Meanwhile, in Mexico City:

A Student Strike Becomes an Occupation, for 17 Years.

Savour that mental image.

It remains unclear exactly who occupies the building and how many members compose the occupying force. Insular and mercurial, they refused repeated requests for interviews. “We’re against the mass media,” explained one occupier, who declined to give his name, saying it was a policy of the occupation not to grant interviews without consent of “the general assembly.” He was standing in what was once the lobby of the auditorium, its walls now covered with insurrectionist stickers, graffiti, posters and murals. “I don’t want to be assimilated into the mass media,” he said.

Oh, there’s more:

Since the late 1960s, the building has been commonly known as the Che Guevara Auditorium. “This has been the most politically symbolic space that the university has had in its entire history,” said Imanol Ordorika Sacristán, head of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s office of institutional evaluation.

And,

For many years the occupation operated as a collective of various radical groups, though its composition mutated, sometimes violently… In 2013, for instance, self-proclaimed anarchists drove other groups out of the building, according to local news accounts. Three months later, however, a band of rivals stormed the auditorium and ejected the anarchists. Later the anarchists — armed with metal rods, fire extinguishers and sticks embedded with nails — violently retook control of the building. The university administration issued a denunciation of the violence and ordered “the immediate surrender” of the auditorium, to no avail.

After several such coups and counter-coups, no-one seems entirely clear what, exactly, the protestors are currently protesting against. However, the building has been unilaterally declared an “autonomous, self-managed workspace,” a leaderless “horizontal organisation,” and is a lively venue for T-shirt salesmen, pamphleteers, and marijuana vendors. And to highlight the occupiers’ immense political gravitas,

A sound system outside the auditorium blasts hard-core punk music.

Via Christina Hoff Sommers. 

Alex Southwell, a pseudonym, on “diversity” hires and the deskilling of academia:

I mentioned that I had received an email from one of the candidates and shared it with the committee members. After reading the email aloud, I argued that the missive effectively disqualified the candidate. The writing was riddled with awkward expression, malapropisms, misplaced punctuation, and other conceptual and formal problems… I asked my fellow committee members how we could possibly hire someone to teach writing who had written such an email. The candidate could not write. I also pointed to her application letter, which was similarly awkward and error-laden. My committee colleagues argued that “we do not teach grammar” in our writing classes. 

Further to the above, Amy Alkon has identified the unnamed beneficiary of these piously lowered standards, and shares some student feedback. As even basic grammar and punctuation are apparently deemed superfluous, even among faculty, and even in official documents, I suspect the “Liberal Studies” department at NYU is probably best avoided.

For more on the Clown Quarter’s disdain for competence, see also this and this. 

Noah Rothman on the delusional excuses of campus Mao-lings: 

Georgetown’s student paper The Hoya endorsed Oberlin’s assessment of the threat posed by Christina Hoff Sommers – and thus, critical statistical analysis – by asserting that her invitation to speak at the university amounted to endorsing “a harmful conversation.” The notion that one is under physical assault eventually legitimises — even demands — a preventative response. The editors at Wellesley College’s student newspaper inadvertently endorsed this grim totalitarianism in an editorial advocating the use of “appropriate measures” against those who support those they deem to be irresponsible politicians or lecturers. “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the piece read. Amid laborious prose that read as though an algorithm translated it from the original Mandarin, these students articulated the logical foundations of fascism: We, the victimised, are owed reparative justice. And here it comes.

And Theodore Dalrymple on vanity as policy: 

The Swedish government agreed to take 160,000 refugees or migrants from the Middle East in a single year (who did not want to claim asylum in Denmark, where the social security payments were lower). The government did this because it (and its supporters) wanted Sweden to be an ethical superpower, a country responsible to and for the whole world, rather than to and for itself… Even these ethical narcissists soon realised, however, that if they proceeded in this fashion for, say, ten years, Sweden would have become, with the aid of a little family reunification and a higher birthrate, a semi–Middle Eastern country stuck in the Baltic, and they promptly closed the borders… Since they were motivated not so much by the desire for change as the desire to preen themselves like ducks at the edge of a pond, they suddenly realised the danger they were in. Their desire to be good was much shallower than their desire to appear good.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Nature doesn’t have to be a rich, white playground. However, structures humans put in place – capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism – allow some people to access the outdoors and force others home.

