To which, Mags adds, “He she didn’t use her his pronouns.” Indeed. A notable omission. One that results in finger-wagging from fellow Reddit forum regulars: “You do have to respect that SHE is the expert on her own gender, not you.”

It’s a bold claim. Despite which, the person being scolded – a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man – can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. There’s no she or her, just a grudging them. Which does rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

It’s all terribly oppressive – for the implausibly faint of heart, I mean. And should a colleague carelessly refer to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a catastrophic gamma-ray burst, this is obviously “misogynistic language” and a basis for the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding.

At which point, readers may wish to ponder whether the best people to be doing astronomy, or teaching astronomy, or to be making workplace rules for astronomers, are the kinds of people who mouth dogmatic assertions without any trace of supporting logic, and who are distracted, even distressed, by hearing the word collision being used to describe a collision.

“One day, when I accidentally sat down to study in the library’s Absolutely Quiet Room, fellow students Shhh-ed me into shame for putting on my Discman… I soon realised that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.”

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

The newborn me was a result of a particular lineage, of choices made by specific individuals and the genes of those individuals – who can of course say the same thing about themselves. To imply that anyone’s birth is a random thing, as if it could have happened anywhere, at any time, as if the particulars were immaterial, is, it seems to me, a little odd. Indeed, arse-backwards. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some random occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events. I’d imagine it wouldn’t seem random at all.

Unless you imagine a queue of souls waiting to spawn in some small but arbitrary body on a continent chosen by the spin of a wheel. Or cosmic bingo balls.

It occurs to me that when your solution to such complaints [from parents regarding classroom indoctrination] includes the words “so parents cannot see it,” it may be time to revisit your assumptions.

Ms Isser’s indignation at the thought of socialist women being romantically shunned, even by fellow socialists, was aired in December in a Twitter howling session, during which extensive use was made of exclamation marks. After much exasperated rumbling, Ms Isser concluded that the fault must lie solely with men, and that “straight men are shallow and sexist even when they’re socialists.” Thereby proving that, contrary to legend, ladies of the left are in no way high-maintenance or difficult to please.

“Our politics reflect who we are!!!!!” said she, loudly. Which is rather the problem, I think.

“Queer stories are so seldom told in museums,” says Jennie Grady, who has worked on the exhibition.

Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

So seldom. So terribly seldom.

Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.

Depending, one assumes, on whether Mr Sonia claims to be a man or a woman on any given day.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth…

The supposedly corrective fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to. Those doing the fretting then set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they have travelled to see, and with which they may feel some affinity, may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness. By liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption.

Well, quite. I was in John Lewis recently, buying towels, and at no point did I feel a need to know about the cross-dressing bondage activities of the sales staff. Whether the person bagging my towels likes to dress up as a pantomime dame while brandishing instruments of torture was not, it has to be said, foremost in my mind…

Whether female customers, the backbone of John Lewis’ customer base, will be inspired to shop harder and more often by the thought of employees bringing their autogynephilia to work remains to be seen. Ditto bondage fantasies and wearing rubber dog costumes. Perhaps well-off ladies in search of posh frocks and upscale furnishings will be dazzled and enchanted by the thought of sad, cross-dressing men in thigh-high boots who like to share photos of themselves smeared with unspecified white substances.

The paragraph immediately above was posted as a comment on the Personnel Today website. It was held for moderation, then disappeared. 

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?

The assembled scholars boast that they are “not seeking to improve scientific ‘truth’” and that the purpose of their intellectual toil is “not to find new or better explanations of light.” As if such gifts were theirs to give, or a remotely plausible outcome. Instead, they are vexed by the “social power relations” of scientific enquiry, its objectivity and usefulness, and the fact that the quantifiable and demonstrable tends to trump mythology and the adorable ramblings of one’s Very Indigenous Grandpa. 

The upside, however – i.e., the premise of the whole 2,300-word article – is, to say the least, a tad vague. Apparently, hiring Iroquois or Pawnee people, or Australian Aboriginals, or whoever is deemed sufficiently brown and therefore magical, would result in “the expansion of our pool of what civilisations might look like.” “It just makes sense,” says she.

Readers unschooled in intersectional woo may be puzzled as to why those chosen as suitably indigenous and put-upon would have much to add to the doing of modern astronomy and space exploration. A pivotal role in any success seems unlikely. Readers may also wonder why those who can construct orbital telescopes and land robots on distant planets should defer in matters of science to those who can’t. 

I’m not sure what’s achieved by gushing over the fact that what we now know as the constellation of Orion was referred to as a canoe by an arrested Stone Age foraging culture. A culture that, despite tens of thousands of years of purported “astronomy,” had bugger all to show for it. While Galileo Galilei was calculating the heights of lunar mountains and discovering the moons of Jupiter, our Aboriginal “astronomers” had little to say on the subject.

And while Angelo Secchi was pioneering astronomical spectroscopy – and proving that the blinding disc in the midday sky must be the same kind of object as those twinkling specks seen at night, only much, much closer – and pondering what follows from that realisation – our Aboriginal “astronomers” were still banging on about sky emus.

However, perhaps a few atoms of sympathy are in order. It occurs to me that if your immediate environment is one in which race-based claims aren’t subject to challenge or scepticism, even when sweeping and rather dubious, it must be quite unnerving to encounter these things for the first time. 

Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended – something close to enraged – by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.” 

