But certainly more than slightly reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire.

The other day I went to a first-run movie, a thing I seldom do.  In fact, I’ll go farther: a thing I pretty much studiously avoid doing.  But my father, who adores movie popcorn and has few other pleasures left in life other than his dog, likes to go and I go with him.  He likes to get the exact middle seats of the very top row, and grouses if there are more than four other people in the theater.  Same thing with restaurants, by the way.  Part of me delights in the magisterial disregard of the basic logic of the thing:  If it’s worth seeing, or worth eating there, people are going to go.  If you want it to yourself you more or less have to confine yourself to places and things that are not desired.  Part of me gets very fatigued with the expression “jammed up” to refer to any crowd in excess of ten.

Be all that as it may, we went to see Spy, a fairly harmless and mindless comedy vehicle for the lead actress, Melissa McCarthy (who came close to stealing the show in Bridesmaids).  If F-bombs tossed about like confetti upset you, it’s probably not a movie for you.  It certainly isn’t for younger children.

Enough of the feature.  Getting there as early as we did — and do, considering my father’s morbid fear of not getting the Right Seats — we got to see the trailers.  Among them was a trailer for what seems to be a television show, which these days is, as I understand, equivalent to saying “reality” television show.

I have very few accomplishments in life I can point to.  Among them is that I’ve never seen an installment of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, or Jersey Shore, or Swamp People, or Real Housewives of East Jesus, Arkansas, or even much of Duck Dynasty.  All the Survivors and their interminable spin-offs have also left me serene in my pop-culture ignorance.  I now have another to add to the list.

Gentle Reader, we are about to witness a show identifying itself as Little Women: LA.  This show is about midget and dwarf women, in Los Angeles.  When one is an abnormally small female in Los Angeles, apparently the thing to do is behave trashy.  People will film you, and then (shudder) a country full of people will watch you behaving trashy.

Consider how many ideas for television shows get pitched every day in Hollywood.  Consider how many people in how many roles and with how much money and influence must all sign off on the concept, the financing, the production details and budget, the marketing strategy, and on and on and on.  Consider how few of the ideas pitched ever see so much as a minute of production.  Consider how many of the ones that actually do get so far as having a pilot filmed get canned before ever being shown.  What I’m getting at is that the tripe that makes it onto your television screen on a daily basis, Gentle Reader, is the surviving remnant of not just a mountain, but an entire mountain range of Stuff That Didn’t Make the Cut.

All of which is to say that, while we might not know their names (I’d hope they’d have enough self-respect to give false ones in the credits: “Executive Producer:  Vyacheslav Molotov; Casting Director:  Richard M. “Bingo” Little.  Editing:  Boris Godunov.  And so forth.), we know by the tracks they are about to leave across the smoldering remains of American pop culture that they do exist.  They are all the people who thought this was a Good Idea.  Stop and ponder, Gentle Reader what must have been the ones they thought too silly, too degenerate, too uninteresting to the breadth of the American television consuming public.

Many years ago, while I was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, the state legislature felt called upon to outlaw a sport, self-explanatorily identified as “dwarf tossing.”  I understand it involved, other than the physical actions which gave it its name, a great deal of beer.  I assume the dwarves were willing participants (never so familiarized myself with it as to know how they were compensated).  Can’t say that I ever saw an evening of dwarf tossing advertised on any venue I drove past (maybe I just wasn’t driving through the right parts of town in the right parts of the state), but I’m not sure how the Scourge of Dwarf Tossing came to be viewed as such a crisis.  Again, this sounds like the sort of function where one gives a false name at the door, just in case there’s a raid and your picture appears on the front page of the local paper.  Caption:  Leon Trotsky, 43, of Spartanburg, is arrested after police raid dwarf tossing den.

Iran is getting the Bomb, the U.S. Supreme Court is re-writing statutes for the express purpose of saving them from the drafters in Congress, Greece has wheedled the EU, which jolly well knows better, into handing over another several billion Euros while they pass empty reform measures they have no intention of ever putting into effect . . . and we’re watching Little Women: LA.  I’ve read several books on the end of the Roman Empire, all the way from Gibbon to more recent re-examinations, but a common theme is that those responsible for keeping Rome shiny side up and rubber side down just finally gave up on it.

As I ponder Little Women: LA, I have to ask myself whether we’ve given up on this peculiar experiment in self-government.

