Zombie pays a visit to a San Francisco “nude-in” and isn’t impressed by what she sees:

Yet no matter how successful they are in smashing cultural norms, they still can’t escape the general consensus that day-to-day urban nudity has public health consequences. The nudists’ reply is that the public health argument is merely a smokescreen to justify puritanical repression. The anti-nudity advocates are being dishonest, the protesters argue; opposition to public nakedness is not based on concern about transmissible diseases, but rather on old-fashioned prudery. While that may be true, I counter with this: The San Francisco public nudists are also being dishonest; there is indeed a sexual component to their behaviour, and they are exhibitionists using politics to justify their thrill-seeking.

Readers of a delicate constitution should note that Zombie’s report contains photos of unattractive middle-aged men in a state of militant undress (boots, cockrings and bandanas notwithstanding). And I suspect most will come to appreciate why it is that attractive people get paid to take their clothes off, while fat ageing hippies and saggy-titted old queens generally don’t.

Some of you may also register a whiff of disingenuousness in exhibitionists accusing their critics of being repressive and stuffy. Exhibitionists may be eager to dispense with clothing in incongruous locations – say, a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection – but they desperately need an audience, preferably a clothed one, and preferably one that’s embarrassed, inconvenienced and unwilling. San Francisco is remarkably well-equipped in terms of nude-friendly laws, clubs and amenities, including a nude beach and nearby nudist colonies. As Zombie notes, what’s revealing is that such venues weren’t deemed sufficient for our wrinkly radicals:

These protesters and urban nudists don’t simply want to be naked in private or be naked around other naked people; they want to be naked around clothed people. Because that’s where the sexual thrill originates; violating a taboo. Being naked where nakedness is normal doesn’t count; eliciting shock or interest from unwitting strangers is the whole point.

Quite. Those indulging in their kink for being noticed are, in effect, saying: “Hey, you. Look at my bollocks. I SAID, LOOK AT MY BOLLOCKS RIGHT NOW, YOU UPTIGHT CONSERVATIVE PRUDES!” And while I doubt many readers here are prone to fainting at the sight of withered genitals and subsiding buttocks, they may conceivably object to being made an accomplice to someone else’s psychodrama. As one young lady points out, “Unwanted exposure to scrotum is never okay.”

Update, via the comments:

Your host is off in search of blogging mojo. By all means dull the pain by browsing the updated greatest hits. 

Its intrigues include a brief guide to leftist psychology, a vivid demonstration of pretentious guilt, and a glimpse at what happens when presumption and callousness become badges of feminist virtue. On a loftier note, the arts coverage may be of interest. And there’s plenty to entertain readers who find the comment pages of the Guardian inadvertently hilarious and morally bewildering.

Back in a few days.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Because Men Have Abortions Too.

Gender activist Jos Truitt tells us about reality and how it really is.

Jos Truitt can be seen here educating an audience with tremendously deep and radical thought, thereby confirming Hampshire College’s status as a “radical space.” We learn, shockingly, that sex change surgery from female to male typically entails the patient losing the ability to bear children. This is described by Ms Truitt as “an issue of eugenics” and an affront to “reproductive justice.” Rather than, say, an obvious consequence of choosing to have the necessary organs removed in order to become more like the gender that, by definition, doesn’t bear children. Presumably a woman who feels male and wishes to undergo extreme surgery to gain some semblance of physical maleness should also retain a functional uterus and associated organs, perhaps cleverly connected to a decorative penis. An intriguing challenge for any ambitious surgeon.

It’s Protest So It’s Righteous.

Alexander Vasudevan says radical people are entitled to “seize” your property.

Readers who wish to reclaim the belongings of Mr Vasudevan – say, his laptop or his phone – should head for the University of Nottingham. As Mr Vasudevan is keen to excuse the “seizure and reclamation” of other people’s belongings as a “potent symbol of protest,” it seems only fair – and important – to bring that sentiment back to his own doorstep, or that of his employers, if only rhetorically. Of course our academic radical has little to worry about. Readers of this blog are likely to have strong inhibitions regarding the invasion or theft of other people’s property, unlike some enthusiasts of the “radical politics” that Mr Vasudevan finds so exciting.

Socialist Hearts Are Just Bigger Than Ours.

Zoe Williams objects to philanthropy by people richer than herself. Because giving money away “creates inequality.”

Normal salaries won’t of course cut much ice at an Ark Gala, where ticket sales alone raise millions of pounds. Even Zoe, whose former school sends well-heeled little socialists on trips to Rome, Morocco and Barbados, would be out of her league. Still, Zoe’s personal resentments are the important thing and these “obscenely” rich people should stop “creating inequality” while giving money away. Given time, the orphans of Romania will doubtless learn to do without while sharing in Ms Williams’ moral satisfaction.

Abduct the greatest hits and probe them thoroughly.

