Or, Feel My Pain, Now Do As I Say.
This is not a grand battle against institutionalised injustice. This is an addiction to indignation.
Below the fold, a short film by Rob Montz on the vanities, hysteria and clown-shoe politics of campus protest culture:
I need you to try to learn to love the lush overgrowth of your body. Let it grow wild and untamed as a garden you loved as a child. Love it for the way it sustains you, keeps you warm, goes to such lengths not to let you get hurt. Its only job is to care for you. I need you to try to love it if you intend to love me.
In the pages of Everyday Feminism, an anonymous woman of girth, a size 26, wants other people to stop trying to lose weight and to stop acknowledging their own fatness, except in flattering terms, as this makes her – our anonymous, rather demanding woman of girth – feel bad about herself:
Every discussion about bodies — whether in the media or amongst friends — is about how to avoid the horrible fate of looking like me… When you say that you shouldn’t have eaten that lunch or dessert, or when you announce your new year’s resolution to lose 5, 10, 25 pounds, you are saying that you don’t want your body to end up like mine.
Well, at risk of being indelicate, yes.
I know that all of us are impacted by body shaming, and that everyone has real, valid, deep, hard feelings about our bodies. I still need you to stop perpetuating it, especially when talking about yourself. No amount of caveats or prologues make it hurt me less. I need you to know that I’m taking it personally because it is personal.
So if any readers are planning to drop a few pounds by cycling, or jogging, or walking the dog, or just eating less, this makes you complicit in the sin of body shaming, and therefore an oppressor of those with surplus flesh.
Ben Shapiro on facts versus feelings:
If the political goal is to alleviate feelings of discrimination, no end point can ever be reached so long as a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison. And a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison not because of discrimination in the criminal-justice system, but because a disproportionate number of black people commit crimes… Crediting the unjustified feeling that there is pervasive bias in the criminal-justice system means making evidence secondary to perceptions. In the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo., a large majority of black Americans felt that Officer Darren Wilson was guilty of murder in August 2015. They were wrong. But according to our political leaders, such feelings ought to be granted the patina of legitimacy. This isn’t leadership. It’s moral cowardice.
It’s also, quite often, arrogance and vanity.
Thomas Sowell on egregious media bias and the war on cops:
To the race hustlers, black lives don’t really matter nearly as much as their chance to get publicity, power, money, votes or whatever else serves their own interests. The mainstream media play a large, and largely irresponsible, role in the creation and maintenance of a poisonous racial atmosphere that has claimed the lives of policemen around the country. That same poisoned atmosphere has claimed the lives of even more blacks, who have been victims of violence by thugs and criminals who have had fewer restrictions as the police have pulled back, or have been pulled back, under political pressure. The media provide the publicity on which career race hustlers thrive. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which turmoil in the streets gives the media something exciting to attract viewers. In return, the media give those behind this turmoil millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity to spread their poison.
Part 2 here. Heather Mac Donald’s book The War On Cops, which is recommended by Sowell, can be purchased here (Amazon UK) and here (Amazon US).
Speaking of media bias:
This is apparently the current state of American journalism. The newspaper printed a fact, but that fact was unacceptable based on the demographics of the people who might potentially see it.
And Franklin Einspruch on why sport remains hugely popular while art is in decline:
Baseball hasn’t spent a hundred years smashing its own conventions. Baseball players don’t endeavour to turn hitting into a critique of late capitalism. Baseball doesn’t call upon fans to comprehend discussion full of coinages by PhD students trying to impress their dissertation committees, or implicitly punish them for having bourgeois values. Audiences instinctively and rightly hate this kind of pretentiousness.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
This really isn’t the time to be having trouble with your roof rack. // Erotic dining. // Edison films Twain. // Hamster-powered hamster-drawing machine. // Harryhausen’s Martians. // Queen of Mars, 1924. // Space dashboard. // Ooh, I don’t like that cracking sound. // This rarely works with cats. // Harry Connick Jr corrects audience clap-along. // A brief history of evil twins in soap operas. // “Scientists draw eyes on cow butts to protect them from lions.” // A brief history of the bra. // Bookstore. // Bananas. // How big is yours? // If architecture grew. // Recapping Thrones. // Razor-less post-mortem shaving powder has “no offensive odour.” // Miracle breakthrough in high-tech armpit cooling. // And finally, probingly, “Scientists have accurately recreated the feel of a rectum.”
Because of my race, I can eat at a fancy restaurant without the wait staff expecting me to steal the silverware.
The psychological abuse of children by leftist educators continues:
The video of the 14-year-old student’s slam poem at his school has gone viral in the midst of heated national discussions regarding race and privilege. Performed at a slam poetry competition in May at The Paideia School in Atlanta, Royce Mann’s winning poem offers a reflection on the privilege he feels he has been automatically awarded as a result of his being white and male… Royce said that he knew about white and male privilege for most of his life, but never knew how prevalent it was in society until he attended a class called “Race, Class and Gender” that opened his eyes.
Because when a credulous 14-year-old is encouraged to declare that all white males are “scared of what it would be like if… I didn’t have my white boy privilege safety blankie,” this is now an aesthetic and political triumph. And when that same child says, “It is embarrassing that we still live in a world in which we judge another person’s character by… the colour of their skin,” while judging millions of people by the colour of their skin, and doing it proudly, this is something to applaud as both brave and insightful. Behold the makings of a morally corrected citizen.