How many legs would a calf have?  This was a rhetorical question put to his cabinet by Abraham Lincoln during a discussion that seemed to be running in circles.  They all answered, “Five,” at which point Lincoln corrected them.  Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Nor can you credibly claim that fossil fuels are being “subsidized” by re-defining “subsidy” into meaninglessness, as a several authors affiliated with the International Monetary Fund seems to have done.  According to those sages, world-wide energy costs — by which they overwhelmingly mean fossil fuel energy costs — are being “subsidized” to the tune of $5.3 trillion annually.  The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has the article.  Here’s the blog post.  The blog post relies heavily on an IMF working paper, “How Large are Global Energy Subsidies?,” available in .pdf here. The reader doesn’t get past the headline without tripping across the writers’ leftist bias splashed across the screen:  “Act Local, Solve Global: The $5.3 Trillion Energy Subsidy Problem”.  Isn’t $5.3 trillion a rather large number?  How did they get there?  Did they add up governmental hand-outs, direct or indirect, to energy producers or consumers?  Well no, no they didn’t.  What they did was define a calf’s tail so that now it’s a leg:

“We define energy subsidies as the difference between what consumers pay for energy and its ‘true costs,’ plus a country’s normal value added or sales  tax rate. These ‘true costs’ of energy consumption include its supply costs and the damage that energy consumption inflicts on people and the environment. These damages, in turn, come from carbon emissions and hence global warming; the health effects of air pollution; and the effects on traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and road damage. Most of these externalities are borne by local populations, with the global warming component of energy subsidies  only a fourth of the total.”

“Externalities.”  “True costs.”  And of course, “global warming.” The latter of which hasn’t been occurring for the past 15-plus years, and the extent to which it is anthropogenic is the subject of massive debate, despite what the acolytes of The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the television talking heads, and the rest of the left-extremist media repeatedly assure us is “consensus” scientific opinion.  Even on the assumption that, long-term, the earth overall is in fact warming up, as of right now there is little robust (in other words, non-manipulated) data to indicate that human activity is the dominant cause of it.  Looked at slightly differently, for the past 15 years, during which time everyone now agrees there has been a “hiatus” in warming, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been steadily climbing.  By every one of the climate alarmists’ models the world should be cooking.  But it’s not.  Why not?  Well, there are a bunch of theories out there, all of which — hardly surprisingly — rely on naturally-occurring phenomena to explain “where the heat is being hidden.”  But what does that tell us?  What it tells us is that naturally-occurring phenomena can very easily overwhelm the anthropogenic component of warming trends, and that assumes that the computer models which are the source of our estimates of the magnitude of that component are accurate in the first place.  Which may or may not be the case.

These IMF writers are perfectly comfortable not only assuming that the world is warming and will continue to warm, but that it’s human carbon emissions that are the cause of it.  And then they pull a number out of thin air to slap a price tag on it, and call it an “externality” which must be accounted for in calculating the “true” cost of energy.

The health effects of air pollution are a genuine external cost of the use of fossil fuels.  And it’s not hard to put some pretty robust numbers on that cost.  Most countries keep pretty good track of mortality and morbidity, and the range of illnesses and diseases reliably connected to ambient air pollution is pretty well-settled.  So when they authors write, “In China alone, the World Health Organization estimates there are over one million premature deaths per year due to outdoor air pollution, caused by the burning of polluting fuels, particularly coal, and other sources,” that’s a number I can take at close to face value (ignoring the extent to which international NGOs have joyfully prostituted themselves to various left-extremist causes).

That million-premature-deaths-per-year data point really doesn’t take full account to the full consequences of China’s fuel consumption, does it?  Let’s look back a few decades to see what life in Red China was like before its economy took off.  China was a land of — in many provinces still is — dirt-poor peasants, without clean drinking water, transportation to keep the villages fed, reliable modern or semi-modern healthcare, or most of the other advantages of modern economies.  They died like flies.  What has happened to overall life expectancy in China as a result of its economic modernization?  Here are the charts: overall life expectancy went from 68.31 years in 1985 to 73.27 years in 2010.  These IMF folks are counting only one side of the equation.  If I increase life expectancy across several hundred million people by five years through generalized, wide-spread economic development — a development which would be utterly impossible without cheap, for which read “fossil” energy — but out of those hundreds of millions, 1 million annually die prematurely, then I’m not only still to the good, I’m massively to the good.  In India, one of the other major “sinners” in fossil fuel consumption, the increase is even more stark.  We see life expectancy going from 62.5 to 67.14 years between 2000 and 2012, five years’ increase over just twelve years.

