Heather Mac Donald on theories of crime.

If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?

KC Johnson on academic groupthink. 

Essay after essay in the NEA’s annual higher-education publication complains about how professors lack respect from the public, without ever pausing to consider how the image of colleges and universities as the bastion of out-of-touch ideologues might have caused the problem.

Candace de Russy on Sociology 101.

It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most “educated” are systematically being taught to loathe it.

Greg Lukianoff on campus censorship and learned intolerance.

Until 2007 Western Michigan University’s harassment policy banned “sexism,” which it defined as “the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” I am unfamiliar with any other attempt by a public institution to ban a perception, let alone perceiving that a person is a man or woman. Even public restrooms violate this rule. […] These codes not only chill free expression by warning students of serious consequences for controversial speech — or even normal, everyday speech — but they also systematically miseducate kids to believe that free speech goes only as far as the most sensitive person in the room can handle.

And it’s worth bearing in mind that “sensitive” may actually mean passive-aggressive or dishonest, or the person with the weakest argument. 

College students are placed in an unenviable position. They are constantly urged to argue, debate, discuss, question, and analyse the most important issues of the day, but they also often know stories of other students who were punished for taking the “wrong side” of an argument. […] When students come to believe that censoring rival points of view is not only permissible but laudable, the potential damage goes far beyond campus. Our colleges and universities produce our scientists, our business leaders, our lawyers, and our legislators. The habits formed in college inevitably seep into the other major social institutions.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

It took 800 exposures, three nights and a rented room.

Emily said yes.

Darleen Click has compiled reactions to Avatar by self-appointed representatives of Designated Victim Groups. Needless to say, the levels of unrealism and doctrinal turgidity are quite hazardous.

There’s a bit of this:

This synopsis contains profoundly ableist language in the way it describes the protagonist Jake as “confined to a wheelchair.” I don’t use a wheelchair; nevertheless, I was very offended when I read that. We’ve been trying to eradicate terms like “confined to a wheelchair” for a while now, and to see this demonstration of ignorance on such a large scale, since it is mainstream, is distressing. […] It’s a long-held stereotype (and still exists today) that disability is unnatural in people and so must be fixed or cured. 

And this, from a breezy sermon titled Gender Normativity and Imperial Domination in Avatar:

I’d like to explain that I do not believe that binary gender is natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans, or even as animals. […] I have too many female friends with penises to put all my faith in biological determinism, no matter what planet I’m on.

Update, via the comments:

Self-preoccupation is essential to the kind of tribalism seen above, along with an urge to pathologise the prosaic. If the prosaic can be made to sound oppressive or inauthentic, it makes those who announce themselves as nonconformist sound much braver and more interesting than they actually are (if only to themselves and those similarly disposed). For instance, the clownish Amanda Marcotte rails against any number of “normativities,” all of which she seeks to pathologise. It isn’t enough that she doesn’t feel an urge to become a parent. She has to claim that those who do wish to become parents don’t know their own minds and are dupes of some hegemonic power. In much the same way, the preference for an intact and functional body is depicted as both a parochial social construct and a moral failing. And likewise, the belief that “binary gender” is not “natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans” is based on an occasional malfunction of the very biological processes that are imagined not to exist.

But this is what gorging on identity politics does – it fosters unrealism and makes dishonesty routine. Often there’s a creep of small dishonesties. For instance, the disabled feminists article grumbles about the Avatar synopsis, which refers to the film’s protagonist as “confined to a wheelchair.” The author complains, “Non-disabled people may think… referring to someone who uses a wheelchair as ‘confined to a wheelchair’ is okay – but of course, it’s really not — ‘wheelchair user,’ for instance, is more acceptable.” However, this means avoiding a perfectly legitimate and accurate term – Jake is confined to a wheelchair; that’s sort of the point, dramatically. But fluffier, more sensitive terms are apparently now required. “Wheelchair user” could of course mean that Jake only uses a wheelchair occasionally – say, when walking leaves him fatigued. Which is deliberately imprecise and hardly the stuff of interplanetary drama.

