Laurie Penny tells us that her politics,

lean towards anarchism/anarcho-communism.

And so, intrigued, we turn to Wikipedia:

The abolition of wage labour is central to anarchist communism. With distribution of wealth being based on self-determined needs, people would be free to engage in whatever activities they found most fulfilling and would no longer have to engage in work for which they have neither the temperament nor the aptitude.

How terribly precious. Imagine all of our delicate hand-wash-only radicals, all those little Lauries, self-determining how much wealth should be distributed their way, and how much, or little, they could be arsed to do in return. Temperament permitting. 

See also, parasite. 

Robert Tracinski on socialist Venezuela and the imaginings of John Lennon: 

Before you judge Venezuela’s looters, consider what you would do if your children were starving. So much for “no hunger.” What about the “brotherhood of man”? Not only is looting soaring in Venezuela, but so are all forms of crime. It has gotten so far out of control that mobs of vigilantes are burning people alive in the streets over petty thefts. It turns out then when people are starving, there’s not a lot of brotherhood. Instead, they fight like dogs over a bone.

Mick Hartley quotes Nick Cohen on Venezuela’s leftist cheerleaders: 

Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination.” What more could a breathless Western punter ask for? Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. […] The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war.

Theodore Dalrymple on charity and welfare: 

Charity given as of right, for that is what the welfare state does, favours the undeserving more than the deserving, in so far as the undeserving have a capacity and even talent for generating more neediness than the deserving. (They also tend to be more vocal in their demands.) The welfare state in fact dissolves the very notion of desert, because there is no requirement that a beneficiary prove he deserves what he is legally entitled to. And where what is given is given as of right, not only will a recipient feel no gratitude for it, but it must be given without compassion — that is, without regard to any individual’s actual situation. In the welfare state, the notion of a specially deserving case is prohibited, for it implies a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.

And Katherine Timpf on sartorial innovation in the name of “social justice”:

The New Hanover County School System in North Carolina has proposed a ban on wearing tight pants in its schools because apparently “bigger girls” are getting bullied for the way that they look when they wear them.

Snug jeans and leggings would only be permissible if a looser secondary garment, say, a long shirt or dress, “covers the posterior in its entirety.” Freddie Mercury and Sir Mix-A-Lot could not be reached for comment.

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

Hubris meets nemesis. (h/t, Damian) // There’s a GoBoat with your name on it. // 12 hours of air conditioner hum. Use it wisely. // Darth by Darthwest. // Bath time. // Behold. // Do not swallow your phone. // For all your subtitled Soviet movie needs. (h/t, Tom) // “History’s most dangerous piece of intellectual malware.” // Suspiciously quiet on Mars. // Miniature nineteenth century photo studio. // Man’s besties. // The making of you. // Hardcore ivy. // Stiff breeze. // Headline of note. // Because Korean hip-hop exists. I denounce the cultural appropriation. // Corgi orgy. // And happily it’s washable. (h/t, Paul) // For the wee ones, a cuddlesome cephalopod. // Sculptural fish tanks. // And finally, thrillingly, the Great Crepitation Contest of 1946. It’s all in the knees, apparently.

Rachelle Peterson on the ugly racial dogma of Black Lives Matter: 

A major claim shared by most of the participants at Black Lives Matter 101 is that the black “lived experience” is impenetrable to non-blacks. The “narrative” is closed off and inaccessible to any who has not lived it, which means, by definition, all “whites.” According to these pronouncements, [non-black people] are inadvertent racists if they attempt to affirm black culture because they will inevitably present it as one-dimensional. And they are racists pure and simple if they do not affirm black culture in exactly the ways the Black Lives Matter activists prescribe. It is racism either way, and racism all the way down. […]

The spokesmen at Black Lives Matter 101 gave voice to what would quickly be recognised in any other context as claims of racial exclusivity. They were not shy about this or worried that it would undermine their larger claims. But, in fact, this view does undermine their larger claims. Their eagerness to take racial categorizations as fundamental, unalterable, and essentially “true,” contradicts their sense that racism is unjust and wrong. Replacing one form of racism with another takes us no closer to a fair and just society… What is the use of protesting racism by affirming an intrinsic all-powerful racial identity? 

And yes, there’s video of the gathering in question. Though to get through it, you may need a handy canister of nitrous oxide. 

Heather Mac Donald on the Great Mao-ling Psychodrama: 

My personal favourite in this tsunami of self-pity comes from Princeton’s put-upon minority students, who proclaimed that they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” a phrase first used by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who had picked cotton as a child on a Mississippi plantation and who was beaten for trying to vote. Can we have a reality check here? Every American college student today, no matter his race or gender, is among the most privileged individuals in human history. Millions of Chinese students are at this very moment studying their butts off in the hope of gaining access to the intellectual resources that American students take for granted. And being a Princeton or Yale student bears no resemblance – need I really say this? – to being a sharecropper in the Jim Crow South. 

Meanwhile, at Dartmouth College, merely suggesting that the lives of police officers matter too can result in indignation, vandalism and organised efforts to intimidate. Note which party college administrators are frightened of upsetting and willing to indulge with double standards, and note the somewhat creepy tactics of those who feel entitled to dictate the range of opinions and facts that may be expressed. Apparently, remembering police officers killed in the line of duty is nothing more than “white supremacist bullshit” and an act of “violence.”

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

Sad news, readers. The Telegraph reports that Ms Natalie Bennett will shortly be standing down as Green Party leader. Says the Great Green Articulator: 

I’m not a smooth, spin-trained, lifelong politician… It’s both my strength and my weakness that I answer the question.

Those wishing to relive Ms Bennett’s attempts to answer questions, and to recall facts and grapple with basic arithmetic, can do so here and here. And given Ms Bennett’s belief that “the world is sodden with stuff” and that therefore the people in it “cannot have more stuff,” and given her party’s commitment to economic recession and “realigning the [public’s] mind” until it embraces an overbearing state and a “new economic order,” also known as ruin, perhaps we should be thankful for her entertaining inadequacies.