Madsen Pirie on the power of our fluffy and benign state broadcaster: 

The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine. Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.

Related. 

Heather Mac Donald on “rape culture” hysteria: 

The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers. Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies — that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery — is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of… And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in. […] If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed… there would be no more campuses. You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning. Why hasn’t that happened? Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

And Steven Hayward quotes several academics who tire of feminist melodrama and the politics of the mob: 

Personally, liberal [i.e., leftist] students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a Facebook page calling me a communist… the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican… The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip — not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery — and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a Twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

But remember, you mustn’t say no to them. Because that one tiny word is now “violent language,” for which you will be “held accountable.” 

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

As clarified by our dear friend Laurie Penny:

You see, an Instagram page about young and attractive people with their pets – one intended to “make you drool more than man’s best friend” – should also feature shorter, fatter, saggier people in order to be fair, and then we should all pretend that those shorter, fatter, saggier people are every bit as hot. 

In shocking news, it seems the concerns of Oxbridge PPE graduates living in Islington aren’t the same as an electrician from Essex.

From the comments following this. 

And which perhaps explains why the Guardian, the foremost national organ of the British left, publishes so many articles like this one, in which the author openly sneers at his proletarian inferiors and their “ugly” recreational habits. Specifically, working class barbecues, with their “blokey chat” and “low-grade sausage meat,” and where heteronormativity “really drains the joy from the summer breeze.” Heavens, how ghastly:   

If there is anything… more oppressively penetrating than the conversation of four suburban men discussing how to light and then operate a barbecue, I have yet to hear it.

And as we’ve seen, many times, such lofty thoughts – and the subsequent self-congratulation, in which rebuttals and factual corrections are construed as validation – are not random anomalies but standard fare.

“Send a bag of dicks to that special someone in your life.” // I want you Bach. // A map of undersea cables. // Miniature recreations of iconic photographs. // How to turn your smartphone into a microscope. // Circle Push, a game of pushing circles. // Sociology and farting, together at last. // Related: “Don’t fart naked near food.” // Robot room service. // Ace dad. // When Kindle covers go wrong. // Shockwave. // Vibrating cat paw massager. // Movie poster quiz. // Artist uses eye-tracker to draw with his eyes. // Done with smoke and bubbles. // Blind painter. // The cost of petrol. // Remember to pack sandwiches for your journey to the centre of the Earth. // At last, a Guardians of the Galaxy porno knock-off. // The erotic aspects of Tetris had previously been overlooked. 

In an eye-widening article that I recommend reading in full, Paul Sperry takes a look at ‘progressive’ education policy and its consequences: 

Thanks to talking circles and peer juries, “young people are now taking control of the environment,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan gushed in a 2014 speech to black students at Howard University. “It’s sort of a counter-intuitive thing for many of us as adults, but the more we give up power, the more we empower others, often the better things are,” Duncan added. “And empowering teenagers to be part of the solution, having them control the [classroom] environment, control the culture, be the leaders, listening to them, respecting them — when we do that, wonderful things happen for kids in communities that didn’t happen historically.”

Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.

A development repeated elsewhere, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, Santa Ana and Syracuse, and all of which is no doubt bewildering to such educators as Eric Butler, a “restorative justice co-ordinator,” whose prideful mantra is “I don’t blame, I don’t punish.” 

How very generous of him.  

After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack…

A white sixth-grade teacher at a mostly black Washington, DC, school told the US Commission on Civil Rights she had similar “conversations” in which she was told that the bad behaviour of black boys is mainly the teacher’s fault. “I have been encouraged to examine and question how my own racial dispositions affect my teaching and my students,” Andrea Smith testified. During cultural sensitivity training required of school districts under restorative justice programmes, teachers are told they are largely to blame for bad behaviour of black students because they “misinterpret” African-American culture.

Via Darleen Click, who asks, 

I’m sorry, but exactly how does one misinterpret a punch to the face?

Answers on a postcard, please.