It seems we’re expected to follow Mr Decker’s lead, into that glorious tomorrow, where cuckoldry is ascendant, an ideal, and where fathers and their children are biologically disconnected and physically estranged. Because that always goes smoothly. No issues there.

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.

One might think that gangs of masked misfits following elderly and disabled people to their cars, then obstructing their attempts to leave, while generally menacing them and muttering vivid threats, might constitute a breach of the peace, to say the least. Causing fear and alarm is the obvious intention.

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.

And so, we arrive at the idea, common among racial activists, that a country to which you’ve migrated, or to which your parents migrated, should reorganise its history, its cultural memory, in fanciful and jarring ways in order to accommodate you or your racial proxies. Thereby providing the most contrived and overreaching affirmation. As if that were some totally proper and incontestable thing.

It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid.” As “emotional labour.” As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.

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.

It turns out that the reckless visibility of a wedding photo may be crushing the self-esteem out of the touchily unwed. You see, the mere sight of a photo of someone’s happy day can “crowd out the experiences of people with minoritized social identities,” albeit in ways never quite explained.

Other taboos include references to “simple activities like family dance parties,” which are apparently a thing, and “gardening with a spouse.”

Curiously, given the stated importance of “sensitivity” and being mindful of what things might mean, we aren’t invited to ponder the kind of person who would resent someone else’s wedding photo. And then complain about it. Or whether such neurotic affectations, these unhappy mental habits, are something to be actively encouraged. In the name of progress. At a university.

Readers familiar with said sitcom may find these claims a little odd, as Tom and Barbara’s experiment in “self-sufficiency” wasn’t particularly self-sufficient. They don’t prevail in the end, not on their own terms or in accord with their stated principles, and their inability to do so is the primary source of story lines.

Practically every week the couple’s survival is dependent on the neighbours’ car, the neighbours’ phone, the neighbours’ unpaid labour, a convoluted favour of some kind. And of course they’re dependent on the “petty” bourgeois infrastructure maintained by all those people who haven’t adopted a similarly perilous ‘ecological’ lifestyle.

The Goods’ highly selective rejection of bourgeois life is only remotely possible because of their own previous bourgeois habits – a paid-off mortgage, a comfortable low-crime neighbourhood with lots of nearby greenery, and well-heeled neighbours who are forever on tap when crises loom, i.e., weekly.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is therefore unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions.

And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends.

If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

Fintan O’Toole, literary editor of the Irish Times, calls for a “national arts strike” to extort further cash from the taxpayer. “The public has to be reminded that it really does care,” says he. And until more wallets land on the bonfire of publicly funded art, the nation’s creative titans should “close the arts centres” and “hold no poetry readings.”

In the nightmare, I’m held at gunpoint and for 24 hours am forced to read aloud works of “queer theory.” I begin with W. Benjamin Myers’ thoughts on “straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity” – and which allegedly reveal the “uninterrogated Whiteness” of routine dental hygiene and its role in maintaining “arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities.”

While you marvel at the naff, strained metaphor – teeth-brushing as an expression of “Whiteness,” an allegedly pathological state – and the irrelevant, space-filling anecdotal rambling, and the unearned,  predetermined conclusion, and the invocation of Judith Butler – this Judith Butler – do spare a thought for your gracious host. As I poke at the smouldering wreckage of academia. 

Because when you look at a sixteenth-century mirror salvaged from a warship belonging to Henry VIII, the first thing you want to know is how it might induce psychological crises in the sexually dysmorphic.

We’re told – indeed, assured – by Hannah McCann, of the museum’s collections and curatorial staff, “From the Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection, to the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, museums are reinterpreting and Queering their objects.” A comfort, I know.

Exactly why such “queering” is underway – what its relevance might be – is not, however, made clear. An explanation for this bolting-on of irrelevant, flimsy tat – in the name of “queer theory” – was not, it seems, deemed necessary. Nor is it entirely obvious how such “queering” of museum contents benefits those who wish to know more about Henry VIII’s favourite warship.

