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.” 

Lifted from the comments, another visit to academia’s Clown Quarter, where issues of deep and pressing import are probed good and hard:

In turning attention to this understudied and overdetermining space — the black anus — “Black Anality” considers the racial meanings produced in pornographic texts that insistently return to the black female anus as a critical site of pleasure, peril, and curiosity.

Hey, I’m just reading what it says here. 

And in other, entirely unrelated news: 

82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once. Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read. Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

A mystery, it really is.

Janice Fiamengo on academia’s sanctimonious totalitarians:

[Feminist academic] Jo Livingstone laments that “the tenured, particularly men, are exempt from the kind of character scrutiny to which ordinary employees are subjected.” It’s remarkable to find self-described “progressive” people calling for “character scrutiny” for professors. It sounds like something out of Victorian times: “We hope Professor Sandwell is a respectable man, moderate in his habits, prudent, correct in his opinions, and regular in church attendance.” It’s clear that these individuals would love to able to sanction their colleagues for thinking incorrectly about feminism.

Somewhat related. 

Brian Min finds more feminists exhibiting their trademark stoicism and level-headedness: 

Student organisers of the upcoming talk [a critique of feminism and pretentious victimhood] by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers put up roughly 50 flyers promoting the event on four different campus buildings at Columbia University and Barnard College earlier this month. Nearly all were torn down within 24 hours. Since then, the organisers replaced the originals, posting roughly 75 flyers throughout the Columbia and Barnard campuses. That prompted another series of bizarre reactions. Flyers at Barnard College have had Sommers’ face torn or clawed off… In Lerner Hall on Columbia’s campus, two young women lurked and took pictures of student organisers as they posted the flyers… One of the students organising the event was putting up flyers… when a female student came up to her and threw a cup of cereal and pretzels at her feet.

And Thomas Sowell on immigration and discernment: 

Sweden was, for a long time, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. As of 1940, only about one percent of the Swedish population were immigrants. Even as the proportion of immigrants increased over the years, as late as 1970 90 percent of foreign-born persons in Sweden had been born in other Scandinavian countries or in Western Europe. These immigrants were usually well-educated, and often had higher labour force participation rates and lower unemployment rates than the native Swedes. That all began to change as the growing number of immigrants came increasingly from the Middle East, with Iraqis becoming the largest immigrant group in Sweden.

This changing trend was accompanied by a sharply increased use of the government's “social assistance” programme, from 6 percent in the pre-1976 era to 41 percent in the 1996-1999 period. But, even in this later period, fewer than 7 percent of the immigrants from Scandinavia and Western Europe used “social assistance,” while 44 percent of the immigrants from the Middle East used that welfare state benefit. Immigrants, who were by this time 16 percent of Sweden’s population, had become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the people receiving welfare payments. The proportion of foreigners in prison was 5 times their proportion in the population of the country.

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

Are you bregant or pergert? // “Have you got clouds stuck in your tongue?” // Conveyor belts. // Grim London. // Tiny, swarming robots. // Robots make tiny springs. // Sad chairs of academia. // When your problems multiply. // Mardi Gras Indians. Not known for toning it down. // African visitors to the Tower of London, 1949. // In search of Steve Ditko. // A six-year-old’s drawings brought to life. // Made with old newspaper. (h/t, Julia) // 10,000 things of possible interest. From the tree goats of Morocco to the Icelandic witchcraft museum. // How to bake Icelandic volcano bread. // Earliest known depiction of improper broom use. // Don’t look now but there’s something under the porch. // And finally, via Jen, and as it’s almost Hallowe’en, The Thing With Two Heads, 1972.

Or Doctor Strange in forty words.

There are the usual origin story tropes to get through and the inevitable exposition, but once things start cooking, the lysergic imagery and unhinged action more than compensate. IMAX 3D viewing strongly recommended. And do stay for the mid-credits sting.

But they don’t want to pay for any of it: 

Students at the University of California, Berkeley held a violent protest on campus Friday to demand additional segregated “spaces of colour” for non-white students. A video of the protest shows demonstrators repeatedly heckling white passers-by, barring them entry to a key bridge on campus by forming a human chain while simultaneously allowing students of colour to pass unmolested. Time and again, white students and professors were denied entry to the bridge as they were surrounded by aggressive protesters shouting “go around!” At one point, the video shows a protester refusing to allow an older white man to cross the bridge, eventually directing him to cross by way of a creek that flows underneath the bridge.

Because what could be sweeter than forcing people deemed too pale to literally walk through dirt?

But why such high passion, you ask?

When protesters were asked about the motive for their demonstration, they refused to be recorded, leaving little to no explanation for the rationale behind such an aggressive protest.

If you can endure this five-minute video of the protesters being theatrical and unpleasant, you may discern the usual inchoate rumblings of oppression, and outrage at the unfairness of being expected to pay one’s bills as agreed in writing. Apparently, the entire campus and surrounding streets now belong to them, i.e., a tiny subset of leftwing students, which conveniently excuses all manner of exciting behaviour, including harassing other students, to whom the campus presumably doesn’t belong. There’s also some anti-capitalist fervour aimed at local businesses and the on-campus student store, the mere existence of which is deemed an affront to socialist piety, prompting threats of further disruption, escalating in vehemence, “with the goal of eliminating any revenue generation.”

Such kind and lovely creatures. Not narcissistic at all.

However, the heaviest, most pressing grievance appears to be this:

Protesters were angered because one of their “safe spaces” was relocated to the basement of a building where it had previously occupied the fifth floor.

If, being sane, that doesn’t sound like something that could credibly justify two hours of shouting, shoving and screaming, let alone the obstruction of traffic, both on campus and at a nearby public intersection, to say nothing of thuggish behaviour and blatantly racist harassment, then you may be missing the point. Which is, that these things allow vain, vindictive mediocrities to exert power over others. All while cloaked by the moral anonymity of the mob dynamic, which allows those so inclined to behave in antisocial ways and get away with stuff. Everything else is window dressing. Including the protestors’ claims that the failure to provide a “safe space” of suitable commodiousness, befitting their self-imagined importance, is “part of the structural racism of UC Berkeley.”

And that word you’re looking for is “expel.”