How to un-dent your car. || The lost art of fire-jumping. || Interspecies communication. || Nommy nom. (h/t, Matthew) || Enhance. || Polly Toynbee, hypocrite. || Not entirely unrelated. || The umbrella on the left is the magic one. || On light and relativity. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Rude elephant. || Build your own computer. || If English were phonetically consistent, it might sound like this. || Owen “goal” Jones. || Gavin did not reply. (h/t, Obo) || A map of Chicago’s gangland, 1923-26. (h/t, Coudal) || Girl Talk In A Box. (h/t, Things) || Male spiders in make-up. || And finally, “Evil is a make-believe concept,” say vegetarian cyclists, before being rammed with a car and then stabbed to death by jihadis.

An unnamed New York Times reader asks, “How can I cure my white guilt?”  

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of colour. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

Times contributors Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, self-styled purveyors of “radically empathic advice,” inform this unhappy, seemingly demented reader that, “We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values,” and therefore any comforts and advantages the reader might have, however they were arrived at, are “unearned, the product of corrupt systems,” for which “every white person should be ashamed.” “What you really feel,” they continue, “is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor.”

Today’s words are abuse, creepy and cult.  

Via Dicentra. 

Like a link fest, only more so. Feel free to share items of possible interest in the comments and then bicker about them, as I believe is the custom. By the way, did you know that violence, when indulged in by leftists, isn’t actually violence, but merely “symbolic speech”? 

If all else fails, the reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.

In the comments, Farnsworth M Muldoon steers us to this unhappy development:

Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given “reverse mentors” to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme. Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor… Prof Jon Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them “feeling quite uncomfortable.”

Professor Rowe admits that no evidence of “overt prejudice” against women and minorities has been found, but he nonetheless hopes to inflict discomfort on those deemed sufficiently pale. As if, in itself, this would be some kind of triumph. “We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful,” says the professor. And so, rather than revisiting his own egalitarian assumptions regarding the distribution of interest, aptitude and talent, he and his team will be searching for witches and racial ectoplasm.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the role of “reverse mentor” will attract people already sympathetic to the hokum being peddled, and intrigued by the personal leverage it affords, and who may feel an ideological obligation to unearth some damning but invisible sin, fairly or otherwise, if only to validate their own conceits. Which is to say, the so-called mentors – who’ve agreed to participate in a project that by definition assumes white guilt regardless of evidence or lack thereof – seem more likely to be racially bigoted than any random member of staff.

The speed with which patent woo can propagate among the supposedly intelligent is quite remarkable. The pseudoscience of “unconscious bias” testing and correction has been repeatedly exposed as both laughable and pernicious – a kind of diversity Scientology – and yet it spreads, thanks to ideological modishness and taxpayer funding. And when minority students reject the excuses and woo being peddled ostensibly for their benefit, they may find themselves denounced by their self-appointed saviours.

What’s objectionable, among so much else, is the conceit that these clowns, with their weird racial fixations, and other clowns just like them, have any business at all probing the unconscious of staff based on their race and sex, their maleness and paleness, in order to find bigotry that they assume must exist solely because of their skin colour.

It seems to me that when you’re reduced to hunting for “unconscious bias,” as supposedly confirmed by a person’s preferred charity or the random positioning of a chair, then you’ve crossed a line into something approaching hysteria. And a license for malice.

And yet we appear to have arrived at a point where people are expected to simply accept this kind of insulting presumption and intrusion, with an understanding that one mustn’t question the competence and motives of the clowns doing the ectoplasmic probing.

London wildlife. (h/t, Holborn) || Interspecies communication. || It’s a chemical art. (h/t, Matthew) || “As languages develop, they create colour names in a certain order.” || Packaging of note. (h/t, Obo) || Debra Soh on transsexuality, fetishes and gaydar. || Nocturnal time lapse. || Heh. (h/t, Julia) || Her bad day was way worse than yours. || The big bitchin’ choons of the ancient world. (h/t, Pogonip) || For working dogs. || In Missouri, sideboob and underboob are banned in public. || Tapping tape. || “The size of Dan’s scrotum affects every aspect of his daily life.” || Holedown is a game. || She’s a druid, obviously, and a feminine chaos dragon. || And finally, I think you’ve got a little something on your face.

You can’t say that. 

Footnote of note. 

Michael Jones on the Clown Quarter’s approximation of scholarship: 

In her paper, How to Write as Felt: Touching Transmaterialities and More-Than-Human Intimacies, University of Toronto scholar Stephanie Springgay suggests that felt, a “dense material of permanently interlocking fibres,” can be linked to racism and capitalism.

It’s those “cis-heteronormative White supremacist settler colonial logics,” you see. And the “queer self-touching,” obviously.  

Charles Cooke on the latest young titan of US socialism:  

Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defence spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. 

Charlotte Allen on “healthy masculinity,” as defined by campus woke-lings: 

In May, the University of Texas-Austin hastily pulled back a programme on “healthy masculinity” that its counselling staff had devised – amid a flood of ridicule over such aspects of the programme as posters depicting young men wearing pencilled-in dresses (complete with bust-lines) and encouraging UT’s male students to try nail polish and makeup. The programme, titled “MasculinUT” and devised in 2015, had been originally marketed as a means of reducing campus sexual assault and domestic violence. Instead, as even UT administrators ultimately conceded, it mainly consisted of promoting “gender fluidity” and the treatment of traditional masculine roles and goals — such as focusing on career “success,” becoming the family “breadwinner,” and being told to “act like a man” — as inherently pathological.

And Jonah Goldberg on Sarah Jeong and racism as a credential at the New York Times: 

Yes, it’s warm and moist, hereabouts at least, and time to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade or so, in over 2,500 posts and close to 85,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Proud father. (h/t, Dicentra) || 50 notable special-effects movies. || Things the Soviets made. || Continue the research. || An encouraging sign. (h/t, Julia) || Remember, citizens – always respect the media. || We must listen to the children. || Campus tolerance, part 4,022. || Painting with light. || Luminous women. || Thirsty lions. || Bored Tourists, an anthropological study. || Call it ambition. || Instagram boyfriends. || The crab bucket life of the woke resistance. || Bitesize. || Want one. || It’s all in the ankles, you know. || Hong Kong in ‘49. || It was 1988, when phones were the size of shoeboxes and Milli Vanilli roamed the Earth. || And finally, perhaps symbolically, something small but strangely maddening.

Further to the previous post, more “critical race thought” from a severely educated young person. 

You see, a pleasing lawn is not only “racist” but obviously a manifestation of “the white psyche’s compulsion to establish complete dominion over ‘property.’” (Do note the scare quotes around the word property, which is apparently a doubtful concept with no basis in reality.) Now excuse me while I nip across the road to tell the chap at number 32, the one whose family hail from India, that his immaculate lawn is merely a sign of his own oppression, of submission to “white norms,” “white supremacy,” and the “white conception of property.”

I’m sure he’ll appreciate being educated in this way.

Via Dicentra.