Chick flick. // Farm your own insects, then eat them. // Following air through Facebook’s Oregon data centre. (h/t, MeFi) // Origami. // Optimism. // Pussy People: “What do the cats bring to the marriage?” // A machine that draws penises (badly). // Tactile comic books for the blind. // Coffee table of note. // Dogs versus citrus fruit, the great struggle of our time. // That towel will not allow you to fly. // Ladies, mouth your vowels and slim your face. // Not-quite-still movie stills. // Wine glass of note. // Ewok sushi. // Wipe
your phone on your shirt. // Phones replaced with sandwiches. // The
complete House of Cards. // Giant rodent hugs cats. 

I’d like to see every citizen receive a basic income of AUD$30,000 per year. No exceptions, no means testing. This is why.

Godfrey Moase, “activist and union organiser,” writing in the Guardian:

I once worked in a call centre where a few of the interviewers would be regularly rostered to do phone surveys about female incontinence products. Asking strangers whether they lost a teaspoon, a tablespoon or more in volume per occasion is a tough gig. Then again, the horror of the role was somewhat less visceral than that experienced by a worker I’d once represented who had to manually slit the throats of chickens at a poultry factory. At Centrelink, he had listed his occupation as “killer.” What strikes me about a dirty job isn’t that it needs doing – it’s that someone has to do it to get by. There’s no other choice for them.

A state of affairs that prompts a radical solution:

Imagine the creativity, innovation and enterprise that would be unleashed if every citizen were guaranteed a living. Universal income provides the material basis for a fuller development of human potential. Social enterprises, cooperatives and small businesses could be started without participants worrying where the next pay cheque would come from. Artists and musicians could focus on their work.

One for our series of classic sentences, perhaps. But imagine the creative avalanche that would be unleashed by Mr Moase alone. 30,000 Australian dollars a year, extracted from others and given to him, could result in even more Guardian articles telling us that artists and musicians shouldn’t be expected to earn a living. Because, well, obviously, they’re artists and musicians. Or indeed “activists.” It’s a bold ambition, the goal of which, as one commenter conceives it, is to “distribute drudgery fairly” via some massive rota system, with dirty jobs – say, abattoir work and drain maintenance – being done, intermittently, by doctors, hair stylists and other random individuals with no relevant expertise. I can’t help thinking that’s been tried somewhere, not too long ago, with – how shall I put this – very mixed results. Though presumably artists and musicians would be exempt from this too.

In the comments Tim Worstall tries to shake some sense into Mr Moase’s skull.

Update:

Elsewhere in the Guardian thread, a fan of Mr Moase says with a hint of triumph, “This universal income… makes employment optional.” For him (and no doubt others), that’s the goal. The sweet, sweet cherry of state-sanctioned slackerdom, all in the name of emancipation and virtue. “Submission to a corporation,” we’re told, “will not be mandatory for your survival on Earth.” Though leeching indefinitely on the
skills and effort of others – who will be forced to submit to him – will be perfectly okay, apparently. And as regular readers will know, this is not an uncommon sentiment among our self-declared moral betters.

Yes, Giving It To The Man™ by taking it from others.

Chris Snowdon on booze, sponsorship and publicly subsidised temperance zealots: 

With tiresome predictability, Alcohol Concern says this must all be done for the sake of “children.” There is, it seems, no interference into adult pastimes that cannot be justified in the name of those who are prohibited from engaging in them. For the moral busybody, all the world is a crèche.

Peter Wood ponders the bean-counting world of campus gender equity: 

To be “representative of the student body,” approximately 55% of the 52 Title IX Coordinator positions should have been held by women. But in our sample, 83% are held by women. Likewise, women appear overrepresented in the staff positions of the relevant campus offices, but the level of overrepresentation was less than for the top positions (73.1 percent of the positions are held by women). Considering that the overwhelming preponderance of sexual harassment allegations are directed by women at men, the disproportion of women to men in the positions charged with interpreting and enforcing the sexual harassment rules is a legitimate concern. Are male students who are accused of sexual harassment likely to receive fair-minded treatment in these offices? 

Mark Bauerlein* on do as I say not as I do:

When white male President Mills pledges to press for race-based affirmative action, the right reply is this: “Well, then, sir, you must resign your post immediately and call for Bowdoin to hire a racial or ethnic minority in your place.” Keep it simple and direct. Every white male board member of the ACE should receive a message to step down. Let’s ask white male campus leaders to stand up for their own principles and do the thing they want everybody else to do. When white women acquire a disproportionate number of jobs in campus leadership, yet still call for more diversity, they, too, should be asked to withdraw. This is the logic of affirmative action, and if diversity proponents who are white follow it to its conclusion, they should relinquish their positions as soon as possible. 

Jennifer Kabbany notes the difficulties of gendered nouns:

The University of Leipzig has voted to adopt the feminine version of the word for ‘professor’ as its default. In German, professorin refers to a female professor while professor is the male equivalent. Under the new measures, written documents will use the term Professorinnen when referring to professors in general. A footnote is to explain that male professors are also included in the description. Physics professor Dr Josef Käs suggested the change as a joke because he was becoming weary of extended discussions about gendered language. To his surprise, the university board voted in favour of the idea.

And Theodore Dalrymple on jihad, entitlement and Michael Adebolajo:

It is not true that the society in which he lived offered him no opportunity for personal betterment. Adebolajo was for a time a student at Greenwich University, graduation from which, whatever the real value of the education it offered him, would have improved his chances in the job market, especially in the public sector. But it was at the university that he encountered radical Islam, that ideology that simultaneously succours people with an existential grudge against the world and flatters their inflated and inflamed self-importance. It also successfully squares the adolescent circle: the need both to conform to a peer group and to rebel against society.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. [ *Added, via Rafi in the comments. ]

In my nightmare I’m sitting in this audience of socialists and communists, unable to leave, while other socialists and communists – more statusful socialists and communists – spend an hour telling me how “serious” they are, and how important and “dangerous” their ideas are. Amid references to Lenin, Marx, Gramsci and other totalitarian fantasists, I’m also told how much these gathered “radicals” value humility. After all, when a room full of unhappy leftists say they want to “break the government” and initiate a “revolutionary transformation of society” – in their own image – humility is the word that springs immediately to mind.

Then, while I try biting down on my own neck, Laurie Penny starts to speak, at length, almost randomly. “We need to be talking seriously about trauma,” says she. Because “it’s quite difficult for the left to talk about how it’s feeling.”

A note of caution. The linked video – hailed as “a very good discussion” – lasts for the better part of an hour, and you won’t get that time back. Though there is, I suppose, a grim humour in listening to denunciations of the “elite” and the “establishment” from a blowhard Trotskyist who, like his peers, wishes to be those things, only much more so.

Previously in hell.

Major crab migration. // Sunrises seen from Mount Fuji. // How to feed your hummingbird. // Sloth-facing, it’s a thing to add to the list. // Your very own Xbox gaming module. // Buzz Aldrin and Thomas Dolby need a little more rehearsal. // Bach, visualized. // Avoid that buzzing, crackling sound. // New York in colour, 1939. (h/t, MeFi) // Under construction. // Cows with luxurious coats. // The Guild of Evil’s partygoer cocaine gun still has some minor issues. // Three languages of politics. // Visualising sound with water. // Ladies sit at a table and read aloud while beneath the table an accomplice pleasures them, for art. (h/t, Peter Forsythe)