Today’s tip: Don’t let demented people take control of traffic.

Oh, there’s more: 

The following is lifted from an article titled Why Are So Many Smart, Gorgeous Women Single? It’s Almost An Epidemic: 

7. We’re Becoming Our Own Husbands.

Thanks to feminism and our ability not only to work but to take on positions of leadership in our careers, women are now able to provide ourselves all the benefits husbands used to provide us. We don’t need a guy to spoil us or buy us a house – we’ve got that locked down already. We don’t even need a husband for kids; if we really want to become mothers, there are ways to achieve that without having to tie the knot with someone we’ll just end up divorcing a few years later.

As Damian Counsell quips in reply,

And you know the worst thing about men these days? Their seemingly endless sense of male entitlement.  

Oh, and from the same publication, this. 

It’s all in the nipples. || Hair recoil of note. || A horse walks into a bar. || A suitcase for your wine. || An alternative approach. || Magazines of yore. || Designer megaphones of note. || Think good thoughts. || Plot twist. || Somewhat fancy pastries, part two. || “Activist Adrian Harrop claimed that the posters were dangerous.” || “He’s raping us through technology.” || Warsaw Tetris. || When you can’t be trusted with a real one. || Snail racing. || It’s a sink, it’s a stove, it’s a fridge. || Cooking crab in the forest. || Dissonance detected. || How to detect extra dimensions. || Toilet dilemma of note. || Today’s word is contrabassoon. || And finally, behold ye a super-woke hairstylist-activist and male feminist ally.

Jillian Kay Melchior shares an eye-widening guide to the Clown Quarter’s academic standards, and the unhappy personalities it attracts: 

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences… Beginning in August 2017, the trio wrote 20 hoax papers, submitting them to peer-reviewed journals under a variety of pseudonyms… Journals accepted seven hoax papers. Four have been published…

One hoax paper, submitted to Hypatia [a journal of feminist philosophy], proposed a teaching method centred on “experiential reparations.” It suggested that professors rate students’ levels of oppression based on race, gender, class and other identity categories. Students deemed “privileged” would be kept from commenting in class, interrupted when they did speak, and “invited” to “sit on the floor” or “to wear (light) chains around their shoulders, wrists or ankles for the duration of the course.”

Students who complained would be told that this “educational tool” helps them confront “privileged fragility.” Hypatia’s two unnamed peer reviewers did not object that the proposed teaching method was abusive. “I like this project very much,” one commented. One wondered how to make privileged students “feel genuinely uncomfortable in ways that are humbling and productive,” but not “so uncomfortable (shame) that they resist with renewed vigour.” 

In the world of intersectional grievance hustling, citing dog-humping incidents as evidence of “rape culture” constitutes “very good work” and “excellent scholarship.” We also learn that an aversion to transsexuality can be “challenged” with “receptive penetrative sex toy use.” Oh, and it turns out that you can impress a peer-reviewed feminist social work journal with chapters of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

And yes, there is a video by the hoaxers, explaining their motives and unexpected success, embedded below the fold. 

As your host has been laid low by the common cold, here’s an open thread, in which to share links and then bicker about them. If you fail in your task of entertaining each other, feel free to rummage through the reheated series. 

Oh, and via Dicentra, here’s a spoiler of note. 

For want of anything better to do, we turn to the pages of the Guardian, where columnist Zoe Williams is once again unhappy and resentful: 

The tweeting began before 6am, as healthy, responsible people announced to the world that they were going to the gym for their 6am workout, and might go for a run later… By 7am, someone had posted a picture of themselves doing a complicated yoga posture on a log, and I was as angry as a bull. The problem wasn’t the hashtagging; the problem is with fitness itself.

Ms Williams, it seems, spends every dawn monitoring Twitter hashtags of which she disapproves and raging at the thought of strangers exercising. And she does this while writing an ostensible fitness column for the Guardian, the details of which she struggles to retain:  

I have been writing a fitness column for a year and in this time I’ve digested very little about what exercise does for your body.

Or as the headline puts it,

I’m not sure what exercise does for your body.

This appears, incidentally, inches above a reminder of the importance of supporting the paper’s relentless professionalism. However, there are some things Ms Williams does know:

Thrilling architecture. (h/t, Damian) || Lest we forget. || Labour Party Conference, #1 and #2. || Ladies and gentlemen, the Huffington Post. || We don’t talk about Papa Bear. || The up-nose view. || While they sleep, a visitor calls. || Vault of the Atomic Space Age. (h/t, Things) || Robotic, self-solving Rubik’s Cube. || “Stop gendering your baby.” || Bee cheeks. || Bum scratch of note. || A brief history of guitar distortion. || More professional outrage. || Professional tag. || Yes, but does yours tilt and rotate? || This thing here, on roadside hoardings. || This is one of these. || She does this better than you would, all things considered. || Scenes. || And finally, a certain Starfleet captain asks, “Have I still got the magic?”

“I’ve had people saying to me, ‘You just want to fuck about!’” says 29-year-old Calum James, who identifies as a heteroflexible pansexual solo polyamorous relationship anarchist.

Tim Newman is reading the Guardian.

Feminist activist and Russian law student Anna Dovgalyuk has taken to pouring a bleach and water mixture on the crotches of unsuspecting men on the St. Petersburg Metro for their anti-feminist sin of “manspreading.” In a “video manifesto,” Dovgalyuk dumps the mixture contained in a water bottle onto over 60 men’s crotches. Most are too stunned to react… “This solution is 30 times more concentrated than the mixture used by housewives when doing the laundry,” she claims in the video. “It eats colours in the fabric in a matter of minutes — leaving indelible stains.”

Ah, feminist activists. Just like normal women.

Bo and Ben Winegard ponder woke piety and its contradictions: 

Even Woke language for popular consumption is complicated by a quickly changing list of taboo epithets. Is it wrong to say homosexual relationship? Is it all right to say African-American? Will I be berated if I say Mexican-American? These changing prohibitions function well to distinguish elites from hoi polloi because they require devotion, erudition, and the right social acquaintances to understand.

Using arcane language and adhering to constantly changing norms about acceptable epithets are not particularly effective for attracting people from the broader population to one’s cause. In fact, they almost certainly alienate many average, and otherwise sympathetic, Americans, who understandably disdain indecipherable prose and elite superciliousness. Therefore, this signalling function of the Woke faith is actually antithetical to the stated goals of Wokeness (i.e., creating a more just social world—which requires a broad coalition of different classes of people).

Also antithetical to the stated goals of Wokeness is the tendency of its most popular preachers to castigate sinners instead of calmly attempting to persuade them of the justness of the Woke doctrine. Antithetical, but perfectly comprehensible from a signalling perspective. Those who are Woke don’t really want to inhabit an entirely Woke world without the bigoted masses; instead, they want to occupy a world of good and evil, of the just and the wicked, of the high status and the low status, of the elite and hoi polloi. 

As noted here previously, it helps if you think of woke piety as a kind of positional good, a marker of in-group status, jealously defended and forever in peril; and hence the unattractive desperation and crab-bucket dynamic that so often accompany such displays. For the woke, it’s always winter, but never Christmas. As Kristian Niemietz put it,