Today’s word is elegance. || Today’s other word is barkour. || Yeah, okay, it’s pretty big, I guess. || Banana in orbit. || He does this better than you do. || And she does this quite well. || Don’t tell your mother. || Rotary mobile phone. || Whiskey decanter of note. || The Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships. || Win $2,000 at the Takhini Hot Springs Hair Freezing Contest. || Korean classic film archive. || Snake makeover. || “Mathematics operates with unearned privilege, just like whiteness.” || Scenes from the North. || How to confound face recognition. || The glamour of flight. || And finally, “The more leftwing you are, the more likely you are to have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness.”

The vast majority of people worldwide, as well as millions in the UK, do not have their needs met – let alone live lives of luxury from which air travel and weekly shopping sprees could be painlessly stripped out and replaced for example with dance lessons. 

Why, yes, I am reading the Guardian. How could you tell?

The paper’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

When so many of the pleasures that we take for granted in the west, and that are desired by billions of people who do not yet have them, are so carbon-intensive, it is surely incumbent upon us to think very hard about the things in which we take joy and meaning that are less demanding of energy and resources.

Because “dancing and singing could be part of the solution to the climate emergency.” It says so here.

If capitalists, politicians and scientists have so far not found the answers – and the global mass movement of people called for by Greta Thunberg and others is, despite recent progress, still proving elusive – could the creative arts possibly provide one means to break the impasse? If the climate emergency is seen as the consequence of a failure of imagination, then this would seem to make sense.

We will save the planet with our expertise in jive, quickstep and Viennese waltz.

this would seem to make sense.

Though presumably we may have to gyrate without shoes.

I thought we’d slide into the week gently with an open thread. Ever the gracious host, however, I’ll share some snippets for consideration.

First up, via Darleen, the intersectional woes of a hefty gay playwright who champions fatness as “political,” a feat of radicalism, while bemoaning the scarcity of sexual interest directed at his person, and while sharing snaps of himself sitting on the toilet, plus-sized pants around his knees.

We also have more scenes of Portland policing, in which The Unspanked can apparently menace with impunity.

Oh, and further to rumblings in the comments, Star Trek: Picard is still testing my patience with what feels like an interminable and badly-written prologue, with each episode being slightly less interesting than the one before.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Blowback. || Corgi buns. || Because they should be. || Bargain detected. || Unexpected duo. || Small dog makeover of note. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || This, this and this are three of these. (h/t, Damian) || They’re just like normal people. || Assorted long cats. || “Chocolate chicken chicken cake” and other A.I. recipes. || Is it food? || Forbidden love. || Torment yourself with four-way Tetris. || 48 trombones. || Felted wool. || Furry pig monster. || Puddle scenes. || It did not go entirely to plan. || And finally, it’s remarkable just how quickly the day can turn to shit.

In racial-dominatrix news:

Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they’re racist.

Says the Guardian,

A growing number of women are paying to confront their privilege – and racism – at dinners that cost $2,500… A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious.

“However subconscious.” Pretentious guilt is, one suspects, billable too.

The women who sign up for these dinners are not who most would see as racist. They are well-read and well-meaning. They are mostly Democrats. Some have adopted black children, many have partners who are people of colour, some have been doing work towards inclusivity and diversity for decades. 

Which, on reflection, might explain quite a lot.

Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behaviour. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause.

Those doubting, damnable souls. The ones who can’t be hustled.

Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.

It turns out that quite a few well-heeled ladies of the left are keen to be denounced over dinner as “part of the problem,” warned against having “unmonitored thoughts,” and told to “own their racism,” whether real or imagined, in what amounts to a niche, and rather perverse, status game. If it sounds self-preoccupied and a tad neurotic, that’s because it is:

How to pronounce Betelgeuse. 

Also, open thread. Feel free to share links and bicker.

Oh, well played. || Wise words. || Upscale puppy puzzle. || Please hold still while your face is being scanned. || Ant-termite politics. || A guide to pre-modern birth control. From ‘pull-and-pray’ to offal and tortoise-shell condoms. || New York, in colour, 1933-1939. || Catching rays. || “Cock on a swine, friends for all time.” || Sigourney Weaver is, it turns out, quite flexible. || Safety first. || Something error happen. || 26 minutes of loafer restoration. || Real-time map of coronavirus incidents. || The rules and aggravations of time travel. || She has a system. || This just in. || Japanese sea-creature teabags of note. (h/t, Julia) || Our betters. || Our betters 2. || Bit nippy. || And finally, Hieronymus Bosch knickknacks.

Steven Malanga on question-begging “equity” and its corrosive effects:  

The equity movement presumes that any unequal results in society reflect structural or institutional racism, even when officials can’t identify any actual discrimination. To redress these purported inequities, the movement demands that every city department’s mission, and every major decision in local government, be looked at from a racial-equity perspective. In practice, this has meant mandatory bias training for municipal and school employees, in order to root out “policies that work better for white people,” in the words of one advocacy group, and laws passed in a number of cities that limit what employers can ask job applicants (about any past criminal history, especially), as well as other measures. […] The basic, but highly dubious, assumption behind these reports, and the equity movement generally, is that no possible behavioural differences among ethnic or racial groups might account for different life outcomes. 

Some of the examples of “equity” education are rather boggling in their evasions. Mr Malanga also discusses the “equity” approach to school discipline, which was predictably disastrous, and mentioned here and here. As I said at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. 

And – not entirely unrelated – Lee Jussim on the dysfunctions of academia – in neologism form:

Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal in all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous.

Emotional imperialism: The strange belief that your feelings should dictate someone else’s behaviour.

See also the subsequent comments, in which Quillette readers suggest additions. For instance,

Ovaryaction: the compulsion to create neologisms such as manspreading, mansplaining, and himpediment, attributing flaws by individual men as representative of all men to buttress the assertion of systemic, institutional oppression of modern, Western women by the bogeyman known as patriarchy.

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

Because I have chores, an open thread.

I’ll set things rolling with some mellow vibes. 

From Tulane University, the very heart of White Devil Babylon – uptown New Orleans – student Shahamat Uddin – pronouns “he, him, his” – howls in protest:

Punctuality centres whiteness. It is far easier for white men to get to work on time than Black people who are having to change their hair to fit the workplace’s professionalism standards.

It’s a hair thing, yes, and therefore terribly political, a hill to die on. But it’s even more than that. It’s also the devastating suspicion that you might be more likely to get hired if you remove your nose piercing, if only during office hours:

I remember the cultural pride I felt when I got my gold studded nose piercing, admiring my ancestors who donned the same kind of jewellery. I take it out now because I know I need a job, and I have learned from the Brown and Black people before me what I have to sacrifice to get one.

You see, wondering whether that nose piercing will be frowned upon, by employers or their customers, constitutes “systemic white supremacy,” a crushing phenomenon “that is barring us from maximal success.” It’s a “sacrifice,” an outrage, proof of being downtrodden. Because nose jewellery is pivotal to both optimal functioning and mental wellbeing. And questions of whether such piercings are ideal for a given workplace – however unspecified and theoretical those questions may be – amount to further, damning proof that “this country was not made for me.”

I have learned when and where it is to my own disadvantage to be too Brown or too gay or too immigrant.

One more time, Tulane University. Where tuition is a mere $60,000 a year. And where the oppressed huddle for comfort against the Cold Winds of Whiteness.