Jeff Goldstein quotes Victor Davis Hanson on matters inexplicable:

Another mystery is the leftism of those who live in a world of hierarchical privilege. If we examine the elite media (the MSNBC or New York Times megaphones), or Hollywood (the lifestyle of a Sean Penn), or leftist politicians (a Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or Al Gore), there is almost no tangible difference in the way they live their lives from those of the corporate or private sector elite they deprecate. […]

That [raises] the question — is the elite left’s infatuation with the good life not so much a paradox, not a hypocrisy at all, but rather a sort of medieval exemption, or perhaps penance? The price for living well is to advocate government subsidies for the less well-off that are rarely seen, and disdain for those who grub for money and as tea partiers lack the refinement that is the dividend of the very rich or the so well connected. Does buying a $40,000 ticket to the president’s 50th birthday party mean that one is exempt from the presidential invective against “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate jet owners”? As a general rule, the more I hear of such carping, the more I assume the whiner covets what he so childishly is obsessed with ending.

The mysteries of the millionaire leftist have been pondered here quite often. It seems reasonable to suppose that our leftwing elite aren’t vehemently opposed to their own status, influence and unusual wealth, which often exceeds that of those whose “unjust rewards” they publicly denounce. It seems they merely object to the wrong kind of rich people. Which is to say, people whose views and backgrounds may differ from their own. Maybe Alan Rusbridger, Jeremy Irons and Polly Toynbee, for instance, imagine themselves as part of an exempted nomenklatura – as consultants and advisors, clearing the road to our egalitarian utopia, where their influence and status will grow accordingly. Or maybe they’ve simply managed to construct personalities that are impervious to their own kleptomania and colossal hypocrisy. Which would also explain why Rusbridger, Irons and Toynbee are so comically unprepared for having their own affairs considered in any way relevant.

Nearly ten years on, Johnathan Pearce, Nick Gillespie and Tim Sandefur reflect on terrible events and inadequate art:

What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Centre at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.”

And Jan Blits revisits the University of Delaware’s infamous “social justice education” programme: 

At every opportunity students were told that their identity, first and foremost, is not “human,” but this or that ethnic, racial, religious or sexual group: “Native American,” “Hispanic,” “black,” “Asian,” “white,” “male,” “female,” “Muslim,” “Hindu,” “gay,” straight,” and so on. Whites and males were singled out and publicly shamed for their “privilege.” […] Students were also forced to behave like bigots and spew forth stereotypes about members of other ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups. When students objected that they were being forced to say things they didn’t mean, the [resident assistants] told them that they were saying what, deep down, they really thought. The obvious purpose of this exercise was to shame whites in general, and white males in particular. But, in fact, minority students especially hated the exercise, because it was in their name that other students were being unfairly shamed and abused.

Details of the pathological race fantasies at the heart of Delaware’s “social justice” programme can be found here, including the belief that “the term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States.” Students’ accounts of their tribal indoctrination – referred to by its proponents as a “treatment” intended to leave “a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness” – can be found here: “The immediate effects were to intimidate and humiliate. The long-term effect is to teach conformity.” And if you believe such behaviour must be a one-off aberration, better think again.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

One for our collection, care of Zoe Williams:

I think she [Margaret Thatcher] almost certainly didn’t say it (the bus thing). It’s just ambiently true, because she seems like a person who hates buses.

The alleged comment in question – “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus, can count himself a failure” – is difficult to verify and somewhat implausible but is nonetheless repeated by Thatcher’s critics, including the BBC. Its repetition seems to exist independently of a reliable source, possibly because so many would like to believe that it’s true. What’s interesting, though, is the notion that this claim, and by extension any number of others, is ambiently true. Which is to say, it’s assumed as somehow typical – accurate or not – and fits a chosen narrative. Presuming the particulars of what so-and-so might as well have said (or done) – whether or not they did – is ripe with potential. It’s therefore no great surprise that others have taken this strategy much further – to its predictable conclusion.

As when Johnathan Perkins, a black law student, told the University of Virginia’s student newspaper that while walking home he’d been taunted and intimidated by two white police officers. Perkins’ letter claimed that “most Americans are raised in racially sterilised environments,” and that “black people are accused of… playing the victim.” The student’s stated hope was that, “sharing this experience will provide this community with some much needed awareness of the lives that many of their black classmates are forced to lead.” A subsequent investigation, involving dispatch records, police tapes and surveillance video from nearby businesses, revealed the student’s story to be entirely fabricated. In a written statement, Perkins admitted, “I wrote the article to bring attention to the topic of police misconduct… The events in the article did not occur.”

As Mark Bauerlein noted recently, Perkins’ dishonesty was oddly free of consequences, for him at least, and not without precedent. Previously, a 19-year-old freshman ransacked her own room and scrawled racial slurs across its walls before curling into a foetal ball, supposedly in shock. When this “hate crime” was revealed as a hoax, Otis Smith, a regional president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, was remarkably untroubled. That the events had been staged and then lied about was, he said, “largely irrelevant.” He added, “It doesn’t matter to me whether she did it or not because of all the pressure these black students are under at these predominantly white schools. If this will highlight it, if it will bring it to the attention of the public, I have no problem with that.”

Similar instances of students fabricating “hate crimes,” rape and “hate speech” aren’t exactly hard to find. Maybe what we’re seeing is, at least in part, a kind of activism, albeit one with an unhinged postmodern twist. Perhaps Mr Perkins and his fellow dissemblers believe themselves to be righteous in illustrating some greater truth – an, as it were, ambient one – in the service of which lies can be told, proudly, repeatedly and in good conscience.