Franklin Einspruch on the Great Boston Kimono Outrage of 2015: 

Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants… This incident — call it Kimonogate — demonstrates just how far the new puritans are willing to reach to impose their version of politics upon all of our pleasures. Watching Chinese and South Asians lump themselves into an aggregate for the sake of claiming offence on behalf of the Japanese, when that conflation of Asian identities is an established microaggression, is weird enough. Worrying that someone might touch a robe Orientalistically is out there in tinfoil-hat territory. Is that the kind of person you want deciding which activities you’re allowed to enjoy at the art museum? 

Franklin also has a message for the modishly indignant.  

Thomas Sowell on favoured narratives and unintended consequences: 

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

And Katherine Timpf reports from the throbbing edge of academic enquiry: 

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” – so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird… Dr Williams [director of social work at Idaho State University] explained that no one should be bothered by a person wanting to drink another person’s blood because “it is generally expected within the community that vampires should act ethically and responsibly in feeding practices,” and it’s not their blood-drinking that’s the real problem here — it’s the fact that they have to worry that other people will judge them for their blood-drinking.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Twitter exchange of note. // The acid should kick in any moment now. // I’m no expert but I think that’s a shark. // I’ve been playing this quite a lot. // There’s whittling and there’s whittling. // Grow new teeth in nine weeks. // So.Much.Guardian, a tumblr. // An interactive atlas of world history. // The props and miniatures of Blade Runner. // Baby storage. // Storm near Rapid City. // Sticky page markers of note. The markers are sticky, not the pages. // “In the small village of Vrontados, there is unrest.” // Soho Square, London, 1956. // Beware the stealth cucumber. // Because you need to be told when to buy new shoes. // At last, a centrifugal fragrance diffuser. // A website you have to queue for. It’s terribly exclusive. // And finally, four minutes or so of daddy-daughter time. 

A headline of note from the Belfast Telegraph: 

Man Fined for Sedating Girlfriend So He Could Keep Playing Video Games. 

In short, 

A court in Castrop-Rauxel, a town in eastern Germany, heard that the man’s (now ex) girlfriend had arrived home while he was playing games with his friend one night in August. Keen to keep playing after she came home, the man put sedative in her tea, causing her to sleep until midday the next day.

Via Chris Snowdon. 

A small southern California company which produces “earth-friendly” feminine hygiene products has released the first tampon for post-op transgender women.

Yes, I too was puzzled at first. 

“Our product is designed to give post-op transgender women the full-spectrum experience of menstruation. You don’t have to be deprived of the beautiful and womanly occurrence of menstruation merely because you were born without a uterus. The Fem-Flo’s cotton core contains a small, vegetable-based capsule which upon reaching body temperature releases the ‘menses’ contained within.”

Still waiting on those lunar bases and flying cars, though. 

Kristian Niemietz is upsetting readers of the Independent: 

I am amazed by how the British left has managed to convince themselves that Syriza somehow represented a break with “neoliberal politics” in Greece… After three and a half decades of economic statism and hyperinterventionism, how exactly is a party that stands for economic statism and hyperinterventionism a “break” with anything? […] The Greek economy had become a rent-seeking economy, in which economic activity is not about creating wealth, but about extracting wealth from others through the political process. If you’re afraid of dog-eat-dog capitalism, you haven’t seen dog-eat-dog socialism yet.

So far in the comments, Mr Niemietz has been called a “sadist,” a “little shit” and “one of Thatcher’s odious children.” Commenters slightly more supportive of Mr Niemietz are also being denounced as “fascists, xenophobes, bigots and racists.”

Tim Blair on the same.  

Ashe Schow on joke degrees: 

“Of those that graduate, some will have degrees that prepare them for nothing that is highly valued by society,” [parent, Anne] Gassel wrote. “I remember last year at a college open house hearing from a young woman who had a degree in women’s studies. She told the parents sitting in the room that she was lucky to get a job with the university. I don’t think she realised how that sounded.” She added: “Apparently the only thing a women’s studies degree prepares one for is working for a university admissions office to promote that degree to other gullible students.” 

And via TDK, Robert Tracinski on the shifting pieties of the left: 

Now a major portion of the left has stopped even pretending that they value work. Hence the growing support for a guaranteed minimum income, a lifetime handout large enough to provide everyone with a comfortable existence. The goal, according to one supporter of this idea, is precisely to allow people not to work… [But] the evidence suggests that when people are paid just for breathing, when they lose the basic habit of working, they don’t spend their time writing symphonies. They sit on the couch smoking pot and watching bad TV.

We’ve been here before, of course. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.