So, anyway, as you may have heard, at a recent awards ceremony, a black millionaire celebrity slapped another black millionaire celebrity. The root cause, however, has only now been discovered:

This is about a much larger systemic issue rooted in white supremacist culture designed to police the behaviour of Blacks amongst the who’s who in Hollywood and beyond.

It says so here:

Respectability politics suggest that equity and fair treatment require that Black people — both inside and outside of Hollywood — conduct ourselves in a manner deemed acceptable to whites. Furthermore, expressing any emotion other than complacence, apathy, or agreeance directly violates those norms, disqualifying Black people from receiving the same equitable treatment that whites enjoy as a birthright. And sadly, there is a large group of Blacks who have internalised this toxic messaging.

You see, when Mr Will Smith, a black millionaire celebrity, publicly assaults Mr Chris Rock, another black millionaire celebrity, on live television, and is promptly given a prestigious award, for which he is applauded, and is then seen celebrating triumphantly at the award after-party, this is somehow proof of victimhood, of being racially “policed” by “respectability politics” and other works of the White Devil. Mr Smith, we’re told, is “not receiving the same equitable treatment that Whites enjoy as a birthright.”

Readers will note the implication that any black viewers who regard Mr Smith’s behaviour as not entirely optimal are merely parroting views “deemed acceptable to whites,” having somehow “internalised” the “toxic messaging” of “white supremacist culture.” For what it’s worth, I don’t have strong feelings on the incident one way or the other – it all seemed rather farcical – but I doubt my first impulse would be to suggest that black people who disapproved, however much or little, are merely aping whitey and don’t know their own minds. But such is wokeness.

The author of the piece, published in Forbes, is Maia Niguel Hoskin, a “writer, activist, and college professor,” whose areas of supposed expertise include “oppression, difference and mental health,” including “racial battle fatigue,” and who claims, modestly, to “facilitate cultural consciousness.” As a self-styled “speaker of truth,” she is, of course, schooled in “critical race theory.”

To accommodate the entirety of Mr Shatner’s talent.

By Nick Acosta. Via MeFi.

Or, Why Don’t More Women Care About Ant-Man’s Pym Particles?  

Writing in the Washington Free Beacon, Elizabeth Harrington tells us, 

The National Science Foundation is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist. The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopaedia. […] Noam Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times… has asserted the encyclopaedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards. “And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.

Such are the ruminations of the modern intellectual. 

Although not indulged with $200,000 of public money, the mighty blogger Ace does share a few unorthodox ideas. Ideas, I mean, that are unorthodox among many left-leaning academics and New York Times columnists:

The very fact that a site exists which gives an exhaustive, 4000-word-plus citations treatment of Ant-Man is going to skew male… Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much. I don’t care about Ant-Man, but for some reason I find comfort in knowing that someone out there does care about Ant-Man, and has digested Ant-Man’s fifty year history for me, should my life ever depend on knowing when Ant-Man married Janet Van Dyne… So the real [feminist] complaint boils down to this: The ten percent of a website which could reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers does in fact reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers, and yes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does get a more exhaustive, nerdishly-loving treatment than Sex and the City.

The federal government needs to pay people to study this and propose “solutions”? It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men. You don’t have to believe that to at least agree: This should have been one of the explanations scientifically studied, if we’re going to have a scientific study at all.

For newcomers, a selection of short films and documentaries from the archives.

Till Nowak visits the Institute for Centrifugal Research. An adventure in human endurance and excessive G-Force.  

From earlier this year, the late Norm Geras on communist cool: 

Born in communist Czechoslovakia, Dalibor Rohac is unsettled by the continued displays of the symbols of communism by people on the political left. In view of the millions of victims of communist regimes, he finds it difficult to understand the surviving taste for the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara t-shirts and the like. Rohac mentions some possible explanations for this: that few people grasp the magnitude of the crimes of communism; that, whereas totalitarian fascism was always a poisonous idea, communism may be seen as a good idea that went wrong… A good idea gone wrong as may be, communism didn’t just go wrong in some minor or insignificant detail, but on a vast scale, and the manner in which it went wrong wasn’t only the manner of what one calls a ‘mistake’… No one with a genuine attachment to humane ideals should want to be associated with, much less bear upon their person, the iconography in question. It should have been completely discredited.

At the same time, for my part I do not find it so difficult to understand why this hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened, because the left is far from having rid itself of those tendencies towards apologia for dictatorship and disregard for human rights that prevailed in the mid-20th century… Moreover, we are not talking here, as is sometimes alleged, of only a small fraction of the left – the far left: unreconstructed Stalinists, the SWP and its penumbra, and so forth. They form, to be sure, a core region of the anti-democratic indulgence I mean. But it also has a large hinterland among well-meaning ‘liberals’… The regrettable fact of the matter is that too much of the left still gives anti-capitalism and/or equality priority over the norms of democracy, liberty and human rights; and this is why the iconography tainted by the deaths of millions of innocent people is still seen as being cool where it no longer should be.

Unsurprisingly, I differ from Norm on one point, a point I think of as quite important. Communism – Marxism and its variants – was never a good idea. It is, and always was, a monstrous idea, a license for coercion, atrocity and horror – predictably so. And not coincidentally, it was conceived by, and has since entranced, some very unpleasant people. 

Mark Steyn on being sued by a fool: 

I’m currently being sued… by Dr Michael Mann, the eminent global warm-monger, for mocking his increasingly discredited climate-change “hockey stick.” So Dr Mann has sued for what his complaint to the court called “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.” In fact, Dr Mann is not a “Nobel prize recipient.” But, as Donna LaFramboise recently pointed out, he has spent many years passing himself off as one. The nearest he got to a Nobel was as one of several thousand contributors to one of various reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2007 shared a Nobel Peace Prize. So Dr Mann is a Nobel laureate in the same sense that my mother is: She’s Belgian, and Belgium is in the European Union, and the European Union was collectively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. My mum does not claim to be a Nobel prize winner, but Dr Mann did, on an industrial scale, including in his publicist’s bio, his book jackets and his website — until, in the wake of his false complaint, the Nobel Institute in Oslo declared that he was not a Nobel laureate at all. In that sense, Dr Mann is, indeed, a fraud. It is a fascinating legal question whether a man guilty of serial misrepresentation can, in fact, be defamed.

John Hinderaker on Big Government economics: 

“We must increase our debt limit so that we can pay our bills.” As Tyler Durden notes, this is the “most disturbing sentence uttered during the debt ceiling debate/government shut down.” […] There are around 72 million American children under the age of 18. If you do the maths, assuming they are on the hook for our debts, that means that currently each American child is around $236,000 in debt. Since only around one-half of Americans are federal income taxpayers, it would be more accurate to say that each future taxpayer owes $472,000. If two of them get married, they owe just short of $1 million, with more debt being piled up every day and with interest costs sure to increase. These numbers can be sliced and diced in various ways, but any way you look at it, it is insane that those in Washington who wanted to blow past the statutory debt limit without hesitation so that we can “pay our bills” are hailed as responsible. Here is a hint: if you have to borrow money to pay your bills, you aren’t paying your bills.

Somewhat related: 

“The federal government is America’s largest employer,” Obama said.