Lifted from the comments, where WTP alerts us to more fun times for commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area:

❓ Did you know ❓

You can ask any station agent for BART’s free bystander intervention cards, which you can use if you’re experiencing or witnessing harassment in stations and trains.

Here’s how they work 👇 pic.twitter.com/09WmyquxVS

— BART (@SFBART) March 29, 2024

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Though given the consequences of recent attempts at intervention – or what Bay Area Rapid Transit refers to as “allyship” – readers may wonder whether prompt and meaningful assistance may be less frequent than one might wish.

In case you had doubts, WTP adds, “This is not parody.”

Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.  It also calls to mind this uplifting scene from no-less-progressive Portland:

What the card for that would say, I leave to the reader.

Update, via the comments:

Diogenese asks, if direct and effective intervention has been discouraged and entails a serious risk of punishment,

Well, I’m assuming the point is largely to misdirect, to conjure an illusion. To give credulous progressive women, like the ladies in the video, the impression that the situation isn’t as bizarrely horrible as it actually is. And to make credulous progressive women imagine that progressives are The Ones Who Care, while so much of what they touch gets much worse, quite rapidly.

By issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.

And – and – every woman in the explanatory video, every single one of them, has brown skin. So there’s that.

Progress!

“Decolonizing” the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau.

From Scientific American, obviously.

You see,

Increasingly, SETI scientists are grappling with the disquieting notion that, much like their intellectual forebears, their search may somehow be undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups…

But of course. Some editorial trajectories are, I guess, inevitable. As one might imagine, the author of the article, Camilo Garzón, is keen to signal his own modish sensitivities, and so the interview with Ms Charbonneau begins as it means to go on:

“Decolonisation” seems to be a problematic term,

This prompts much rhetorical nodding, along with the news that space exploration is “a stand-in for encounters with Indigenous peoples.” Sadly, before this claim can be explored or tested in any way, we shift sideways in search of a point. Says Ms Charbonneau:

When you park the car in Portland. 

Also, open thread.

Or, The Minefield Of Modern Progressive Manners:

Dan Springer on Seattle’s woke, broke public transport:  

At a recent Sound Transit Board meeting, the outgoing CEO summed up the situation. “Our fare collection system relies overwhelmingly on an honour system,” Peter Rogoff said, “and our increasingly acute problem is that our riders aren’t honouring the system.” By one measurement, as many as a staggering 70% of all passengers are free riders. But even that is only an estimate as there is almost no fare enforcement. Sound Transit did away with fare enforcement officers after a study revealed people of colour were disproportionately getting fined.

Sound Transit Board member Claudia Balducci appears untroubled by this trajectory, insisting that “People are feeling more welcome on our system and less afraid to use it because there’s less of a fear of fare enforcement.” Apparently, this is a good thing. The views of local, law-abiding taxpayers, who are subsidising this experiment in social progress, are left to the imagination.

Ben Sixsmith on the steep decline of Swedish education:

Many of the problems [Magnus] Henrekson and [Johan] Wennström diagnose will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the British education system. Grade inflation has masked declining standards, which, in Sweden, manifested themselves with a Wile E Coyote-esque fall down the PISA rankings. […] Sweden has, in recent decades, undergone an extraordinary demographic transformation. As of 2020, a quarter of Swedish residents had a foreign background. In 2015, research by Dr Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren suggested that “the change in pupil demographics due to immigration explains almost a third of the average decline between 2000 and 2012: 19 per cent in mathematical literacy, 28 per cent in reading literacy, and 41 per cent in scientific literacy.” 

And Emil Kirkegaard on super-progressive Ontario, where “diversity” trumps standards: 

It is now illegal to use a math test to make sure that math teachers know the material they would be teaching.

The motives for removing tests of educator competence soon become apparent. The likely effect on students – including minority students, in whose name competence is being sidelined – is a topic on which readers may care to speculate.

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