Right, I’m off for a few days, a holiday of sorts. Chiefly, it’s to attend a niece’s wedding at a fancy country house in the middle of nowhere, but it’s also an opportunity to not think about whatever pretentious agonising is in fashion this week among our self-imagined betters. By all means use the comments to share links and bicker while I’m away. And for God’s sake, use coasters.

Oh, and while I remember, via Dicentra, this. And via Damian, this. 

Heather Mac Donald on media dishonesties and contrived definitions:  

What do you do if you are the New York Times and 20 people show up to the white-supremacist rally that you had been breathlessly billing as further proof of the normalisation of hatred in the Donald Trump era? Expand the definition of “white supremacist” to cover a large portion of the American electorate and its representatives… It turns out that if you are for “immigration restrictions,” “ending affirmative action,” or “instituting trade protections,” you have been influenced by white nationalism and are embracing “policy issues the far right has promoted.”

And again, on biology, ideology, and inconsistent feminists: 

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting… Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centred work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google). And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously. Even as the director of the Yale initiative insists that it’s time to “stop treating women as a subgroup of the human population” (because women are biologically and psychologically distinct from males), the magazine and its sources carefully follow the conventions of social constructivism.

As Ms Mac Donald points out, “For academic feminists, male and female biology is either interchangeable or immutable, depending on what complaint they need to lodge.” The James Damore saga was outlined here.

Steven Pinker on feminist utopia:  

How to un-dent your car. || The lost art of fire-jumping. || Interspecies communication. || Nommy nom. (h/t, Matthew) || Enhance. || Polly Toynbee, hypocrite. || Not entirely unrelated. || The umbrella on the left is the magic one. || On light and relativity. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Rude elephant. || Build your own computer. || If English were phonetically consistent, it might sound like this. || Owen “goal” Jones. || Gavin did not reply. (h/t, Obo) || A map of Chicago’s gangland, 1923-26. (h/t, Coudal) || Girl Talk In A Box. (h/t, Things) || Male spiders in make-up. || And finally, “Evil is a make-believe concept,” say vegetarian cyclists, before being rammed with a car and then stabbed to death by jihadis.

An unnamed New York Times reader asks, “How can I cure my white guilt?”  

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of colour. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

Times contributors Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, self-styled purveyors of “radically empathic advice,” inform this unhappy, seemingly demented reader that, “We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values,” and therefore any comforts and advantages the reader might have, however they were arrived at, are “unearned, the product of corrupt systems,” for which “every white person should be ashamed.” “What you really feel,” they continue, “is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor.”

Today’s words are abuse, creepy and cult.  

Via Dicentra. 

Like a link fest, only more so. Feel free to share items of possible interest in the comments and then bicker about them, as I believe is the custom. By the way, did you know that violence, when indulged in by leftists, isn’t actually violence, but merely “symbolic speech”? 

If all else fails, the reheated series and greatest hits are there to be poked at.