Tim Worstall on the ever-changing grievances of the left: 

There are certain people, Dianne Abbott being a good enough example, whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are. If everyone’s a model of Victorian primness then the shriek will be that free love is a necessary part of civilised society. If everyone is indeed practising free love then Victorian modesty is the only valid more for society to allow. It’s not that either is better or worse. It’s that, by definition, whatever people are doing is wrong and they must be controlled to do the other. After all, Kip Esquire’s Law does require that someone should do the controlling and there are those who do insist they are in the vanguard of those who ought to be. What is being controlled and to what end is much less important than the controlling itself.

Daniel Hannan tackles the myths of Occupy:   

The Occupy crowd are occupying the wrong place. In this country, they were literally occupying the wrong place – they set out to occupy the Stock Exchange; they ended up in St Paul’s Cathedral, on grounds that it’s vaguely near the Stock Exchange. But even if they had a better sense of direction and found the place they were after, they’d have still been occupying the wrong place. 

And Christina Hoff Sommers ponders attempts to reinvent children: 

Swedes can be remarkably thorough in their pursuit of gender parity. A few years ago, a feminist political party proposed a law requiring men to sit while urinating – less messy and more equal. In 2004, the leader of Sweden’s Left Party Feminist Council, Gudrun Schyman, proposed a “man tax” – a special tariff to be levied on men to pay for all the violence and mayhem wrought by their sex. In April 2012, following the celebration of International Women’s Day, the Swedes formally introduced the genderless pronoun “hen” to be used in place of he and she (han and hon).

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Fremont Street, Las Vegas, circa 1958. Photographed by Woodrow Humphries. Larger version here.  

Arts Council luminary and devout Guardianista Dame Liz Forgan, of whom we’ve spoken previously, has had a rather grand leaving do costing just north of £8,000. A mere bagatelle compared to the £50,000 spent on two Arts Council Christmas parties. However, the Telegraph’s Stephen Pollard isn’t overly impressed:

There could be no clearer demonstration of the contempt that Dame Liz, who exudes the haughty sense of self-worth and entitlement that typifies the arts establishment, has for the rest of us that she chose a drinks party funded by the taxpayer to attack the Government for cutting the arts budget.

A budget that’s been slashed by a hair-tearing 2.6%. Yes, our insufficiently leftwing and therefore evil government is, we’re warned, practically “robbing a generation of its birthright.” 

It’s fair to say Mr Pollard is none too keen on the Arts Council, and not entirely without cause: 

The Arts Council is a body set up specifically to ignore the public’s wishes and provide an income to organisations that they would not receive through the free choices made by consumers… Arts Council England makes sure that “street artists” (buskers is, it seems, a derogatory term) are well looked after: in the recent past, Zap street art in Brighton has received £25,000 a year; Circus Space (a leading provider of “circus education”) has been given £70,000 a year, and Circomedia has been handed £80,000 to train street artists. One might have thought that buskers got their money from passers-by, depending on whether or not they were any good. Apparently, it is much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and simply hand it over.

Those familiar with the assumptions of our official taste-correcting caste will not be altogether surprised, and the readiness with which the Arts Council sets fire to public money is hard to overstate. In 2006 – to take a year at random – the following artistic projects were beckoned to the taxpayer’s teat. £20, 470 was handed to a “participatory photography and self-advocacy project” for East London’s “female sex workers,” while £15,000 found its way into the hands of those hosting “Malian mudcloth and DJ workshops.” A more modest amount, a mere £4,950, was felt necessary for “research and development to explore the writing of a poetry and music show examining issues of cultural identity and sexuality.” Despite the funding, no poetry or music need actually be produced and no show need materialise. The five grand was merely to facilitate the exploration of such things. 

Joshua Sofaer’s artistic project Meeting the Public is described thusly: “A range of initiatives which combine production, research and professional development. They are brought together as a body of work in a collaborative relationship with a producer and a particular kind of active engagement.” All very cryptic and no further explanation is offered, but evidently the project served some pressing cultural need, thereby receiving £31,889. Also funded was the “research” of “live art practitioner” Helena Bryant, whose mission was to “establish the performance persona of Sally Bangs, through an inquiry into intimacy and engagement in performance encounters thematically based on love-sickness and exploring the pathology of erotic love.” When not funding “research” trips to Mongolia, Cuba and the frozen poles, the Arts Council uses your money to bankroll Greenpeace, whose no doubt unbiased “programme of educational activities” coined the handsome sum of £66,795. I could, of course, go on. But such are the mighty talents deemed deserving of your money – which is to say, obviously, more deserving than you. 

