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August 2018

Elsewhere (279)

Michael Jones on the Clown Quarter’s approximation of scholarship: 

In her paper, How to Write as Felt: Touching Transmaterialities and More-Than-Human Intimacies, University of Toronto scholar Stephanie Springgay suggests that felt, a “dense material of permanently interlocking fibres,” can be linked to racism and capitalism.

It’s those “cis-heteronormative White supremacist settler colonial logics,” you see. And the “queer self-touching,” obviously.  

Charles Cooke on the latest young titan of US socialism:  

Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defence spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park

Charlotte Allen on “healthy masculinity,” as defined by campus woke-lings: 

In May, the University of Texas-Austin hastily pulled back a programme on “healthy masculinity” that its counselling staff had devised – amid a flood of ridicule over such aspects of the programme as posters depicting young men wearing pencilled-in dresses (complete with bust-lines) and encouraging UT’s male students to try nail polish and makeup. The programme, titled “MasculinUT” and devised in 2015, had been originally marketed as a means of reducing campus sexual assault and domestic violence. Instead, as even UT administrators ultimately conceded, it mainly consisted of promoting “gender fluidity” and the treatment of traditional masculine roles and goals — such as focusing on career “success,” becoming the family “breadwinner,” and being told to “act like a man” — as inherently pathological.

And Jonah Goldberg on Sarah Jeong and racism as a credential at the New York Times

Continue reading "Elsewhere (279)" »


Summer Lovin’

Yes, it’s warm and moist, hereabouts at least, and time to remind patrons that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant a while longer, and remain ad-free, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade or so, in over 2,500 posts and close to 85,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start - in particular, the end-of-year summaries. If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 


Friday Ephemera

Proud father. (h/t, Dicentra) || 50 notable special-effects movies. || Things the Soviets made. || Continue the research. || An encouraging sign. (h/t, Julia) || Remember, citizens - always respect the media. || We must listen to the children. || Campus tolerance, part 4,022. || Painting with light. || Luminous women. || Thirsty lions. || Bored Tourists, an anthropological study. || Call it ambition. || Instagram boyfriends. || The crab bucket life of the woke resistance. || Bitesize. || Want one. || It’s all in the ankles, you know. || Hong Kong in ‘49. || It was 1988, when phones were the size of shoeboxes and Milli Vanilli roamed the Earth. || And finally, perhaps symbolically, something small but strangely maddening.


Lawn Maintenance Is Racist

Further to the previous post, more “critical race thought” from a severely educated young person

You see, a pleasing lawn is not only “racist” but obviously a manifestation of “the white psyche’s compulsion to establish complete dominion over ‘property.’” (Do note the scare quotes around the word property, which is apparently a doubtful concept with no basis in reality.) Now excuse me while I nip across the road to tell the chap at number 32, the one whose family hail from India, that his immaculate lawn is merely a sign of his own oppression, of submission to “white norms,” “white supremacy,” and the “white conception of property.”

I’m sure he’ll appreciate being educated in this way.

Via Dicentra