Readers will doubtless be intrigued by the “foraged” food – i.e., carrots and leaves, served repeatedly – plus the unheated rooms, the lack of running water, and the whole shitting-in-a-barrel thing. For a mere £900 a night, one can’t expect luxuries like plumbing, protein, or the prospect of heat.

And for those inclined to squint, there may be a rustic charm to things being a loose approximation of what is claimed. And so, just as unheated fishing huts with no plumbing or sanitation are framed as “luxury,” seemingly random objects on a plate are hailed as meals, as “artisanal” and “delicious.”

Well, courtesy towards other road users is a necessary social lubricant and, generally speaking, something to be encouraged. Readers are of course welcome to speculate as to whether changing the word cyclist to people who cycle for some particular purpose about which I’m supposed to care will make anyone’s journey more fragrant, harmonious and morally uplifted.

It may also be worth noting Ms Laker’s tacit assumption that only drivers are in need of behavioural correction, as if cyclists were faultless and incapable of being inconsiderate. Which in turn hints at what may be a factor in some motorists’ limited sympathy for People Of The Pedal.

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 bitch 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.

In light of which, Mr Kaufman’s claims of being “bombarded” with racism – daily, everywhere – become at least explicable, if not convincing.

The pedestrian crossing signal that so distresses Mr Kaufman – a rudimentary humanoid figure, made of white lights on a black background – can be seen here, from a safe distance. You may want to steady yourselves. It’s all very upsetting, at least for the exquisitely sensitive – people finer than ourselves, and who write for the New York Times.

And so, when local parents discover that a determined paedophile has once again been stalking children, and even trying to enrol in schools – supposedly as a girl, despite him being a 27-year-old man with facial hair – then none of those concerned parents must be allowed to know what the man in question looks like, or to know about his previous crimes – even though he’ll be loose again within days – and they must not be allowed to pass comment on his somewhat bizarre appearance.

Because that would be hateful, it seems. The very stuff of wickedness.

Indeed, you are “erasing the values and culture of indigenous people,” and are bolstering “post-colonial discourses of White power and control over people of Colour via forcing the internalization of Western science knowledge.” Instead, all people of pallor must denounce themselves as oppressors, embrace “other ways of knowing” and “re-imagine what science education spaces can look like.”

Sadly, however, and despite the assertions above, the aboriginal alternatives to Maxwell’s equations and commutative algebra remain oddly unspecified.

In the comments, Karen M notes with amusement that science education is construed by Dr Matias as “forcing the internalization of Western science knowledge,” and adds, “This is called teaching. It’s why the students are there.”

Indeed. One might even suppose that internalising Western science knowledge might help students pass science exams and perhaps find science-related jobs. Say, in the West, where the students in question happen to live. Or in fact anywhere, given its global nature.

However, like so many of her peers, Dr Matias shuns the obvious in favour of contortion. And so, we’re told that “colour-blind” teaching – which is to say, treating students fairly, as individuals, rather than tribally, as racial mascots – is itself somehow “racist” and must be done away with. Apparently, we must have different rules for different groups, based on how brown they are.

Again, the basic conceit is that “urban students of colour” are incomprehensible creatures, akin to leprechauns, and not subject to normal proprieties; and that in order to impart even rudimentary information, one must first disavow one’s own values and standards, which other, paler students are nonetheless expected to meet. This, we’re assured, is “social justice.”

Because, you see, being pressured to declare yourself oppressed and racially traumatised, truthfully or not, while being chased into your bedroom and invited to wrestle, is an obvious path to both mental health and “social change.”

We’re told that being a “coloured” or “Indigenous” writer is fraught with “structural oppression,” on account of being “marginalised” – as when being invited to literary award parties and then swooned over by pretentious pale-skinned lefties.

“Whiteness” and “white men” are particular burdens to Ms Whittaker and her peers, whose suffering – their “collective plight” – is seemingly endless and endlessly fascinating, at least among those for whom such woes are currency.

