Canadian performance artist Martine Viale thrills and captivates passers-by, armed only with a carrier bag of bobbins and a head wrapped in yarn.

This bloated ‘diversity’ infrastructure, and the larger bureaucracy, has made the recent wave of student protests look particularly foolish… There they are protesting against tuition hikes, and my view is, who are you guys protesting against? […] Gibor Basri, the Vice Chancellor of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity at Berkeley, participated in some of these tuition protests and said rising tuition gives him heartburn. Well, if he’s got so much heartburn, how about he starts divesting the seventeen staff in his ‘diversity’ office? He could even give up his own salary [of $200,000] or cut it by half.

Heather Mac Donald holds court for 90 minutes.

According to Dr Ben Pitcher, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Westminster, the sedate Radio 4 panel show Gardeners’ Question Time is riddled with “racial meanings” disguised as horticultural advice… Dr Pitcher said the “crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain” meant people felt unable to express their views for fear of being called racist, so expressed their racial identity in other ways, such as talking about gardening.

No mocking, you heathens. We must heed our sociology lecturers.

In the late ’80s, I took part in a lot of performance art that included nudity, so I was familiar with baring my breasts in public.

And her nipples will guide us to the light.

Sexism, obviously.

Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much… So the real [feminist] complaint boils down to this: The ten percent of Wikipedia which could reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers does in fact reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers, and yes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does get a more exhaustive, nerdishly-loving treatment than Sex & the City.
The federal government needs to pay people to study this and propose “solutions”? It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men. You don’t have to believe that to at least agree: This should have been one of the explanations scientifically studied, if we’re going to have a scientific study at all.

If further proof of aesthetic genius is needed, I’ve managed to track down video of Ms Wang collaborating with Shizu Homma on a “guerrilla performance piece” on a bridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The length of said recording, a mighty 24 minutes, is necessary to convey the magnitude and seriousness of the work in question. Brace yourselves.

No, don’t laugh.

Now do as we say:

The MP in question, Sarah Wallaston, “formerly a doctor and teacher,” is now hoping to dictate your default portion size. The state, says Ms Wallaston, has “a duty to intervene” by telling you what it is you “don’t need” when buying drinks and snacks at the local cinema. Because you simply can’t be trusted near those sweet and shiny objects. At which point, I’m reminded of the Guardian‘s Jill Filipovic, who also struggles with the concept of personal liberty and, specifically, with why “every socially conscious person” doesn’t agree with her. Being “socially conscious,” so defined, and therefore better than us, doesn’t seem to entail any reservation about spending, or indeed wasting, other people’s earnings on imposing state-dictated portion sizes. Or any reservation about embracing a condescending relationship with those of whom one is supposedly being conscious. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In cartoon smoke.

Readers may recall the Guardian‘s Emer O’Toole, a “postcolonial theorist” and assistant professor of Irish Performance Studies, for whom all cultures past and present are equally vibrant and noble, except of course the culture in which she currently flourishes, on which opprobrium must be heaped ostentatiously and often. Ms O’Toole famously bemoaned the colonial propagation of Shakespeare, whose works she denounced as “full of classism, sexism, racism and defunct social mores.” And worse, “a powerful tool of empire, transported to foreign climes along with the doctrine of European cultural superiority.” The possibility that at any given time one set of values and insights might be preferable to another, even objectively better, bothers her quite a bit.
Her article was accompanied by a photograph of New Zealand’s Ngakau Toa theatre company performing Troilus and Cressida in a distinctively Maori style. To me, it looked fun and worth the price of a ticket. But this cross-cultural fusion saddened Ms O’Toole, who dismissed notions of the Bard’s universality as “uncomfortably colonial.” She then presumed to take umbrage on behalf of all past colonial subjects, whose own views on Shakespeare and literature she chose not to relate. She did, however, get quite upset about “our sense of cultural superiority” – a sense of superiority that, she insisted, has long been “disavowed by all but the crazies.”
It may be a tad indelicate, even improper, but I can’t help wondering how Ms O’Toole might have felt had she been among the 19th century English colonists who encountered a Maori culture that was all but prehistoric, with no discernable literature or science, in which the average lifespan was about thirty years or so, and where cannibalism was not unknown. Faced with such things, I’m sure Ms O’Toole would have resisted the wicked urge to think herself a little more culturally advanced.

