Commenter RY steers us to another contender for our series of classic sentences from a certain newspaper:

Witchcraft – and the embrace of “magical” practices, like reading tarot cards – has recently experienced a resurgence of sorts among young, creative, politically engaged women.

Ah, you didn’t see that coming.

The bearer of this hitherto suppressed knowledge is Ms Sady Doyle, who further enlightens us,

Women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a “spiritual but not religious” way to express feminist ambitions.

You see,

A popular Tumblr blog, Charmcore, purports to be run by three witch sisters; it gives sarcastic “magical” advice and praise of the female celebrities it deems to be “obvious witches.” On the more serious side, teen sensation Rookie magazine has published tarot tutorials along with more standard-issue feminist and fashion advice, and Autostraddle, a popular left-leaning blog for young queer women, has an in-house tarot columnist.

Yes, all that. And furthermore,

Tarot cards are available in trendy Brooklyn knick-knack shops and Urban Outfitters, as well as New Age stores. And these days, no one thinks there’s anything weird about herbal medicine and other potions.

Apparently, there are also “witchcore” punk bands. And – and – if even more proof were needed, a book: 

Mixed in with the spells and rituals of The Spiral Dance, you will find meditations on sexual violence, ecology and anarchist group building, and thoughts on how men can overcome patriarchal conditioning in order to participate effectively in leftwing activism.

Clearly, it’s a vibrant and thrusting cultural force, a subversive political juggernaut, one that will topple The Patriarchal Hegemon™ any day now. It’s game over, man. No, there’s no time to collect your belongings, we must flee to the escape pods. 

Oh my. The Green Party’s Natalie Bennett has had yet another car crash interview. Your reaction to Ms Bennett’s performance and grasp of the particulars may answer the question asked recently in this Green Party poster campaign.

Previously. And previous to that. 

Roger Kimball on the unacknowledged charms of Swedish multiculturalism: 

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%. If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

Christopher Snowdon on why BBC documentaries aren’t always to be trusted: 

To be clear, nobody is snaffling anybody’s cake. The cake has been getting bigger for all, including those in the rest of the top [income] decile. But whilst inequality has not risen in the nation as a whole, it has risen sharply within the upper echelons. It is not the richest ten per cent who have “pulled away from the pack.” It is the very rich who have pulled away from the rest of the top 10 per cent. It is, then, the upper-middle classes who may feel that they are having their cake scoffed. If so, it may explain why there is currently such a sense of resentment and antipathy from the wealthy (a group that includes politicians, professors, television presenters and BBC editors) towards the very rich.

And Mark Steyn on the blatherings of the Most Clever President Ever: 

“Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to “the fabric of our country” for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody’s fabric, but instead tends to unravel it – as it’s doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

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

As I’m sure you all know, watching people eat online is now a thing in South Korea. 

“Whenever I’m a bit lonely it feels like I’m eating with someone else.”

The following is from a letter by Tony Clark of the Communist Party Alliance, as featured on the letters page of the Weekly Worker, “a paper of Marxist polemic and Marxist unity”:  

I never claimed that the future of humanity “may rest on the beneficence of extra-terrestrial reptiles.” I… referred to the reptilian control theory, which argues that for thousands of years humanity has been controlled by a reptilian race, using their mixed reptile-human genetic bloodlines, who have oppressed and exploited humans, while claiming descent from the ‘gods’ and the divine right to rule by bloodline. Ancient and modern society is obsessed with reptilian, serpent and dragon themes, possibly due to this heritage. Even the flag of Wales has a dragon on it. 

Most people have closed minds, depending on the issues. Mention the possibility of aliens secretly manipulating humanity behind the scenes and the shutters come down.

Anyone wishing to express their solidarity with Mr Clark and the Communist Party Alliance can do so here. Members of the Alien Reptile Hegemon™ are advised to use false names and adopt a human appearance.  

Via PootBlog. 

Use of pepper spray brings forth tears, possibly laughter. // Landscapes of note. // Their lightning machine is much smaller than ours. // Man spends 52 years building own cathedral. // Dog and owl. // Potty Glo. “If lit, then sit.” // Limpet teeth. // Unappetizing cheeses. // Snacking hoopoe. // Speechless Obama. // Courtyard balcony of note. // “Beverage holders on all four corners.” // Camouflaged beverage holder of note. // That’s not a bookstore, this is a bookstore. // Some kind of rat-beast. // An object approaches Chelyabinsk. // Chairbending. // New Year’s Eve mega-rave, Wembley Stadium, 1994. I see a lot of suspicious gum-chewing. // Fog in Tokyo. // 3D-printed selfie statues. // The unseen Pakistan. // And finally, why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 12.

Good news, dear reader. You too can learn to be a performance artist and thereby make the world tremble. You could, for instance, attend Sandrine Schaefer’s course in Durational Performance Art, which is run by the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art. The ripened fruits of this intense and demanding study can be witnessed in the video below. Among its gems are the vigorous crayoning works of Nicole Dube, complete with off-camera grunting and sounds of exertion; a 90-minute display of marker pen misuse and poorly choreographed wrestling by Ambar Janual and Luke Ryba; and Darien Stankowski’s haphazard scraping of a wooden door, the purpose of which remains stubbornly unobvious and hard to care about.

However, the video begins with the colossal radicalism of Elaine Thap, a woman who refers to herself as “they,” “their” and “them,” and whose talents are described thusly, if only by herself – sorry, themself:

Elaine Thap uses identity in their work to convey layers of being and relationships… Taking the form of social constructs and the irony of it, they are asking for critical communication and concocting the politics of identity. Performance allows them to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility. They seek intersectional meaning and memory in others by the act of othering.

Ah yes, the politics of identity, intersectional meaning and of course othering. How terribly non-conformist. Now brace yourselves, people. I don’t want anyone fainting from the daring of it all: 

This, I mean. 

Via PootBlog.  

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Speaking, as we were, of campus intolerance and the Clown Shoe Left, here’s something that may be worth half an hour of your time. In the following short film by Steve Brulé, Professor Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa talks about the assumptions and effects of doctrinaire feminism and the censorious tactics of self-imagined radicals. Tactics that are illustrated quite vividly throughout. 

Professor Fiamengo also discusses campus censorship here. Via Joan in the comments following this.