And we mustn’t forget the tale, via New York magazine, of the Brooklynite comedian and podcaster named Billy, his girlfriend Megan, and his girlfriend Megan’s other boyfriend Kyle. An exhaustingly self-consciousness three-way entanglement resulting in a series of grimly farcical situations that were framed, rather coyly, as “relationship difficulties.”

The above, I should add, was one of several attempts by New York magazine to portray unfaithfulness and cuckoldry, and the consequent anxieties, as the very zenith of a progressive lifestyle.

As when a betrayed husband, Michael Sonmore, boasted, unconvincingly, that he “finally became a feminist” thanks to his wife’s nocturnal sexual adventures with a chap named Paulo. A wife who was “embracing herself” and becoming empowered, we were told, while her children, aged six and three, wondered where their Mommy was.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment.

Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter.

He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”

Once some mental association has been discovered or contrived, everyone must act as if the innocuous object or action were in reality malicious and/or wounding, whatever the actual intention and regardless of how absurd and/or dishonest the claim of grievance is. Because whatever bizarre association of things is in the accuser’s head is assumed to be in everyone else’s head too.

Dr Golz and her peers are in effect saying to students, “You should want to be the guy who bitches about the rather unobvious racist subtext of party snacks. And if you do choose to behave that way, we’ll reward you and flatter you and make you feel important, while making other people jump through clown hoops to appease the feelings you pretend to have.”

And the more implausible and contrived the claim of victimhood is, the more status points accrue, on account of the complainant’s heightened sensitivity and supposed mental prowess. One has fathomed an injustice mere mortals cannot see. And bewildered onlookers are expected to pretend that this is a high and noble function of an academic institution.

Dr Riley goes on to denounce engineering’s “cultures of whiteness and masculinity,” and informs us that, “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonising.”

Says she, “This is about doing away with the concept [of rigour] altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being. It is about criticality and reflexivity.”

Yes, the design and construction of fighter jets, oil rigs and 1000-tonne tunnelling machines will one day be informed not by careful calculation, a knowledge of materials and thoroughly tested principles, but by criticality, reflexivity and “other ways of being.”

Dr Riley is the author of the little-read tome Engineering and Social Justice, which she describes as “an attempt to explain the lack of emphasis on social justice in engineering.”

The term “social justice” is, we’re told, “difficult to define” and “resists a concise and permanent definition,” a problem illustrated by the author’s own struggle to arrive at a convincing definition, despite deploying the term on every other page.

But apparently, engineers need to spend less time doing load-bearing calculations and more time pondering “radical protest” and “Marxist traditions.”

Needless to say, Dr Riley opens the book by congratulating herself for having devised “alternative ways of thinking” that are “challenging,” and which, for those less enlightened, may be “difficult to understand.”

As Dr Riley complains that expectations of rigour generate both inequality and “white male heterosexual privilege,” presumably she would rather we erased distinctions more broadly, between ability and mediocrity, and between diligence and half-arsedness. Though her own so-called scholarship, and indeed her employment, suggest that these wishes may already be coming true.

Readers are invited to ponder the psychology in play at this terribly progressive school. The triumphal righteousness of compelling thirteen-year-old schoolgirls to undress in front of a mentally ill male or opportunist pervert. A mentally ill male or opportunist pervert that the schoolgirls do not trust. Resulting in the girls feeling frightened and upset.

Imagine that tingle of power. All wrapped in a drag of modish piety.

And – as so often – note just how readily the school administrators, these uniformly progressive women, will sell out their supposed sisters. The daughters of their neighbours. In order to look fashionable and therefore high-status…

In light of which, it’s difficult to see any plausible common ground. When activist attendees would rather jeer and preen, and call concerned parents bigots and racists, rather than address their actual concerns, it’s not obvious what room for compromise, or debate, there could be. Ultimately, either mentally ill boys and opportunist creeps can pretend to be girls and invade schoolgirls’ changing rooms, or they can’t.

Answers on a postcard, please.

In the all-too-brief video below, filmed at Boston’s Proof Gallery in September 2011, Mr Fryer performs a thrilling and ambitious piece titled Wall Melody, in which he “explores” the theme of commitment by holding down one note on a child’s musical toy, while accompanied by an unspecified power tool, operated elsewhere by persons unknown, for reasons unclear.

And note that the plumber’s reticence on political matters – i.e., his professionalism and good manners – is viewed by Resnikoff as suspect.

Not one of us.

This, lest we forget, is the kind of effete meltdown that Mr Resnikoff felt important to share publicly with his peers, in order to establish his ‘progressive’ credentials.

If I may paraphrase the dynamic: “I feared that, despite his civility and professionalism, this broad-shouldered prole might at any moment sense my disdain for his kind, rise up in a rage, and then strangle me with his big, unmoisturised hands.”

Yes, I exaggerate, though not by much.

