Yet again, we find that the victim group du jour’s distress is not predicated on any overt act of exclusion or discrimination, but upon the group’s own internal emotional hang-ups.

So writes R Sherman in the comments, regarding this latest fit of identitarian psychodrama, shared by Atempdog, in which implausibly delicate students and administrators rail against the “homonormative whiteness” of a campus LGBTQ centre. As commenter Farnsworth M Muldoon notes in reply, the students are, inevitably, also aggrieved, or pretending to be aggrieved, by a great many other things, including gay pride flags, which apparently perpetuate “a white gay ideal”; notions of fraternity and sorority, which are “problematic” and a cause of discomfort, albeit for reasons not entirely clear; and the campus gym, which, we’re told, reinforces “expectations of manliness” while simultaneously creating a crushing and intolerable “pressure to be fit.”

Being, as these things are, the result of pretension and personal dysfunction rather than anything approaching actual injustice, the umbrage on display is of course insatiable. There’s no way to please the compulsively, competitively, neurotically indignant, whose in-group status and sense of importance depend on disaffection and imaginary woe, and any effort to appease such creatures is likely to encourage further scolding and demands.

As illustrated, for instance, here and here.

Some Nth-level virtue-signalling:

“Come, look at the negroes, Martha.”

Via Farnsworth M Muldoon in the comments.

Yes, I know, you’re getting another glorious opportunity to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. Oh, don’t pull that face. Besides, you’re getting pretty good at it. I’ll set the ball rolling with an assortment of home maintenance horrors, an improbable heist, a lesson in the importance of tilting your head, a second-language difficulty ranking, a burly chap in search of jewellery, and an endeavour that starts with jumping off a mountain and only then gets tricky. 

Oh, and how to turn a cat into a black hole. 

With the season of bonhomie fast approaching, patrons are reminded that any festive shopping done via the following Amazon links – here for the UK and here for the US – results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

That is all. 

At Ballou High School, Washington, DC, it would appear that miracles happen:

Teachers… say they often had students on their rosters they barely knew because the students almost never attended class.

And yet, this year, every student of suitable age, including those who were absent more often than in class, has somehow graduated and been accepted by a college or university. At a school were only 3% of students were deemed proficient in reading, where the average SAT score is 782 out of 1600, and where, according to one teacher, those who do attend, in the loosest possible sense, “roam the halls with impunity.”

Of course I use the word graduated in the same entirely bogus way favoured by the school’s administrators.

Via Rafi.