A librarian replies to a comment piece in the Daily Californian:

Please don’t fuck in the library. I work here. My staff works here.

The piece in question is by UC Berkeley student Nadia Cho, who seems to believe she’s very edgy and progressive. In fact, it’s difficult to overstate just how edgy and progressive our columnist believes she is:

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck.

How incredibly, desperately transgressive. Ms Cho gleefully explains that she and her companions are “desecrating” buildings with their “perverse ways.” You see, the sex she’s having is much more radical than yours, and therefore more important.

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it.

Indeed. And what’s the point of exhibitionist psychodrama without an audience? We’ve been here before, I think.

Thankfully, the author also obliges with some practical tips:

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up.

And,

It’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying.

Of course it’s not just a matter of sexual abandon and incriminating evidence. It’s political too. Very political:

Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognise the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few.

Tuition fees well spent, then.

For newcomers, four more items from the archives.

The Arts, They Ennoble. 

Leotard, heels and coloured puke. It’s a vision of loveliness. 

In this 34-minute milestone of cultural enrichment, Ms Brown “explores the relationship between music and performance art via self-induced vomiting.” The word explores is of course obligatory and, given the context, entirely devoid of meaning. Unless we’re to believe that the fruits of this alleged mental activity will redefine human knowledge and shake the world when finally, dramatically revealed to the public. 

Insufficiently Prole.  

The Observer’s Barbara Ellen oozes socialist benevolence. 

While any use of the term chav is denounced by Ms Ellen as bullying, “posh-bashing” is considered protest and an artform. This is the logic of identity politics, according to which, you must always treat people as social categories, as examples of some put-upon victim group, or conversely, some notional oppressor group. To which, various contradictory and patronising assumptions must be applied regardless of the particulars in any given instance. By this reckoning, when opportunist oiks at my old comprehensive school picked on a new arrival who was well-spoken, polite and somewhat studious, the people doing the bullying were righteous, entitled and “responding to oppression.” Their shoving and sneering was apparently “an instinctive protest against inequality.” But my calling them oiks for doing so is practically a hate-crime. You see how it works?

The Cost of Purity.  

“Shut up,” they explained. 

Actually, some of our budding intellectuals do declare their censorious urges out loud and in public, as if such urges confirmed their own unassailable righteousness: “We no longer need to listen,” say these mighty radical thinkers. Nor will they permit others to listen to ideas and arguments they, our betters, deem improper – on our behalf, of course. Let’s not forget the equally progressive efforts to shape young minds at Queen’s University, which decided that students’ private lunchtime discussions were in need of monitoring by hired eavesdroppers called “dialogue facilitators.” Eavesdroppers whose uninvited “interventions” would “encourage discussion of social justice issues” and “issues of social identity, power and privilege,” as defined by them and whether welcome or not. “Positive spaces and mindsets” would of course be created. 

Playing in the Dirt with Occupy. 

Bongos, bombs and ersatz farming. 

Here we have a movement whose “non-hierarchical” founder says Occupy is “about antagonising people and slapping them around a little bit.” A movement whose favoured “non-violent” tactics rely on mobs and coercion – and the moral anonymity that mobs make possible. A movement that’s explicitly premised on the seizure and violation of other people’s property, and which measures its impact by the disruption and distress it inflicts on others. And oh yes. A movement whose cheerleaders tell us that mobbing random retailers and intimidating their customers is “a perfectly justifiable form of protest.” And whose apologists and hagiographers have told us, repeatedly, that they “have no problem with principled, thought-through political violence,” that property damage is “not the same thing as violence,” and that setting fire to occupied buildings isn’t “real” violence. For members of this movement to then affect “shock” when that same thinking is taken one notch further requires colossal dishonesty. But hey, that’s who these people are.

There’s more to be had in the greatest hits. 

Mark Steyn on the cost of Big Government:

The problem facing the United States government is that it spends over a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have. If you want to make that number go away, you need either to reduce spending or to increase revenue… We already have a more severely redistributive taxation system than Europe in which the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income tax while the poorest 20 percent shoulder just three-fifths of one percent… Yet Obama now wishes “the rich” to pay their “fair share” — presumably 80 or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in the New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year’s federal deficit. And after that you’re back to square one. It’s not that “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share,” it’s that America isn’t. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it’s not willing to pay for. 

A couple of years back, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute calculated that, if Washington were to increase every single tax by 30 percent, it would be enough to balance the books — in 25 years. If you were to raise taxes by 50 percent, it would be enough to fund our entitlement liabilities — just our current ones, not our future liabilities, which would require further increases. This is the scale of course correction needed. If you don’t want that, you need to cut spending — like Harry Reid’s been doing. “Now remember, we’ve already done more than a billion dollars’ worth of cuts,” he bragged the other day. “So we need to get some credit for that.” Wow! A billion dollars’ worth of cuts! Washington borrows $188 million every hour. So, if Reid took over five hours to negotiate those “cuts,” it was a complete waste of time. So are most of the “plans.” Any “debt-reduction plan” that doesn’t address at least $1.3 trillion a year is, in fact, a debt-increase plan.

