Franklin Einspruch on the Great Boston Kimono Outrage of 2015: 

Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants… This incident — call it Kimonogate — demonstrates just how far the new puritans are willing to reach to impose their version of politics upon all of our pleasures. Watching Chinese and South Asians lump themselves into an aggregate for the sake of claiming offence on behalf of the Japanese, when that conflation of Asian identities is an established microaggression, is weird enough. Worrying that someone might touch a robe Orientalistically is out there in tinfoil-hat territory. Is that the kind of person you want deciding which activities you’re allowed to enjoy at the art museum? 

Franklin also has a message for the modishly indignant.  

Thomas Sowell on favoured narratives and unintended consequences: 

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

And Katherine Timpf reports from the throbbing edge of academic enquiry: 

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” – so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird… Dr Williams [director of social work at Idaho State University] explained that no one should be bothered by a person wanting to drink another person’s blood because “it is generally expected within the community that vampires should act ethically and responsibly in feeding practices,” and it’s not their blood-drinking that’s the real problem here — it’s the fact that they have to worry that other people will judge them for their blood-drinking.

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

Twitter exchange of note. // The acid should kick in any moment now. // I’m no expert but I think that’s a shark. // I’ve been playing this quite a lot. // There’s whittling and there’s whittling. // Grow new teeth in nine weeks. // So.Much.Guardian, a tumblr. // An interactive atlas of world history. // The props and miniatures of Blade Runner. // Baby storage. // Storm near Rapid City. // Sticky page markers of note. The markers are sticky, not the pages. // “In the small village of Vrontados, there is unrest.” // Soho Square, London, 1956. // Beware the stealth cucumber. // Because you need to be told when to buy new shoes. // At last, a centrifugal fragrance diffuser. // A website you have to queue for. It’s terribly exclusive. // And finally, four minutes or so of daddy-daughter time. 

A headline of note from the Belfast Telegraph: 

Man Fined for Sedating Girlfriend So He Could Keep Playing Video Games. 

In short, 

A court in Castrop-Rauxel, a town in eastern Germany, heard that the man’s (now ex) girlfriend had arrived home while he was playing games with his friend one night in August. Keen to keep playing after she came home, the man put sedative in her tea, causing her to sleep until midday the next day.

Via Chris Snowdon. 

A small southern California company which produces “earth-friendly” feminine hygiene products has released the first tampon for post-op transgender women.

Yes, I too was puzzled at first. 

“Our product is designed to give post-op transgender women the full-spectrum experience of menstruation. You don’t have to be deprived of the beautiful and womanly occurrence of menstruation merely because you were born without a uterus. The Fem-Flo’s cotton core contains a small, vegetable-based capsule which upon reaching body temperature releases the ‘menses’ contained within.”

Still waiting on those lunar bases and flying cars, though. 

Kristian Niemietz is upsetting readers of the Independent: 

I am amazed by how the British left has managed to convince themselves that Syriza somehow represented a break with “neoliberal politics” in Greece… After three and a half decades of economic statism and hyperinterventionism, how exactly is a party that stands for economic statism and hyperinterventionism a “break” with anything? […] The Greek economy had become a rent-seeking economy, in which economic activity is not about creating wealth, but about extracting wealth from others through the political process. If you’re afraid of dog-eat-dog capitalism, you haven’t seen dog-eat-dog socialism yet.

So far in the comments, Mr Niemietz has been called a “sadist,” a “little shit” and “one of Thatcher’s odious children.” Commenters slightly more supportive of Mr Niemietz are also being denounced as “fascists, xenophobes, bigots and racists.”

Tim Blair on the same.  

Ashe Schow on joke degrees: 

“Of those that graduate, some will have degrees that prepare them for nothing that is highly valued by society,” [parent, Anne] Gassel wrote. “I remember last year at a college open house hearing from a young woman who had a degree in women’s studies. She told the parents sitting in the room that she was lucky to get a job with the university. I don’t think she realised how that sounded.” She added: “Apparently the only thing a women’s studies degree prepares one for is working for a university admissions office to promote that degree to other gullible students.” 

