As today is this blog’s ninth birthday, it seems as good a time as any to have one of the quarterly fundraisers that keep this rickety barge afloat. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant for a while longer, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love for this low establishment. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you. Now you can indulge your consumerist lust and feel saintly while doing it.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last nine years, and in over 2,000 posts, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in. 

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad casts an eye over politically corrected academia:

There is a disorder known as Munchausen syndrome, wherein I fake illness and I go to the hospital because that will garner me a lot of attention and sympathy… I think this hyper-victimology poker is a manifestation of this type of syndrome. I can garner a lot of sympathy by constantly seeing life through a prism of endless victimhood. People respond to that. “Oh, it’s okay, you’re protected here.” It’s hard to argue this stuff with me, though, because I can always use the card of “I escaped execution in Lebanon, therefore you better have a really strong victimology story to outdo mine.” And usually they run away. So this is what happens when people are using their identity for these types of purposes. It’s grotesque.

Dr Saad’s recent lecture at the University of Ottawa can be viewed in full here. A brief taster, with illustrations by Matthew Drake, can be viewed here.  

Attention, citizens. Rotary dials are coming. (1936) // Duet is a maddening game. // A small miscalculation, an atomic explosion, and a rapidly moving manhole cover. // Home-made smart mirror. // Home cinema on a budget. // Alaskan blue. // PlantBlock. // Baby swordfish. // On Kubrick’s beginnings. // Because she could. (h/t, Franklin) // A brief history of spite houses and passive-aggressive architecture. // The London that never was. // Wearable chair for the upright citizen. // Yiwu Commodity City, Zhejiang, China, is a really bad place to get a migraine. (h/t, Coudal) // People holding posters, a Tumblr. // Lover’s eye and other horrors. (h/t, Things) // A brief history of Japan. Some liberties taken. // And finally, athletically, Jurassic Parkour II: The Revengening.

The Council of the District of Columbia approved legislation Tuesday that would pay residents in the nation’s capital for not committing crimes.

No, really: 

First reported by the Associated Press, the bill penned by Democratic Council-member Kenyan McDuffie gained unanimous approval from the D.C. Council. The legislation, called the “Neighbourhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 (NEAR Act),” would establish an office to identify as many as 200 residents annually who are at risk of committing violent crimes or becoming a victim of such crimes. The individuals would be instructed to participate in life planning, trauma informed therapy, and other programmes; if they comply and do not commit crimes, the individuals would receive a stipend. The legislation was based on a Richmond, California, programme that pays individuals who participate as much as $9,000 annually.

Mr McDuffie describes his bill as “bold and innovative,” “a step in the right direction,” and “working to prevent crime by treating its root causes.”

Update, via the comments: 

Meanwhile, on feminist Tumblr…

Someone wants to buy a shirt that bears the immensely radical slogan “you cannot weigh beauty” and is promptly horrified to discover that said shirt is available in different sizes.  

Apparently, sizing clothes is triggering and oppressive.

Katherine Timpf on when blue hair and facial piercings just aren’t enough to get a girl noticed: 

A Norwegian woman is claiming that she is actually a cat trapped in a woman’s body — and that the fact that she has a human body is a “genetic defect.” […] Because Nano believes that her true identity is as a feline, she sees no choice but to live her life as one, even wearing cat ears, a tail, and fluffy pink paws that she grooms herself with in order to express her true self. Nano claimed to have feline characteristics such as superior hearing, better night vision than day vision, the urge to hunt mice (although she’s never actually caught one), and a fear of water. In fact, she even said that some of her catlike behaviours are involuntary. For example, she claimed to have no real control over how she started hissing at a dog in the middle of her interview.

Happily, there’s a video. 

