Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina.
He Wants To Influence Your Children
“Whiteness,” an allegedly deplorable yet oddly nebulous phenomenon – blame for which is assigned to all white people currently roaming the Earth – is apparently rooted in the “destruction of the environment” and the “total demolition of value,” including, we’re told, the destruction of “integrity, honesty… common sense.”
Infantilised For The Cause
The language guide, published by the university’s “diversity” department, is promoted as a way for students to “gain credibility.”
And nothing screams credibility like pretending to be injured by the terms mothering and mankind.
The Old Balls And Chain
It’s fundraising week over at my place, along with news of an overdue event. If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and keep it ad-free, by all means do.
The Way Of The Woke
The new hotness in grading for woke academics: “Dispensing almost completely with judgements of quality.”
Participants will be shown how to “revise course materials so they don’t accidentally promote or reinforce racist practices,” though the particulars are somehow both emphatic and opaque. We are, for instance, told that, “single standards” for language “kill our students,” which sounds just a tad breathless. There will, it seems, be lots of “redesigning assessment ecologies,” and quite a few “dimension-based rubrics,” which, via an as yet unspecified process, will upend “white racial habits of language,” resulting in some kind of righteous emancipation. In short, grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an apparently murderous phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of “inclusive excellence.”
Technology Works
Our Betters And Their Mighty Brains
“The only reason to be upset about demographic change is if you’re a racist.”
See Her Agonies, See How They Catch The Light
“Actress, poet and activist” Rosanna Arquette wants us to know how ashamed she is of being white.
Superior Beings
Wants to smash capitalism. Is triggered by gendered language.
Our Betters At Large
The protestors’ chanted demands include “No borders, no nations, no gas power stations.”
They Know We Can Hear Them, Right?
If broadcasters still cared about the editorial independence of their employees, then comments like this [aired on Twitter] would not be made by their journalists. For they further reveal what most of the public have come to suspect – that broadcasters presenting themselves as non-partisan in fact hold very clear political views and that these usually veer in a particular direction… Of course, people have always harboured their suspicions, but not until journalists began to freely give away their thoughts on social media was such a smorgasbord of evidence presented…
On one single occasion in recent years has a television presenter let slip a view that did not fall into lockstep with the narrow orthodoxies of the broadcasting class. When Politics Live presenter Andrew Neil sent out one tweet last year mocking the increasingly conspiratorial Observer writer Carole Cadwalladr, he not only deleted the tweet but himself immediately became a news story. There were swift calls for his sacking, and the BBC felt compelled to publicly chastise Neil. As it happens, despite being almost uncontested as the country’s leading political interviewer, Neil no longer has a regular slot on the BBC.
Douglas Murray on broadcasters, Twitter and public trust. One of these.
Don’t Forget The Toilet Paper
Those who wish to save the world from rampant masculinity, possibly by chaining themselves to something, are advised to bring “a tent, a sleeping bag and a torch.”
She’s Expending Mental Energy
“The personal is political,” says she. But it’s also worth considering just how often the political, or allegedly political, is a function of personality and a self-flattering rationalisation for personal shortcomings and sub-optimal choices. Not least among the kinds of people who loudly announce that the personal is political.
In the Guardian, a feminist objects to cleaning her own bathroom.
No, You May Not Choose The Best For Your Child
Put another way, “State education is generally suboptimal and often shockingly bad. Let’s make sure that’s all there is available.”
The Sorrows Of “Social Justice”
Apparently, being a “proud SJW” means never growing up. And being rendered tearful by a photograph of a hat.
‘Instagram Therapist’ Is Now A Thing
Lose weight or topple Western civilisation? The fat person’s eternal dilemma.
Getting Their Jollies
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.
Excusing Malevolence In The Name Of Piety
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.
Theodore Dalrymple on choices, crime and the importance of punishment.
Ladies Who Launch
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?
A Guardian columnist envisions a women-only space colony equipped with feminism and frozen sperm.
And Only $56,000 A Year
It’s worth noting that Oberlin College is the Clown Quarter writ large, a leftist fiefdom, where woke psychodramas are normative, encouraged and institutional. And hence the delinquency and moral inversion – the ripened fruit of all that leftist psychology. Such that students were encouraged by staff to side with a trio of physically aggressive shoplifters – people stealing for fun – and to actively destroy the livelihood of a baker who would rather not be preyed upon by thieves. The expectation of lawfulness, of common civility, being repaid with libel, harassment and ruin. Activities that Oberlin’s administrators were happy to enable, using college funds, and often with bizarrely adolescent behaviour of their own.