And via TDK, Robert Tracinski on the shifting pieties of the left: 

Now a major portion of the left has stopped even pretending that they value work. Hence the growing support for a guaranteed minimum income, a lifetime handout large enough to provide everyone with a comfortable existence. The goal, according to one supporter of this idea, is precisely to allow people not to work… [But] the evidence suggests that when people are paid just for breathing, when they lose the basic habit of working, they don’t spend their time writing symphonies. They sit on the couch smoking pot and watching bad TV.

We’ve been here before, of course. 

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

Or, Socialists Watch TV, Hallucinate Wildly.

Lifted from an old comments thread about fretful eco-piety, some thoughts on the 70s sitcom The Good Life and its message as construed by a Guardian reader and another fellow leftist. Specifically, its role as some kind of moral lodestone for the modern anti-capitalist:

Listen to Tom on one of his speeches to see how far ahead they were… Whilst the funny bit is watching Tom and Barbara struggle, they are treated the most sympathetically, and usually prevail in the end. Nothing better illustrates how little progress we have really made in nearly 40 years towards a more sustainable society.

Sentiments repeated in this indignant comment following a Spectator article on the same programme:

First of all, the heroes of The Good Life are Tom and Barbara – a couple who have given up the rat race and acquisitiveness to live off the land. Quite the opposite of Thatcherism and more in-line with the green movement than any other ideology… Margo’s petty-bourgeois [sic] conservatism and social climbing usually lead her into ending up looking ridiculous… And that’s precisely the kind of idea that The Good Life was clearly proposing a sustainable and non-greedy alternative to.

Readers familiar with said sitcom may find these claims a little odd, as Tom and Barbara’s experiment in “self-sufficiency” wasn’t particularly self-sufficient. They don’t prevail in the end, not on their own terms or in accord with their stated principles, and their inability to do so is the primary source of story lines.

Practically every week the couple’s survival is dependent on the neighbours’ car, the neighbours’ phone, the neighbours’ unpaid labour, a convoluted favour of some kind. And of course they’re dependent on the “petty” bourgeois infrastructure maintained by all those people who haven’t adopted a similarly perilous ‘ecological’ lifestyle. The Goods’ highly selective rejection of bourgeois life is only remotely possible because of their own previous bourgeois habits – a paid-off mortgage, a comfortable low-crime neighbourhood with lots of nearby greenery, and well-heeled neighbours who are forever on tap when crises loom, i.e., weekly.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is therefore unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions.

And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

Even if you feel a very strong urge, don’t try this at home. // Age of Tin Man. // User preference. (h/t, Kristian) // Throwable panoramic ball camera. // Unfortunate technical gaffe of note. // How to detect a nuclear weapon test. // Chicago below. // Sweet Dreams banjo-style. // More joys of public transport. // The puzzle of baldness. // She’s a big girl. // Battle of wits. (h/t, Dr W) // Ice cream in Cuba. “I thought this was a bus stop.” // Crash helmets of note. // Tiny hand-thrown pottery. // Parts of speech. // Restoration. // “An erratic structure brought to life by mechanical agitations.” // Mechanical calculator. // Victorian data visualisation. // At last, your very own bioluminescent desktop dinoflagellates. // And finally, for the adventurous, hold on to your lunch. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Repent at Leisure. 

Graduate job-seeker is shocked to discover that choices have consequences.  

And so we’re expected to believe that Mr Clark – who chose to make a bold statement by deliberately stretching and deforming his earlobes, to the extent that a jar of instant coffee could almost fit through the holes – is somehow being wronged, indeed oppressed, when, during job interviews, potential employers notice – and find inappropriate – the bold statement he’s chosen to make. Having decided at university to scandalise the less daring whenever in public, he now seems surprised when those same less daring people make choices of their own, i.e., not to hire him. But aren’t their raised eyebrows and looks of disgust what he wanted all along?

Comedy Economics. 

Improving the species through enforced poverty.