As Ms Whittaker’s world is one of practised self-involvement, her point is at times unobvious. However, our unhappy poet appears to be annoyed both by “underwhelming responses” to her own writing and by insufficiently convincing displays of approval. All that “endless patronising praise.”

At which point, the words high maintenance spring to mind.

Such is the world of identity politics and playing Browner Than Thou. And if you base your written output and literary persona, and your claim of artistic importance, on being Brown And Therefore Fascinating™ – or as Ms Whittaker puts it, “Blak literature” by “Indigenous creatives” – this will happen.

To complain about pretension – “white fawning” – while in the very same paragraph demanding race-fixated, self-agonised appraisals – “criticism that is responsible for the race of its giver” – is incoherent and faintly ludicrous.

To bemoan woke piety as insincere and unsatisfying, which it is by definition, while simultaneously milking it for all it’s worth and encouraging those same pretensions, is unlikely to evoke much in the way of sympathy.

At least not sympathy that’s sincere. 

Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.

It seems we’re supposed to believe – emphatically and indignantly – that Mr Perry and Mr Olatunji Oboi Reed, our candidates for victimhood, are being induced to break the law and to drive in ways that are dangerous to others, including repeatedly running red lights, because of “fewer pedestrians and more vacant lots.”

Cyclists and dog walkers are also invoked as possible factors, along with the claim that a black person may have to drive to the nearest grocery store, a feat rarely undertaken by people of pallor, obviously.

And all of this is presented as if the gentlemen’s behaviour, their choices, could only have external causes. Other variables apparently being unworthy of consideration.

And so, Mr Reed, an “activist for racial equity,” expects city officials to “eliminate any racial… disparities in camera ticketing,” while avoiding any mention whatsoever of behaviour and personal responsibility. “The root cause of traffic violence in our society that is disproportionately impacting Black and brown people is structural racism,” says he.

As a result, the default narrative, the woke conceit, is just a little odd. Namely, if black people are being injured or killed as a result of reckless driving, very often by other black people, this is “traffic violence” and “structural racism.” But attempts to enforce the law and reduce the number of such incidents are also “structural racism” and must therefore be done away with.

Exactly how Ms Heffernan’s neighbours were being aggressive is unclear, but it seems that we, the reader, are expected to dislike them, quite intensely, on account of their being insufficiently leftist.

As readers may be a little confused by the air of displeasure, I should point out that no history of neighbourly rancour is offered as an excuse – no disputes over hedges or noisy pets. Nothing of that sort is mentioned at all. Ms Heffernan’s neighbours are, it seems, to be frowned upon, indeed despised, in print, in a newspaper they may well read, simply for failing to vote for Mr Biden.

You don’t get to control how others perceive you. Emotional blackmail based on demands that others must use fabulist pronouns, even out of earshot, will not change that fact. It may, however, make you look obnoxious and deranged.

‘Every time you refer to me, whether I’m present or not, you first have to clap your hands three times.’

Same vibe.

Even if it were the case that Ms Meghan feels “misgendered” – which would be assuming quite a lot – she has not in fact been “misgendered” by use of the words she and her, or by any recognition of the fact that she’s obviously a woman. She has been referred to accurately, in accord with physical reality. Her mental health problems – any feelings of being “misgendered” – are not the arbiter of what is.

We can see what is.

On grounds that acknowledging tardiness, misbehaviour and a lack of diligence results in “racial imbalance,” which, in the land of the bedlamites, simply won’t do.

And so, those sufficiently dense and inclined to antisocial behaviour will be given a license to disregard normal deadlines and to be selfishly disruptive, all with academic impunity. Why, it’s convenient and morally improving. Mr Patterson, an eleventh-grader who deploys the word inequities with dutiful enthusiasm, informs us, “Students all across the district are excited about this.”

