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. 

Daniel Hannan on stats and cover stories: 

“The rich are richer and the poor are poorer,” says the left-of-centre British newspaper, The Independent, on its front page. That phrase is so common, so facile, so glib, that it is almost a truism. Except that it’s not true… On almost every measure of absolute wealth, the poor are getting richer. Because this fact seems counterintuitive, some people scrabble around for data that seem to contradict it. The Independent’s rather tendentious use of savings as its main measure of wealth is typical… The same partiality explains why leftists clutch so determinedly at their bizarre definition of poverty as having a household income less than 60 per cent of the mean – a measure which gives Britain a greater rate of poverty than Bangladesh.

And Natalie Solent on minimum wage laws and the subsequent, inevitable, dancing around the obvious: 

I came across this article asking “Why are so many Seattle restaurants closing lately?” The writer, Sara Jones, goes through the possible answers to this question at some length. Ownership changes. “Concept switches,” whatever they might be. Premises too big. Ingredients too pricey. Menus too esoteric. Too loud. Too quiet. Managers who do too much. Managers who do too little. Many and various are the potentialities diligently listed by Ms Jones. It is a little hard to see why a plague of Managers Doing Too Much should suddenly descend on so many of Seattle’s eateries all at once, though. Could there be something else behind it, some really strange and frightening phenomenon whose name no one in Seattle dare speak? […] In fairness to the author, she does discuss the effect of the minimum wage hike eventually, after having exhausted all other options. She’s doing better than many.

As Anthony Anton of the Washington Restaurant Association puts it, “It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.” And I was rather taken by this comment here, spotted by Sam Duncan and offered in reply to a typically pious and self-flattering leftist:  

No you don’t get to get away with that. You don’t get to advocate policies [i.e., higher minimum wage laws] which allow you to use force to deprive people of their jobs and their opportunities, and then claim that those who would have provided the jobs are the heartless ones. You don’t get to trot out the insipid, mindless, tendentious talking points about how you are morally or intellectually superior when every “solution” you proffer is destructive and is based upon forcing others to do your bidding. You don’t get to decide whose job is worth preserving and whose isn’t and still claim the moral high ground.

As yet the leftist in question has not seen fit to respond. Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments below.