempts to establish her own radical credentials in yet another sphere. And so, in the following video, recorded over the weekend at a public library in Portland, Oregon, Ms Keith – now a “radical feminist and gender abolitionist” – speaks truth to power, fearlessly, radically, and at enormous personal risk. Specifically, she shares the truth that, “Being a man requires a psychology based on entitlement, emotional numbness, and a dichotomy of self-knowledge.” Self-knowledge being a subject on which Ms Keith can speak with unassailable authority. 

Naturally, Ms Keith’s latest area of expertise is not limited to maleness and its inherent wickedness; the entire world of manandwomanlyness™ is hers to describe, and of course correct. And so we learn that, “Gender is a political creation because patriarchy has to separate who counts as human and who counts as an appropriate target for violation. That’s what gender is.” Gender, it turns out, is merely a “caste system,” one “disguised as biology.” Therefore there must be “organised political resistance.” Which is to say, “The sex class ‘men’… needs to be abolished if women are ever to be free.” Because, “Liberty and a living planet will only be won when masculinity, its religion, its economics, its psychology and its sex is resisted and finally defeated.” These deep thoughts and more can be savoured more fully in the video below: 

Or, When Anarchists Gather. Or, Tremble, Ye Patriarchs.

Further to the shocking news that narcissists are distressed by public contradiction and the apparently fashionable claim that “debate is violence,” Bart steers us to footage from Portland State University’s 5th Annual Law and Disorder Conference, a gathering of self-styled anarchists, feminists, anti-capitalists and other radical titans. And which, it turns out, was a little disorderly.

“You shouldn’t be given the space to speak.”

Three items, thematically related. First, the world of the arts, where some things just won’t be tolerated by those who know what’s best for us. Like artist and writer Bill Drummond: 

It not only offended me morally and aesthetically, it also went against everything that I feel political discourse should be about. Thus there was nothing for it.

And so vandalism ensued. Followed, obviously, by self-congratulation in the pages of the Guardian, where Mr Drummond conjures the obligatory post hoc ambiguity. Is it “a mere publicity stunt?” he asks, as if that were in doubt. “By doing this have I added to the political discourse in the country in any sort of positive way?” Apparently Mr Drummond is making us think, an activity impossible without his intervention, while saving us from the things we mustn’t be looking at. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. 

Then academia, where talking, it turns out, is now considered violence: 

Lauren Steele, the Cambridge Student Union Women’s Officer who organised the protest, rejected these calls [for discussion]… A statement issued by the pro-choice protesters, derived from the text of the leaflets handed out to passers-by, argued that “Debate is a conversation of power, where the objective is to win: to overpower the other side. This is violence. It is not ‘discussion’.”

Because being contradicted is distressing for a narcissist. Imagine the indignity. Therefore words must be redefined, and redefined again, until talking equals violence and debate becomes impossible. And then, well, the rest of us must comply or risk being denounced as violent haters. Why, oh why, don’t you people CARE™ about the feelings of narcissists?

And finally, in case you missed it in the comments yesterday, there’s this rather passionate incident:  

GAAAAHH! WAHH! MMMEHHH! 

Evidently, when walking past a loon holding a placard about the post-mortem comeuppance of “masturbators, drunkards, fornicators and homosexuals,” the obvious thing to do is to suddenly assault the man, repeatedly, while braying like a donkey. And then screech with inexpressible outrage when further assaults are interrupted. Readers may wish to imagine how our somewhat inarticulate Social Justice Warrior might have behaved if a similar placard were being held by a bearded adherent of another religion.

With hat tips to Kate and Mr X.