“Can pot make you a better parent?”

Asks the Guardian, in a classic-sentence-kind-of-way. It has to be said, even for the Guardian, it isn’t the most promising start:

An Oregon mother posted a photo last year of herself breastfeeding her baby while she took a bong hit.

This photo here, in case you’re curious. 

Naturally, the image went viral…. Jenn Lauder, an Oregon cannabis activist… chided the breastfeeder for exposing the baby to smoke and for the “optics” of the image. “That mom could have made better choices,” Lauder told me recently.

Happily, things soon mellow out a bit:

Yes, it’s jarring to see a woman in a quintessential act of motherhood with her face in a bong. But the reality is some parents believe cannabis improves their child rearing… Marijuana, as cannamoms and cannadads see it, relieves the tedium of parenting while helping them engage with their children. With marijuana, “I’m able to sit and play Legos for an extensive period of time… and make it more fun rather than something functional,” said April Pride, founder of Van der Pop, a line of stylish cannabis accessories for women. She said it also helped break up the monotony of spending more time at home. 

You see, they’re doing it for the kids. How terribly selfless and high-minded. Another imbibing parent adds, “There’s too much taboo about it. It’s the equivalent of having a couple of glasses of wine in my life.” Though I suspect that a parent knocking back several glasses of wine during the day, every day, to make playing with their child more fun, might raise a few eyebrows.

And then,

When a parent is an open cannabis user it can also change the tenor of conversations with kids about drug use. “Cannabis has strengthened the bond I have with my daughter because I’m honest about something that’s important to me,” Lauder said. “At age 10, she’s incredibly social justice minded.”

Oh dear. And it was going so well.

Update, via the comments:

For what it’s worth, I’m not disapproving of recreational cannabis use, though it’s not my thing. I find it incapacitating. But the Guardian article does feature a tangle of messages that aren’t entirely consonant and seem rather self-serving. We’re told that getting stoned while supposedly being responsible for small children, and talking with 10-year-olds about the joys of getting high, is “the equivalent of having a couple of glasses of wine.” As if parents getting pissed while looking after the kids, and as if 10-year-olds talking about mummy’s drug use, were in no way contentious. We’re also told that getting stoned while on duty, as it were, is a bonding exercise. Specifically,

Cannabis has strengthened the bond I have with my daughter because I’m honest about something that’s important to me.

But imagine someone saying my drinking is important to me. What would that suggest?

Via Julia. 

For those who missed it in the comments:

While fat activism has disrupted many dominant discourses that causally contribute to negative judgments about fat bodies, it has not yet penetrated the realm of competitive bodybuilding. 

Savour that sentence. Let it roll around your mind.

According to its author, Richard Baldwin, fat bodybuilding should be a thing that exists. Specifically, “a fat-inclusive politicised performance… embedded within bodybuilding,” in which the “assumptions” and standards of the sport would be “destabilised,” with the result that “everyone” can be “taken seriously,” regardless of their girth and athleticism. Competitors, we’re told, would “showcase fat through poses… that display fat in a body-positive way,” while wearing whatever commodious garments are deemed to enhance the, um, aesthetics of their gyrations. And hey, showcasing fat is what sport’s all about. 

It takes time to make a fat body. It takes even more time to make a politicised fat body. This is precisely the message fat bodybuilding should convey: the fat body is a body built by time and work and deserves to be respected.

These are the dizzy heights of Fat Studies scholarship.  

Unlike Mr Baldwin, I make no claim to being “dedicated to fighting oppression and promoting social justice,” but actually, it occurs to me that a fat body, by which the author seems to mean an ostentatiously obese one, is quite easy to arrive at, as it generally involves the abandonment of self-denial, succumbing to temptation by default, and a tendency to shun any avoidable exertion. Basically, torpidity and a lack of care. A point somewhat underlined by the unremarkable fact that the number of fat people exceeds by orders of magnitude the number of bodybuilders.

Via Darleen. 

At the Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where annual tuition is north of $50,000, education is under way:

“Why is it okay to bring people to talk against their own people?” the student finally asked, though when [invited speaker, Burgess] Owens attempted to answer, the student again began complaining about the “structural racism” he has experienced. “Please let him answer the question,” the moderator interjected. “Let me finish talking!” the student shouted back. As Owens once again attempted to answer, the student reiterated that he was “not finished talking,” and continued to interrupt Owens. The moderator was eventually forced to shut down the question-and-answer portion of the talk, prompting cries of “white fragility!” from the audience.

You see, in the Clown Quarter, black people are only allowed to have one point of view. 

And note the woke student, here, who refers to Mr Owens as an “Uncle Tom,” before hurrying away with a self-satisfied grin. Moments later, just after Mr Owens mentions the importance of debate and showing each other respect, things go downhill. 

Due to your host being sleep-deprived, you’re getting a precious opportunity to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with a demonstration of inadequate planning; via Holborn, the thrill of knitting patterns; some New York City scenes circa 1911; a photogenically frozen Siberian lake; and, because you deserve it, some high-quality cinema. 

Oh, and a headline of possible interest. 

Rafi steers us to this article by Charlotte Allen on the ever-narrowing parameters of leftist tolerance. The following extract, on her attempts to cover a “white privilege” conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, may be of particular interest:

I had already covered the White Privilege Conference for the Weekly Standard in 2013, when it had met at a Seattle airport hotel. Back then, the conference had struck me strictly as a subject for laughs… So my story had highlighted the conference’s most salient feature: that although minority-group victimologists were robustly represented, many of the speakers, and certainly most of the audience, consisted of white people feeling guilty for being white.

I gently poked fun at the George Mason University professor who got up onstage to apologise that his pants had been stitched in a sweatshop in Bangladesh; the soi-disant American Indian activist who had been ousted as tribal chief for financial mismanagement after a large sum of money went missing; and the large percentage of conference workshop leaders who seemed actually to be flogging their books and hustling for participants to sign up as paying customers for their own white-privilege conferences elsewhere. […]

I returned to the scene in 2018 because during the intervening five years “white privilege” seemed to have mushroomed from a zany preoccupation of far-left professors into a mainstream pedagogical trend. Just a few days ago elementary-school teachers in Raleigh, N.C., sent second-graders home with a sheet for their parents titled “11-Step Guide to Race, Racism, and White Privilege.” The sheet proffered such injunctions as “Drop ‘colourblindedness’ (which is arguably an ableist term anyway)” and “Only white people can be racist.” The white-privilege movement had become serious — and a serious threat to those who declined to be indoctrinated or to have their children indoctrinated.

Do read the whole thing.

Previously on the Planet of the Bedlamites.