Please, for the love of God, someone help me understand this. — Regular readers know I like to start with an analogy. Virtue signallers are like overenthusiastic toddlers. Saviour complexes are like Munchausen by proxy. Social media is like a bucketful of crabs. That kind of thing. But I’m struggling to think of anything like the recent cancellation of singer Róisín Murphy. …

Everything terrible all at once. — It’s usually a bad sign when someone speaks (or writes) with total confidence, but I’m totally confident you hadn’t heard of country music megastar Oliver Anthony until a couple of weeks ago. I’m guessing some of you are only discovering him now. In just two weeks, Anthony (whose real name…

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. — Maybe it’s the prices or the Stepfordesque customer service or just something in the air, but people throw a lot of tantrums in Apple Stores. And frankly, it’s confusing. I mean, everybody knows what to do when a kid throws a tantrum. We know we can bribe them with ice…

Trump never left, he just outsourced. — Like so many things Donald Trump has taken credit for, “Make America Great Again” was somebody else’s idea. Bill Clinton used the slogan during his 1992 presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan used it in 1980. Barry Goldwater used it in his unsuccessful 1962 bid. …

In search of Afro-optimism. — 1998, Nagano, Japan. Surya Bonaly becomes the first (and still the only) figure skater to land a one-legged backflip at the Olympics. The commentators hailed the feat as “truly amazing,” the crowd erupted with delight, yet the judges only awarded her tenth place. A clip of Bonaly’s performance went viral…

The hidden power of trans man-splaining. — Let’s start with a riddle: A boy and his father are in a car accident. Both are seriously injured and get taken to hospital. The father goes to intensive care. But the boy, needing brain surgery, is prepped and taken into theatre. …

The myth of born criminality refuses to evolve. — In 1893, a physician named Cesare Lombroso published La Donna Delinquente (The Criminal Woman) in which he claimed to have discovered a new human subspecies: the “born criminal.” Lombroso rejected the idea that crime was a product of social inequality or human nature. Instead, he argued that it was a…

The rise of the idea supremacists — July 2017. In response to a request for feedback on Google’s diversity and inclusion policies, an engineer named James Damore wrote a memo called Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber. Damore argued that restricting opportunities to specific identity groups was discriminatory, suggested that gender disparities in areas like software engineering were due…

The scourge of competitive acceptance. — Back in March, Freddie deBoer wrote about a game that’s become popular in progressive circles. A kind of “competitive acceptance,” if you will. The rules are simple enough. You score points by pretending there’s no such thing as objective reality or logical reasoning or commonly understood facts. That a society…