You see, expecting students to meet basic standards of behaviour, punctuality, and, it seems, probity – say, resisting the urge to cheat – is “not fair,” according to San Diego Unified School District Vice President Richard Barrera, who adds that the new policy is – and I quote – “an honest reckoning.”

Indeed, we’re told that this self-satisfied obliteration of standards, all in the name of racial fairness, is “a change that’s been a long time in coming,” one that “reflects reality.”

Again, an intriguing choice of words.

“We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful,” says the professor. And so, rather than revisiting his own egalitarian assumptions regarding the distribution of interest, aptitude and talent, he and his team will be searching for witches and racial ectoplasm.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the role of “reverse mentor” will attract people already sympathetic to the hokum being peddled, and intrigued by the personal leverage it affords, and who may feel an ideological obligation to unearth some damning but invisible sin, fairly or otherwise, if only to validate their own conceits.

Which is to say, the so-called mentors – who’ve agreed to participate in a project that by definition assumes white guilt regardless of evidence or lack thereof – seem more likely to be racially bigoted than any random member of staff.

What’s objectionable, among so much else, is the conceit that these clowns, with their weird racial fixations, have any business at all probing the unconscious of staff based on their race and sex, their maleness and paleness, in order to find bigotry that they assume must exist solely because of their skin colour.

It seems to me that when you’re reduced to hunting for “unconscious bias,” as supposedly confirmed by a person’s preferred charity or the random positioning of a chair, then you’ve crossed a line into something approaching hysteria. And a license for malice.

Readers may also wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.

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.

Because apparently that’s now the reason that museums exist.

Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

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…

But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.

And so we have high-status cultural custodians whose traditional function is now merely an ostensible function, such that the kinds of appreciation and sense of historical connection that their predecessors sought to engender are now merely qualities to inhibit and subvert. The perversity of which is hard to overstate.

Says she, “My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender.”

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

Needless to say, Ms Myers’ website and Twitter feed are an endless churn of unconvincing smiles and rather desperate progressive signalling. We learn, for instance, that “Knowing the sex of a baby… does not tell us anything about the child’s… attitudes toward climate change.”

We also learn that Ms Myers’ “environment” – by which I assume she means her home, social circle, academic workplace, and the leftist lifestyle-hustling circuit – is, “like yours, a patriarchy.” She just knows this, you see, by some paranormal means, and no evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, it seems there’s no expectation that evidence might be appropriate, for this and many other things.

Our author’s male partner, Brent, whose views aren’t deemed worthy of sharing, presumably agrees. If he knows what’s good for him.

Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.

At which point, the word irony springs to mind.

So far as I can see, Professor Wax’s heretical comments – whether on the statistical benefits of bourgeois values, or on cultures of dysfunction, or on “equity” versus competence, or on her own students’ performance disparities and drop-out rates – have yet to be refuted by those trembling with indignation. They have, however, been denounced as “hate speech,” “racist,” “segregationist,” “white supremacy,” etc.

But if a person’s worldview and piety, and social standing, are based on a series of fairly obvious lies, they will tend to be touchy. This can, of course, be extrapolated to describe an institution, many institutions, an entire elite culture. Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.

And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Likewise, when a grad student insists that the self-serving claims of self-defined victims, including her own, should not be questioned or verified, then this isn’t an obvious basis for respect or academic gravitas. Yet, says Ms Reidinger, “I tell students it isn’t the job of the marginalised to prove their marginalisation and that we must take the words of those who suffer discrimination as true and legitimate.”

In short, don’t question me.

This, we’re told, constitutes “critical thought.”

You see, being a grubby, antisocial prick and stealing from a library or grocery store is giving it to the man, man. An exercise in “radical ethics” and the “aesthetics of theft.”

At which point, readers are invited to imagine Dr Pugh being robbed in broad daylight – a bag-snatching or phone-snatching or possibly a mugging – and her subsequent search for some aesthetic in the experience.