In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.
The year began with Europe’s ongoing experiment in massive, indiscriminate immigration – in which crime news is airbrushed of details one mustn’t register, and ludicrous progressive women perform please-don’t-rape-me dances. And in which those on whom this experiment is being conducted, the indigenous population, are expected not to notice any unhappy transformation of their neighbourhoods. Say, by the sudden ubiquity of Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose modes of expression involve machetes.
We also pondered the reinvention of maths teaching by progressive educators in order to flatter the selfish and disruptive. A reinvention deemed necessary because “mathematics curricula are saturated in whiteness,” which causes “intellectual trauma” to students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, and who repeatedly undermine the efforts of others. The exact meaning of the term “whiteness,” deployed many times, remained unclear, beyond a claim that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”
And we visited an immensely progressive Austrian kindergarten, where staff saw fit to expose four-year-old children to “sexual education” without parents’ knowledge or consent, using images of naked men pretending to be women. Other visual aids included jolly scenes of obese adult men showering with children. Parents who dared to question the suitability of the staff’s enthusiasms found their children promptly expelled and blacklisted from 93 kindergartens throughout Vienna, on grounds of being insufficiently tolerant and inclusive.
Academic matters weighed upon our minds in February, with news of the new position, at King’s College London, of Yasmin Benoit, a “model and award-winning asexual activist,” whose asexual credentials include pointedly and repeatedly drawing attention to her cleavage. Ms Benoit’s insights, aired via Instagram, included the now mandatory claims of racial victimhood, and the revelation that SpongeBob Squarepants is also asexual. We were intrigued to hear that Ms Benoit would be revealing her first academic paper within three weeks of her appointment. Doubtless a sign of the scholarly rigour in play.
We also learned that Shakespeare’s The Tempest includes scenes of bad weather and must therefore be accompanied by pre-emptive trigger warnings, lest drama students at the University of the West of England be rendered tearful and distraught. Among the 200 similar cautions issued by the university were warnings of references to blood in Macbeth. Not to be outdone, the Chichester Festival Theatre felt it necessary to warn patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most widely seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.
Oh, and we dutifully noted the latest frontier of human suffering – namely, the phenomenon of hair dysphoria. In which, deep psychological distress can be caused both by length and lack of length simultaneously. Such is our age of competitive complications.
The wellbeing of burglars was a topic in March, following efforts by California’s progressive lawmakers to outlaw the defence of one’s home and loved ones against sociopathic intruders with long criminal histories. Said lawmakers were distressed by the thought of the law-abiding regarding the violation of their homes as in any way provocative or a basis for self-defence. Homeowners, we were told, should instead “retreat,” thereby reducing the risk of “force likely to cause death or great bodily injury” to the burglars, whose wellbeing is apparently a matter of great importance, if only to progressive lawmakers. Advocates of the policy claimed that meekly surrendering one’s possessions to criminals, thereby emboldening them, “promotes racial justice.”
We then catalogued some memorable examples of the latest status-seeking fad – namely, vandalising the Teslas of random motorists. We considered the conceit that picking at one’s own arse in a public car park and wiping the excavated material onto some random person’s car constitutes a moral triumph, the sign of a good person, and the decision to do this to a make of car equipped with eight external cameras. An activity that suggests a level of emotional dysregulation, of total impulse control failure, that’s quite hard to relate to.
The month also brought us transgender-sex-offender-urine-hurling news, in which a cross-dressing gentleman in Germany – known, by himself, as “Sophie Koko” and resplendent in a polka-dot ensemble – proved difficult to apprehend. Possibly due to the public being told by both the police and media that the man lifting his frock and flashing his genitals, and threatening to murder women, and spraying children with his own piss, and for whom they should be alert, was somehow a woman.
And we encountered the traumatising outrage of not having one’s feet affirmed as “non-binary.”
The studious observance of fabulist pronouns came to our attention in April, when sexual predation met the world of Scooby Doo. And when Mr Alec Ray Craig, aged 27, found himself in the care of the Albany Police Department, following his activities at South Albany High School, where the bestubbled Mr Craig tried to pass himself off as a fifteen-year-old girl. Mr Craig was indulged by the court with two years’ probation and ordered to stay at least 500 feet away from schools. Local parents were invited to rely on the promise of a 27-year-old man with a history of violating similar conditions, and who is convinced that he’ll be perceived as an adolescent girl.
Via the pages of Psychology Today, we noted the evaporating standards of “affirmative psychotherapy.” Specifically, the loudly announced imperative to “validate without hesitation,” in which a willingness to pretend the untrue – that a man is a woman, say – and to then applaud oneself as righteous and heroic – is the highest possible goal of a mental health professional. In this Yes, You Are Napoleon school of psychotherapy.
