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. 

Pogonip steers us to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where Sophia Stephens, a freelance writer and self-described “educator,” informs white employers of how to “ensure the safety of the black people and people of colour who work with and for you.” Not safety in the sense of fire regulations, of course, or loose stair carpeting, but with regard to the exquisitely delicate emotional state of All Brown-Skinned People Everywhere. Due to this perilous and inherent instability of mood, there are “questions to interrogate as you engage with people of colour and their labour.” Among which,

Are you asking or demanding? Many white people who approach Black and non-Black people of colour for labour do not ask for our labour — they demand it from us. Asking someone to do something leaves it open-ended with space for the person to say no… If you are exhausting and hurting Black and non-Black people of colour around you because you won’t take “no” for an answer when you request labour from us… it’s time to check your privilege.

If that’s not catnip for employers with tight deadlines, I don’t know what is. Oh, there’s more:

The most common opening for a demand that most white people don’t even realise is a demand is, “I need.” Of course you have needs, but is it necessary that you consistently go to people of colour, who also have needs that are systematically denied to them, to help you?

Yes, white employers must avoid using the phrase “I need such-and-such by the end of the week,” as this inflicts cruel and unusual hardship on those possessed of brown skin. And as an employer, a white employer, you must always remember to ask yourself, ‘Could I give this person’s work – which I hired them to do, and am paying them to do – to someone else – ideally, someone whiter?’ Or as Ms Stephens puts it,

It is important to reflect on how generations of access and entitlement to our labour does not mean you automatically get it from us now.

Needless to say, there are many other terms and conditions for white employers to observe, including parsing your requests for signs that they may be “inherently racist” or contain unspecified “microaggressions” and “triggering” language; and this:

Take a peek at our social media (if you have access and permission), or go on Google and do some research before you ask us for labour.

Presumably, this is in order to perform a daily, perhaps hourly, check on the current moods of every single brownish employee, and thereby discern whether or not they may be willing to consider doing whatever it is you’re paying them to do.

Yes, huzzah, an open thread. Feel free to share links of possible interest and then bicker about them. I did briefly toy with the title Link Dump, but fest sounded so much jollier.

If all else fails, you can always poke through the reheated series and greatest hits.

Drink or soak? || Mystery solved. (h/t, Julia) || That’s not a zoom lens, this is a zoom lens. || Close enough. (h/t, Dicentra) || Old but gold. (h/t, Obo) || Hey, ladies, come get some. || Cosplay interruptus. (h/t, Damian) || His is bigger than yours. || Cardboard machines. || At last, space beer. || “Good evening, Stuttgart.” || Jelly Tetris. Well, I’d play. || Journalism is a proper job. || I repeat, journalism is a proper job. || The 93 penises of the Bayeux Tapestry. || We want plates, revisited. Includes meat on a clipboard and other horrors. || These old trousers are older than your old trousers. || Continue the research. || Now make fire. || And finally, via Dicentra, and quite understandably, he’s still haunted by it.

Tyson E Lewis, a professor of art education at the University of North Texas, fires his wisdom into our minds: 

Lewis posits that there is a “corporeal geometry of whiteness,” and that what emerges from his analysis “is a description of the aesthetic dimensions of discrimination through the geometric deployment of lines (that maximally extend white bodies into space) and an angle of vision (that constitutes totalized and rigidified racial hierarchies).” 

So far as I can tell, and having stared at it for some time, the pile of words above seems intended to repel comprehension. Perhaps we’re supposed to back away from it in bewildered deference.

“Race is lived through an aesthetic geometry of lines and angles that connect and disconnect bodies on a pre-conscious level,” Lewis asserts, adding that “whiteness is a kind of one-dimensional way of being in the world.” 

Ah. Bad whitey. That much is clear. Now do brownness.

According to Dr Lewis, “The question of whiteness cannot be avoided if we are to continue to uphold the idea of educational equity and equality.” However, as the word equity, when used anywhere near a campus, roughly translates as “equality of outcome regardless of input,” and is therefore both condescending and unfair, readers may not share our educator’s enthusiasm.

When not signalling his fashionable disdain for all things white and male, and doing violence to the English language in the name of “critical pedagogy,” Dr Lewis writes inexplicably neglected erotic literature. 

Grace Gottschling on what it takes to be a woke law professor: 

A Yale University law professor encouraged people to “hide” illegal immigrants from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but says he has “no qualms” about revealing the home addresses of ICE employees.

Apparently, the law professor in question, Dr Gregg Gonsalves, plans to aid and abet law-breakers in the name of “civil disobedience.” Note too that Dr Gonsalves doesn’t like his own public comments – one might call them boasts – being quoted verbatim by people he deems insufficiently sympathetic. To the extent that he wants Campus Reform, which reported on his views, classified as a “hate group.”

Heather Mac Donald on selective outrage: 

In the first six months of 2018, more than 60 children under 15 have been shot in Chicago. In June alone, an 11-year-old boy was shot in the head; a 12-year-old girl was killed as she was carrying her baby cousin; and a 14-year-old boy was gunned down by a passing car. Black Lives Matter activists have nothing to say about this violence because it does not involve police officers. Officer-involved shootings are a minute fraction of Chicago’s ongoing carnage—in 2016, they made up 0.5 percent of all shootings in the city.

And Grace Carr on an unexpected development: 

Zander Keig, a Coast Guard veteran, now works as a clinical social work case manager at San Diego’s Naval Medical Centre. She started transitioning in 2005. She told the Washington Post that she was encouraged to speak up loudly and often when she was a woman, but now that she looks like, and identifies as, a man, she gets accused of “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege,” by outspoken feminists like her former self.

Truly, we live in an age of wonders.

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

Pachelbel’s Canon played on a rubber chicken. (h/t, Matthew) || Full-colour 3D x-rays reveal the meaty goodness within. || It’s a phone, it’s a shaver. || Lemon makes bid for freedom. || Because all houseplants need robotic legs. || Cool, yes, but just don’t lean backwards. || He bought a dog spa. || Sad and embarrassed. || “We had to crawl under the rotor blades.” || An iceberg passes by. || Oh, that black-supremacist-UFO-cult. || Iridescent insects. || Popcorn-powered robots. || At last, a phaser-controlled mood rock. || Smile-activated mirror. Ideal for tormenting moody teenagers. || And finally, via Julia, “The woman contended that police had no basis to make comments about her possible mental health issues.”

Are you neurotic, insecure, easily preyed upon? Or maybe just pretentious and desperate to participate in some fashionable agonising? If so, this exclusive online seminar – So… You Have White Guilt. What Now? – is just the thing for you. During the seminar, you’ll be taught how to “avoid acting out the guilty, white stereotype” by “channelling” your white guilt “through a healthy and productive anti-racist stance.” Provided, that is, you already have the all-important “white guilt,” without which no channelling can occur:   

You’ll receive guidance that will help you cultivate a “both/and” mindset that will allow you to hold the tension of being complicit with racism and white supremacy while simultaneously cultivating a healthy, white anti-racist identity.

Yes, all this and more can be yours. But first you must confess. And hand over $35.

We’ve been here before, of course.