Cathy Young on the psychodramas of academic feminism: 

Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women's studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.” Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields. Welcome to the age of the trigger warning. […] Initially, the warnings were primarily for sexual assault and partner abuse. Eventually, they spread to just about everything that could be potentially upsetting to any person of politically correct sensitivities: sexism, racism, homophobia, “ableism,” “victim-blaming,” “slut-shaming,” “fat-shaming,” “body-shaming” and a host of other sins and oppressions. (My personal favourite is a warning for “discussion of gender policing” – that is, of norms dictating proper bounds of masculine and feminine behaviour. How startling to find such a discussion on a feminist blog.)

Christopher Snowdon parses the assumptions of “medical socialism”: 

‘Neoliberalism’ means free markets and ‘transnational forces’ means globalisation, i.e., free trade between countries. These are the main factors that have led to the extraordinary reduction in poverty in developing countries since 1980. The world suffers less from an unequal distribution of wealth than it does from an unequal distribution of capitalism. Countries which have resisted free market reforms have suffered greatly as a result.

Thomas Sowell feels the benevolence of teachers’ unions:  

The teachers’ unions see charter schools as a threat to their members’ jobs, and politicians respond to the money and the votes that teachers’ unions can provide. The net result is that public schools are often run as if their main function is to provide jobs to teachers. Whether the children get a decent education is secondary, at best.

And Dr Ben Carson, a retired black neurosurgeon, recently spoke at a conservative conference and received thunderous applause. Much to the annoyance of quite a few people on the Totally Non-Racist Left™, who denounced him as an “uncle Tom,” a “token” and a “house negro.” “He can shine my shoes,” wrote ‘progressive’ comedian Laura Levites. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Giant cursor is somewhat impractical. // Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988). // Trees in unlikely places. // POV juggling. // Rug made from jeans labels. // 2048, a tile game. (h/t, MeFi) // A big nag. // At dinner time, I bet your kids don’t behave this well. // Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 8. // Spider stealth. (h/t, Julia) // Soundwall. // Everyday tips for women. // For fresh eggs every morning, house a chicken indoors. // “It would take several trillion cell phones to collectively levitate a snowflake.” // And finally, the narcoleptic squirrel song.

Following this tweet and this one, and many others like them, here’s a contender for Tweet of the Day:

Via Martin Durkin. Thanks to dicentra. 

It all began for me more than a decade ago, with the “mangetout moment”; a passing conversation with my editor at the Guardian about those pangs of consumer guilt that wash over us, but upon which we rarely act. 

Ah, consumer guilt. I bet you’re feeling its sting right now. 

Those moments when, for example, you pick up a plastic-wrapped packet of mangetout in a supermarket, fleetingly dwell on their food miles or the likely exploitative wage of the Kenyan farmer who grew them, but still pop them into your shopping basket and shuffle towards the next aisle.

Such are the recollections of Mr Leo Hickman, whose ten years of struggling with ethical purity will be known to long-term readers. And who believes that the way to make poor people rich is to not buy their goods. 

Our experiment was never framed as anything other than a personal journey. It certainly was never meant to be a finger-wagging sermon – more a fumble and a feel through some of modern life’s most chewy dilemmas.

Yes, Mr Hickman and his equally fretful colleagues shied from any hint of such competitive piety, honest, and instead merely had debates on subjects ranging from ethical sandwich-wrapping and the immorality of fireworks to whether it’s acceptable to employ a cleaner and alternative uses for inherited fur coats – among them, dog bedding and indoors-only fashion. And debates on whether roadkill could be an alternative ethical food source for Guardianistas who “hate waste.” Those “chewy dilemmas” that bedevil us all. 

And Mr Hickman’s moral guidance was often reciprocated by his readers:

A woman from Derbyshire wrote to enthusiastically explain how she hung her “washable menstrual products” out to dry from the guy rope when camping.

It’s good to know these things. And such wisdom was not without influence:

Earthworm, 80mm in length, photographed by John Hallmén. One of these. Via sk60.