Subway scenes. || Putty want ball. || Adventures in Magnetism with Professor Julius Sumner Miller. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || What if the Moon spiralled inwards towards the Earth? || He doesn’t respect you, alas. || Gusto detected. || Now wiggle yours. || Printed GIFs. || The thrill of teapot-making. || AI-generated 1970s sci-fi pulp covers. (h/t, Things) || The progressive retail experience, parts 414, 415, and 416. || “The universe will expand by 527,250 kilometres” in the blink of an eye. || Between bites and sips. || Beverage of note. || Cable guy. || The thrill of mental illness. || You shall not escape. || Headline of note. || I hadn’t considered this. || Old-school alternative. || And finally, a service is offered.

Those of you who keep track of these things will know that today is this blog’s fifteenth birthday. I started doing… this, whatever it is, on the same day that the original iPhone was announced, back when the Blackberry Curve was a desirable thing, and 200 million people had a MySpace account. After close to sixteen million pageviews, it seems I’ve joined the ranks of the Old Guard, at least as measured in internet years. Happily, I have moisturiser.

During those fifteen years, we’ve chewed on many topics, from Laurie Penny’s lifestyle advice for terribly radical leftwing women, and the assorted lamentations of that same demographic, to the London riots of 2011, and the Guardian’s oddly selective agitation about litter inequality. We also marvelled at Melissa Fabello’s somewhat neurotic guide to interracial dating, witnessed the mental contortions of the scrupulously woke, and pondered the claim, by a Marxist academic, that conscientious parents reading to their own children are causing “unfair advantage” and are therefore an affront to “social justice.” Oh, and then there was that time when two dozen leftist artists sailed to the Arctic, at taxpayer expense, bent on saving the world with their fearless, selfless creativity.

All of which is, of course, a tissue-thin pretext to remind patrons that this rickety barge, on whose seating your arses rest, is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there are buttons in the sidebar with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option. And if one-click haste is called for, my PayPal.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon UK shopping done via this link, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and 130,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

Oh, and for those that don’t know, I now have a Gettr account.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. Now share ye links and bicker.

Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.

The University of Bristol, since you ask, where staff are urged to perform this season’s modish contortions in “verbal introductions and email signatures.” Say, by starting each meeting and conversation, presumably every day, with an ostentatious declaration of their own pronouns, lest there be massive and widespread confusion as to which sex they actually are.

Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns,” where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.

While not mandatory, but merely encouraged, one university employee who expressed objections has been “invited to a meeting with a senior diversity manager.” A nourishing mental experience, I’m sure.

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments.” The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.” Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline.” The word nyan is Japanese for “meow.”

Because if you’re bent on humiliating your employees, and unmooring them from probity and any lingering realism – and if you want to make them routinely dishonest and pander to delusions, narcissism, and competitive pretension – then hey, why not go all-in?

Bristol’s guide says that if staff make a mistake by using the wrong pronoun, “it is important not to become defensive or make a big deal out of it. Simply thank the person for correcting you, apologise swiftly, and use the correct pronouns going forward.”

Other, less dementing options are, of course, available. At the time of writing.

Also, open thread.

“Oh, this isn’t so bad.” || Dinner is served. || Dude. || On human biodiversity, a series of documentaries. || Helping hands. || Her pronouns are “a little bit too complicated” to fit in her bio. || At last, tiny power tools. || That’s the spot. || There may have been an explosion. || What’s under the pavement? || The progressive retail experience, parts 411, 412, and 413. || Never say never, they say. || Internet vending machines. || Nice save, sir. || Nice save 2. || Insufferable twat detected. || I think there’s something in the dark. || Creature comfort. || They congratulate themselves. || How to make colour-changing cabbage juice. || “He gets very excited when he sees food.” || And finally, rather briskly, scenes of forbidden love.

Oh, and a reminder that I now have a Gettr account.

Attention, lowly workers. I bring you cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja.

Also, some chafing may have occurred. Previously, another double helping.

