Further to yesterday’s post (and any number of others), Arthur C Brooks on the consequences of competitive victimhood: 

Victimhood culture makes for worse citizens — people who are less helpful, more entitled, and more selfish. In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups. Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task.

The results were stark. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13 percent more entitled. In a separate experiment, the researchers found that members of the unfairness group were 11 percent more likely to express selfish attitudes. In a comical and telling aside, the researchers noted that the [self-defined] victims were more likely than the non-victims to leave trash behind on the desks and to steal the experimenters’ pens.

Imagine my surprise. Via Ace. 

I was excommunicated… from a religion that I didn’t know existed. 

Gad Saad chats with Christina Hoff Sommers. 

Victor Davis Hanson on the vulgarity, hypocrisy – and appeal – of Donald Trump: 

The children of Republican elites do not sit in classes where a quarter of the students do not speak English… Their children are not on buses where an altercation between squabbling eight-year-olds leads to a tattooed parent arriving at your home to challenge you to a fight over “disrespecting” his family name. The establishment Republicans… are rarely stopped in a Walmart parking lot by a gang-banger in the next parking stall who out of the blue says, “Hey essay, what the fuck are you looking at me for already? And what are you going to do about it, punk?” 

Much like our own Guardianistas, gripped as they are by the Simon Schama Tendency. 

John Daniel Davidson on mass immigration and cultural decline: 

In the long term, Europe can either prefer its own civilisation and culture, and defend it, or capitulate to another. But it cannot absorb masses of unassimilated members of another culture and expect to survive. It will be changed forever, and the change will be in the direction of the immigrants’ way of life, and away from that of the native-born. This is a difficult truth to accept in our egalitarian age.

And Mary Grabar on Melissa Click and her equally arrogant faculty supporters: 

When news of her firing came, supporters doubled down: at the faculty council meeting, no one supported her firing. In fact, faculty expressed concern about how the decision would impact “the ability of academics to participate in activism.” […] What we have is a group of employees assuming the right to use company time in any way they want. Their outrage at outside scrutiny shows a level of privilege that no other profession enjoys. Attorneys, doctors, engineers, or manufacturers, all can be sued, but a professor who cheats students preparing for communications careers by teaching Lady Gaga cannot.

As Grabar notes, many of Click’s supporters, chiefly from the worlds of sociology and gender studies, were featured in David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s 2009 book One-Party Classroom, an eye-widening catalogue of absurdly dogmatic and politicised courses often taught by educators of questionable competence.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

In which the students of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a winner of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art’s Foster Prize, stagger beneath the knee-buckling weight of their own immense talents. From Ms Phoebe Warner, an aspiring educator of children, and her exercise in gratuitous, somewhat masochistic thigh abuse, to the cryptically-named Fatty Spice, a Twitter poet and graduate of the Montserrat College of Art, who “makes shrines to her failed relationships” and dazzles us today with a pink ensemble and a gripping exercise in drooling, doomed horticulture and radical fatness. All captured for posterity at the Zeitgeist Gallery and Studios, Beverly, Massachusetts, May 2014: 

Readers will of course recall Ms Schaefer’s own, even more staggering contributions to the culture. A body of work perhaps best summarised by this video of the artist gnawing at a lettuce while slouching in her underpants. 

How cats and dogs differ. // 2,000 ball bearings and one of these. // An en caul birth. // When patience is tested on British roads. // “The laws would allow people to ‘bequeath’ their dead bodies for necrophilic intercourse.” // Pilea involucrata.// Pictures posted on social media accounts cause cancer in children, says Islamic cleric. // It’s not paint thinner, it’s moonshine. // Issues of If magazine, 1952-1974. // First world problem. // Janice Fiamengo on so-called “structural violence.” // Trek enthusiasts convene, 1976. // Gershwin plays Gershwin, 1924. // A guide to British industrial history. // I question the geography. // What happens to marshmallows in a vacuum? // Vienna. // I’m pretty sure a thing like that shouldn’t be in there. // And great scenery + toilet = good times.

Janice Fiamengo on complaints of “microaggression” and other recreational outrage:

Previously. And before that. 

Or, The Politics of Tipping, As Devised By An Idiot: 

I never tip white waiters. I don’t want to enable their sense of entitlement. I want to break the cycle of them getting what they want. I only tip minorities. It’s time we balance the power structure, one gesture at a time.

Identity politics. Just say no.

Further to this, Juan Carlos Hidalgo on the vanity and horror of Venezuelan socialism: 

A couple of years ago, the then minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was “not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos” (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.

As noted many times, the left’s self-imagined radicals have little to gain from successful, independent people. Because success and independence – independence of them – makes you the enemy.  

And Thomas Sowell on socialist thinking as sleight-of-hand: 

Free college of course has an appeal to the young, especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money… Those young people who understand this, whether clearly or vaguely, are not likely to be deterred from wanting socialism. Because what they really want is for somebody else to pay for their decision to go to college.

British readers may recall the student rioting of 2010, during which students took thuggish umbrage at the thought of being expected to pay for their own choices, like adults, albeit with generous credit, and while depicting themselves as “slaves.” A bold choice of words for people so engorged with entitlement that they assume an unassailable right to other people’s earnings. Stripped of its threats and theatrical pretensions, the students’ message was: “I don’t think the degree course I’ve chosen is worth paying for and yet I refuse to do without, therefore someone else should be forced to pay for it instead.”

And by happy coincidence, these little clownlings are currently ‘occupying’ a lecture hall at Sheffield University and demanding a “free, non-hierarchical” university education. Because choosing to take a degree course that they don’t want to pay for, and don’t think is worth paying for, is apparently “a radical act,” and because, being so fabulous, so incredibly radical, they have a “right” to the money that other people had to earn by doing something of value. According to the occupiers and their supporters, learning useful skills and thereby becoming employable “is exactly what education shouldn’t be [about].” Which suggests they probably aren’t the engineers and biochemists of tomorrow.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

The Ladybird Guide to Leftwing People. From the chapter Leftwing People Are Funny:

Leftwing people have “enlightened comedians” who make jokes on “panel games.” These are broadcast on the television and BBC Radio 4. The enlightened comedians make people laugh at rightwing people, whom they consider stupid. In the olden days, comedians made jokes about Irish people, but these comedians weren’t clever like the enlightened comedians.

Instead of the Irish people, the enlightened comedians make jokes about working-class people. Because they care, they use special words like “Glaswegians,” “Sun readers” and “UKIP supporters,” so the working-class people will not notice.

Working-class people do funny things like drinking Monster energy drinks, eating Haribos and watching television. This is funny and the enlightened comedians are helpful because they point at them and laugh, so we know who to laugh at as well. It is very funny and we all laugh because we are enlightened too.

Oh, there’s more. Via Christopher Snowdon. 

Miracle engineering breakthrough. (h/t, Liz) // This is how the robot uprising starts. // Real estate of note. // House spider embryo. // The Shadow stalks his prey. // Frozen lake ice pile-up. // Californian topiaries. // Earplugs of note. // Upbeat Vader. // A video catalogue of every known vertical landing jet aircraft. // A brief history of the shopping trolley. // Beer keg of note. // Good question. // Minefield. // The north-east megalopolis. // “A Hawaiian mushroom that allegedly induces orgasms in women who sniff it.” // I don’t think we’re alone in the snow. // Nine things you (probably) didn’t know about The Silence of the Lambs, from casting could-have-beens to impressive prosthetic nipples. // And finally, expertly, a three-year-old girl reaches in deep and delivers a baby lamb.