By the way, despite the obviously Marxist leanings of these IMF wonks, general economic development and prosperity inures to everyone’s advantage.  Everyone’s.  If air pollution is an external cost, then general economic advancement is an external benefit, and it’s asinine — and dishonest — to include the one without accounting for the other.

“The effects on traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and road damage”:  These are likewise “external costs” that amount to “subsidies” of energy.    I’d love to see someone demonstrate that “too-cheap” energy prices result in traffic congestion and accidents.  What produces traffic congestion and road accidents are too many people trying to fit their vehicles onto a given surface of road at the same time.  And what produces that is geographically concentrated economic opportunity that grows faster than government’s ability to respond to it.  Unemployed people don’t drive to work, to put it bluntly.  Businesses that go out of business don’t run their trucks.  So if we just tamped down productive economic activity our roads would be safer and less congested.  Which appears to be the objective of these authors.

The kind of economic advancement which produces crowded (and dangerous) traffic condition arises from, and only from, relatively inexpensive transportation, and that requires relatively inexpensive energy.  By “relatively,” I mean, incidentally, relative to other mechanized and non-mechanized forms of transportation.  When you had to own and maintain a horse and wagon in order to “drive” anywhere, that was both highly inefficient and very restrictive.  As Paul Johnson describes travel in pre-railroad England in The Birth of the Modern, the vast majority of people walked wherever they went, because they couldn’t afford to ride, not because they wanted to stop and smell the flowers.  That’s still true elsewhere in the world.  Despite all the picturesque photographs in The National Geographic of swarms of passengers so covering rail cars that you can’t see the rail car beneath them, most people in the less developed world walk, and not from choice.

Non-mechanized travel is slow, it’s inefficient (how many horse-drawn wagons would it take to deliver the lumber and brick to build a single house? how many guys driving flat-bed trucks?), and it is, relative to fossil-fueled mechanized travel, horribly, horribly expensive.  Among forms of mechanized transportation, railroads are phenomenally inefficient in any sense of how much energy it takes to move X people or weight of objects Y distance, from any given Point A to Point B.  Those who extol the virtues of rail conveniently pay attention to the first component X over Y, forgetting that niggling little issue of where it’s being transported from and to: which Point A to which Point B.  There is not money enough in all the world to build and run railroads to everywhere that needs cheap transportation.  If I’m 30 miles from the nearest railroad point of embarkation (and many, many places, even in the Easter U.S., are), then it doesn’t really do me much good to ponder how much weight a train can pull per unit of energy, does it?

Once more, the “too-cheap energy” hand-wringers need to answer the question of precisely how they account for the overall benefit, in length and quality of life, provided by modern capitalistic economies operating through the inter-connectedness of inter-continental markets for everyday goods (and even services, although to a lesser extent).  These authors’ outlook assumes a pre-lapsarian paradise where an increasing population somehow has jobs that somehow enable its individuals to pay the bills and somehow live long, relatively-healthy lives, without a relatively inexpensive way to move people and goods, to heat, cool, and light houses and businesses, and to operate the machines which make the physical objects that make it all possible.

How do our authors propose to impose on consumers the “true cost” of energy?  Why, through taxation, of course.

“The fiscal gains from subsidy reform are sizeable and could be a game changer for fiscal policy in many countries.  This would give room, for example, for governments to reduce some types of taxes (such as those imposed on labor) that weigh down growth;  raise growth-enhancing public expenditure (e.g. for infrastructure, health  and education); and finance targeted cash transfers for the poor.  Furthermore, there would be appropriate incentives for investment in green technology because dirty energy would no longer be artificially cheap.”

In the working paper linked above you get a better idea of just how purely theoretical all these wonderful “savings” actually are.  Reducing a tax on labor sounds nice, but it really doesn’t answer the question where you are going to replace the money from all the income tax revenue lost from jobs destroyed or more importantly jobs never created.  Moreover, if you just read the above paragraph you’ll notice a curious contradiction:  Increasing energy costs will reduce energy consumption, and we’re going to use all that money flowing in to . . . build and repair more roads and bridges for all the cars and trucks that aren’t being driven any more.  It also assumes an infinitely linear relationship between economic growth and government expenditure on “education” (no such relationship has ever been shown above a certain level; if that were the case the United States would be a nation of Einsteins) or “health” (ditto).  And finally we get to the nub:  more money to hand out to our pet constituencies and “green energy” cronies.

