Minor malfunction detected. || An appetising dessert. || Just the usual family drama. || An alarming example of upside-down peas. (h/t, Damian) || How to sound like Erik Satie, or alternatively, like Bach. || The sounds of American doomsday cults. (h/t, Things) || It undulates. || Theodore Dalrymple on modern dishonesties. || The car of tomorrow. || Firecrackers of yore. (h/t, Coudal) || South African scenes. || Horse sense. (h/t, Darleen) || High anxiety. || I think something is rattling. || Attention, retailers: How to sell the Sony Betamax. || Stromboli goes boom. || There and back again. || God one, boat nil. (h/t, Rita) || Eleven elements. || And finally, via Elephants Gerald, a balance of terror.

I think it may be time for an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

What?

Oh, sorry. Forgot.

Breasts.

A discussion ensues.

You can tell from his outpourings:

As someone who writes about Trump and his subordinates every day, I need every reprieve I can find from the ongoing toxic demise of our country, including in my personal social media. But my decision today to unfriend this individual was no simple purge; I am significantly emotionally wounded. 

It’s all terribly dramatic. Practically a miniature opera. You see, while browsing Facebook, Mr Ford saw a photo of an old high school friend celebrating the Fourth of July with her daughter and while wearing a Make America Great Again hat. The latter detail, the hat, being, for Mr Ford, “unacceptable,” a personal violation and source of deep trauma. Naturally, and not at all oddly, Zack decided to scold his old high school friend, as was his duty as a super-woke being: 

I gave my friend an ultimatum.

Always a sound opening gambit.

I told her I wouldn’t unfriend her so long as she apologised for wearing the hat and promised me I wouldn’t have to see it in my feed again. 

Terms of surrender. A bold choice.

When she claimed I was trying to police her beliefs, I corrected her, pointing out that my conditions only regarded the hat, not her position on any particular issue. 

Ooh. Terms of surrender with bonus sophistry. That’s bound to go down well. Let’s see:  

When asked to choose between a hat that embodies that evil and someone she’s known half her life,

Wait for it.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this item of possible interest:

As the fat-positivity movement has gained momentum, so, too, have debates around how fat folks should lead healthy lives. [Sonalee] Rashatwar, though, considers how sizeism is affected by racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, and she counsels people against intentional weight loss.

Well, we mustn’t be practical. That wouldn’t be woke. And regaining viable proportions, such that one’s health is not at risk and one’s lifespan needlessly shortened, sounds way too much like work and responsibility. Instead, attention is displaced to a more theoretical, and conveniently improbable, project:

Rashatwar traces contemporary fatphobia to colonial brutality and how enslaved people were treated. Citing researcher-advocate Caleb Luna, Rashatwar said curing anti-fatness would mean dismantling society’s foundation: “I love to talk about undoing Western civilisation because it’s just so romantic to me.”

Hm. Lose weight, or topple Western civilisation? It’s the fat person’s eternal dilemma.

Ms Rashatwar is a “community organiser” and “Instagram therapist,” a self-styled healer and woman of insight, and is therefore not at all grandiose, self-excusing or pathologically unrealistic. And so, her therapeutic endeavours include posting “really, really political and radical content” about how terrible capitalism is, how terrible the police are, and how righteous it is to be obese and consequently to live with needless limitations and increasing discomfort.

Ms Rashatwar has chosen to blame her own health issues, including high blood pressure, on “weight stigma” and “white supremacy,” rather than on her size and prodigious eating habits. When not equating routine health advice with eugenics and “Nazi science,” Ms Rashatwar, a self-described “donut queen,” claims that “diet culture and fat phobia are forms of sexual violence.”

The being named Caleb Luna, mentioned above, has cropped up here before. Readers are welcome to ponder said being’s credibility as a “researcher-advocate,” an authority to cite.

Somewhat related.

Bad dog. (h/t, Holborn) || Inadvisable cat handling. || Scenes. || More scenes. (h/t, Damian) || Yet more scenes. (h/t, Holborn) || Restoration. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Style points. || Today’s word is gripping. || How to be glamorous. || London pad, only £9,950,000. || She seems nice. || Headline of note. || Somewhat related. || Gyro-X, the two-wheeled transport module you’ve always dreamed of. (h/t, DRB) || Deadheads. || Bra donations of note. || His is bigger than yours, and louder. || “Earth music for plants.” || The vampire of Cinkota. || Russian eruption. || Luftraum. || Skillz. || It’s what Sibelius would have wanted. || It’s not a Ferrari. || Friend. || And finally, that was closer than one might like.

Again, via Darleen in the comments:

It’s as if the movie Inherit the Wind had a different ending.

She’s referring to this intriguing academic development: 

Instructors at a prominent university in Australia have been warned not to lecture on the natural historical record of that country; instead, they should teach a creation narrative regarding the origin of indigenous Australian people. Lecturers at the University of New South Wales “have been warned off making the familiar statement in class that ‘Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 years’,” The Australian reports. Instead, they should state that “Aborigines have been here ‘since the beginning of the Dreaming/s’ because this ‘reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land’.”

It seems we’ve gone from “The aboriginal population is primitive and unable to think rationally about things,” which is a sentiment to be denounced, especially in academia, and progressed to “We must treat the aboriginal population as if it were primitive and unable to think rationally about things.” Which, apparently, is something to be applauded. Especially in academia.

