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.

Readers may recall Priyamvada Gopal and her efforts to redefine violence so as to include anything to which she and her peers take political exception, thereby elevating actual thuggery to the status of retaliation. For Ms Gopal, setting fire to occupied buildings isn’t “real” violence and is no more objectionable than “hypocritical language.” This bold and convenient philosophy appears to have been embraced by other Guardian contributors – among them, chronic confabulator Laurie Penny, whose recent pronouncements on Twitter included the following (now deleted):

I have no problem with principled, thought-through political ‘violence.’

Note Ms Penny’s daring use of the inverted comma.

Smashing windows is property damage. That’s not the same thing as violence.

The term criminal damage is harder to diminish and smashing windows with bricks in a non-violent manner is not an easy thing to do on the streets of central London. Needless to say, it takes a fair amount of effort to heave larger, heavier objects through someone else’s windows. Just as it takes a certain disposition not to care particularly about where, or on whom, those objects may land along with shards of flying glass. And perhaps we should assume that Laurie has no objection to her belongings being destroyed by those who disagree with her, provided they feel sufficiently righteous and entitled.

Elsewhere, Leah Borromeo pursues a similar theme in a piece titled Protesters Can’t Disown the ‘Violent Minority’. She tells us, apparently in all seriousness,

There are no “good” protesters and no “bad” protesters. The state sees anyone who publicly declares their dissent to its laws and policies as one thing – a threat. When a state is threatened, it sends its henchmen out to quell it.

Yes, I know. Henchmen. All things considered, there’s a distinct whiff of projection. Another contender, I think, for our series of classic sentences.

The henchmen are the police. And you – student or teacher, patient or nurse – are that threat.

No doubt the state’s “henchmen” will be raiding the offices of the Guardian as I type and Polly Toynbee will soon be hauled away, hooded and in chains.

You can’t balance the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed.

Sadly, Ms Borromeo doesn’t pause to explain exactly how she and her peers are being violently oppressed. Perhaps she’s referring to the government’s modest reduction in the growth of public spending. We do, though, get plenty of self-flattering assertion:

To try to make distinctions between a “peaceful” and a “violent” protester is inherently flawed. Dissent is a violent reaction. Saying “no” is resistance… So – many apologies to those who wish to distance themselves from the “violent minority.” But we’re in this together. You may not like having to share a boat, but it’s a lot better than drowning.

Those who attended Saturday’s protest untroubled by violent urges, possibly with children in tow, may take exception to this casual flattening of distinctions. But people who managed to walk through central London without smashing windows, trashing cash machines or hurling projectiles at the police are, according to Ms Borromeo, no better than those who did.

Over the past few months I have become, and remain, deeply embedded in the student movement in the UK and Europe. Many of the young people who feature in the piece – on whose activities I’ve been keeping meticulous notes, and who are of a similar age and political attitude to myself – have since become as close to personal friends as observational subjects ever can be… This has stretched my objectivity to its limits. I have had to work and rework the article to make sure I was constructing an accurate portrait.

So says Laurie Penny, reporting from “the front line of student activism.”

Readers familiar with Ms Penny’s brand of activist journalism – in the pages of the Guardian, New Statesman and the communist Morning Star – may find her use of the words “accurate” and “objectivity” inadvertently amusing. This is the same Laurie Penny who tells us that, while “not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist,” football is nonetheless “commodified nationalism” played by “misogynist jocks” indulging in “organised sadism.” The World Cup is apparently not about football at all, but “only and always about men.” It’s a “month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia,” one that “violently excludes more than half the people.”

Like so much in Laurie’s world, it just does, okay?

Writing for Red Pepper, Ms Penny tells us that, “capitalism is built on the docile bodies of women” and that women are reduced to “reproductive labourers whose physical and sexual autonomy is relentlessly policed.” The same article rails against “US state governments [that] compete to think up ever more cruel and unusual ways to punish women for sexual self-determination.”

It is, I think, fair to say that Laurie Penny enjoys railing against things, generally things that aren’t entirely obvious but which are framed as both terrible and somehow self-evident. A typical Laurie Penny article is long on assertion, short on facts and coherent argument, and invariably written in the highest possible gear.

She rails against the Conservative Party (“hordes of drooling poshos”) and its “brutally intolerant moral agenda.” The details of this brutally intolerant agenda are, alas, somewhat vague. She rails against “the bruised superstructure of patriarchal capitalist control,” the particulars of which also remain unspecified and mysterious. She rails against a “heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses all of us.” (What, you didn’t know?) She rails against “brutal repression” by an impending police state that no-one else can see, and she rails against protestors “not being heard,” as if being heard must entail being agreed with and obeyed. Ours, she says, is a world “on fire.”

When not railing against a heteronormative police state that’s brutal, intolerant and also on fire, Ms Penny likes to share with us an extensive menu of personal miseries, along with other aspects of her fascinating self:

It’s getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It’s getting harder to stay angry… That terrifies me more than anything… The centre-right have taken back my country… Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world’s only superpower.

Megan McArdle suspects Julian Assange is unwell.

[Assange says,] “In a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

Ah. This must be why WikiLeaks has been getting so much material from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, and why internal documents from Cargill are currently dominating their traffic. Ooops! That was a flash from an alternative universe where what Assange is saying isn’t nonsense. In the real world, he got a bunch of government documents because the US, in its addlepated, well-meaning way, dumped all of them on a network open to 3 million people where they could be seen by a disaffected 23-year old stupid enough to either believe he could get away with this, or not understand how long the years in jail might be.

Theodore Dalrymple on what’s wrong with WikiLeaks.

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness.

And Tim Blair notes the vanities and secrets of the WikiLeaks mouthpiece.

[Assange] says that WikiLeaks has “changed two governments, taken the scalp of a prime minister, taken the scalp of a defence minister and [achieved] many other reforms.” Assange doesn’t identify the governments or the two ministers. Perhaps he’s talking about the 2007 election in Kenya, which Assange claims to have influenced by leaking a secret report. Then followed months of deadly violence, with which Assange seems oddly comfortable: “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya.” So another 1,300 corpses won’t matter much. Tipping an already-volatile African nation into further mayhem might be Assange’s greatest achievement to date.

Update:

Christopher Hitchens weighs in.

The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda… All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

For newcomers, two more items from the archives.  

Tears and Role-Play.

Transsexuals take umbrage with the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Cue orgy of self-pity and radical spelling.

“I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honourable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space.”

Projecting Just a Tad. 

Disabled feminists and gender activists respond to Avatar. Psychodrama ensues.

Not long ago on Radio 4, a legless and rather prickly “activist” insisted that it was “oppressive” to view the loss of a person’s legs as in any way regrettable. Regarding this loss as something negative was apparently “ableist,” “ignorant” and offensive. This claim was repeated several times, emphatically. At one point the activist declared that given a chance to walk again he would refuse, such was his “pride” in having lost a third of his body. Anger had been displaced from the obvious grievance – the traumatic loss of one’s legs – to the supposed “injustice” of regarding limb loss as a dismaying or terrifying state of affairs. As a coping mechanism, it wasn’t entirely honest. Or, it seems, successful.

Contraband may be hidden in the greatest hits. So grope them thoroughly.