On a more practical level, when has there even been a sustained pattern of government taking one tax revenue source and using it to reduce another?  That is a supposition that defies uniform experience of government since the days of the pharaohs.  For that matter, it seems to me that if most of the externalities of energy consumption are experienced locally, then paying a whacking great chunk of money to a centralized bureaucracy to siphon 40-80% of it off the top in “administration” costs and then dole the balance out to its favored constituents is precisely the wrong way to match externalities with those who must experience them in the actual lives.  I’ll give you a hint:  There aren’t a whole lot of “green energy” mooches in Atlanta, and yet there’s a boat-load of externalities to experience there (as anyone who’s tried to drive further than three blocks around there can tell you).  So the solution is to impose a tax on all those who live and work in Atlanta, so some firm in Silicon Valley can be handed $535 million in taxpayers’ money to get behind the major-political-donors’ equity position when the firm, which was already irretrievably broke when the money was paid, files its bankruptcy petition?  Color me uninterested.

Finally, other than using less energy, what do the authors’ suggested uses of this tax revenue actually do to reduce the externalities of energy consumption?  China could burn 17% less coal and it would still have lousy air quality in its large cities.  New Yorkers could burn 17% less automotive fuels and mid-town would still be a parking lot for most of the day.  Where the change would occur would be at the margin and in truth would largely occur in the form of lack of economic activity.  In any single year that might not be a terribly large number, but once you slice 0.5% off your annual rate of growth over several decades because energy is now so damned expensive, and suddenly the difference in overall societal condition is the difference between the American Midwest and rural India.

Also noteworthy is the authors’ pointing out that the “externalities” of “too-cheap” energy are very predominantly local.  Even assuming all the climate alarmist chatter to be true in every detail [It’s not; all these models and projections trace themselves to data held by the University of East Anglia, data so thoroughly corrupted by manipulation that the man they hired to recreate their original measurements gave up after about three years of trying; the source data has been so monkeyed with that it is unusable for any other than propaganda purposes . . . which coincidentally is what it’s being used for; useful entry points to understand what’s been going on here, here, and especially here.], something like half the total is accounted for by local air pollution.  Local.  All of which is to say that there are enormous swathes of every country on the face of the earth where the air simply isn’t all that bad.  Yet the taxes proposed will hit everyone in the country.  Seems like what they’re proposing is to shift the externalities from one subset of people (residents of dense urban pockets) to another subset (everyone else).  I’d also note that non-residents of dense urban areas tend to use — at least in their personal existence — more energy for things like transportation than their urban cousins.  Ditto businesses.  If you live or work out in the sticks, you’ve got further to move yourself and your stuff than if your customer base all lives within 25 miles of you or your business.

In fairness to the authors of the linked paper, they do come right out and admit that their conclusions rely on enormous assumptions that may or may not be true, especially on the benefit end of things.  This is significant, because we do know a great deal about the cost of suppressing growth.  Take a look at the life expectancies as of 1960 in — China: 43.47 years; India:  41.38 years; Brazil: 54.69 years.  Those truncated lives are the “externality” of allowing a bunch of coastal elites to feel good about themselves by taxing the rest of us into oblivion so they can have more of our money to play with.

I humbly suggest that willfully knocking the creation and aggregation of wealth back to an era when we didn’t have a million Chinese dying “prematurely” each year, but rather hundreds of millions of Chinese with over 20 years’ less life expectancy at birth, all based on pie-in-the-sky assumptions about all this magical government revenue that will roll in from a shrunken economy, is a suggestion that does not deserve to be taken seriously.

And those assumptions sure as hell are no basis to claim that energy is being sold at $5.3 trillion below its “true cost” annually.

Instapundit I think it was who formulated a very helpful rule:  In trying to make sense of what gets or doesn’t get reported in the U.S. mainstream media, and how is reported what does see the light of day, if you simply proceed from the notion that the reporter and the organization are Democrat Party operatives then you won’t go far wrong.

Notwithstanding we see the wisdom of that rule confirmed time and again, we are forever assured that there is no lamestream media bias in favor of the left.  Oh noes!  You can, of course, regularly and with depressing uniformity of result play “Name that Party,” in which reports of egregious wrong-doing by prominent Democrats either never mention party affiliation, or bury it in the third-from-last paragraph of a 25-paragraph story, over on page B-15 of the Saturday morning paper, while Republicans will have their affiliation mentioned in the lead sentence of the first paragraph, if not the headline as well.  You can read the whole sordid history of Journolist, the conspiracy hatched and run from The Washington Post’s offices by Ezra Klein during the 2008 presidential campaign, and the intent and effect of which was to coordinate among roughly 400 reporters and Democrat operatives what and how they were going to report in connection with that campaign.  You can go back and watch Candy Crowley (I think it was) jump into Mitt Romney’s shellacking of Dear Leader during their debate, to buttress a fraudulent claim by Dear Leader that he had correctly identified the Benghazi attacks as being of terroristic origin, when in fact he did no such thing for weeks afterward.  And so forth and so on.