Regarding the mysterious purpose of all this “queering” of sixteenth-century objects, Rafi adds, drily, “It justifies the employment of lecturers in ‘Queer Theory’…” Indeed. That does seem to be the primary objective. That, and the modish tactic of identifying a thing that people find interesting and then inserting one’s own rather narrow and tedious politics, and by extension oneself.

Looking through the catalogue notes, no other obvious benefit, for visitors, springs to mind. Unless we include the exercising of eyebrows by moving them up and down. And the effect, the incongruity – the sheer cack-handedness of it – is quite bizarre. It reminded me of the ‘adverts’ in The Truman Show, in which Truman’s wife and neighbours suddenly, rather desperately, and often mid-sentence, draw attention to some cleaning product or chicken dinner.

Welcome to the world of queered history. It’s like actual history, but less so.

Other questions generated by means of Queer Theorising include, “Do I think I’m having sex with my dogs when they kiss my face?” Apparently, for Dr Kathy Rudy, a Professor of Women’s Studies, being licked by a dog is difficult to distinguish from kissing grandma on the cheek or being lost in a full-on erotic fever. And thus, we’re told, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”

The, um, research in question – by Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester – was not without its challenges and frustrations: “I had hit a wall in my research. Semi-structured interviews can only take you so far,” we’re told. “I had a persistent feeling of only having traced the surface of my topic, and of wanting to go deeper.” And the hence the masturbation, of course.

Further, annotated and fairly graphic, details of Mr Andersson’s paedophilic self-pleasuring project – sorry, “ethnographic fieldwork” – can be perused via the link above. Should that be your thang.

As to the “embodied understanding” mentioned above, it remains unclear what exactly was achieved – beyond the obvious, I mean. Mr Andersson tells us that during three months of, er, research, and 30 notebook entries, his mind often wandered to thoughts of other gentlemen doing much the same thing with the same publications, including the copies he’d acquired second-hand.

This is described as a “feeling of intimacy.” Dozing off afterwards is described as “self-care,” which is apparently important. And we’re informed that the Cellophane wrappers of his pornography collection “signalled luxury and investment in myself.” It’s Earth-rumbling stuff.

If you’re an employer and trying to thin a pile of job applications, repeated errors of even simple grammar and spelling are, inevitably, going to be a big help, given their tendency to correspond with, and thereby signal, both carelessness and imprecision. If someone is apparently too distracted to proofread their own job application, that’s unlikely to inspire great confidence.

However, Dr Strouse has foreseen this practical problem and proposes a bold, if unorthodox, solution: “The workplace has way too much power and should not be allowed to determine something as fundamental as how we speak,” says he. “People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’” And a long and satisfying employment history will no doubt follow.

You see, Dr Strouse is – in his mind, at least – “dismantling linguistic racism.” And he’s doing this using minority students as his little foot soldiers. How very brave of him. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. Because by the time any sufficiently credulous students have pinned their hopes upon it, it won’t be his problem. 

Apparently, San Francisco’s elementary-school children are expected to have, or at least regurgitate, strong opinions on the Israeli military.

Many young children are of course accustomed to being given a “word of the day,” though I would guess that such highlighted words don’t usually include “strike,” “ceasefire,” and “protest.” Nor, I suspect, would third-graders often be tasked with “disrupting whiteness,” which seems somewhat ambitious and just a tad question-begging, or with imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords.”

Yet here we are.

Readers may wish to ponder whether the sins against progressivism mentioned above – expressing doubts about rioting, or teaching Chinese pronunciation to students of Chinese – exist on the same level of inaptness as, say, a public-school teacher showing ten-year-olds shockingly graphic video of a man being shot in the neck – and killed, in front of his family – and showing that footage repeatedly, “numerous times,” while hectoring those same ten-year-olds on the merits of so-called “anti-fascism.”

