It was a partial success. 

Also, open thread. Have at it, me hearties.

Writing in the pages of Inside Higher Ed, sociology student and “self-identified fat woman” Bobbi Reidinger bemoans the hardships of the chunky would-be educator:

Fat academics need to be more vocal in calls for increased structural accessibility such as larger desks or substitutions for tables and chairs, greater ease in access to elevators, and more. Yet in addition to structural changes that campuses could make to help people of size be more comfortable — such as providing larger bathrooms, chairs without arms and larger auditorium seating — we need to discuss more techniques to combat stigma within classrooms.

You see, it’s not just a question of remodelling half the campus:

Weight-based stigma has an impact on the credibility of fat academics, in particular female academics who often must contend with both gender and fat stigmas… Weight stigma negatively impacts a professor’s credibility as a communicator within the classroom, with greater credibility being given to those who argue against their own self-interest.

Being sufficiently obese that it requires special furniture and enlarged bathrooms, and such that it becomes an obvious topic of classroom conversation, is in a person’s self-interest, apparently. As opposed to, say, a significant health concern – a cause of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, stroke, osteoarthritis, joint failure, incontinence, sleep apnea, breathing problems, depression, anxiety, and cancer.

Therefore, when a fat professor makes their fatness salient inside the classroom, their fatness overrides their educational and occupational statuses, as students interpret this information as coming from an unreliable source.

It occurs to me that if an overweight educator, or would-be educator, presents her own fatness as a kind of moral elevation, a political piety arrived at via victimhood, and then demands oversized desks, plus-sized seats without arms, modified lifts, modified bathrooms, modified auditoria, “and more” – and does all this while sidestepping responsibility for her own rotundity – then students would do well to question the motives and credibility of such a person. And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly. || Gone fishing, with goat. || Bit gusty. || African film posters of note. || When parrots share. || Pizza beyond the pale. || Probably best to just buy a new one. || Paranormal activity. (h/t, Damian) || Children of the night. (h/t, Julia) || The secret lives of snails. || Good day at the office. || When the trashcan brings you coffee. || Small child containment system. || Coming through. || Three amigos. || The thrill of pufferfish neurotoxin. || “I thought there was something wrong with the movie.” || I did not know about these. || Close enough. || Unfriending of yore. || That’s my sister! || Road rage scenes. || And finally, I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, where the delusional hyperventilate, Mr Chauncey DeVega once again rails against Donald Trump. Today we’re being warned of his “political thuggery and mobster-style behaviour.” The current President is, we’re told, a “dictator.”

The question is… whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.

To embellish this tale of impending doom, Mr DeVega turns to academia. Specifically,

I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.

It’s a regime, you see. Mr DeVega likes this word and uses it no fewer than nine times, as when telling us, confidently, that,

The American people are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.

Not just Salon columnists, then, but the entire population. Apparently, 300 million people are teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode.

Dr Ben-Ghiat, a lecturer in Italian Studies, is of course on-message:

I’m very upset that there are in fact Trump supporters and I have zero sympathy towards them.

This is followed by pointed references to Hitler and Mussolini – because hey, why not? – and whisperings of a cowed and fearful media:

Many people in the news media are afraid to really engage the fact that Trump is an authoritarian because if they do so then reality becomes too threatening, and therefore they would have to take a different stance publicly.

Readers are invited to take a moment to reflect on Mr Trump’s famously warm and not at all fractious relationship with the mainstream media, which never, ever calls him names. Like “proto-fascist,” for instance. Or when MSNBC’s Niccole Wallace breathlessly announced that the President was genocidal and, for reasons left to the imagination, clearly bent on “exterminating Latinos.” Or when the same broadcaster’s Frank Figliuzzi suggested that Trump’s lowering of flags following a shooting tragedy was actually a coded salute to Adolf Hitler.

Apparently, these things never happened, are not in fact bizarrely routine, and the pundits at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, NBC, Salon, etc., are just too terrified and deferential to admit, as Dr Ben-Ghiat puts it, that “they are living in the middle of a fascist, authoritarian takeover.”

“I like how it looks aesthetically next to my hand tattoos.”

Also, open thread.

Remember, students. You are not an individual, but a mascot of a notional group. 

From Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, By Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo.

