Links for the “Week of Racism” (with feminist aside)

•As this blog‘s “Week of Racism” reaches its hump day, we see that even lefty site Jezebel is not immune to charges of racism.

•For an orthogonal approach to the question of skin color, learn the true story of blue-skinned people (not technically Andorians) living in the woods of Kentucky, a state that gives us not only Sen. Rand Paul but, clearly, a pleasing array of body types. It’s more than the hills that are blue there, apparently.

•If both stories above sound like distractions from the urgent liberal mission of helping black people, though, know that Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley (himself a person of blackness) has a book out about why liberals really need to stop “helping” blacks.

•One particularly lame solution liberals have long pushed to ethnic tensions is, of course, using slightly different words to describe everything and everyone. They also love to change the preferred terminology when most of the culture isn’t watching so that they can feel morally superior to the rest of us if we aren’t up to speed on the nomenclature (witness the abject insanity of liberals attacking even Ru Paul and Dan Savage for using the term “tranny”).

A subtler problem analyzed in this article (h/t Russell Hanneken) is that the left (roughly speaking, the so-called “Social Justice Warriors” found both among liberals and, alas, libertarians who now live to spot “privilege,” offenses, and “micro-aggressions” against p.c. norms and egalitarianism) will strategically shift back and forth between more-radical and less-radical definitions for words.

A feminist radical, for example, may well tell you with one breath that the world has to be remade -- and then claim feminism is merely “the belief that women are people” with the next. This is not an accidental ambiguity. It’s passive-aggressive bullshit, and it’s good that more people are waking up to the fact that these sorts of word-game-playing propagandists do not hold the moral high ground. Indeed, they’re disingenuous, power-seeking assholes.

P.S. By the way, I notice stats suggest Americans have higher mental illness rates than many other countries, women are around 40% more likely to be mentally ill than men, leftists have higher rates of mental illness than conservatives, New York is especially prone to mental illness compared to other parts of the U.S., people show the highest rates of mental illness in their twenties, and fat people are more likely to have mood disorders than the rest of the population.

So we might predict that fat, female, twentysomething, New York-dwelling, left-wing people would be one of the most insane large cohorts of people in the world. I wonder if that has any implications for modern, urban feminist political discourse. You might predict, for instance, that East Coast feminists on social media would be especially prone to irrational arguments, but I don’t pretend to have any hard statistical data on whether this is the case. For now, you’ll have to keep an eye open and make your own judgments.