And academia’s hothouse of pretentious agonising once again steered us to the topic of middle-school mathematics. Writing in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, curriculum writer and “social justice” activist Michael Lolkus claimed that the rules of multiplication, percentages and other simple mathematical operations are being befouled by “whiteness,” albeit in ways left entirely mysterious. Mr Lolkus lamented his “positionality” as a “knower of… mathematical concepts,” and therefore an oppressor, before suggesting that underperforming minority pupils – the party least familiar with the subject matter – should be put in charge of structuring lessons and the broader curriculum. A sure-fire recipe for success.
May prompted us to consider the merits of living next door to antisocial morons, “problem families,” as recommended by two Guardian contributors. That’s recommended for others, obviously, not the columnists themselves. Dr Peter Matthews, an Urban Studies lecturer, wants to ensure that more of us live next door to “the poor and marginalised.” By which he means people who blast out loud music in the small hours and who, for entertainment, hurl pets from upstairs windows. While Zoe Williams, who lives far removed from any rough council estates, told us that those who’d prefer not to be assailed by thunderous basslines at 4am, or to have their evenings enlivened by terrified animals falling from the sky, are merely being “dehumanising” and needlessly judgemental.
We also marvelled at the Labour government’s efforts to spare burglars the indignity of jail sentences in prisons deemed overcrowded. Along with plans to prematurely release murderers and rapists, up to 1,500 each year. We then mulled the implication that the level of serious criminal behaviour at any given time should somehow conform to the amount of prison space you have at that time. As if the moral gravity of a criminal act, and likelihood of recidivism and danger to the public, should be determined by whether or not you can be bothered to build another dungeon.
And thanks to the scrupulously peer-reviewed Journal of Lesbian Studies, we visited a world of tree-licking, politically radical masturbation, and an erotic activity coyly referred to as “lesbian-dog relationalities.”
In June, we beheld some lively scenes from the zombie apocalypse in downtown Los Angeles, where gangs of masked progressive activists throw themselves at moving cars in an attempt to dominate alarmed and bewildered drivers, before feigning outrage when the inevitable self-inflicted injuries finally occur. These supposedly radical activities, a kind of demented recreation, prompted thoughts on how the activists’ own actions – their gleeful disregard for normal moral boundaries, while finding amusement in repeatedly causing damage and alarm – render their wellbeing of very low importance.
We also witnessed the fractious melding of witchcraft and transgenderism, and the hierarchy of pretending things that aren’t actually true. A world of colliding make-believe, in which Ms Angela Howard, a “second generation witch,” found herself expelled from both the UK Pagan Federation and the British Druid Order, and denied any further training in uncanny powers, following her belief that ladies’ toilets should be occupied by women, not oddly dressed men. The Pagan Federation issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate.” And so, we were lectured on reality by people who think they’re witches.
And we unearthed some improbable agonising from the pages of the Guardian, where topics of torment included the woman-unhinging properties of cupcakes, the oppression of insufficiently gender-balanced barbecues, and an exquisitely delicate woman crushed by spellcheck software.
In July, we revisited our experiment in multiculturalism and indiscriminate immigration, in which uninvited newcomers have to be reminded that torturing animals and loitering by school gates in order to film children are activities not generally approved of by the indigenous. There followed a menu of other cultural subtleties not being grasped by new arrivals – say, queuing, courtesy and not raping schoolchildren – along with efforts by governments to tactfully convey local customs, while suppressing any noticing of what must not be noticed. Apparently, we must explain civilisation to those unfamiliar with the concept, while pretending that no such corrective measures are required or taking place.
Via the pages of British Vogue, Ms Hanna Flint expressed her dismay that new adaptations of works by Emily Brontë and Jane Austen have “cast the protagonists as white once again.” Ms Flint bemoaned the “factory setting of a white perspective” in tales about white people, and the lack of “historical inclusivity” in adaptations of novels set in rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ms Flint informed us that she is “left somewhat cold” by period-appropriate pallor. A train of thought that terminated before arriving at the possibility that others, perhaps some larger number, might be left somewhat cold by modish anachronism and jarring racial contrivance.
We also visited Loughborough University, where senior lecturer Dr Ben Roberts has devised, at taxpayer expense, an unorthodox use for yoghurt – namely, smearing it on windows so as to slightly lower indoor temperatures during that rarest and briefest of phenomena, the British heatwave. Dr Roberts assured those intrigued that, as soon as the yoghurt has dried, “the smell disappears.”
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