It occurs to me that when these clowns bang on about analysing events through a racial or identitarian lens, as for instance here and here, what they mean is shoehorning people through an identitarian keyhole, then pretending that the subsequent cartoonery and narrow contrivance, with its phantom evils and funhouse-mirror bigotry, is some universal profundity and proof of the speaker’s personal sophistication. The possible results of such “social justice education,” in which group affiliations, however contrived or incidental, are foregrounded and categorised, and their acknowledgement made habitual and a matter of great importance, are not hard to fathom. 

Update, via the comments:

I question his commitment, frankly. (h/t, Damian) || I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. || Incoming air. || Nommy nommy nom. || If we all flap together, this baby is ours. || Bubbles of hydrogen. || Bathroom door distinction of note. (h/t, Holborn) || A brief history of colour charts. || It’s how they reproduce. || Vintage pulp magazine archive. From Astounding Stories to Weird Tales. || Parachutist of note. || Popcorn. || Fair point. (h/t, Damian) || The thrill of algae. || Long shot detected. || Land of ice. || Lunatic asylum notebook of note. || Last year, summarised. || At sea, diabolical scenes. || Suboptimal delivery service. || And finally, as time-saving measures go, it was, it has to be said, a partial success.

We’re nearly all vegan now.

Yes, you guessed, it’s a Guardian headline. For an article in which an oddly confident Barbara Ellen asks,

Who isn’t vegan in some way these days?

Ms Ellen describes herself as a “dairy-dabbling vegetarian.”

Update:

In the comments, Rafi reminds us that, even according to the Vegan Society, vegans make up barely 1% of the UK population.

Which is practically all of us, if you’re using Guardian maths.

I’m sure it’s nothing.

Also, open thread. Our first of the year. How exciting.

In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with several displays of exquisite sensitivity by our woke betters, including the “poet and essayist” Rashaad Thomas, who managed to take umbrage at an old photograph in a restaurant, a photograph of miners drinking beer while covered in coal dust, which Mr Thomas promptly construed as “blackface,” a message of “whites only,” and therefore a “threat” to his wellbeing. And Zack Ford, the “LGBTQ Editor” at ThinkProgress, was traumatised by crime news. Specifically, on hearing that a woman alone at a bus stop in Chicago was able to defend herself from an armed mugger on account of herself being armed and shooting her attacker. According to Mr Ford, who declares himself a “proud SJW,” women being attacked on their way to work should not attempt to defend themselves: “If she had let him rob her, even at gunpoint, both likely would have survived.” And apparently, the well-being of the mugger – who was mugging while on probation – trumps any imperative for self-defence, even if the victim fears for her life.

In February, we learned how to “shatter capitalism” and explode “fragile masculinities” with emojis, courtesy of the scrupulously woke Vice magazine, which, in entirely unrelated news, was simultaneously laying off hundreds of scrupulously woke employees. We also marvelled at the the creative outpourings of Ms Angeliki Chiado Tsoli, whose attempt to “challenge the existence of social, economic, cultural, and class-based inequalities” is both difficult to describe and a thing to behold. Other delights included the discovery of intersectional knitting, a subculture in which the merest deviation from the latest woke pieties can result in staggering levels of spite. And we mustn’t forget the news, courtesy of Salon, that many progressives are now suffering from “Post-Trump Sex Disorder.”

In March we encountered Dr Deborah Cohan, a mistress of “embodied medicine” and “shamanic healing” employed by the University of California, and who rails against the “tendrils of white supremacy” – the ones in her head, presumably – while indulging in a kind of theatrical ethno-masochism. Such that we’re told, quite emphatically, that white doctors are a clear and obvious danger to non-white patients: “Health care is not safe for people of colour as long as the overwhelming majority of U.S. physicians are white.” A claim one might categorise as paranoid, invidious and wildly irresponsible. Though it did rather highlight the overlap of wokeness and ludicrous New Age woo.

Dr Charlotte Riley, currently employed by the University of Southampton, unveiled her latest feminist innovation, which she titled Patriarchy Chicken, and which entails deliberately and repeatedly colliding with random male commuters. For the Sisterhood, you see. Mr Claude Boudeau thrilled us with his seemingly limitless artistic talents, namely a performance piece titled Cascade. We also witnessed the phenomenon of Brookylnite lefties in search of love via a socialist-only dating platform, with the fiercely egalitarian declaring their revolutionary ambitions to each other, along with their preferred pronouns and various mental health issues. Alas, said platform has not proved an enormous success, resulting instead in disgruntlement, mutual loathing, and demands for romantic quotas.