Optimism. // “Tightly holding the pelican by his mouth pouch” and other foreign euphemisms for masturbation. // From above. // Burglars on burglary. // How to teach a baby to climb a fence. // Here is today. // Proportional and sensible. // Ladies, look away now. // The cordless ice drill you’ve always wanted. // Attention, welding enthusiasts. (h/t, Julia) // Japanese water cake. // Why colour grading matters. // Then and now. // Art. // Untarnished. // How to cut string. // So many kinds of things in Star Trek: Voyager. // What metallic electrocrystallization looks like. // On Mandelbrotting and other effects for Doctor Strange. // The Japanese museum of rocks that look like faces. // And finally, VoCo is like Photoshop but for audio and speech. Stay with it, it gets a little odd. 

Here’s a footnote to Monday’s post on Ben Shapiro’s attempts to discuss free speech with Christina Hoff Sommers at DePaul University. And specifically, the claim that his visit would be dangerous, and therefore impermissible, because the university doesn’t have sufficient security staff to protect either the speakers or their audience from harassment and thuggery by its own students.  

Well, it turns out that DePaul did manage to scrape together 30 burly chaps in order to repel, as Shapiro puts it, “a 5’9” Jewish guy.” You see, in modern academia, you mustn’t be allowed to discuss censorship and intolerance in modern academia. Because of “security concerns.” At a lecture with no visible protesters. In case you’re wondering, Mr Shapiro ended up having to Skype Dr Sommers from several blocks away, at which point they had a brief online chat for the benefit of the audience, before relocating the event, along with the audience, to a nearby off-campus theatre, where the discussion could take place as intended. The Skype chat starts around 32:38. 

And do note the YouTube warning, informing us that the video is “unlisted” and that you should therefore “think twice before sharing.” 

Update:

Here’s more of Mr Shapiro, filmed last night at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where things got lively. And where leftist protestors tried to prevent non-students from attending the lecture, and then blocked the stage, before finally conveying their righteousness by pounding on the floor. And note Shapiro’s comment about the protestors’ evident privilege when it comes to disruption and impunity. Do we think that a conservative protest against a leftist speaker, with protestors acting in the same manner, using the same tactics and comparable language, would be accommodated in a similar fashion? Without consequences?

Rules are for the little people, you see.

Update 2: 

A white female journalist, Vicki McKenna, was covering the UW-Madison event. Here’s how she was treated by the leftist protestors. And again, note the behaviour of campus security.

Further to yesterday’s post and lifted from the comments, via sH2, a warning from anti-Trump protestors to Portland’s local press:

Or, “Do as we say and no-one gets hurt. Apart from the people we’re going to hurt while you’re not filming us, obviously.”

Emily Zanotti spies more campus censorship backed by the threat of thuggery: 

DePaul University’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom says they will defy an administration ban on “controversial” speakers, and go ahead with an event next week at the Chicago school featuring conservative speaker Ben Shapiro and “Based Mom” Christina Hoff Sommers. Late Friday, YAF issued an open letter to DePaul University’s administration, noting that they could no longer accept DePaul’s argument that Shapiro did not “substantively contribute” to campus discourse, and that “security concerns” warranted keeping him off campus. DePaul’s Vice President of Facilities, Bob Janis, issued the ban in August, telling YAF students that they could not host the author… [because] DePaul’s modest security forces simply could not handle the ensuing chaos.

“Given the experiences and security concerns that some other schools have had with Ben Shapiro speaking on their campuses, DePaul cannot agree to allow him to speak on our campus at this time,” Mr Janis wrote. Since then, however, Shapiro has spoken at several schools, including Yale and UT Austin, without incident — as has Milo Yiannopolous, whose “Dangerous Faggot” tour has criss-crossed several states. YAF argues that it’s DePaul’s students, and not its invited speakers, that create the problem. DePaul’s YAF branch also note that DePaul claims to have doubled down on its commitment to free speech and the open exchange of ideas on campus, creating a “free speech” speaker series that did not feature any conservative speakers. Hosting Shapiro, they contend, would be well in line with that commitment.

So, to recap. The university’s stated rationale for censorship is that it can’t protect either the speakers or their audience from disruption and thuggery by its own students, which is quite an admission, really. And as we’ve seen, the threat of physical intimidation and mob harassment – by these would-be intellectuals of the left – is quite real. What the university doesn’t admit, however, is that this problem won’t be solved by banning any speakers deemed remotely controversial – in this case, two speakers who prefer evidence and debate over threats and hysteria. It seems to me that the problem will only be addressed, or begin to be addressed, when leftist students no longer feel that mob censorship and physical intimidation are things they can get away with, and get away with repeatedly, without facing consequences. Say, being expelled.

Given the rich seam of psychodrama hinted at above, in which victimhood is professed with rumblings of mob intimidation, and “diversity” comes to mean intolerant mental conformity, it’s perhaps worth revisiting this earlier episode at California State University, Los Angeles, where Mr Shapiro was attempting to speak, and noting both the level of student thuggery and the participation of faculty. Specifically, one Dr Robert Weide, an assistant professor of sociology – a grown man who spends his time tearing down flyers for events he doesn’t like, who denounces those who disagree with him as “fascists” and “white supremacists,” and who offers to fight dissenting students in the university gym, boasting, “I lift bro.” Several videos of Dr Weide’s progressive protégés and their, um, physical vigorousness can be found here. 

Burdened as she is by deep political insight and enormous talent, Ms Yoko Ono wishes to share something with you.

That is all. Carry on.