The New Economics Foundation is convinced that, once implemented, its recommendations would “heal the rifts in a divided Britain” and leave the population “satisfied.” That’s satisfied with less of course, and the authors make clear their disdain for the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.”

Scenes of Extended Fretting. 

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman discovers how competitive piety can be.  

Mr Hickman, whose ten years of struggling with ethical purity will be known to long-term readers, believes that the way to make poor people rich is to not buy their goods. 

Just Surrender to the Will of Clever People. 

Private education must be banned, says leftist academic. And reading to your children causes “unfair disadvantage.”

Sadly, Dr Swift doesn’t say whether he has any personal experience of the state education system that he thinks the rest of us should make do with in the name of “social justice.” But perhaps he could share his comforting words with some of the children left at the mercy of such schools, where, as one national survey of teaching staff puts it, “a climate of violence” and “malicious disruption” is the norm, the assaulting of staff and pupils is commonplace, with almost half of those surveyed witnessing such behaviour “on a weekly basis,” and where vandalism of personal property is “part of the routine working environment.”

I’ve hidden free puppies in the greatest hits. 

Kevin Williamson on being the wrong kind of brown person: 

For his political conservatism, Governor [Bobby] Jindal, like Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, also Republicans of Indian origin, is savaged as an Uncle Tamas — an Indian guilty of acting white. The charge has been led by the New Republic, the former political journal turned vanity press owned by Facebook millionaire Chris Hughes, one of the whitest white men in the history of whiteness, an argyle sock of a man… Jindal, D’Souza, and Haley stand accused of the worst sort of heresy: being members of an ethnic minority group who neither present nor understand themselves as the white man’s victims, whose stance toward the country in which they all reside and in which two of them were born — the country they love — is not one of opposition. The Left needs neediness, and these three aren’t offering up much of that.

Tim Blair explores the subtle, compassionate mind of Clementine Ford, a writer of “feminist social analyses” who tells us “abuse is not a joke.” 

And Brendan O’Neill on austerity and its champions: 

Before they developed their new-found emotional attachment to describing everything they don’t like as ‘austerity’, [leftist critics] were openly calling for austerity. George Monbiot is one of the Guardian’s chief complainers about Tory austerity — the same George Monbiot who in 2006 proudly described environmentalism as a “campaign not for abundance but for austerity” and who inspired the radical group Riot 4 Austerity. His colleague Zoe Williams likewise complains about “austerity” yet a few years ago she was dreaming of introducing Second World War-style food rationing, because “the lesson from the 40s is that to fix a public-health problem… you need big government.”

Yes, the chronically unhappy and tormented George Monbiot, who one week claims that austerity is crushing the poor and is “an assault on public life,” and then another week calls for his readers to “riot for austerity. Riot for less.” Because, says he, economic growth is “a political sedative,” a tool of false consciousness, “snuffing out protest” in our dulled, befuddled minds. And so Mr Monbiot denounces “the blackened waste of consumer frenzy,” by which he means shopping, and instead wants “a campaign not for more freedom but for less… a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.” “Unpleasant as it will be,” says George, and while “some people [will] lose their jobs and homes,” austerity and recession will avert “ecological collapse,” while saving us from those jet skis and diamond saucepans that we’re all intent on buying, and the mere existence of which robs him of sleep.

For more of Mr Monbiot’s strange mental adventures, see here, here and here. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Attempting flight. // Tooth, claw and torpedoes. // About 40 seconds in you’ll spot what’s gone wrong. // Trees and fog. // A bunk bed for dogs. // “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Jaws, short version. // Jazz computer. Full-fat cheesy noodling. // Caterpillars, baby. // Abandoned Chinese fishing village could use a woman’s touch. // Jellyfishies. // Caution, wet floor. // Students, check your leftist privilege. // Up, up and away. // To lift a big helicopter you need a bigger helicopter. (h/t, drb) // First swim. // Leafcutter ant farming. “They’re using the leaves to grow something else.” // Maps on demand. // Dickens World and other theme parks. // Vertical turntables. // And finally, “obtain alluring slim loveliness” with bust-reducing cream. Works in weeks. Also enlarges bust.