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.

In news that will shock no-one, Laurie Penny is once again unhappy. Today we find her telling the world that, “People are not poor because they… made bad choices. People are poor because capital requires a surplus population.”

This of course is the same Laurie Penny who tells her followers to “Fuck social mobility. Fuck money. Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy and every other small ugly ambition.” And who urged her readers to “destroy marriage,” to reject romantic love as “a systemic lie,” to champion “polyamory,” and to wage “war” on capitalism. Because employers can’t resist job applicants who want to wage “war” on capitalism. And shunning monogamous coupledom and opting instead for unstable family structures, or no family structure, and sneering at bourgeois values and conventional avenues of advancement, these things couldn’t possibly have sub-optimal consequences, could they? They couldn’t possibly be bad choices.

Laurie and her followers are also being outraged by a Telegraph article by Frank Field, who dares to mention the fact that two parents are generally more able to cope and less dependent on the state – and less likely to be poor and to stay poor – than single parents. And so Laurie’s Twitter circle of 19-year-old students and self-styled misfits are now telling each other how “angry” the article makes them. Presumably on grounds that one mustn’t acknowledge the fact that poverty is very often caused, and prolonged, by a series of bad choices.

Of course Laurie has the considerable advantage of being raised, comfortably, in a stable family by two middle-class parents with the terribly bourgeois values she now claims to hold in contempt. If instead she’d been raised in keeping with her own professed standards – say, by a disaffected single parent with multiple transient partners and no lifelong commitment – I somehow doubt she’d have been able to spend time at Wadham College finding herself politically and playing “riot girl.” In effect, and like so many of her type, our leftist guru is coasting on the legacy of values that served her well but which she claims to despise and urges others to reject.

Assembled from comments following this. 

Ace ruminates on leftist piety as a kind of status signalling: 

I’ve heard it called “Luxurious Concerns.” That is, your concerns mark your social status. If your concerns are about keeping your job, paying your rent, or whether your kids’ school is any damn good, you’re worried about Big Things, and therefore you are marked as a Struggling Person. Only those who have really made it — who are at the top of the economic and social order — have the luxury of worrying about the Small Things. And if you worry about the Very Small Things, or indeed the Microscopic Things, then, well and truly, you have arrived… If you can’t afford a Luxury Car, or a Luxury Apartment, you can at least adorn yourself with Luxury Worries. It’s very cheap. Easy, too… Our modern class of intellectually-insecure social climbers are posing as connoisseurs of offensiveness. 

See also Kristian Niemietz and Daniel Hannan on the same. 

The attempt to cultivate pretentious guilt and pretentious indignation, and to balance grief and umbrage on a very tiny thing, the tinier the better, is of course a Guardian staple. It gives the left’s national organ its distinctive tone – that tinny, unconvincing high-pitched whine. Affecting woe, especially improbable woe, is how many leftwing columnists signal their position in their own moral hierarchy, relative to you, the heathen rabble. As I said some time ago, 

It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.” 

And this is why, for instance, a tearful Theo Hobson tells us, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Because until “this problematic world” has been purged of all vice and inequity, however unrelated to your own behaviour, a heavy, heavy heart must be worn on the sleeve. How else will people know how superior you are? According to Mr Hobson, if you aren’t ostentatiously fretting about the eating of meat and “affluent lifestyles endangering the planet,” and if you aren’t “anxious about your status as a comfy bourgeoisie” and ashamed of earning more than some other random person, then there must be something wrong with you. And so you should feel guilty for not feeling guilty about things you shouldn’t feel guilty about. It’s the Guardian way.

And so, breathless with anticipation, we return to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where questions of cosmic import are chewed over, and where Celia Edell, a self-described “24-year-old feminist philosopher interested in social justice,” shares the many things learned by her over many, many years. The great and pressing issues that weigh upon her mind:  

Does feminism require vegetarianism? This is something I am asked about often.

Often. Because, 

Vegetarians and vegans sometimes go around telling meat-eaters whether their eating habits are consistent with their feminist beliefs.

Imagine the parties. The time must fly.

The main argument you will likely hear in favour of feminist vegetarianism is that of linked oppression. Basically the idea is that women are consistently objectified in a morally problematic way that is very similar to the way animals are objectified.

You see, great feminist thinkers have insisted that “female animals are particularly oppressed” because “we consume animal products which must come from female bodies (i.e., milk and eggs)” and “this can be understood as a type of male domination of female bodies.” And so, obviously,

Many feminist theorists have therefore recommended that refraining from consuming animals and their products is a necessary step toward undercutting patriarchal power. It will not only benefit non-human animals, but also work to undermine the entire system [that] disadvantages women.

The mechanism here is, unsurprisingly, somewhat unclear. Possibly because enthusiasts of truck stop bacon butties rarely give much weight to the ponderings of “feminist theorists.” Even theorists who imagine that a liking for bacon or steak, or even the humble cheese sandwich, reinforces “the same system… which positions women as lesser than men.” However, Ms Edell is more temperate in her views, because,  

Animals and women are exploited quite differently in the patriarchy.

At which point, readers may wish to imagine a world in which feminist theorists are ascendant, patriarchy has been smashed and rendered unto dust, and womenfolk, being wise and inherently benign, shun the exploitation of animals altogether, living instead on a diet of compassion and self-righteousness. However, it turns out that on a practical level, building a meat-free, dairy-free utopia is fraught with agonising, due to the “many intersecting issues which complicate these decisions”:

Some people cannot eat a vegan or vegetarian diet as it is triggering for their eating disorder.