Kevin Williamson on the inadvertent comedy of identitarian Oscars protests: 

The protest rhetoric inevitably has been concentrated into a Twitter hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite, which invites the longstanding and sometimes uncomfortable question of who is white  —  and who decides. The 88th Academy Awards are hardly an all-Anglo affair: Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico has been nominated for best director; Rosa Tran, an Asian-American, shares a nomination for Anomalisa; Gabriel Osorio Vargas and Pato Escala Pierart of Chile share a nomination for Bear Story. There are Danes and Irish and Welsh and loads of Brits, and the nominations were announced by Guillermo del Toro of Mexico and Ang Lee of Taiwan… The convolution necessary to maintain #OscarsSoWhite–type thinking is substantial. If excessive whiteness is the offence, then “white” needs to be defined in such a way that it includes Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pato Escala Pierart. 

And Jacob Kohlhepp on the farce and dishonesty of “diversity” classes: 

[Psychology professor Anna] Lau recalled a situation during which a foreign student asked “what if the reason black males are incarcerated more than whites is because they commit more crimes?” She said there was a total silence in the room. She then stated she wished she knew how to answer, because hard questions should be asked. Shortly after, Assistant Professor Safiya Noble stated “we cannot let unsophisticated comments stand.” She said that as a faculty in residence for the “Afrikan Disapora” dorm floor, she has learned that “those questions outside the norm make black students feel not just microaggressed, but actually aggressed.”

Yes, those unsophisticated questions can really be a bitch. By most credible estimates, black males aged 15-24 – around 2% of the U.S. population – are responsible for around 5o% of U.S. murders, and for disproportionately high rates of other violent crime, including rape, armed robbery and assault. The disparity is so great that even if one assumes police bias and differential rates of conviction, despite evidence to the contrary, one still has to wonder why the victims of such crime  - whose descriptions match rates of arrest and who are themselves very often black – would lie about the appearance of their attacker.

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

Levitating Bonsai trees. You heard me. // Large scale snow drawings. // Polish priests blessing things, a Tumblr. // Badland is a game. // Beat box of note. // How to build your very own electronic bee counter. // Sampulator. // Waffle poots. // An actual oasis. // Manhattan snow. // New York Public Library menu collection, from the 1850s to the modern day. // Spherical Droste videos explained. // Wall-mounted drawing robot. // For display purposes only. // Action figures. (h/t, Damian) // Filmmaker trolls censors. (h/t, Franklin) // Text tone analyser. // Is titanium bulletproof? // Intelligent headlights. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // Darwin awards, a compendium of dumb and acts of an angry god. // You want one very badly. // And finally, erotically, some of that good lovin’.

California State University, Los Angeles, where the life of the mind is a thing to behold: 

It all started when CSULA’s branch of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organisation, announced that [conservative author Ben] Shapiro would be appearing for a lecture titled “When Diversity Becomes a Problem.” The lecture will discuss topics like Black Lives Matter, microaggressions and trigger warnings, and whether they pose a threat to freedom of speech. Ironically, several students and faculty have reacted to the notion they want to stifle free speech by savagely attacking the event, with some of them arguing it should be shut down.

In short, the standard obliviousness. But then things got a little heated:

One of those aggressively denouncing the event is Robert Weide, an assistant professor of sociology at the school. Weide posted a comment on the event’s Facebook page accusing “Young Americans for Liberty” [sic] of being a group of “white supremacists” looking to intimidate “POC” (people of colour), and predicted they would need police protection at their event to protect themselves from mob violence.

Yes, it turns out that if you dare to question the premise of microaggressions, you will be called names and there will be shoving and punching. 

Weide became enmeshed in a long-running, extremely bitter argument with supporters of the event, both on-campus and off. In the process, he repeatedly accused his opponents of “white supremacy,” and at one point suggested they show up at CSULA’s campus gym for a fight. But they had best be careful before accepting the challenge, he warned, saying “I lift bro.”

If we’re doing the whole chest-puffing thing with lecturers in sociology picking fights with students who happen to disagree – and apparently we are – why settle for just punching each other? So uncouth. Pistols at dawn, I say.

Update: 

I am a truth-teller, if nothing else.