Or you can follow the story of George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton operative who now masquerades as a “journalist” on ABC, and who interviewed the author who has described in detail the patterns of cash flowing from various unsavory foreign governments and operations to the Clinton family’s slush fund, while Hillary Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State, and which — coincidentally, we’re assured — achieved favorable results in the discussions they just happened to be having with the U.S. government and its agencies at the time.  Ol’ Georgie-boy kept asserting during his interview that the author had “no evidence” of any quid pro quo arrangements.  No “smoking gun.”  No evidence.  No evidence.  No evidence.  Well, of course not:  Hillary destroyed any evidence that might have existed after cherry-picking what e-mails to surrender to the U.S. government.  [N.b.  When the images of her private server’s hard drive are finally leaked, however, then we’ll see the evidence.  I am perfectly comfortable that those images exist in the hands of multiple parties hostile to the U.S. . . . and that their existence has been made known to Hillary, very quietly of course.]

The problem for George is that at no time before or after that interview did Stephanopoulos disclose that over three years — 2012, 2013, and 2014 — he had made annual $25,000 contributions to the Clinton Foundation or that he was an active participant in several of its functions.  When confronted, he first dismissed annually giving over half the annual median income of a household of four as chump change, and nothing we ought to worry about.  Moreover, it was just part of his larger charitable giving program, dontcha know, and he’s just such charitable guy and all that stuff.

There’s only one problem:  At the end of 2010, the Clinton Foundation spun off the vast bulk of its charitable activities and since then has concentrated on activities more properly characterized as Clinton campaign networking.  By 2013 the foundation spent less than 15% of its revenue on charitable grants; in contrast, over 60% of its expenses are characterized as just “other.”  So whatever else George Stephanopoulos’s $75,000 in chump change was paying for, it sure as hell wasn’t much charity at all.

ABC has already doubled down, vigorously defending their standard-bearer and declining to do anything more than promise he won’t “moderate” a GOP presidential debate.

If the GOP has a lick of sense about it, they’ll categorically refuse to permit this hack to come anywhere near a 2016 presidential debate.  Which means he’ll do ’em all, of course.

Twenty-odd years ago someone came up with the assertion that it was impossible for someone from a “minority” to be racist, because racism is by definition an aspect of a unidirectional power relationship, and not a mind-set, a frame of reference, or even a visceral animosity.  If I can exercise no power over you, then necessarily I am incapable of racism towards you.  “You,” by the way, is defined by group affiliation (an affiliation which I claim the right to assign, incidentally).  It thus follows that even though I can treat the guy bringing me my lunch at the restaurant like shit, if he’s a member of a group over which I deny the ability to exercise “power” (or “privilege,” the new and ill-defined term used in its place), then I can lord it over you to my heart’s content based on your skin color and all with a clean conscience.

I cannot recall if it was Leonard Jeffries, enjoying his taxpayer-funded gig at CUNY, who came up with that precise formulation of the idea, but if he didn’t he should have.  He peddles, among other notions, that of whites as “ice people,” who are genetically violent and oppressive, and blacks as “sun people” who are genetically peaceful and compassionate.  This is  one excrescence of something going by the name “melanin theory.”  Wikipedia describes it as a “pseudo-science,” and it gets the “pseudo-” part only because there is one tiny little grain of truth in it:  “white,” by which is meant “Caucasian” hued skin is in fact the result of a genetic mutation which seems, as I understand, to have occurred after the first humans left Africa.  All humans once had skin much closer in color to today’s sub-Saharan Africans.  And then at some point in the DNA history up cropped the “white” mutation.  Since having very dark skin was not a particularly helpful trait for those humans living outside of sub-Saharan Africa (and let’s recall for a moment that humans didn’t evolve all over Africa, but rather in that part of it comparatively near the equator, where the sun is at its most intense), the mutant strain didn’t select out of the population.  By the way, humans aren’t the only ones to evidence the dropping of a gene that is no longer of assistance; there is (I read this years ago in The Economist) a species of wild dog on New Guinea which used to be domesticated.  The gene for tail-wagging has sifted out of that species after it went wild again, and so they, like other wild canids, do not wag their tails as does your labradoodle.