The poem in question can be heard in full below:
Menstruation is universally referred to as your “moon time”; there is a Moon Lodge with a “Moon Blood Earth Altar” where we are encouraged to offer our “Holy Menstrual Blood to Mother Earth” with prayers and intentions.
Marisa Meltzer ventures into the sisterly world of braiding circles, “water healing,” and ayurvedic breast massage:
“We have created — and are creating — a community of mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers,” Spirit Weavers’ founder and trademark owner, Amy Woodruff, says into a microphone. She has long brown hair and a deep tan. In 2011, a photo of her doing a naked headstand while simultaneously breastfeeding her daughter Naia went viral. (“I was just doin’ my daily flow when the little sweet pea came to sneak a suckle,” Woodroff wrote at the time on her blog, Daughter of the Sun, where she also sells juice cleanses, incense, and “organic baby bootie balm.”) A Kundalini yoga teacher, Woodruff used her newfound fame to pivot into a kind of nexus for the sort of women who are drawn to water births and food-fermenting workshops.
Oh, there’s more. Much more. And yes, there is a photo.
Via Alice.
Thomas Sowell on the displacement of blame:
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a “socialist.” He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism. What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector…
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favourable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the “greed” of the insurance companies. The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
Dave Huber on racial favouritism in college admissions:
Although the US Supreme Court recently upheld the legality of using race as a factor when considering college admissions, a substantial majority of Americans disagree… Perhaps the most interesting aspect of a new Gallup Poll on the topic is that a majority of black Americans believe that merit, not race, should be used for admission to a university.
And Heather Mac Donald on the escalating dysfunction of black Chicago:
Fatherlessness in the city’s black community is at a cataclysmic level — close to 80 percent of children are born to single mothers in high-crime areas. Illegitimacy is catching up fast among Hispanics, as well. Gangs have stepped in where fathers are absent. A 2012 gang audit documented 59 active street gangs with 625 factions, some controlling a single block. Schools in gang territories go on high alert at dismissal time to fend off violence. Endemic crime has prevented the commercial development and gentrification that are revitalising so many parts of Chicago closer to downtown; block after block on the South Side features a wan liquor store or cheque-cashing outlet, surrounded by empty lots and the occasional skeleton of a once-magnificent beaux-arts apartment complex or bank. Non-functioning streetlights, their fuse boxes vandalised, signal the reign of a local gang faction.
There’s more, lots more, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
And then this happened. // Thunderstorm at 37,000 feet. // French horn and chair. // Atomic Filmmakers – Hollywood’s secret film studio. // An auction of space history paraphernalia. (h/t, Things) // Inside Porton Down. // Protozoan Pac-Man. // Jellyfish portraits. // Japanese billiards. // BearCam, Katmai National Park, Alaska. // 3D Calvin & Hobbes. // Handmade omni-capable wheels. // Captain America: Civil War – how it should have ended. // Just swipe, they said. // New wave club night, California, 1986. So much moody, so much hair. // UK media influence. // Bookcase Tetris. // Gardening bras. // The Sequence is a game. // And finally, via Paul, it’s a good-news-bad-news thing: “Passers-by found him sitting in the rain with steam coming out of his body.”
Sarah Marsh alerts Guardian readers to yet another workplace hazard, i.e., the dangers of cake:
It’s 10.30am on a Monday and already the smell of cakes is wafting towards your desk. The colleague, who usually does a spot of baking over the weekend, has been up all night making cupcakes and an email has just flown around about their latest goodies.
Yes, it’s a tale of horror.
Later in the day another email pings into your inbox, this time it’s an update – there’s still some cake left and also sweets have been purchased.
Sweets? A second email? Why, it’s practically harassment.
And it’s always the same people who bring in the treats (you know the ones I mean).
Those bitches, trying to make the day a little more fun by sharing baked fancies with their workmates.
They are not trying to make you overeat, but they are making it much harder to stay healthy. Arguably you don’t have to take the snacks, and, as an adult, you should be able to say no.
I fear the word arguably is doing an awful lot of work here.
However, there is almost a reverse guilt around not accepting the baking of your colleagues. You feel bad for turning down a cake they’ve made to share together. The whole office frowns on you as if you’re some sort of killjoy when you decline to even taste Michael’s prize gateau.
The whole office, you say? It’s strange how the empowered, progressive ladies at the Guardian seem forever at the mercy of every small social expectation, however trivial and weightless.
What’s more, some people (myself included) simply do not have the willpower.
As I was saying, empowered ladies.
For those who are genuinely struggling with their weight and trying to diet, the office baker wafting croissants around is their worst nightmare. Added to that the fact you’ve had a hard day, burdened with loads of extra work, and it’s even more difficult to resist.
Oh, that this world should have such woe in it, such vile temptations. We must recalibrate the term “worst nightmare” to include the offer of a small bun.
Farnsworth M Muldoon steers us, once again, to the pages of Everyday Feminism:
Can’t say so, no. Compulsively tearing out one’s own hair and ripping one’s own skin like an unhappy parrot, which is what we’re actually talking about here, isn’t the most common way to while away the evenings.
But a thought does occur. Given that the publication in question addresses subjects of this kind with extraordinary frequency – covering a thrilling spectrum of neuroses and personality disorders, even delusions of witchcraft and clairvoyance – it’s hard to avoid the impression that the readership of Everyday Feminism, and certainly its staff, is largely made up of people with quite serious mental health issues.
Next week, an article for readers who spend their evenings eating tissues by the fistful and then being sick behind the sofa. #GirlPower!
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