Oh, there’s more.

On crime and punishment:

This “conspicuous forgiveness,” a kind of vicarious tolerance, can be quite striking in its boldness and disregard for facts, with acts of savagery being met with improbable excuses and rhetorical diversions. Generally from a safe distance. In 2011, following the London riots, China Miéville, a middle-class Marxist and member of the International Socialist Organisation, claimed to be “horrified” that members of the press and public had used the word feral when describing the career predators and assorted thugs who, seeking excitement and a sense of power, had beaten passing pensioners unconscious and burned random women out of their homes. And who, on the arrival of firefighters, had dragged them from their vehicles and punched them insensible.
To use the word feral when describing such people was, Mr Miéville said, our “moral degradation far more than [theirs].” You see, by referring to such behaviour as savage and anti-social, we are the degraded ones in Mr Miéville’s eyes, the ones in need of chastisement.

The Guardian’s Laurie Penny is unhappy about… something:

As so often in Laurie’s mental landscape, dark forces are at work although the evidence has been lost in a mysterious warehouse fire. We are, however, pointed to the “front pages of celebrity magazines,” on which, obviously, all sane people model their own, actual lives. We’re told that “Successful women on the verge of mental and physical collapse… is a myth that pleases the powerful,” though who the powerful might be is also far from clear. Can she mean the overwhelmingly female readership of Heat magazine?

Theodore Dalrymple:

I remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been an astonishing gestalt switch in my lifetime. Independence has now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and dependence on the state. Mothers would say to me that they were pleased to be independent, by which they meant independent of the fathers of their children — usually more than one — who in general were violent swine. Of course, the mothers knew them to be violent swine before they had children by them, but the question of whether a man would be a suitable father is no longer a question because there are no fathers: The state would provide.

Oh, there’s more.

The question on everyone’s lips:

Is it anti-feminist to watch the World Cup?

People just aren’t mixing in ways Urban Studies lecturer Peter Matthews wants. Therefore it’s time to consider a “physically radical intervention”:

The idea that we must demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing is still way off the agenda. Maybe it is time this changed.

You see, what we need – good and hard – is some “deliberate urban degeneration.”

Some links of possible interest, from dogmatic faculty and the joys of modern schooling to incendiary literature and the unbecoming urges of Hillary Clinton.

Greg Collins notes the advantages of siding with the campus hive mind, and artist Franklin Einspruch tries to sell free speech to his peers.

For a long while I’ve been trying to interest my friends in the art world to get behind freedom of speech in a bigger way… This usually doesn’t persuade anyone who isn’t already liberty-minded to begin with. So next I resort to self-interest. We creative types rely on that openness to function… If injured feelings take on the seriousness of injured bodies, we will become a society that pulls art off of walls, cancels performances, and strikes essays from public view. Sadly, this usually doesn’t work either, because the targets of accusations of hate speech typically lean right, and the art community leans left.

There’s more, of course.

And other items of possible interest:

But America’s most outspoken socialist, being an outspoken socialist, deserves nine properties, including an agreeable Upper West Side apartment valued at $1.27 million and, naturally, a mansion. This, remember, is a self-described multimillionaire who told the world, quite boldly, “Capitalism did nothing for me.”

The Student Union of University College London resolves to “fight the root cause of fascism.” Which is, of course, “capitalism.”

The prize-winning oratory in the Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship:

Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!

Go Team Dada.

Ms Lierre Keith, a former radical vegan turned radical advocate of a return to subsistence farming, has long been a vocal champion of vandalism, harassment and “militant action,” and taken at their own words, she and her colleagues would like to see those they deem “associated” with environmental accidents being killed by the state. They also like the idea of “sabotaging infrastructure” and cutting power lines, thereby leaving tens of thousands of people without light and heat, as this would somehow encourage “class consciousness.” Elderly people in remote locations would presumably embrace the finer points of revolutionary eco-socialism as they shivered in the dark and the feeling left their limbs.

Now a self-described radical feminist, Ms Keith’s latest target is maleness, which must be abolished.