Don’t try this at home. No, really. Don’t. || A heartwarming moment of cross-cultural bonding. (h/t, Holborn) || How to make a blockbuster movie trailer. || It seems we need a bigger bomb-bay. || Impress your friends with fingertip bling. || A partial list of parenthetical pop songs. || Wouldn’t it be nice. || Riposte of note. || A partial success. || Always respect the media. || So many X-Men. || This. (h/t, Damian) || Air conditioner with bonus features. || All aboard. || Debussy plays Debussy, 1913. || Enterprise-D virtual tour revisited. Watch out for the dead crew member and the creepy apparition in the turbolift. || Handmade oak and brass phone cases. || On the origins of chili con carne. || No, you first. || And finally, especially for American readers, “Look, the stars are coming out.”

Want to thwart the life chances of black students? Then hey, become an educator. Say, a professor of Medieval literature at the City University of New York:

In an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed, Dr A W Strouse argues that colleges should support “greater linguistic diversity” and “affirm and embrace” language differences among students, such as the use of slang and African American Vernacular English. Affirming students’ use of non-standard English is important, he says, because students who speak nonstandard English may feel discouraged if called out for it.

Correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can, we’re told, “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry.” Yes, personal growth can do that, especially when overdue.

“Already, scholars of rhetoric believe, as the consensus view, that instructors should not try to change their students’ speech patterns,” Strouse writes. “In the classroom, students shut down in the face of pedantry because they hate when bossy teachers tell them how to talk, especially in cases in which bourgeois white teachers dictate ex cathedra about what speech is ‘correct.’”

Bourgeois white teachers. No prizes for guessing where this is going. And it occurs to me that whether speech patterns are ‘correct’ may depend on whether you’re being understood, or sufficiently precise – say, in class. Or on whether you’re employable.

Further, he declares that the academic norms that privilege standard English should be suspect, because they can justify the judgment of “people’s intelligence based on dubious standards.”

Well, if you’re an employer and trying to thin a pile of job applications, repeated errors of even simple grammar and spelling are, inevitably, going to be a big help, given their tendency to correspond with, and thereby signal, both carelessness and intellectual imprecision. If someone is apparently too distracted to proofread their own job application, that’s unlikely to inspire great confidence. However, Dr Strouse has foreseen this practical problem and proposes a bold, if unorthodox, solution:

When asked why he believes it’s important to embrace and support alternative types of English, especially those that are typically frowned upon in the workplace, Strouse said employers shouldn’t dictate how their employees speak. “The workplace has way too much power and should not be allowed to determine something as fundamental as how we speak,” he declared. “People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’”

And a long and satisfying employment history will no doubt follow.

You see, Dr Strouse is – in his mind, at least – “dismantling linguistic racism.” And he’s doing this using minority students as his little foot soldiers. How very brave of him. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. Because by the time any sufficiently credulous students have pinned their hopes upon it, it won’t be his problem.

Further to this, Glenn Reynolds on the Google memo saga: 

The Damore firing, and [CEO, Sundar] Pichai’s disgraceful handling of it, represents colossal damage to Google’s brand. In essence, it’s an announcement — by a company that has access to everyone’s data — that it endorses the notion of thought-crime.

Heather Mac Donald on divining phantom prejudice: 

The attempt to find systemic police bias has come to this: the difference between an officer saying “uh” and saying “that, that’s.” According to Stanford University researchers, police officers in Oakland, California, use one of those verbal tics more often with white drivers and the other more often with black drivers. If you can guess which tic conveys “respect” and which “disrespect,” you may have a career ahead of you in the exploding field of bias psychology.

Howard Husock on the fallout of “affirmative action”: 

Liberals should ponder the implications of what we’ve learned to date about Harvard admissions. Blacks can score 400 points lower than Asians on the SAT, and almost as much less than whites, and still get admitted. In an earlier time, blacks were told that they must be “twice as good” as whites to get into school or make partner at a law firm; they are now being told that they need only be half as good… Why work hard when less effort will be rewarded in the same way? Inevitably, this logic means that those African-Americans whose work really is twice as good are nonetheless suspected of being sub-par — a dispiriting fate. Who would ever want to be viewed as having been hired (or retained) for reasons other than one’s capabilities — say, fear of litigation?

Jackson Richman on the same: 

Chunyan Li, a board member of the Asian American Coalition for Education, said: “Who is to say Obama’s daughters should have preference over a Chinatown cook’s son?”

Oh, and according to the founder of Vox and Daily Kos, you’re all Nazis now. 

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

Instapundit quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Berkeley faculty’s fear of their own students: 

The University of California at Berkeley played down news last summer that it had installed an “escape hatch” from protesters in the chancellor’s office. The term was “the concoction of a 19-year-old headline writer,” a university spokesman said, referring to the student reporter who broke the story. “It’s a door,” the rep said, later adding that campus security thought it was “beneficial” to have more than one exit. But internal emails we’ve seen show that a staff “deeply disturbed by [recent] occupations” did build the exit to protect themselves from potentially dangerous students.

A $9,000 security door. Oh, and a $700,000 security fence to keep the agitated Mao-lings out of the home of former Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks.

Enabling and excusing all that leftist psychodrama sure is expensive.

