The trio’s history of mismanagement and self-indulgence is pretty much what you’d expect of leftist monomaniacs given power and a seemingly endless supply of other people’s money, with a budget deficit of $125 million, and two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad was sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee.
Your Children, Their Politics
Children of kindergarten age are defined, enthusiastically, as “natural social justice warriors” and “small activists.”
Oddments For The Weekend
Including subway scenes; an old-school alternative; an intriguing service; adventures in magnetism; and what would happen if the Moon spiralled in towards the Earth.
A Birthday Is Announced
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.”
The Lying Gets Easier With Practice
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?
On indulging imaginary pronouns – and delusions of being feline – at Bristol University.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a rapidly changing opinion; a cold explosion; tiny power tools; internet vending machines; two nice saves; and when your pronouns are too complicated to fit in your bio.
So Many Fs
Or, what happens when the kids don’t like the race-hustling curriculum.
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.”
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a hardcore rocker; some careful turning; how to cut a baby’s hair; how stickers are applied to lemons; and scenes of grilled chicken detection.
How Dare You Not Pretend
Some insist that not indulging modish pronouns, including animal pronouns and clown pronouns, and pronouns that can change randomly, several times a day – and being reluctant to indulge any other attendant psychodrama – is a violation of human rights and a basis for severe legal consequences. One might think that coercively eroding the probity of other people, demanding that they lie, and even hallucinate, is a pretty bad thing too. At best, a recipe for grim farce. But there we are.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a big-belly drama; lab-grown hair; an ode to preserves; a closely watched repair job; and a reminder that your cat is trying to kill you.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including accelerated penguins; phantom nipples; the restaurant of mistaken orders; a robotic bartender; and a back-yard view that’s not too shabby.
The Red-Light Cameras Made Me Do It
On dangerous driving and racially “disproportionate” ticketing:
Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a niche dating option; mixed messages; some amblin’ by; a big digit; and how far a ball could be thrown on the Moon.
Heroism, The Progressive Way
A senior editor at The Atlantic reveals more than she seems to realise, chiefly about herself.
You see, a very comfortable middle-class life with three children and a loving husband, in which time can be spent choosing new kitchens and chatting with the cleaner, is actually intolerably oppressive and an obvious basis for divorce.
The Year Reheated
In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.
The year began with an oddly specific medical diagnosis courtesy of the Guardian, where Afua Hirsch informed us that boob eczema is caused by “racist microaggressions.” Readers were left to suppose that the condition might only be resolved by lengthy grumbling about “structural racism” and the oppressive nature of “whiteness.” More prosaic solutions – say, a change of detergent, or indeed bra, were not explored. “Whiteness” also bedevilled Ms Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, who was both mystified and aggravated by the existence of non-white Trump supporters, and who identified “multiracial whiteness” as the only conceivable explanation. For Ms Beltrán, non-white voters who prefer to be engaged with as individuals, as opposed to racial mascots, are merely surrendering to “whiteness” and “white supremacy.” And so, Ms Beltrán bemoaned racism and “the debasement of others” while casually erasing agency from anyone brownish who happens to disagree with her.
Meanwhile, academics at the University of York were rendered fretful and distraught by an image on the website of an art history conference – specifically, of the seventeenth-century Buddhist figurine, the three wise monkeys – which, via much focussing of intersectional lenses, was construed by our academics as a caricature of black people, and therefore oppressive. And denunciations of “whiteness” and “white supremacy” also featured in a mandatory course at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. On grounds that, in order to be a dentist, you must first submit to condescension and insults, and accusations of being either a bigot or an enabler of bigotry, based solely on unchangeable aspects of your appearance.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including alternative apple-bobbing; a twenty-first century problem; a surprisingly detailed mushroom colour chart; some seasonal umbrage; and scenes of pretty hardcore daddy-daughter time.
Partying With The Woke
The [party] organisers decided to clean house over fears of overcrowding… What followed was a message blaring through the speakers from Google Translate that looped for several minutes on end — telling white students to leave.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including a significant miscalculation; big cat music; all about snowflakes; slow-motion microbes; and, for the bold, state-of-the-art sex toys.
Allow Me To Carry Your Purse, Madam
It’s fundraising week over at my place. Last one of the year.
If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and keep it ad-free, by all means do.
Oddments For The Weekend
Including pillow fights of note; the joys of public transport; the thrill of plankton; the trembling patriarchy; and a photographic project going somewhat awry.