Ms Morris tells us that in her youth not being white and not looking like the women seen most often in media and advertising made her feel “insecure.” And yet now, when women who resemble her, racially, are all but ubiquitous in media and advertising – way out of proportion to actual demographics, and even added anachronistically to historical dramas – this is also a cause of unhappiness and resentment, and an excuse for convoluted theories of racial victimhood.

But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them. It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort. 

A “polychronic” culture, since you ask, is one in which chatting and distractions are both commonplace and encouraged, and in which “issues such as promptness” – and reliability and productivity – are not prioritised. As favoured in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, that engine of civilisational blossoming and human betterment. 

At which point, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that readers’ comments are not welcome at the Today site, and Yahoo News, where the item above is also published, is “temporarily suspending article commenting.” This, we’re told, is in order to “create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions.” Yes, we will engage and connect by not talking about things.

It does often seem that people writing on certain topics, and with certain political leanings, are to be spared the indignity of discussion or disagreement. Say, people who use their own small children as a political experiment. Or whose list of things deemed “too masculine” includes a shirt with a tractor on it, owning a Ford car, and, obviously, manual labour.

This assault, presumably intended to humiliate the woman and assert dominance over her, is passed over with remarkable ease by Dr Stabler, as if the “white feelings” of the teacher, and the implications of such behaviour – and its accommodation by leftist educators – were unworthy of exploration.

Apparently, hearing that your immediate predecessor was harassed and assaulted, and reduced to tears on a daily basis – by the same teenagers you’re hoping to teach about art – couldn’t possibly be a warning sign, or have any informational content, beyond a belief that those indulging in the disruption, harassment and assault must be steeped in “cultural knowledge,” and obviously oppressed, and therefore deserving of further latitude.

“As the new teacher hired to replace her, I also dealt with feelings of frustration, humiliation, guilt, and anger,” says Dr Stabler. “On the occasions when I reported infractions to parents or administrators, I too played a regrettable role in the consequences my students received at school and at home.”  He’s so sorry for having dared to complain about classroom misbehaviour and vandalism, and for being targeted for humiliation. All those “white emotions” we shouldn’t care about.

Other examples of students displaying their “cultural knowledge” – and “kinetic” creativity – include the punching of a white male teacher, who subsequently agonised over whether to press charges, and which prompts Dr Stabler to deploy the euphemism “interpersonal conflict.” 

We are, however, told that the priorities of physicians, nurses, and medical administrators should be less about “professionalised knowledge,” those drug dosages and such, and more about “lenses of social justice.” These allegedly corrective lenses will “allow physicians to more effectively engage in… social change.” Suitably re-educated, their mentalities rewired, medical workers will have “bidirectional relationships with… the land.”  Which is obviously what you want when that itchy rash won’t go away. 

Professor Jebb insists that her desire to make workplace cake-bringing taboo – and seen as something harmful and antisocial – is “not about the nanny state,” or, dare I suggest, some personal inadequacy. You see, the advertising of cakes and other confections – and the fact that they may be accessible in the workplace – is “undermining people’s free will.” Free will being demonstrated only by compliance with Professor Jebb’s New Rules Of Cake-Eating. And which is why, one assumes, this grown woman, a professional intellectual, can’t say no to a bit of sponge. 

Despite attempts to romanticise aboriginal medicine, the persistent differences in health and lifespan rather speak for themselves. If aboriginal approaches, untainted by “colonial organisations,” are so praiseworthy and desirable, one wonders why aboriginal people suffer from alarming rates of diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis, chlamydia, and any number of other afflictions – from cardiovascular problems to hearing loss and disastrous oral hygiene. And the less contact they have with the “biomedical models” that so offend Ms Blow, the more pronounced the disparities seem to be. Being “disruptive” and “the antithesis of colonial” doesn’t appear to be working out awfully well.

But it does, I think, offer a glimpse into the strange, unhappy world of woke psychology. 

Even being referred to by the public as woke is presented as a basis for weeping, a form of psychological torture. Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos.

However, the more plausible explanations for why journalists may not be held in the highest possible regard remain oddly untouched. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasts that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And the implications of a room full of statusful media professionals being fixated with the supposed pathologies of “whiteness,” and being pretentious and neurotic, and mentally uniform, and both distant from and disdainful of the concerns of the public that they claim to serve, are, needless to say, not vigorously explored. 

Those actually doing the thieving offered more revealing explanations. As one pair of female looters put it while drinking stolen wine: “Chucking bottles, breaking into stuff, it was madness… good though. Good fun. Free alcohol.” Obligingly, with prompting, the duo added a political dimension, of a sort: “It’s the government’s fault. I dunno… the Conservatives… yeah, whatever, whoever it is. We’re showing the police we can do what we want.” 

In short, the students are admitting, albeit unwittingly, that in fact they are the inflexible and bigoted ones, the ones preoccupied with racist and ageist stereotypes, and are incapable of feeling “comfortable” with people whose appearance differs from their own. Apparently, for them, learning is next to impossible unless they are being taught by people who look just like them, are of a similar age, and who share the assumptions of a subset of nineteen-year-olds who are very much accustomed to flattery and indulgence. 

The guide notes, rather earnestly, that the first attempt, by Mr Carvalho – to envelop his head in bread, string, and assorted meat products – prompted more amusement from the tiny audience than the subsequent repetition of it by Ms Cochrane. This is presented as an invitation to “a fundamental shift in paradigm” and some allegedly profound insight into gender politics. Or, how “different actions are read on different bodies.” Our artistic deep thinkers are seemingly unaware of the concepts of novelty and diminishing returns. 

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.”