You think you’ve had a hard day? // Paramusical ensemble. // Lower the shields. // Belted sweaters and other 1970s fashion nightmares for men. // Designer bird houses. // Siberian beach snowballs. // Which Bond girl was formerly a chap? // Cow summoning. // Cosplay. // To say it’s so tiny, he handles it well. // A map of New York street trees. // Made of paper. // Matte painting. // Constructing Rushmore. // 1870s London. // Seen from above. // Today we are learning about salt. // “I get what ‘juicy’ means now.” // Decorated food. // Defensive vomiting. // And finally, the soothing sound of 14 pitched-down crying babies.

Morning, all.  

Via Jeff Wood, Robert Stacy McCain pokes through the feminist memoir of Jessica Valenti: 

The question raised by Sex Object, if read with a critical eye, is whether Jessica Valenti has ever been a victim of anything except her own bad judgment… What kind of fool would major in Women’s Studies? The kind of fool who loses her virginity at 14, goes off to Tulane, sleeps with her ex-boyfriend’s roommate, flunks out and then transfers to SUNY-Albany, that’s who. The only career possible for a Women’s Studies major is as a professional feminist, and there are only so many full-time gigs at non-profit “pro-choice” organisations to go around. However, the Feminist-Industrial Complex  —  the departments of Women’s Studies on some 700 college and university campuses across the United States  —  has a rent-seeking interest in promoting the metastatic growth of feminism, so the fact that many of their alumnae are quite nearly unemployable isn’t mentioned in the course catalogue.

See also this sorry but instructive tale. And Ms Valenti’s mental contortions have been noted here previously. 

Michael J Totten on the joys of feminist Shakespeare: 

The Globe Theatre’s new director, Emma Rice, detests the original Shakespeare. The Bard’s plays, she says, are “tedious” and “inaccessible.” Perhaps, with such a dim view of the source material and its creator, she should have taken a different job, but instead she chose to make Shakespeare more “relevant.” For instance, [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] “Away, you Ethiope,” was changed to, “Get away from me, you ugly bitch.” Rice knew that plenty of Shakespeare purists would find her coarse edits appalling, so she had an actor walk on stage in a spacesuit and say, “Why this obsession with text?” She also placed identity politics front and centre. She mandated, for instance, that 50 percent of the cast be female regardless of the gender of the characters. “It’s the next step for feminism,” she said, “and it’s the next stage for society to smash down the last pillars that are against us.”

And David Kukoff on an alternative educational model of the 1970s that wasn’t altogether successful: 

Following a meeting with progressive-minded parents, [educator and drug counsellor Caldwell Williams] teamed up with English teacher Fred Holtby to create a curriculum that would channel the pop-psych teachings of the time. They wanted students to guide their own learning, focus on their feelings, and engage in raw dialogue about sex, drugs, and all the other topics that animated their lives. The teachings incorporated principles of the popular self-help movement known as est, then shifted to those of Scientology.

Shockingly, it turns out that hugging lessons, watching porn and choosing your own grades has its limitations.

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

I know, I know. I’m leaving you to fend for yourselves again. But after nearly a decade of Fridays, I’m sure you know what to do in the comments. To get things rolling, here’s one of these, and one of those, and some of that. Plus, a Morgan Freeman flashback circa 1971, Brad Bird on animation, and because I know you so well, a searchable historical compendium of coarse and vulgar English. 

Melissa Fabello, the managing editor of Everyday Feminism, the one who told her readers that feminism is a Joy-Bringing Total Explanation For Everything In The World, is once again unhappy: 

When you’re a human being of any combination of marginalised identities making your way through the world, a funny thing happens: People want to fight with you a lot. And I don’t necessarily mean physical fights… but rather, the seemingly innocuous form of fighting known as “debating.”

Yes, Ms Fabello, our graduate, educator and publishing powerhouse, is also “a combination of marginalised identities” – all sadly unspecified – and is continually assailed by the life-threatening outrage that is People Who Disagree With Her. Specifically, people who don’t regard Ms Fabello’s “lived experience,” i.e., her pantomime of victimhood, as the rhetorical full stop, the decisive hand of cards, that she wishes it to be. Put another way, if Ms Fabello says she’s oppressed, then you mustn’t talk back or offer facts to the contrary. Because claims of “lived experience,” however theatrical, embellished or self-flattering they may be, are The Last Word, a triumphant “End Of,” to which no reply is welcome, or decent, or permitted.

If you’ve ever been a marginalised person on the internet, you may recognise this phenomenon as “The Facebook Comment Thread Effect” – and it’s the reason why so many people choose to bow out of these arguments entirely: not because they can’t defend themselves, but because they shouldn’t have to.

Note the conflation of defending a stated position – a not unreasonable expectation, even today, even on Facebook – with defending oneself, and the implication of an assault on one’s very being, or at least one’s ego, which is apparently unfair. This, remember, is a woman paid to edit feminist polemic in order to make it more convincing.

But these absurd arguments happen because there’s always at least one person who just can’t admit that they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

It’s most frequently the people with the most privilege in any given situation who want to engage in “debate” with me and others. And that’s not because I expect more of, say, straight, white, cis men – because I most certainly do not.  

See, that wholesale embrace of “social justice” really does swell the heart and sharpen the mind, making it nimble, attuned to nuance. Not at all stiffened by presumption and the casual dismissal of entire notional categories of humankind.  

To the contrary, I expect this desperate attempt at domination because that’s how oppression works on an individual level.

Ah, so let’s be clear. When straight, white, cis men disagree with feminists and those who imagine themselves “marginalised,” and therefore pious, this is an evil act, a “desperate attempt at domination.”