I have to wonder how Jeffries accounts for, say, the Japanese, or the Amish . . . or the Hutu and Tutsi.  Imagine that:  In 1994 over the course of 100 days or so an entire genetically peaceful and compassionate ethnic group so revolted against its genetic coding as to slaughter 900,000 of its neighbors, whose skin is nearly precisely the same color as theirs.

Suffice it to say that Jeffries is enjoying his taxpayer-funded (and that’s New York City, state, and federal funds, since CUNY receives funding from all three sources and one dollar is fungible with all others) position to put out a load of “Afrocentric” clap-trap that is doing no one any favors but himself.

Demonstrating that one of the hallmarks of idiocy and fraud is recrudescence, we now have a point-blank statement of the principle from Great Britain.  Some weeks ago the student union at Goldsmiths University in London sponsored a function.  The university’s “diversity officer” (alas, that title is genuine; there really does appear to be such a person), perhaps not understanding the word “diversity,” posted on the union’s Facebook page a curious appendix to the event announcement:  If you’re male, or white, do not come to this event.  This is for “BME” (whatever the hell that means) and “non-binary” people (what-really-ever the hell that means) only.  Because diversity, you know.  Notice, by the way, that white women are also specifically uninvited; that’s important to recall in light of the quotation I’m about to share with you.

As anyone with enough to sense to make anything of his/her life other than become a “diversity officer” could have foreseen, the rational world exploded at this — well, frankly racist exclusion based upon skin color, and sexist exclusion based upon genitals.  Even the WaPo picked the story up.  The diversity officer in question then proceeds to dig her hole even deeper:

“I want to explain why this [people pointing out that her actions betray both racism and sexism] is false. I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describes structures of privilege based on race and gender.  And therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist because we do not stand to benefit from such a system.”

She really said that.  She really used the expression “minority genders.”  Presumably she wasn’t talking about females, since they’re not quite 51% of the gross human population.  And we know that she’s not talking about males, since she hates them based upon their genitals.  Presumably there are multiple genders out there which are “minority”.  Now, she identifies as an “ethnic minority woman,” and based on that she’s on the wrong end of at least one “structure[] of privilege based on . . . gender.”  Of course, white women are also on the wrong end of any such “structures of privilege based on . . . gender,” but she specifically disinvited them as well.  On what could that disinvitation be based if not racism?  Oh, but they’re white, and so they cannot be victims of “structures of privilege based on race.”  I guess white women are to be left to sort things out for themselves in respect of the structures of privilege based on gender.  Notice that she only claims that she cannot be racist or sexist towards white men; do I sense an admission that she can be racist towards white women?

Oh dear, how does a human mind get so confused?  We cannot say for sure, but whatever the cause if you try to wade through her self-description you realize the rot has gone deep:  “I am particularly interested in looking at the gendered body in Japanese pornographic anime and horror through a Foucauldian framework in order to analyse the West’s gaze upon a world it attempts to categorize.  My politics are intersectional, queer, feminist, anti-racist . . . I am a working class, Turkish Cypriot, queer, disabled woman and activist.”  If by “disabled” she means “gibbering lunatic,” then I suppose that may explain some of it.

I guess it’s a good thing that no one outside the West — oh, say, for example, the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia or the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Hindu in India — attempt to “categorize” the “gendered body.”  No, in Saudi Arabia they just won’t let people wearing a vagina drive a car or hold a job.  In Afghanistan they’ll throw acid in the “gendered” face for the crime of exposing it to God’s sunshine and fresh air.  And in India entire gangs of men will enjoy themselves on some teenage “gendered body” before hanging her by the neck in a tree.  And in Southeast Asia they’ll sell pre-pubescent “gendered bodies” to brothels to be whored out to bus-loads of middle-aged Southeast Asian men (and Europeans and Americans who also travel to those places for precisely those purposes; at least in That Awful West we try to arrest them on their return if we can catch them at it).

Maybe Miss Mustafa can move to New York City and shack up with Leonard Jeffries.  They can “categorize” each other’s “gendered bodies” and condole each other that it’s all Whitey’s fault.

[Update 20 May 15]:  Apparently using Twitter hashtags like #killallwhitemen does not constitute racism, under Comrade Mustafa’s rules.  Problem for her is that the students at her university might not agree.  They’re gathering signatures for a vote of no confidence in her.