Sentiments of this kind may be dishonest – indeed bizarre – but they are surprisingly common. Not long ago on Radio 4, a legless and rather prickly “activist” insisted that it was “oppressive” to view the loss of a person’s legs as in any way regrettable. Regarding this loss as something negative was apparently “ableist,” “ignorant” and offensive. This claim was repeated several times, emphatically. At one point the activist declared that given a chance to walk again he would refuse, such was his “pride” in having lost a third of his body. Anger had been displaced from the obvious grievance – the traumatic loss of one’s legs – to the supposed “injustice” of regarding limb loss as a dismaying or terrifying state of affairs. As a coping mechanism, it wasn’t entirely honest. Or, it seems, successful.

(h/t, Dicentra.)

Smileycam. // Electricity. // You are teeming with bacteria. // Trillions and computing. // The evolution of life in 60 seconds. // A year in 40 seconds. // B-movies! // Dominoes. // Roots. // Nick Veasey talks x-rays. // Yes, but is it real? // “You have to be committed to tattoo your eyes.” // The parkour flip book.  (h/t, Coudal) // Ancient Egyptian art. (h/t, Derek) // Play Tetris with your feet. // Before you can fight crime you must first make a costume. // Godzilla gets some. // “Men know when they’re aroused, women may not.” // The Flatiron Building, 1902. // And finally, evil rabbits.

Colosseum made of illuminated ice at the International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, Harbin, northeastern China, January 3.

A chessboxing pictorial. Above: Andy “The Rock” Costello v Gianluca “Il Dottore” Sirci, October 2009. More chessboxing. Via.

Here’s an archive of classic films by the late Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the pioneer of stroboscopic high-speed photography. The collection includes early experiments featuring hummingbirds, fan blades and falling cats. Though Edgerton’s most ambitious work was done for the Atomic Energy Commission, for which he filmed and photographed early nuclear tests using his own Rapatronic camera system. With exposure times measured in nanoseconds, the results were often eerie and surreal, as when capturing the first milliseconds of atomic fireballs in Nevada.

Also archived, Edgerton’s photographs and notebooks. Via MetaFilter. 

Stuart Taylor takes another look at Duke University, where its infamous far left faculty has dug in even deeper.

Duke’s rules define sexual misconduct so broadly and vaguely as to include any sexual activity without explicit “verbal or nonverbal” consent, which must be so “clear” as to dispel “real or perceived power differentials between individuals [that] may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion.” The disciplinary rules deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser. The rules also give her – but not him – the right to be treated with “sensitivity”; to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents.

Jeff Goldstein notes why Duke’s infestation will persist. 

The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities.

As Jeff, myself and others have pointed out, the relevance and power of identity politics advocates requires a cultivation of grievance among those ostensibly being championed. The grievance narrative must never be allowed to go away, whatever the actual situation, since grievance (or professed grievance) is the principal source of leverage, influence and funding. Even if this entails exaggerating minor slights or distorting statistics, or framing the issue so tendentiously that almost any kind of dissent can be deemed oppressive and malign. See, for instance, the ludicrous campus rape claims of Barbara Barnett, formerly of Duke, or the reactions of many feminists to factual correction by Christina Hoff Sommers, or the outrageous treatment of Keith John Sampson and Thomas Thibeault.

And Ophelia Benson notes some routine moral flummery at the BBC.

It had to report on this al-Shabab guy trying to kill Kurt Westergaard so therefore it had to make sure you didn’t get the wrong idea and think it, the BBC, didn’t think Kurt Westergaard deserved it, at least a little bit.

Indeed. Yesterday morning, the BBC’s Today programme performed much the same manoeuvre, suggesting the attempt to murder the 75-year-old cartoonist with an axe showed the strength of “feeling” on the issue and the “anger that still exists over what he did.” A more realistic response might stress instead a psychotic sense of vanity and barbarous presumption – one that validates the point of Westergaard’s cartoon.

Feel free to share your own items of interest.

Spork. (nsfw) // Asteroids and diplomacy. // Dolphin boats. // A breakthrough in gingerbread. // Fly pepper. // What gulls will eat. // Grow mushrooms at home. // Dental tattoos. // Space as seen on television. // Planets forming in the Orion Nebula. // The Known Universe. // Kraftwerk live in Buenos Aires, 1998. // DJ desks. // A fondness for drum machines. // Nuclear reactor wall charts. // Original Alien script, formerly titled Starbeast. // Last suppers. // Toys of extinct animals. // The art of green screen. // To be or not to be. (h/t, Anna)

Two galleries of snakes photographed by Guido Mocafico. Click to embiggen.

Mocafico’s book, Serpens, is available here and here.