Farewell, old friend. (h/t, Damian) || High-speed fabulousness is now a thing. || Lifestyle choice. Choose wisely, children. || A compendium of skillz. (h/t, Obnoxio) || The interactive Bluetooth mood-light salt dispenser you’ve all been waiting for. || Today’s word is tonguebath. || Best done outdoors. || He does this better than you do. || Today’s other word is busted. (h/t, Tim) || Bond title sequences. || At last, a sweat towel for your ta-tas. || Illusion of note. || Kayaking through a cargo ship. || Ye internet of yore. || Voyage ongoing. || Grievance is easy. || The swinging Sixties. || Wardrobe solutions. || Something error happen. || Tiny desktop dramas. || Masculine Women and Feminine Men, 1932. || And finally, the absurd tragedy of the Great London Beer Flood of 1814.

Princeton University is offering a course this fall that will “examine the changing history, aesthetics, politics, and meanings of fatness” through dance and performance art.

Yes, fat feminist dance therapy is a thing that exists. Needless to say, “intersectional dimensions of the fat body” will be thoroughly explored.

“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion. I just hope he gets fired for it.”

Regarding the ongoing ‘Google memo’ saga, I thought I’d lift the following from yesterday’s comments:

To recap. A Google software developer with a PhD in biology writes a polite, conciliatory and politically centrist memo suggesting that there’s a leftist groupthink problem in the company that inhibits open discussion; that men and women on average have differing preferences and abilities, albeit with a large overlap, and so “diversity” policies might benefit from bearing that in mind; and that perhaps people should be treated as individuals rather than as mascots of allegedly oppressed identity groups.

This is immediately met with ludicrous and wilful mischaracterisation by “social justice” Twitter and the ‘progressive’ media, including deliberately deleting the memo’s links to supporting data; a general refusal to engage honestly with the author’s points, or in many cases even to read them; baseless accusations of every ‘ism’ going; personal doxxing; boasts of blacklisting; and demands that the author of the memo be fired for his heresy and never employed again. On grounds that his arguments are “violently offensive” and in need of being “silenced.” He is, you see, “committing violence” with his statistics. All of which rather proves the author’s point about leftist groupthink and its reliance on distortion, intimidation and outright hysteria.

The employee in question has of course now been fired. Readers who wish to be violently offended can read the memo here.

Update: 

Jordan Peterson interviews James Damore, author of the supposedly scandalous and “fascist” memo. Skip forward to 5’10:

Ian Miles Cheong pokes through the literature of Antifa affiliate Redneck Revolt: 

Much of the group’s official website includes rhetoric pulled straight out of Marxist publications, echoing various talking points about the evils of capitalism, property ownership, “artificial borders,” and basic systems of social order, including police, prisons, and courts. Redneck Revolt refers to these public institutions as “systems of social control [that] only exist to serve the rich,” and calls for the end of the “nation-state project.” It lists the US Armed Forces alongside the Ku Klux Klan as having “undermined the struggle for freedom among all people.” The “Resources” page of the group’s website offers a number of publications that promote violence, including a 36-page manual called the “Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla,” which advises readers on how to conduct urban warfare, with sections on “sabotage,” “kidnapping,” “executions,” and “terrorism.”

Related: “Violence can and should be… made commonplace.” And previously. 

Ed Driscoll on Lena Dunham’s latest gratuitous attempt to signal her piety: 

Dunham is now babbling “I live for my truth,” in response to being described, yet again, as a fabulist. In any case, as Ace of Spades writes of the above incident, the SJW crowd “are militant, they are dogmatic, they are intolerant, and they are vicious… They have convinced themselves that their Pleasurable Cruelty to people is justified because they act to vindicate the Righteousness of Strange Gods.” The incident may or may not have happened, but Dunham has chosen to position herself, as veteran journalist Kurt Loder tweeted, as “Lena Dunham, millionaire scourge of working-class women.”

Related, Iowahawk has an idea. 

Toni Airaksinen on complaints that women are being held back in class by “white” and “heteronormative” mathematics:

In a recent article titled Unpacking the Male Superiority Myth and Masculinization of Mathematics at the Intersection, Professor Luis A Leyva argues that factors such as teacher expectations and cultural norms “serve as gendering mechanisms that give rise to sex-based achievement differences.” Citing the “masculinization of mathematics,” Leyva then suggests that the apparent “gender gap” in mathematical ability is socially constructed (as opposed to arising from inherently different cognitive abilities) and therefore a “myth of male superiority.” 

Apparently, it’s “unfair” to hold all students to the same standards of proficiency, as this oppresses women. Or at least it oppresses feminists. And so mathematics must be corrected with “intersectionality theory” and lots of fretting about “whiteness” and “identity.” And very much related, this. Because the best way to teach engineering is to waste class time with lots of “social justice” hokum.

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

As time was short this week, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I will, however, set the ball rolling with, via Obnoxio, some classy signage; a collection of people posing for photographs with their television sets; a map showing the concentration of metal bands in Europe per million residents; some more Korean rap care of Elephants Gerald; and a reminder that among this world’s wonders are amateur video guides to public lavatories.

Oh, and this. 

One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.

Hannah Dreier on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism:  

In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Paediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.

And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line. Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organising lines each morning, not to buy bread, but to eat trash.

And from a safe distance, our betters speak.