It is, I think, worth picturing what it would be like to be a boy raised by an ostentatiously progressive father, a social worker and therapist, who sneers at men “boxed in by masculinity” – for instance, men who own wrenches.

Unlike our ideologically emasculated neurotic, who imagines himself on a much higher plane, and who “spirals into panic” at the mere thought of a toolbox or anything approaching manual labour.

“You can… mouth the words that are white, but… they’re coming from a [black] body,” says Dr Inoue, as if expecting applause.

In Dr Inoue’s classroom, a student’s ambition to develop linguistic skills, to be clearly understood, and to succeed in life, must be subordinate to the paranoid, tribal politics conceived by Dr Inoue. So, no selfishness there, clearly. As a display of the pernicious and perverse, it’s quite a thing.

Achieving proficiency and wishing to be taken seriously as someone capable of thought are framed by Dr Inoue as some kind of internalised oppression. And being able to express yourself precisely, and getting a job you want, is somehow a failure, a betrayal of authentic blackness. And by implication, getting on in life – being able to provide for yourself and your family – is, according to Dr Inoue, “a really shitty choice.”

This, then, is the man to whom hopes should be entrusted.

The risk of being punched, vigorously, is important. It inhibits quite a lot of recreational malice.

One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of lecturers in “critical whiteness studies.”

Possibly, this is because it tends to look contrived and rather silly, even when celebrities do it. A contrivance that suggests, not so much a high-minded “dismantling” of “gendered fashion,” or “a small step towards gender equality,” as Mr Harper would have us believe, but something closer to tedious self-absorption.

The kind of thing one might expect from a disingenuous, noodle-legged Guardian columnist, say.

But apparently, this craving for attention, for being the skirt-wearing star of any social gathering, all this radical flouncing, will somehow liberate British women from their supposedly grim, downtrodden existence.

Those of you with an urge to behold Mr Harper in a skirt – complete with tights, trainers, and dickie bow – can do so here. A second ensemble, featuring a bold leaf print, also awaits your applause. Readers are welcome to say whether the word panache – favoured by Mr Harper – is one that comes to mind.

Though I’d suggest that the author’s own fashion statements rather solve any mystery as to why said garment hasn’t been widely adopted by the menfolk of the nation.

And boasting of how you’ll teach your children about their “white privilege,” a recipe for affectation and neurosis, endless pretentious guilt, doesn’t seem likely to help matters enormously.

And if Ms Brown’s children should have the goodness in them taken away, as she puts it, this seems unlikely to be a result of a Trump second term, and more likely to be due to a figure much closer to home and more prominent in their lives. Say, a mother whose mind has, in her words, been consumed.

It must be quite strange to go through life feeling a need to boast in print of some pointed behaviour – specifically, “showing my sons what a real woman’s body… looks like” – as if this feat of not wearing knickers were somehow radical, empowering, and a basis for applause. And to then have to justify this lifestyle affectation in ways that are somewhat contradictory and not particularly convincing. As if no-one would notice. It seems a lot of effort.

You see, by issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.

With such levels of unrealism and contrivance, such practised not-noticing – say, the claim that people in general are somehow unconcerned by “whether their children are genetically theirs” – it’s not altogether clear where one might begin.

We have arrived at the assumption that a primal, root-level motivation found across species is somehow absent in human beings – for no clearly stated reason – despite all appearance to the contrary, across continents and centuries, and despite the fact that human offspring are unusually dependent and require an uncommonly prolonged and costly investment by the parents.

Presumably, we should ignore studies confirming the correlation of parental investment and physical resemblance, i.e., relatedness, and the statistical preference among adoptive parents for children who could pass for their own biological offspring. Likewise, the lower aggregate levels of investment by stepfathers, noted many times.

And I’m guessing we’ll have to ignore the entire history of human courtship, a great deal of which has been geared towards ensuring genetic relatedness – and to avoiding cuckoldry. The cuckoldry that Mr Decker claims will somehow improve the world.

And remember, the targets in the videos above – the unimposing, the elderly, the disabled – are chosen deliberately and with glee. Because that’s who they are, these mighty warriors of the Cluster B Tendency. Malevolence is their aphrodisiac, their euphoria. It’s how they feel important. It’s how they process the buzzing noise inside their own heads.

The threat of catastrophic injury would, I suspect, be the only language such creatures are likely to heed. It’s certainly hard to imagine them being swayed by appeals to logic, reciprocation, or basic decency. I see no evidence of a better nature to which one might appeal.

I mean, once you’ve chosen to spend your afternoon menacing the elderly and disabled precisely because they’re unlikely to give you the vigorous kicking you deserve, you’re pretty much beyond any negotiation or genteel outreach project.

The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether.” Though possibly not in ways the author intended.

Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.

The kind of woman who would moan about the chore of choosing a holiday that her husband is paying for. And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour.” The final indignity.

The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting,” while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.