So says Meghan Murphy, whose frankness and modesty entertained us quite recently. Not least with her belief that the world needs “a feminist revolution… an end to masculinity,” and that “it’s time to consider a curfew for men.” Our self-effacing Amazon and speaker of truths, and editor of “Canada’s leading feminist website,” is once again sharing her wisdom with the world’s downtrodden womenfolk, with “Ten things every woman should know by the time she’s 36.” The nuggets on offer cover a spectrum of womanly woes, from the prosaic – buying shoes that fit as opposed to ones that don’t – to matters more profound:  

(3) Love, marriage, and heterosexual couplings will not complete you or make you happy.

Specifically,

I’m not saying that having positive, loving relationships with men is impossible. But it’s very hard.

Because,

First of all, most men are men… They are men who have been socialised as men in a world that teaches them male entitlement… As much as a man might be good and kind and loving, he’s still going to exhibit certain behaviours that will remind you that, oh right, I’m a woman living with a person who has spent their whole life in a position of power over me and my sisters and he will never fully understand what that’s like. 

You see,

Patriarchy makes heterosexual love next to impossible. Do your best to live the life you want regardless of whether or not there is a man in it and remember that having a man in it won’t necessarily make your life any better… Often, in fact, it makes it worse.

At which point readers may wonder if this severely jaundiced view of men – in which masculinity is something to “end” as a matter of urgency, and in which a male presence in one’s life is deemed likely to make it worse – is an obvious aid to success in the world of heterosexual romance. With heterosexual love being “next to impossible,” despite it occurring frequently across much of the planet’s surface. And some of you may be wondering whether the wholesale regurgitation of radfem boilerplate, including demands for male curfews, may give potential suitors the impression of being seated with a woman in need of medication. A perception unlikely to enhance any hopes of contented lifelong coupling.

However, if attempts to attract a male life partner fail – possibly as a result of explaining to him, at length, why he and other men are so ignorant, oppressive and dysfunctional – there is a consolation prize:

(10) You should get a dog.

So. Not a total loss.

Christopher Snowdon on Tory paternalism: 

[Conservative MP, Dr Sarah] Wollaston wants the government to ‘tackle’ the alleged problem of cheap food. She also wants to tell shopkeepers where to position their goods, explaining her reasons in words so pathetic it almost makes me weep: “Do I want to have a kilogram of chocolate for almost nothing when I buy my newspaper? Of course I do but please don’t offer it to me, please don’t make me pass the chicanes of sugar at the checkout while queuing to pay for petrol.” Younger readers may not know this, but at one time the Conservatives were reputed to be the party of free markets and personal responsibility. In 2016, however, it is a party for people – grown, adult human beings, mind – begging to have sweets put out of their reach on other people’s property and pleading with petrol station attendants to put wine gums on the top shelf.

Kevin Williamson on the return of politically correct subprime mortgages: 

Under its new and cynically misnamed “HomeReady” programme, borrowers with subprime credit don’t need to show that they have enough income to qualify for the mortgage they’re after — they simply have to show that all the people residing in their household put together have enough income to qualify for that mortgage. We’re not talking just about husbands and wives here, but any group of people who happen to share a roof and a mailing address. And some non-residents can be added, too, such as your parents. That would be one thing if all these people were applying for a mortgage together, and were jointly on the hook for the mortgage payments. But that isn’t the case. HomeReady will permit borrowers to claim other people’s income for the purpose for qualifying for a mortgage, but will not give mortgage lenders any actual claim against that additional income. This is madness.

Remember, citizens. Standards must be eroded for the sake of “social justice.” 

And Toby Young on a modern heresy: 

[Dr Adam] Perkins published his findings last November in a book called The Welfare Trait, but you won’t have heard about it or seen it reviewed in any UK newspaper anywhere because his research has been judged to be off limits by the self-appointed guardians of the academic establishment and their outriders in the media. A senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as “unethical,” and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a “capitalist construct.”

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