I’m dealing with delivery chaps and a glorious new oven, so you’re getting an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

Oh, and via Perry de Havilland, a toilet-roll holder of note. 

Lifted from the comments, regarding recent scenes from Portland. Though it applies to the Mao-ling left more generally.

This is what happens when malevolent narcissists don’t get slapped and thrown to the ground. The kind of psychology we’re seeing, over and over again, overwhelmingly from the left, is an exercise in bad faith, a fundamental dishonesty. It therefore isn’t amenable to correction with facts or debate, or appeals to reciprocity or some higher purpose. Tolerating such behaviour – and worse, deferring to it – will only encourage an escalation of vanity, malice and sociopathy. It may, however, be discouraged with reminders of physical consequences. Ideally, physical humiliation. A reminder that nasty little egos can be publicly broken.

These are people who will lie as readily as breathing in order to excuse their antisocial urges. They aren’t being obnoxious reluctantly, in desperation, or under duress. They harass, provoke and delight in domination because it gives them pleasure. It makes them feel important and powerful. Power being conceived solely as power over others. It’s a focus for their spite. Anything else is a fig leaf, a pretext. Among Portland’s mentally uniform radicals, the ones exulting in the alarm and misery of others, there is no good faith. And so, you can’t engage with such creatures on their own ostensible terms.

Because that’s not what it’s ultimately about.

Update, via the comments:

In the video linked above, note the planning, the efforts to maximise the imposition and its somewhat menacing implications. Someone sat down and thought, “How can we really aggravate hundreds of random people, ordinary families, about whom we know nothing, and make them feel unsafe in their own homes?” And then, other, like-minded people agreed, presumably with enthusiasm.

This isn’t politics. This is recreational sociopathy.

They’re not sure what it is. || She loves her little figurines. (h/t, Holborn) || Effort-saving measure of note. || 1940s New York. Click a dot, any dot. || They do this better than you. || Bonus points for the dog. || Remember, kids. Antifa are just like normal people. || “The Chinese language, with its 70,000-plus characters, couldn’t fit on a keyboard.” || Cherry-blossom chillfest. || Ventilation malfunction results in chocolate snow. || Charming house with charming basement jail. || Shops for mice. || Highlights from Australia’s Mulletfest 2020. || “The glass allegedly becomes opaque after you lock the door.” || Venn diagram of note. || Vortex detected. || And finally, their décor crisis is probably worse than yours.

Because you crave one, an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

Oh, and here’s something savoury. 

Best enlarged. 

From the archives, Amy Wax on the contortions of “affirmative action”: 

On the one hand, all good people are for affirmative action. That’s a sign of virtue. On the other hand, to talk about the predicate, the reason that affirmative action is needed, which is that there are these gaps in educational achievement and proficiency, is verboten. So, we kind of twisted ourselves in knots that we have to embrace something but deny the factual underpinning of it.

And Heather Mac Donald on pantomime claims of “systemic racism” and their corrosive and farcical effects:

It has been taboo to hint at the reason that the millions of dollars already expended on campus diversity initiatives have yet to engineer exact proportional representation of blacks in the student body and on the faculty: the vast academic skills gap. Now this truth will be even more professionally lethal to anyone who dares mention it. The highest reaches of the university have declared as a matter of self-evident fact that systemic racism is the defining feature of American society, one that explains every inequality. Fighting against that racism has now officially become colleges’ reason for being…

The dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, pronounced himself “absolutely dedicated” to turning the engineering school into an “anti-racist organisation.” Doing so “crucially includes unconscious bias work we must do within ourselves,” he added. How that work will interact with research on nanoparticles and viral transmission, say, was unspecified… The chairman of the earth and planetary sciences department at the University of California at Davis announced an “anti-racist reading group” for faculty and students. The group’s purpose was to confront the “structural racism that pervades” the field of geology. Such structural racism in the study of igneous rocks is apparently so obvious that the chair did not bother to elaborate further. Failure to attend the reading group would undoubtedly count against any faculty member during his promotional review, as a sign of insufficient enthusiasm for “diversity.”

Worth reading in full. As Ms Mac Donald notes, with the question of disparities in academic performance effectively short-circuited, and “systemic” but unspecified “racism” the go-to explanation, the all-but mandatory conclusion, any hope of addressing underlying behaviour and suboptimal choices recedes even further. Instead, we can look forward to more unearned resentment and grandiose entitlement, quotas for the unqualified, and more pretentious self-incrimination. In the name of “social justice.”

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.