Or, When Progressive Education Policy Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong:

Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.

And not just in San Diego.

As Seattle’s restaurants begin to go out of business ahead of the $15 minimum wage law, the comment below was offered in reply to a typically pious and self-flattering leftist:

No you don’t get to get away with that. You don’t get to advocate policies [i.e., higher minimum wage laws] which allow you to use force to deprive people of their jobs and their opportunities, and then claim that those who would have provided the jobs are the heartless ones. You don’t get to trot out the insipid, mindless, tendentious talking points about how you are morally or intellectually superior when every “solution” you proffer is destructive and is based upon forcing others to do your bidding. You don’t get to decide whose job is worth preserving and whose isn’t and still claim the moral high ground.

As yet, the leftist in question has not seen fit to respond.
One of these.

Jim Goad on “social justice education” and the shaping of young minds:

I’ve looked over the [dictionary] definition [of racism] many times and still haven’t seen an addendum that says, “….but only when white people are doing it.” So for the time being, the official definition of racism does not contain any such “whites only” clause. But according to Luke Visconti, a white man who is the CEO of something called Diversity Inc, such dictionary definitions of racism are indeed “too white.” From a cursory glance of his website, I suspect that everything may be “too white” for Visconti — possibly even himself. If he were offered the magical ability to moult his skin like a snake and emerge as a coal-black Haitian, I tend to believe he’d accept the offer, provided there was no salary cut.

One of these.

Students at the University of California, Irvine have denounced exposure to the American flag as potentially inflicting “hate speech” on passers-by. Indeed, the mere sight of it could make young intellectuals burst into tears and feel terribly unsafe.

Don’t forget the self-described “bacon-eating vegan” who was left shocked and tearful upon discovering that her degrees in “social justice studies” and “gender studies” have zero value in the job market. “My degrees mean NOTHING,” tweeted she. “I don’t even know how to process the reality that is my life now.”

On pretentious students, their enablers, and the misplaced moral glamour of defaulting on student loans.

Women in the US have been harnessing [witchcraft’s] power for decades as a “spiritual but not religious” way to express feminist ambitions.

Yes, it’s from the Guardian and, yes, it goes downhill from there.

Roger Kimball on the unacknowledged charms of Swedish multiculturalism:

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%. If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

One of these.

“Whenever I’m a bit lonely it feels like I’m eating with someone else.”

< panhandle >
It’s fundraising week over at my place. If anyone here would like to help out, you’re more than welcome to.
< /panhandle >

From poorly-choreographed wrestling to radical door scraping, students of performance art attempt to blow our minds.

“I began to wonder what it must be like to be a young man at university, sitting through course after course after course, whether it was an English course, a history course, a philosophy course, or sociology, whatever, and just hearing about how the whole history of humanity had been a history of men oppressing women. And how, even now, supposedly, he should feel bad about his ‘privileges’. Hearing over and over again about how you’re responsible for all the bad things in the world, that if there were fewer men or they were just less manly, somehow we wouldn’t have any more war and everyone would live abundant, peaceful lives, and if women were more collectivist oriented and egalitarian… All these things demonstrably not true if anyone has ever spent time in a women’s organisation or lived with a bunch of women.”

Janice Fiamengo questions feminist orthodoxy and is punished for her wickedness.

Words you mustn’t use on campus. Including “angry,” “passive,” “exotic” and “illegal.”

I can only guess that the reason you don’t hear much about black-versus-Hispanic violence in America is that you’re not supposed to hear much about it. It’s the sort of thing that swims upstream against the dominant narrative with the tenacity of a thuggish, heavily tattooed salmon.

One of these.

If you want to find bad faith theatrics and unshakeable idiocy presented as virtue, head for the Clown Quarter of the nearest university. It’s where you’re most likely to find the word “privilege” deployed as an ad hominem device. A way of saying, “Your opinion doesn’t count (or doesn’t count as much as mine) because you have a certain level of melanin, or a penis, or the wrong kind of upbringing, or an insufficient number of hang-ups and fashionable pretensions.” Think of it as a kind of Maoist snobbery, in which, as Jesse Walker notes, the unwary are denounced for the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery.
In my experience, the personalities to which such things appeal aren’t terribly interested in civility or justice, “social” or otherwise. What they seem to be interested in is opportunist scolding and one-upmanship, that all-important social positioning. And so what you see, and see quite often, isn’t concern for the supposedly vulnerable; it’s an assertion of status and a pay-off for all that wound-up dogmatism. It’s how professed egalitarians let us know they’re better than us.
Because they really do have to let us know.

Peter Wood on leftist academics who find violence titillating:

Eric Linsker, an adjunct professor of English composition at [the City University of New York], was arrested on December 13, after he had carried a large garbage can onto a walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently in an effort to drop it on the heads of police officers below. Linsker was ordered by the police to put it down but fled the scene, dropping his backpack, with two hammers inside, and, among others things, his CUNY ID. Cindy Gorn and Zachary Campbell were among the academics arrested for assaulting police on the Brooklyn Bridge in an effort to help Linsker escape. Gorn is a graduate student at Columbia University… Her “areas of work” are “geography from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, social movements, autonomous labour movements, health, and the environment.”

Oh, there’s more.

Performance artist Eames Armstrong insists, “I am not an entertainer.”

Professor Judy Haiven’s idea that women should always speak first in classroom discussions and at public events was brought up several times during the forum. Haiven said she already tries to apply this idea in her own classroom… “In the management department, women get to speak first.”

By which the professor means, male students aren’t allowed to speak first.

Haiven’s idea was met by a round of applause.

Thomas Sowell on milking pretentious guilt:

Our schools and colleges are laying a guilt trip on those young people whose parents are productive, and who are raising them to become productive. What is amazing is how easily this has been done, largely just by replacing the word “achievement” with the word “privilege.”

One of these.

It could always get worse.

From rent-seeking “creative” people and racist furniture to hegemonic beards, the sin of buying peas, and some decidedly unerotic feminist pornography. The year reheated.