Some of you may remember Ms Lierre Keith, a former radical vegan activist turned radical advocate of a return to subsistence farming. Ms Keith has long been a vocal champion of vandalism, harassment and “militant action,” and taken at their own words, she and her colleagues would like to see those they deem “associated” with environmental accidents being killed by the state. They also like the idea of “sabotaging infrastructure” and cutting power lines, thereby leaving tens of thousands of people without light and heat, as this would somehow encourage “class consciousness.” Elderly people in remote locations would presumably embrace the finer points of revolutionary eco-socialism as they shivered in the dark and the feeling left their limbs.

In March 2010 Ms Keith was herself targeted for “militant action” by disgruntled vegans even more radical and pious than she, and who disrupted her lecture at an anarchist book fair by pelting Ms Keith with chili-flavoured cream pies. An experience our fearless titan found both bewildering and outrageous. “The whole thing was designed for social humiliation,” Ms Keith told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me.” Unfortunately, the Chronicle didn’t ask Ms Keith whether this small taste of her own medicine, her own methods, had altered her position on changing the views of others by means of “militant action.”

Having since recovered from this traumatic encounter with slapstick protest, and armed only with an anatomical slideshow of male genitalia, Ms Keith has resumed her attempts to establish her own radical credentials in yet another sphere. And so, in the following video, recorded over the weekend at a public library in Portland, Oregon, Ms Keith – now a “radical feminist and gender abolitionist” – speaks truth to power, fearlessly, radically, and at enormous personal risk. Specifically, she shares the truth that, “Being a man requires a psychology based on entitlement, emotional numbness, and a dichotomy of self-knowledge.” Self-knowledge being a subject on which Ms Keith can speak with unassailable authority. 

Naturally, Ms Keith’s latest area of expertise is not limited to maleness and its inherent wickedness; the entire world of manandwomanlyness™ is hers to describe, and of course correct. And so we learn that, “Gender is a political creation because patriarchy has to separate who counts as human and who counts as an appropriate target for violation. That’s what gender is.” Gender, it turns out, is merely a “caste system,” one “disguised as biology.” Therefore there must be “organised political resistance.” Which is to say, “The sex class ‘men’… needs to be abolished if women are ever to be free.” Because, “Liberty and a living planet will only be won when masculinity, its religion, its economics, its psychology and its sex is resisted and finally defeated.” These deep thoughts and more can be savoured more fully in the video below: 

An unparagraphed outpouring, edited for brevity: 

It saddens all that I believe is truly good so deeply to see such ignorant and violently senseless comments made out of selfishness and an inability to think beyond an immediate and primitive reaction… But how do you address a flood of ignorance, a torrent of hatred and insecurity? How do you speak to the angry voices with pitchforks and torches? You are the witch hunters and you project your own inadequacies onto others without any self-critical thought or capacity for ideas outside of your own selfishness. Good art causes us to ask questions of ourselves and the reason you hate this art is because you refuse to ask yourself any meaningful questions… Your soul will remain undeveloped and your life without meaning if you allow your ignorance to control you. In art, as in life, you must ask yourself the most important question: why? And ask it honestly. Give yourself some time. And for most of you, a lot of time.

You see, we mustn’t laugh at the vanity of substandard artists. Alas, we can only guess at the identity of the commenter. 

“Aunt Velma, she never married.” // At last, a swingers-only apartment complex. // “How often do you fart in your place of work?” // The bath houses of 1950s Tokyo. // Transparent faucet. // On drunk and sober fish. // Adorable fungi. // More fun with magnetic putty. // Light painting. // At play, from above. // Poolside Radio. // How to wake your pig. // 808 cube. // The rise and fall of the courtroom sketch artist. // Cinematic matte painting, from Black Narcissus to Alien. // Unsold cars. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Spielberg’s long takes. // In local news. // At last, the vegan feminist network. // A snoring albino hedgehog. // Cross-dressing gentleman, 1896. // And finally, Glenn Close in space. With a talking raccoon.

Two weeks before its scheduled completion, this hotel in Asan, South Korea, “abruptly tilted to one side.”

Via Mick. 

Kevin D Williamson on where Big Government goes: 

In the run-up to the 2012 election, senior IRS executives including Lois Lerner, then the head of the IRS branch that oversees the activities of tax-exempt non-profit groups, began singling out conservative-leaning organisations for extra attention, invasive investigations and legal harassment. The IRS did not target groups that they believed might be violating the rules governing tax-exempt organisations; rather, as e-mails from the agency document, the IRS targeted these conservative groups categorically, regardless of whether there was any evidence that they were not in compliance with the relevant regulations… Also targeted were groups dedicated to issues such as taxes, spending, debt, and, perhaps most worrisome, those that were simply “critical of the how the country is being run.”

An exhaustive archive of IRS-related items can be found here. 

Stephen Carter on the narrowness and hubris of student ‘radicals’:  

In my day, the college campus was a place that celebrated the diversity of ideas. Pure argument was our guide. Staking out an unpopular position was admired – and the admiration, in turn, provided excellent training in the virtues of tolerance on the one hand and, on the other, integrity. Your generation, I am pleased to say, seems to be doing away with all that. There’s no need for the ritual give and take of serious argument when, in your early 20s, you already know the answers to all questions. How marvellous it must be to realise at so tender an age that you will never, ever change your mind.

And Luke James steers us to the following round-table discussion about the suppression of free speech by self-styled student ‘activists’. If you’ve 30 minutes to spare, the video below is well worth watching, though not exactly encouraging. The participants are Professor of English Janice Fiamengo, whose encounters with such ‘activists’ have been mentioned here previously, Justin Trottier of the Centre for Inquiry, Huffington Post blogger and “community organiser” Rachel Décoste, and Alice McLachlan, Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto. The views of Ms Décoste and Ms McLachlan may be of particular interest, though possibly for reasons the ladies didn’t intend.