Ed Driscoll quotes Rich Lowry on ‘progressive’ parenthood:

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” [MSNBC host, Melissa] Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

This impulse toward the state as über-parent is based on a profound fallacy and a profound truth. The fallacy is that anyone can care about someone else’s children as much as his own. The former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm liked to illustrate the hollowness of such claims with a story. He told a woman, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She said, “No, you don’t.” Gramm replied, “Okay: What are their names?” The truth is that parents are one of society’s most incorrigible sources of inequality. If you have two of them who stay married and are invested in your upbringing, you have hit life’s lottery. You will reap untold benefits denied to children who aren’t so lucky. That the family is so essential to the well-being of children has to be a constant source of frustration to the egalitarian statist, a reminder of the limits of his power.

Echoes of this attitude – that your children shouldn’t be privileged in your affections above the children of others – can be found in the pages of the left’s national newspaper. As, for instance, when Arabella Weir insisted that parents must make sacrifices – not for their own children, of course, which would be selfish and irresponsible – but of their own children. For the Greater Good. Children, see, must learn “who to be wary of, who to avoid, how to keep their heads down” by mingling conspicuously with “people of different abilities” and “local roughs,” including local roughs who see bookish children as prey.

By Ms Weir’s thinking, if you had a grim and frustrating experience at a state comprehensive school, you should still want to inflict that same experience on your own offspring. Ideally, by sending them to a disreputable school with poor educational standards, demoralised teachers and lots of people for whom English is at best a second language. This, then, is what makes “a good, responsible citizen.”

The notion of children as collective property, something to be distributed for optimal social effect, as determined by the left, isn’t hard to find. Nor is it hard to find the penalties for thinking otherwise. As when the Guardian’s education journalist Janet Murray, who is presumably familiar with the eye-widening surveys of state schooling teaching staff, decided to spare her daughter those same physical and psychological thrills. And was promptly denounced by her readers in no uncertain terms.

At least a dozen commenters called Ms Murray “selfish” on grounds that she is paying extra for her child’s education while also paying via taxes for a state system that she doesn’t regard as fit for use. (Paying twice, for her own child and for others, apparently makes her “elitist,” “uncaring” and mean.) Amid the inevitable accusations of racism and moral degeneracy, several readers took comfort, indeed pleasure, in the belief that Ms Murray would soon be fired for her heresy thus leaving her unable to afford her daughter’s tuition. Proof, if more were needed, that the Guardian is read by the nation’s most caring, enlightened and tolerant people.

“Connie-Anne is a veteran at being a target for her mother’s cutlery.” 

Via Coudal. 

In sport you can only dominate your opponents, sometimes and only briefly. Leftism offers the promise of dominating everyone.

The Heresiarch ponders the Chinese market for human milk: 

Apparently – well, according to the South China Morning Post, as retailed in shocked tones to readers of Telegraph Online by Tim Stanley – there’s a trend among China’s increasingly prosperous and fashion-conscious middle classes to hire wet-nurses. Only not all the milk is intended for babes in arms… Yes, it’s unconventional. But you may reasonably wonder why it’s normal for people to consume milk intended by nature to feed baby cows, yet enjoying milk intended for human beings should be considered disgusting and wrong… Leaving aside the yuck factor, it is of course impractical (and morally unacceptable) to milk women in the same way that cows are milked commercially: human milk as such will only ever be a niche product.

For those sufficiently curious, recipes are provided. Via sk60 in the comments here. 

At last, fake tampons for smuggling hooch. // This is not a Muppet, this is Pootoo. Yes, Pootoo. // Milk Seafood Noodle and other Japanese commercials. // “The English profanity ‘shitstorm’ is widely used by Germans.” // Cleaning out the hippo enclosure of Milwaukee County Zoo. // Six hours of Nevada’s night sky (with no time lapse). // Trainers repel water, shirt repels gravy. // Afghanistan of yore. // A history of aspect ratio. // Roam the stars in comfort. (h/t, Coudal) // House climbing. // How common is your birthday? // How cows work. // Life-size whale portraits. // My dad was in a band. // I do believe it’s Elvis. // Duct tape surfing.