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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

2014: The Year in Dreherbait

David Thompson's compulsively readable compilation of the year's Social Justice Warrior hathos
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Via Niall Gooch comes this fantastic review of 2014 in what you readers have come to call Dreherbait: cultural expressions of the Loony Left. The compiler is David Thompson, a British wit who has brought sunshine and mirth to this wet, dreary day. Excerpt:

In July we encountered the transgressively artistic Ms Jane Wang, whose “guerrilla performance piece” on a bridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts had no discernible impact on passers-by. And the Guardian’s Tracy Van Slyke detected an egregious racial subtext in the smoke emitted by cartoon trains.

Academic matters came to the fore in August, thanks to Dr Ben Pitcher, a sociology lecturer, who revealed to the world secrets hitherto unguessed. Specifically, that your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” and that the apparently innocuous Gardeners’ Question Time is in fact “saturated with racial meanings.” When not finding racism in discussions of soil acidity, Dr Pitcher busies himself by pondering “the relationship between race and neoliberal capitalism.” Meanwhile, Canadian performance artist Martine Viale, whose body is “a place of research,” staged a daringly intellectual “infiltration in public space” by flailing about randomly and wrapping her head in yarn. And the performance art duo Mothergirl created “a strategic refraction” by standing on a roadside and bashing themselves with pillows for 90 minutes. Despite appearing unhinged, the ladies were in fact challenging the public “to think critically about their own relationships with feminism, consumerism, and representational visuality.”

In September we felt the pain and hardship of the modern student, many of whom are denied such basic amenities as $13,000 vibrating nap machines. The same month also brought us the deep thinking of the Guardian’s Yomi Adegoke, a specialist in “race, popular culture and intersectional feminism,” and whose racial sin detector was triggered by a pair of prosthetic comedy buttocks.

I looked in on the video of the roadside pillow abusers. Verily, they exist:

From Thompson’s commentary:

Elsewhere in the comments, Sam pores over the joint CV of our terribly daring and intellectual artists, the ones who are trying to educate us, and which includes gems such as this:

2010 M.Phil Theatre and Performance, Trinity College Dublin. Thesis: The Subversive Potential of Humour in Selected Clown Theatre Pieces by Female Artists.

Ah, catnip for employers. And so one has to wonder what our creative betters’ long-term plan is. How, exactly, were they hoping to entice employers and repay the cost of their extensive education? Is incongruous pillow flailing – sorry, “strategic refraction” – a skill in demand? Is it something the public cries out for and will rush to throw money at? What do the ladies plan to do when they’re, say, forty, or fifty? Given the improbability of such people being self-supporting in later life – at least in their chosen line, the one for which they’ve studied – do they have wealthy parents who will indulge them indefinitely? Or do they expect their talents, such as they are, to be rewarded with other people’s earnings, confiscated forcibly by the state and redistributed as artistic subsidy? And is self-inflicted dependency a thing to encourage and applaud?

I ask because the ladies say they want us to “think critically.”

Clearly, this David Thompson, able chronicler of the Social Justice Warrior caste, has a blog worth following in 2015.

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