Everyday Feminism’s Emily Zak wants us to know that the allure of fresh air and countryside is in fact, like everything else, terribly oppressive:  

Those of us who manage to get outside, we need to go beyond calling ourselves lucky. We need to understand ourselves as privileged.

Well, I suppose we all knew that was the predestined conclusion, the only permissible one, and that fretting about it theatrically is something we need to do. And naturally, Ms Zak has an extensive, at times bewildering list of excuses for why any outdoors recreation should be tinged with guilt and wretchedness. From the claim that, “our society leverages natural spaces as a tool for capitalism and colonialism,” to the “toxic binary expectations we have about gender.” You see,

Society actively discourages millions from playing outside, possibly stopping budding conservation activists. 

And then the inevitable list-cum-incantation:

Media paint a homogenous picture of who enjoys the outdoors, as well. They’re typically white, male, cisgender, slender, able-bodied, and assumed straight.

To spare you the tedium, I’ll summarise: If you can’t borrow a tent or don’t have a pair of suitable shoes, and if you don’t see enough adverts featuring gay people kayaking, and kayaking in a discernibly gay-affirming manner, it turns out you’re being oppressed by society.

Of course there’s also the issue of girth:

Only last year did anyone think to build a bike for someone who’s heavier than 300 pounds.

The inhumanity of niche markets. And if the limited availability of reinforced bicycles weren’t quite enough of a stretch:

Many outdoor jobs, like wildland firefighting and logging, remain hyper-masculine and painfully heteronormative.

You heard the lady. The logging industry is painfully heteronormative. And so – er, obviously – “marginalised people” can’t enjoy the great outdoors. “The barriers to outdoor recreation are very real,” says she.  

Meanwhile, in other twenty-first century news, 

A family in Bangladesh has been arrested after using a fake penis to trick villagers into believing a genie had performed a sex change on their teenage daughter. “The girl and her parents have set up a profitable business promising to heal people with a genie,” Monzur Murshed, the local police chief, said. As news spread that the girl had not only been transformed but undergone a mystical circumcision, villagers flocked to seek the genie’s intervention with their own medical woes.

Via sk60.

Blake Neff notes the exquisite sensitivities on display at another $50,000-a-year educational institution: 

Hampshire College in Massachusetts has announced that it will no longer fly the US flag at all in response to an incident where the flag was taken down and burned. The president of the college says that by getting rid of the flag the school will be able to focus on other issues like halting Islamophobia and promoting gay rights.

Because focusing on “Islamophobia” and gay rights, prioritising these things, is what a college is supposed to do, obviously. And it simply can’t be done while the national flag is visible anywhere on campus.

Heather Mac Donald on open borders and indiscriminate immigration: 

Demographics were now driving immigration policy, not vice versa. State and city jurisdictions with large numbers of illegal aliens passed law after law to minimise or eliminate the distinction between legal and illegal status. The most egregious of those policies — and the ones that jump-started Trump’s campaign — were so-called sanctuary laws. These rules forbid state and city employees to co-operate with the already listless efforts of federal officials to enforce the immigration laws, shielding even convicted criminals from any possible risk of deportation.

Although local activists had complained about sanctuary policies for years, no one with power paid attention — until a young woman was fatally shot in July 2015 on the San Francisco Embarcadero by a Mexican drug dealer with seven felony convictions and five previous deportations. Kate Steinle’s murderer had recently been released from jail back onto the streets by the San Francisco sheriff, despite a request from federal immigration agents to detain him for deportation proceedings. Yet despite the belated national outrage directed at San Francisco for its sanctuary ordinance, the city reaffirmed that ordinance in May 2016 in a breath-taking demonstration of the rule that immigration demographics are political destiny — at least until now.

Tim Blair spies an intriguing way to combat bullying: 

Victoria’s controversial Safe Schools founder Roz Ward has been photographed harassing a bystander while marching in a Melbourne rally protesting against the election of Donald Trump as US president. Images obtained by The Australian show the high-profile LGBTI rights and anti-bullying campaigner trying to remove a cap from a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Trump 2016.” Ms Ward, who is carrying ­several copies of the Marxist newspaper Red Flag, is seen smirking while the distressed man tries to pull away and shield himself from her.