I’ve locked the doors, so don’t even try. And yes, open thread.

“The kids don’t even want this stuff,” says [high-school English teacher, Kali] Fontanilla, noting that the ethnic studies course replaced a much more popular health class – in the midst of a pandemic, no less. “Most of them are just like, ‘Why do we have to take this class?’”

Robby Soave on when classroom race-hustling doesn’t impress the kids. 

As the classroom in question is in Salinas, California, where the children in question are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and therefore supposedly oppressed, and supposedly hungry for “critical race theory,” you can imagine the complications. It turns out that when Hispanic children turn up to learn English as a second language, they’re not overly thrilled to find their time being spent on “institutional, internalised, ideological, and interpersonal oppression.” Or at being told that, on account of not being white, they may suffer from “intergenerational trauma.” Or spending class time on a “privilege quiz,” in which they must rank their imagined victimhood, while comparing “intersectional rainbows.”

However, the disaffection of supposed beneficiaries seems unlikely to deter adult enthusiasts.

Beginning with the class of 2030, all public high school students in California will now have enrol in the same sort of course that Fontanilla’s students already took.

Ms Fontanilla, who happens to be black, isn’t impressed either. Cultivating victimhood and racial resentment is not, she feels, an ideal use of her students’ time, or indeed her own. Believing that parents had a right to know exactly what their children are being taught, she wrote a letter of protest to the school board. It was read aloud during a meeting at which parents were present:

“I do not appreciate constantly being pandered to and treated differently because of the colour of my skin, especially since I did not have the freedom to not go along with it,” Fontanilla wrote, warning that the curriculum was an attempt at left-wing indoctrination. The statement elicited cheers from other parents attending the meeting. In response, the school board prohibited anti-CRT comments at its next public gathering.

And if the air of somewhat creepy condescension isn’t sufficiently obvious,

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, a tale about the perils of noticing things:

She describes the emails as “rather polite” and “relatively kind.” Her daughter had been a Girl Guide, and she herself had done some volunteering with the organisation. “I thought it was a really uncontroversial, uncontentious email,” she says. It expressed her view that “this person should not be in charge of young people.” (The Critic has seen the email and can confirm her description of it. It does, however, refer to Sulley as a “male”…)  

And that’s when a police officer appeared on her doorstep.

Also, open thread. 

Hardcore rocker. || Careful now. || Fashion statement detected. || Innards. || Nice touch. || Snow scenes. (h/t, Julia) || Beach scenes. || And speaking of beaches. || Job candidate of note. || Because you’ve always wondered. || Bodes well. || We must flee. || How stickers are applied to lemons. || How to cut a baby’s hair. || Educating children. || Unemployed dogs. (h/t, Damian) || Golden mole at large. || Virtual ancient Rome (minus Romans, filth, etc.) || Free very soon. || And finally, fragrantly, it’s entirely possible that the grilled chicken may have been detected.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to the latest mental rumblings of Ms Laurie Penny:

Ms Penny is, I think, referring to fellow feminist Julie Bindel, whose review of Laurie’s latest book is not entirely positive, and who chose not to refer to its author as a suddenly ungendered being. But the broader claim is perhaps worth exploring.

I can’t say that my own views on modish pronoun stipulation make me feel “cool and edgy.” If anything, they seem fairly self-evident and unremarkable, not the stuff of obvious scandal or sudden intakes of breath. And I doubt that anyone here is likely to feel “threatened… by the ideas of a more progressive generation.” Though Ms Penny’s tendency to self-flatter – her inevitable trajectory – does catch the eye.

Regarding rudeness, I’m generally polite by default, at least in person, and don’t go out of my way to needlessly put a kink in someone else’s day. I’ve had perfectly civil chats with people who regard themselves as transgender or gender-non-conforming or whatever. Nobody got upset. But what is often being asked – or demanded – is not a small thing, not in its implications.

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

Where many things come with sliced tomato.

Via Tim Newman. Consider this an open thread.