Via Darleen and lifted from yesterday’s comments:

What’s interesting about Antifa’s mob assault of the journalist Andy Ngo isn’t that an organisation premised on recreational thuggery has once again indulged in recreational thuggery. That’s why it exists. What’s interesting is that so many left-leaning journalists have been so eager to excuse or diminish that thuggery and to frame Mr Ngo either as the aggressor or as somehow deserving of assault by people with borderline personality disorders.

The implication being that the poor, put-upon Antifa goons, who are all terribly oppressed, felt threatened by the presence of the unimposing Mr Ngo, and therefore retaliated, albeit pre-emptively, by jumping him from behind, robbing him, and putting in the boot. That’s why they went back in time to stock up on iron bars, knuckledusters and, it seems, cement milkshakes. Obviously.

Previously in the not-at-all-sociopathic world of Antifa:

“Are you willing to die for YouTube shit? That’s what’s gonna come, man. Death is coming to you, dude. Real shit. Feel that energy? That’s why your heart’s pounding.”  

And again here:

“You’re inherently violent,” screams an unhinged blue-and-purple-haired woman named Hannah McClintock, while repeatedly spitting on people and trying to punch them in the face.

Update:

If you poke through the comments, you’ll find additional illustrations of the psychology of Antifa and their cheerleaders, including contortions by leftist educators and the morally ludicrous Laurie Penny.

Also, open thread.

Patriarchy detected. They were “taken by surprise.” || The circle of life. || Altered stone. || I think not. || Enthusiastic newcomers. || Wine glass of note. || Where to put the baby while you use a public toilet. || Medieval trade routes. (h/t, Brian) || Important notice of note. || He spent 3 years building a pyramid of pennies. || Periscope spectacles for the height impaired. || More liveliness in London. || Tesla vs Lovecraft is a game. || Gorilla crow. || Glories of the 1980s. || Thank goodness the clever ones are in charge. || Always respect the media. || Always trust Google. || Entirely unrelated. || One and four, obviously. (h/t, Tim) || And finally, via Dicentra, things that will be found by future archaeologists.

Theodore Dalrymple on choice, crime and the importance of punishment:  

One of the explanations of ill behaviour, if you like, is a kind of mechanical one. People have certain experiences and they react to them in a certain self-destructive way, as if their behaviour was that of a billiard ball being impacted by another billiard ball… [But] agency is extremely important. You don’t deny that things are more difficult for some people than for others, but if you deny the agency of people, then you begin to treat them as objects rather than as subjects.

There’s been a very strong current in British intellectual circles that criminality is akin to an illness, and therefore it’s wrong to treat it as something that people have any control over. And of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In England, the leniency of our criminal justice system – precisely, I think, because of our tendency to sociologise everything, to say that people are not agents… this actually promotes criminality… It’s as if criminals didn’t have thought processes like us, [as if] they’re completely different from people like us. But they’re not different from people like us, on the whole…  

It’s very curious how people say that prison doesn’t work because a high proportion of prisoners when they come out commit offences again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere in a British publication that this might indicate that actually they should be in prison for longer. Another very obvious consideration, which is completely beyond the British intellectual class, is that the number of victims of crime is very much greater than the number of perpetrators. So each perpetrator actually creates large numbers of victims, and therefore it’s not kind to people who live in areas where there’s a lot of criminality not to deal properly with the criminals. We deal with criminality as if it is a benefit received by the poor, instead of what it is, one of the great hardships of being poor.

Mr Dalrymple’s views are somewhat at odds with those found in the pages of the Guardian, where readers are told with great certainty that burglary is “really quite inconsequential,” unworthy of punishment, and that anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation are somehow trivial, plebeian and unsophisticated. Such that expectations of lawfulness and justice – and not being preyed upon, repeatedly, with impunity – are airily dismissed as “idiotic attitudes.”

Would a future women-only space colony have to live with that same fear? Would the very idea of a self-sufficient community of women so infuriate and threaten men that they would take it as a challenge to seek out and invade any feminist planet? And what about the frozen sperm?

I’m sorry. I’m reading the Guardian. Perhaps things will settle down.

If our future colony is reliant on what it can transport from Earth, stocks will eventually run out unless they can be replenished, which means giving birth to at least a few male children. Whether, in a matriarchal society without examples of male aggression, those boys would grow up to be the kind of man who grabs a peaceful protester by the back of her neck remains one of the great unknowns.

Or not. Never mind.

Readers may be tickled by the conceit that men would be infuriated and threatened by the departure from Earth of the planet’s feminists. And not, say, delighted. In fact, given recent trends, it seems more likely that feminists would be the ones determined to sabotage and eliminate any all-male spaces, while exempting themselves from comparable restrictions. 

The rest is fairly predictable, the standard template, with jabs at “jowly white men in positions of power,” and inspirational rumblings in which women “just take the sperm and leave the men behind.” This bold vision of tomorrow is then traded for a more modest scenario, a compromise of sorts, in which, rather than being “redundant” and eliminated entirely, men are merely “educated… out of bullying and aggressive attitudes towards women” – an education that entails “putting women in positions of power on this planet before we think about how to populate others.”

We await the Guardian article in which a male columnist, perhaps white and somewhat jowly, ponders the appalling nature of women and how they require correction lest they contaminate the heavens with their inherent awfulness.

Via Guardian Science.