Author: David

Oxford Undergraduate Discovers Dickensian Injustice

“Coats,” she informs us, “are especially essential on nights out, because alcohol, although it makes you feel warmer, makes you more vulnerable to hypothermia.” From this, she concludes, “If local councils are looking for a way to protect young women on nights out, they ought to make a free cloakroom a condition of a club’s license.”

Because if nightclub cloakrooms insist on charging two whole British pounds, the nation’s womenfolk will simply freeze to death.

Bravery in the Face of Paper Cuts

Katherine Timpf reports on academia’s ongoing cultivation of stoicism, fortitude and self-possession:

Princeton University students recently launched Tiger Microaggressions, a service that takes other students’ reports of microaggressions and publishes them on its Facebook page — so that no one has to “carry the burden alone to call out” offences against political correctness… The page, by the way, also refers to microaggressions as “papercuts of oppression,” which are “so small but slice deep.” […] According to the operators, “microaggressions are all around us” and anything can be a microaggression because “there are no objective definitions to words and phrases.”

One of these.

Bad Medicine

Victor Davis Hanson on post-Ferguson policing:

[Officer Darren] Wilson’s second apparent error was in winning the fight over Brown for his gun. Had he allowed Brown to beat him, then Wilson might well have had a chance of surviving the wounds, and thus he might now still be a policeman with a career, rather than ostracised, in danger, and unemployed. Neither the community nor the media would have found newsworthy the shooting or beating of a white policeman by an African-American youth — in the manner that the murder of two California sheriffs by a twice-deported illegal alien was one-day news.

One of these.

I Felt a Great Disturbance in the Narrative

Kevin Williamson:

When former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani takes seriously the operative slogan of the Ferguson protests — “Black Lives Matter!” — and asks the obvious question — “Don’t they matter in the 93 percent of cases when the lives of black murder victims are taken violently by black criminals?” — the Left’s reflexive response is to denounce him as a racist. The Washington Post‘s hilariously Orwellian fact-check column labelled Giuliani a liar even as it confirmed that his observation is, as a matter of fact, entirely true. […]
The reality is this: Black men, especially young black men, die violent deaths at appalling rates in these United States. But they do not die very often at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, thugs reminiscent of characters from American History X, police officers of any race or motivation, lynch mobs, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Walmart, the Tea Party, Goldman Sachs, carbon dioxide, or any other bogeyman currently in vogue among so-called progressives. As Giuliani noted, blacks die violent deaths almost exclusively at the hands of black criminals. But attempting to accommodate that reality in any serious way does not pay any political dividends for the Left. It does not put any money in Jesse Jackson’s pockets or create any full-time jobs for graduates of grievance-studies programs.

One of these.

Message Received

Nothing says “we are righteous and entitled to deference” like smashing and looting a local woman’s cake shop. And smashing and looting the mini-market that Michael Brown robbed and then running away laughing, and looting the local phone shop, and burning down the local pharmacy, and burning down the local auto spares business, and the local pizza restaurant, and the local beauticians, and then shooting at the firemen who are trying to put those fires out before other people lose their livelihoods too.
You know, for “social justice.”

From the comments here.

Sowell on Obama

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do. When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

The above is one of these.

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