Related, the trajectory of socialism in cartoon form. Also, Thomas Sowell on taxes and fairness. And of course this.  

Victor Davis Hanson ponders the American left:  

Weighing over 250 pounds, not rickets, is a national plague. Riots target sneaker stores, not food bins. Sandra Fluke naturally became the epitome of frustrated liberal-mandated equality. We are to believe that an upscale white law student, who by choice enrols at a Catholic university, is deprived because her university will not pay for her condoms or abortion pills. Her cell phone no doubt costs more than a year’s supply of prophylactics. The result is psychodrama, not class struggle, as liberals strain to find ways in which America is Les Misérables rather than the Kardashians, plagued by this obsession to step in and make everyone (except themselves) the same. 

And Claire Berlinski, mentioned previously here, reviews Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution – The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind: 

In what must be reckoned a martyrdom operation, Bawer has spent countless hours not only reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies, but also travelling America to attend their conferences. At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters the young Michele, who’s “like, a grad student at UC Davis?” She’s “sort of reviving a Gramscian-style Marxism,” involving the idea that global warming is “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” Bawer claims that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Rummaging through my images files, I found this.

It’s one of the less baffling signs from Zombie’s report on Occupy LA, May 1st, 2012. Zombie’s caption reads, “Narcissistic personality disorder, coupled with delusions of grandeur.” Which seems fair enough. I suppose the placard might have been a little more honest if it had said, “I expect to be paid for a job that doesn’t actually exist and which no-one has asked me to do.” Or, “I’ve decided I’m an artist and therefore you owe me money.” Or, “I’m not prepared to do any of the things that you unenlightened people would be willing to pay me to do, but I’m still going to demand that you give me your earnings anyway because, yes, I’m that important.” Though admittedly the last one might be a little wordy for a slogan. Readers may wish to devise captions of their own.

Or, “Mommy, What’s a Cock Ring?”

Further to this comedic excursion from September last year, Zombie visits San Francisco’s latest radical nude-in, where a coalition of “nudists and leather folk” unveil their big ambitions:

From the Castro District they seek to expand the nudity zone outward to all of San Francisco; if the movement gains momentum, could it expand to all of California, and then eventually nationwide?

Viewer discretion advised.

Update:

In the comments, David Gillies captures the protest’s essential neediness: “Look how transgressive I am!” We can, I think, assume that the ‘activists’ aren’t trying to share a glorious aesthetic experience. Even many of the locals, who I’d guess are fairly accustomed to juvenile displays, are finding the ‘activism’ a little intrusive and annoying. Zombie cites an article in the Bay Area Reporter, in which the protestors’ need for attention and provocation is pretty obvious, if not actually pretty:

They have become more aggressive in the Castro. Some don cock rings – euphemistically referred to as ‘genital jewellery’ – to simulate an erection. Others, according to witnesses, shake their dicks at oncoming traffic, obviously seeking a reaction.

Unsurprisingly, local businesses and other residents, especially those with children, aren’t terribly impressed. As Zombie says,

Although the Castro may be a gay mecca, it is not exclusively populated by single gay men, nor are the surrounding neighbourhoods gay. Many families with children live in and around the Castro, which means that children are out in public, occasionally encountering the nudists. In fact during the protest itself families with children needed to get from Point A to Point B along Market Street, and had no choice but to navigate their way through the crowd of naked penises.

Which may strike some as funny, at least initially and from a distance. But imagine you’re out shopping with the kids in tow and having to weave your way through large groups of unattractive men waving their tackle at you. And the standard blather about “civil rights” and “body image” isn’t very convincing. One doesn’t have to have “unrealistic issues of body shame” to find the exhibitionism tiresome or inappropriate.

And the denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s ‘protest’ claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

A supporter of the exhibitionists pops up, as it were, in the comments at Zombie’s place and insists,

It’s only your selfish control freak streak that wants to dictate what other people wear; your disrespect for the opinions and lifestyles of anyone whose opinion and lifestyle doesn’t match what you consider ‘proper’… Your statement reminds me of how selfish, childish and disdainful of anyone else’s rights so-called ‘conservatives’ are.

It seems to me this is more than a little dishonest. Setting aside the issues of exposing oneself to children, the impact on local businesses, etc., I think what’s objectionable is that random people are being made participants in the exhibitionists’ psychodrama, whether they wish to be or not.

For many, if not most, of the ‘activists’, this isn’t even about an enjoyment of being naked per se. It’s about confronting other people with unsolicited nakedness. That’s the enjoyment – it’s a juvenile kink. Being nude in private or among consenting nudists in dedicated bars, clubs, spas, on nature trails, at specialist beaches, etc., of which San Francisco has plenty, doesn’t give the ‘activists’ enough of a thrill. Because the people there are willing.

Hence the demand to display their genitals in front of random passers-by, including children. An audience is required in order to feel transgressive and it’s pretty obvious that’s what matters. They want to be naked near you. They want you to witness their daring. It’s essentially a kind of challenge – an imposition on others, and the act of imposition is, for some, the whole point. And so the source of the “selfishness,” “childishness” and “disrespect” is also pretty clear.