David Rutz on the “woke eight-year-old” manoeuvre: 

The phenomenon came to my attention via @Neontaster, who discovered this trend of eight-year-olds (or children of a similar age, depending on their Woke Quotients) whose opinions, shockingly, seem to perfectly mirror those of their progressive parents… Let’s state the obvious: When pundits tweet out these little stories, all they’re doing is sending out their own opinions, but doing so in a way that (a) makes them look like great parents for raising such emotionally advanced children, and (b) shields them from criticism. Because what kind of jerk is going to attack a child, for God’s sake?

And what kind of person, I wonder, would be that preening and dishonest. And while we ponder that. 

Madeleine Kearns, a young Scottish woman, on a bewildering year at a ‘progressive’ New York university: 

It was soon obvious to my fellow students that I was not quite with the programme. In a class discussion early in my first semester, I made the mistake of mentioning that I believed in objective standards in art. Some art is great, some isn’t, I said; not all artists are equally talented. This was deemed an undemocratic opinion and I was given a nickname: the cultural fascist. I’ve tried to take it affectionately.

Tim Newman on life skills and the lack thereof: 

What isn’t normal is for a kid to run around swearing. Letting slip a swear word indicates the kid has his ears open. Running around swearing indicates his parents don’t care, and if they don’t care about his language you can be absolutely sure they don’t care about other things, some of which are essential to his development. A child who routinely uses bad language, especially in front of adults, is not going to do very well in life.

And again, entirely unrelated, of course, on polyamory and children: 

Were any of these friends shagging either or both of your parents? I ask mainly to understand how you’ve turned out.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Another do-it-yourself, I’m afraid, so by all means share your own links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with a guide to the five stages; why friends don’t let friends write for the Guardian; how to swear in sign language; a real-time map of tracked traffic; and a heart-warming tale of when car-jacking goes awry. 

Oh, and via dicentra: Anyone need a lift?  

And behold their glittering minds:

“You shouldn’t even have an opinion about this.”

The above exchange was filmed at the Boston Free Speech Rally, August 19. A longer, even more educational version, with lots of additional shoving and liveliness, is embedded below the fold. And remember, these Children of Marcuse, the ones demanding “empathy” while laughing at accounts of random beatings, have been educated, quite thoroughly.

Because hey, you can’t be too careful.

Via Obnoxio.  

In today’s competitive grievance culture, unearthing new sorrows, or reheating old sorrows, can require prodigious, indeed bewildering, feats of contortion. And so, in the pages of The Atlantic, we find one Alice Ristroph railing at the heavens. First, a little context:

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will arrive mid-morning on the coast of Oregon. The moon’s shadow will be about 70 miles wide, and it will race across the country faster than the speed of sound, exiting the eastern seaboard shortly before 3pm local time.

Clouds permitting, it should be quite a thing to witness.

It has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, and along most of its path, there live almost no black people.

There we go. If that one caught you off guard, here’s another:

As the eclipse approaches, the temperature will fall and birds will roost, and then, suddenly, the lights will go out. For each place within the path of totality, the darkness will last a minute, maybe two, and then daylight will return. Oregon, where this begins, is almost entirely white. The 10 percent or so of state residents who do not identify as white are predominantly Latino, American Indian, Alaskan, or Asian. 

This goes on for some time. It’s an attempt at symbolism, I think. A beverage may be useful.

It is a matter of population density, and more specifically geographic variations in population density by race, for which the sun and the moon cannot be held responsible. Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.

The message, it seems, is that people – specifically, black ones – aren’t arranged geographically as Professor Ristroph would wish.

From Oregon, the eclipse will travel through Idaho and Wyoming… Percentage-wise, Idaho and Wyoming are even whiter than Oregon… The few non-white residents of Idaho and Wyoming are not black — they are mostly Latino, American Indian, and Alaskan. 

Perhaps this demographic bean-counting is all building to some kind of point, a moment of profundity. 

From Kansas, the eclipse goes to Missouri, still mostly bypassing black people. 

Surely a contender for The Most Woke Sentence Yet Uttered.

Moving east, the eclipse will pass part of St. Louis, whose overall population is nearly half black. But the black residents are concentrated in the northern half of the metropolitan area, and the total eclipse crosses only the southern half.

If you laughed at that, tittered even, you’re a terrible, terrible person.