Answers on a postcard, please.

The above does, I think, invite questions as to the vetting of public school educators and the kinds of personalities the job seems to attract in high concentrations. It also invites questions as to what kind of environment, what kind of workplace assumptions, might make a teacher of ten-year-olds think that such behaviour would be considered acceptable.

I mean, if nothing else, and even absent any conventional moral inhibition, you’d think that one of the obvious considerations for a teacher of ten-year-olds might at least be the assumption that parents will find out. In this case, when their children arrive home bewildered and distressed. And to therefore behave accordingly. And yet.

On the subject of parents being shocked to discover, belatedly, what their children are actually being taught, these three incidents came to mind. Among many others. Note, in the third link, the casual invention of a fake curriculum – yes, a fake curriculum – so as to deceive any curious parents. And all while insisting, “This is not being deceitful.”

In light of which, the “anti-fascist” snuff-video session mentioned above – the one for other people’s ten-year-olds – doesn’t exactly scream anomaly or aberration, or some unfortunate misreading of the room, so much as a ratcheting upwards.

Behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming.

Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.

“Our aim,” says Fay Hield, professor of music at the University of Sheffield, “is to break down the barriers for people to get involved in folk music. Opening up the genre to different audiences will help to sustain the nation’s folk music for decades to come.”

Different audiences. Not the audience it actually has, mind, the one it attracts, and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. No actual barriers to participation are specified, of course. But the actually existing audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.

Having covered quite a few of these “decolonisation” efforts, which generally rely on a fig-leaf of widening access and removing barriers, it’s remarkable just how rarely any meaningful obstacle to access is actually mentioned. Typically, the humdrum is depicted as gruelling and somehow agonising, and motes are inflated to the size of boulders.

We were told, for instance, that racial minorities are being “deterred” from visiting the British countryside “due to deep-rooted, complex barriers.” Barriers such as the fact that rock-climbing instructors are usually white. And apparently this unremarkable state of affairs, in a white-majority country, is something that needs fixing.

Though it occurs to me that if a person with brown skin were being deterred from trying rock climbing by the fact that the instructor is likely to be white, then it seems somewhat unlikely that said person is interested in rock climbing to any significant extent. And a person deterred by such things may also want to reflect on their own racial assumptions. But we’re not supposed to mention those, at least not in an unflattering light.

You see, it’s “the radical act of collective song.” The “radical act of joy.” And the radical act of shunning white people as some kind of moral contaminant. How the time must fly.

As the only racial group being explicitly excluded is Old Whitey, the obvious inference is that the cause of all this alleged misery and “trauma” is the party being excluded. As if the mere proximity of People Of Pallor would inhibit and befoul any creative endeavour, any glimmer of “joy.” Given the minority status of white people in London, it seems a bit much. And ever so slightly ungrateful.

And it is, I think, worth noting that the nation’s capital, where these dramas of “resistance” unfold, has in my lifetime gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%. Yet it would seem that even this dramatically downsized white devil population is, for some, still too burdensome and oppressive. A cause of “collective trauma.”

I have questions, dear reader. Important, probing questions. Are you unenthused by hip-hop tracks about “police brutality and racialised oppression”? Does rapping about poverty and “the woes of Black Americans as artists” not render you giddy and enthralled? Do you not delight in endless repetition of the word nigga?

I ask because we’re told – by Dr Jeremy McCool and Dr Tyrone Smith, two devotees of “critical race theory” – that a failure to gush with enthusiasm is a result of “systemic bias and inherent prejudice,” and is suppressing such innovation. It is, they say, “the silencing of intellectuals in music.”

It’s perhaps worth noting how one of the most hazardous of words to use – one that may result in a kicking or sudden unemployment, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil – is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are supposed to be drawn, or at least happy to tolerate. Provided it’s being mouthed, endlessly, by idiots of a certain hue. And failing to have a taste for this experience, over and over again, is, we’re now told, evidence of racism.