“Your future’s gone. How old are you?”

Members of Extinction Rebellion block a bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A lively discussion ensues.

Also, open thread.

Lifted from the comments: 

It goes without saying chappie is an educator. Also needless to say, our educator chappie has form.

Given the self-satisfied ignorance on display – or malign perversity – I’m guessing Dr Kotsko doesn’t live in a neighbourhood rapidly being enlivened with Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose social skills, and machetes, are so much in the news here.

Of course, it’s much easier to be dismissive of rapidly changing demographics and to disdain expectations of cultural common ground if your own immediate neighbourhood hasn’t yet been enriched by gangs of machete-wielding sociopaths, or by people butchering animal carcasses in the back garden, or newcomers struggling with the concept of electricity, or getting lively in the name of Islam, or just shitting on your doorstep, as happens in some of the more vibrant areas.

And yes, we’ve been here before.

He was white, you see, and obviously that’s another incriminating feature:

Update, via the comments:

As so often, these little things are quite telling. I realise that gestures of politeness or chivalry aren’t always perfectly expressed, but it takes a certain churlishness, a practised sourness, to construe the above as some ill-intended act of patriarchal oppression, and therefore something to resist – before publicly congratulating yourself on Twitter. And as noted previously, it’s curious how all this feminist empowerment doesn’t seem to result in much stoicism or self-possession or mental resilience, just lots of narcissism, ingratitude and chronic whininess. Such that publicly disdaining the physical attributes – whiteness, maleness, middle-agedness – of the person offering to help you retrieve your overhead luggage – is deemed an act of woke piety. As if these were things for which a person should be disdained, along with their offers of help.

Via Ben Sixsmith. Also, open thread.

Climate change activists chained themselves to the wrong building in the City of London after failing to realise the fossil fuel company they wanted to disrupt had moved address last year.

And yes, there is a punchline:

The group of 200 protesters instead brought chaos to the entrance of a building which houses the offices of a leading renewable energy company.

The protestors’ chanted demands include “No borders, no nations, no gas power stations.”

Update, via the comments:

Readers are invited to marvel at the patchwork of seemingly incompatible concerns, and to ponder how, if at all, any of the protestors’ professed objectives could actually be met without nations, with borders, to implement them. Do they imagine that some borderless, undifferentiated and continually shifting mass of human beings with no common identity or common bond could function at all for any length of time, let alone in ways that they, or we, might find congenial?

Via Tim. Previously. Also, open thread.

Again, via Darleen in the comments:

It’s as if the movie Inherit the Wind had a different ending.

She’s referring to this intriguing academic development: 

Instructors at a prominent university in Australia have been warned not to lecture on the natural historical record of that country; instead, they should teach a creation narrative regarding the origin of indigenous Australian people. Lecturers at the University of New South Wales “have been warned off making the familiar statement in class that ‘Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 years’,” The Australian reports. Instead, they should state that “Aborigines have been here ‘since the beginning of the Dreaming/s’ because this ‘reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land’.”

It seems we’ve gone from “The aboriginal population is primitive and unable to think rationally about things,” which is a sentiment to be denounced, especially in academia, and progressed to “We must treat the aboriginal population as if it were primitive and unable to think rationally about things.” Which, apparently, is something to be applauded. Especially in academia.