Time for another tug on the teats of super-woke theorising:

White people ‘can’t dance’ because white-ness is a traumatized state that is disconnected from the body.

Set aside those thoughts of ballet, Footloose and MGM musicals. We must press on.

Colonization/Westernization has profoundly impacted the way we move our bodies. Just think about even this little fact: most non-European people didn’t wear pants before colonization, and if they did, they were not tight.

Tight pants. The obvious tool with which to oppress the Brown-And-Noble-By-Default.

We also generally didn’t sit on chairs. We squatted or sat on the ground. Many of our cultures didn’t glorify tight muscular abs.

Damn you, White Devil, conquering the world with chairs. And defined abdominals.

Our bodies ‘moved’ completely differently before colonization/Westernization. We had a much greater sense of the lower body and abdomen.

In short, the Brown-And-Noble-By-Default “have been white-ified,” which is “trauma.” You see,

White-ness… is an energetic imbalance caused by a loss of spinal fluidity and awareness of the lower body. Emotional energy becomes concentrated in the upper body, particularly gathering in the mind. To live in a world dominated by white-ness is to live in an environment that denies and protects white-ness as embodied trauma.

If that’s insufficiently persuasive,

White-ness is traumatization itself.

The “white body,” it turns out, is a “state of disconnection between mind and body. It is ungrounded and cannot feel the earth.” And which therefore has to be corrected, by an expert, a healer, for $200 an hour.

Interloper detected. || Good deed of note. || Time-lapse dental alignment. || Aliens did it. || “I’ll try to guess your name.” || Unregistered guest roams politely. || Rest assured. || Nommy-nommy-nom. (h/t, Damian) || Neon puddles. || The thrill of pickles. || Perks of the job. || More metal than thou. || Escalator malfunction. || I see a sea monster. || Super Great White Shark, a work in progress. || Happy accident. || Question asked. || Heh. || This and this are two of these. || Two items, possibly related. || The eternal struggle. || And finally, obligingly, there’s room for two.

Further to this recent tale of aching tenderness, it’s time for another visit to the pages of Slate, where our progressive betters mull the quandaries of modern living:  

I’m a woman in my mid-30s, and I’ve identified as asexual and aromantic basically forever. A few months ago, something changed, and I experienced sexual attraction for the first time, 

Ah, a sexual blossoming.

I’m kind of touch-averse, 

Albeit complicated.

I befriended a man online. We were a little flirty right from the start, but I drew a hard line in the sand because he’s (unhappily) married, and that’s very much against my moral code. 

Thank goodness for moral codes.

Our relationship escalated during this time and turned sexual (still just over text or online).

That hard line in the sand.

As we go further, though, I’m starting to wonder if I’m a terrible person for encouraging and enabling this man to cheat on his wife, just because he treats me in a way that no one else ever has. He tells me I’m beautiful and desirable and values me so much more than I am often able to value myself.

Yeah, screw the wife. I got mine and now I’m hot, baby.

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.