My local publicly-funded galleries of contemporary work, one of which is a glorified coffee shop for two dozen middle-class lefties, can be relied on to disappoint – and to go on disappointing precisely because there’s no obvious mechanism for correction. No box office takings to fret about, no bums on seats, no ghastly commercial metrics need be considered. And so the featured artists, or pseudo-artists, can expect taxpayers to serve as patrons, whether they wish to or not, while being immune to the patron’s customary discrimination between promising art and opportunist flim-flam. The expectation that one must be exempt from base commerce, and by extension the preferences of one’s supposed audience and customers, is an arrangement that rewards and encourages the peddling of drek. Yet Liz Forgan and her associates would have us believe that an interest in visual culture, music, etc., should coincide with an urge to make others pay for whatever it is that tickles you, or for whatever is deemed to improve the species by Liz Forgan and her colleagues, i.e., People Loftier Than Us. Though one might still wonder how the coercive public subsidy of fatuous posturing and god-awful tat became a permanent function of the welfare state. One might also ponder this. The unspoken ethos of the Arts Council is, and always has been, We Have Your Wallet And We Know What’s Best™. And yet somehow they’re the victims.

At last, sweaters made from the dog wool. // Dogs use Skype. // A real-time map of the London Underground. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // A guide to dim sum. // Spider + worm = spiderworm. // Designer heels. // How to clip your fingernails in space. // There are howling, carnivorous mice. // How to dance like James Brown. // Dollhouse of note. // Deafen your friends. // Floor plans of fictional apartments. // Impressive frozen dung sculpture. // Cold brew coffee. // This is one of these. (h/t, MeFi) // Pac-Man plus physics. // “Need 2 or 3 women for Star Trek roleplaying. No nudity, no touching. Strictly TNG era. Nothing weird is going to happen.” 

Theodore Dalrymple on tax, altruism and Gérard Depardieu:

Suppose that Gérard Depardieu were to undergo a conversion experience and see that his wealth was not unjust but unseemly in view of the difficulties or hardships of others, and that as a consequence he decided to give it away to those most in need (as determined by him) in exactly the same proportion as he would have been taxed. Would that be acceptable to all those who criticised him for refusing to pay his tax? I suspect not: for in the modern world, the state claims the monopoly not only of force, but increasingly of compassion as well.

Dalrymple refers to a Libération article by Marcela Iacub, who tells us, “a rational and just society must prevent the accumulation of capital by individuals above a certain level.” Presumably Ms Iacub is much less troubled by an accumulation of power by the state – say, to limit what an individual may lawfully earn.

KC Johnson on the politicised narrowing of American history:

If, in fact, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in purging “traditional” approaches to the American past, why don’t we see departments and colleges boasting of the fact? Departmental websites could explain how the study of U.S. history must occur through the prism of race, class, and gender; or how the university eschews such old-fashioned topics as political, diplomatic, or military history. But with rare exceptions colleges have followed the opposite approach, doing everything they can to obscure just how one-sided their approach to U.S. history has become. For those parents, students, or alumni who don’t have the time to drill down and comprehensively examine curricula, the assumption remains that all elements of the American past continue to be taught.

Related, this report by the National Association of Scholars:

The root of the problem is that colleges and universities have drifted from their main mission. They and particular programmes within them, increasingly think of themselves as responsible for reforming American society and curing it of prejudice and bigotry. When universities and university programmes consider it necessary to atone for, and help erase, oppressions of the past, one way in which they do so is by depicting history as primarily a struggle of the downtrodden against rooted injustice. This pedagogical conception may be well-intended, but it is also a limited and partisan one, and history teaching should not allow itself to become imprisoned within a narrow interpretation… The dominance of race, class, and gender themes in history curricula came about through disciplinary mission creep. Historians and professors of United States history should return to their primary task: handing down the American story, as a whole, to future generations.

Apparently it’s all too easy to conflate education with political activism, especially among those educators who see themselves as “critical thinking change agents” – as gadflies and rebels, “enlightened leaders” – for whom the classroom is a place “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture” and where “education is a political act.” Which is to say, the act of describing the world through a Marxoid filter of rhetorically convenient oppressors and victims, while “speaking on behalf” of those they, our self-appointed leaders, deem oppressed. A much more glamorous and flattering function than merely teaching history or literature as commonly understood. And we’ve seen what happens when these “change agents” are challenged by students and peers on points of fact, probity and rudimentary logic.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.