Dan Greenfield (brilliantly as usual) analyses the new political system, which Aristotle somehow managed to overlook.

The Victimocracy is a lot like any other tyranny. In an aristocracy, power belongs to the nobles, in a theocracy, power belongs to the clergy, in a meritocracy, to anyone with skill and a work ethic.

But in a Victimocracy the biggest and angriest whiner wins.

In a Victimocracy, suffering is the exclusive privilege of the elites. No one else is allowed to suffer except them. No one else has ever been oppressed, has felt pain, been insulted, abused, degraded, enslaved and ground down into the dirt except the very people who are grinding you into the dirt now.

Victimhood is what entitles them to special privileges, it’s what ennobles them as a superior class of people and gives them the right to rule over you. They are the victims. What they say goes.

Victimization is the currency of their power. They have 1/16 Cherokee blood and high cheekbones. They are ‘triggered’ by loud noises and differing opinions. They spent their twenties “coming to terms” with something because of the lack of sitcom role models for their favorite sexual preferences or skin color. They are all survivors of something or other. They were activists and someone once said mean things to them. And if all else fails, they are deeply passionate about the plight of the oppressed. Like, seriously.

Now stop oppressing them and educate yourself by recognizing their right to oppress you. …

Victimocrats don’t win arguments. They convince others that they are entitled to avoid the argument. In the Victimocracy the illusion of weakness is power. The weak are entitled to disproportionate power to protect themselves from the rest of us. The weaker they are, the more power they need. And the more power they get, the weaker they grow until we live under a tyranny of the absolutely powerless who wield absolute power.

Read the whole thing.

The Baudet du Poitou.

The Poitevin donkey almost became extinct, living specimens having dwindled down to about 40 world-wide just a few decades ago, but a combination of public and private efforts to save this ancient breed got the numbers up to over 450 by 2005.

The Baudet du Poitou is one of the largest breeds of donkey and was kept for breeding mules. The origins of the breed are thought to go back to Antiquity when the Romans introduced mule breeding as a specialty of the region.

Mechanization of agriculture caused the decline of the breed. But, starting in 1977, patriotic efforts to save the locally famous breed were underway.

Arc in Space article via Kuriositas.

Filmed at Norman Carr Safaris‘ Chinzombo Camp in Zambia.

German cemetery at Tetes des Faux.

Telegraph slideshow

Boris Johnson (who typically dresses better) defends poor Matt Taylor against the Social Justice Warriors.

The other day the brilliant space scientist Dr Matt Taylor was asked to give a report on the progress of Philae, the astonishing little landing craft that has travelled, in all, four billion miles to become the first representative of humanity to visit the surface of a comet. Dr Taylor leant forwards. He started to speak. Then his voice went husky, and it became painfully obvious to viewers that he was actually crying. And of course he has many very good reasons to feel emotional. The London-born astrophysicist has been part of a mind-blowing success. …

Except, of course, that he wasn’t crying with relief. He wasn’t weeping with sheer excitement at this interstellar rendezvous. I am afraid he was crying because he felt he had sinned. He was overcome with guilt and shame for wearing what some people decided was an “inappropriate” shirt on television. “I have made a big mistake,” he said brokenly. “I have offended people and I am sorry about this.”

I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot. It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.

Why was he forced into this humiliation? Because he was subjected to an unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse. He was bombarded across the internet with a hurtling dustcloud of hate, orchestrated by lobby groups and politically correct media organisations.

Read the whole thing.

Via This Isn’t Happiness.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

“Gunner Girls” Hawaiian shirt, sold out!

Sane people marveled world-wide as Social Justice Warriors ignored the fascinating story of mankind successfully landing a spacecraft on a comet and instead focused angry attention on the content of Astrophysicist Matt Taylor‘s Hawaiian shirt.

The Telegraph grumbled:

Political correctness officially went mad on November 14, 2014. It happened when Dr Matt Taylor, the man who helped put a rocket on a comet, choked back tears as he apologised for wearing a risqué shirt. And thus absurdity hijacked a moment in history. While some of us were following Rosetta’s landing on Philae with wonder, others were apparently rather more interested in what the scientists were wearing. It’s almost as though they suffer from some ocular defect that makes it impossible to correctly identify wood when looking at trees. Although, to be fair, trees can be offensively phallic.

Atlantic tech writer Rose Eveleth: “No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt.” Astrophysicist Katie Mack: “I don’t care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in science.” New York blogger, James DiGioia: “Technology advances while society remains decidedly retrograde.”

To remind you, Mr DiGioia is writing about a shirt. Not forced marriages in rural Pakistan but a guy wearing a tacky shirt with some ladies on it firing guns. And while that shirt was brutally occupying Mr DiGioia’s television screen like Germany invading Poland, a rocket was quietly touching down on a comet and making our dream of conquering the stars a little closer to reality. Wood? Trees? “You say potato, I say patriarchy.”

But Taylor was, of course, reduced to tearful apologies.

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But the Washington Post’s Rachel Feltman was not satisfied with Taylor’s tears. She thinks he should come back and apologize some more and repeat publicly the politically correct message he has learned.

Of course, I personally hope that one day (when he’s a little less busy) Taylor will say a bit more on the subject, and show that he understands why the shirt wasn’t okay. Science is not a welcoming place for women, even today, and the only people who can truly make it more welcoming are the men who run the show. If a stellar scientist walks into work — and then says hello to the whole world — wearing a sexist shirt, what kind of message are we sending to future scientists?

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Myself, I think it is appalling that an adult employed professionally as a scientist finding himself responsible to appear in public to address an international audience in connection with a historic scientific achievement has grown to adult years without any sense of personal dignity or knowledge of conventional etiquette, and thinks it proper to appear on television with a Hawaiian shirt (pretending to be a coat or sweater) layered over a polo shirt. And to top all this off, he is so far removed from the older model of the British gentleman, his upper lip is so lacking in stiffness, that he cries publicly over being criticized by crackpots. Jesus wept.

I will add, on the positive side, though, that though I don’t own or wear Hawaiian shirts, and would not be caught dead wearing one of them to a dogfight, as Hawaiian shirts go, I thought his was relatively cool.

The Times also describes a developing fashion for all-glass high-rise bathrooms.

Among the many vertiginous renderings for the penthouse apartments at 432 Park Avenue, the nearly 1,400-foot-high Cuisenaire rod that topped off last month, is one of its master (or mistress) of the universe bathrooms, a glittering, reflective container of glass and marble. The image shows a huge egg-shaped tub planted before a 10-foot-square window, 90 or more stories up. All of Lower Manhattan is spread out like the view from someone’s private plane.

Talk about power washing.

The dizzying aerial baths at 432 Park, while certainly the highest in the city, are not the only exposed throne rooms in New York. All across Manhattan, in glassy towers soon to be built or nearing completion, see-through chambers will flaunt their owners, naked, toweled or robed, like so many museum vitrines — although the audience for all this exposure is probably avian, not human.

It seems the former touchstones of bathroom luxury (Edwardian England, say, or ancient Rome) have been replaced by the glass cube of the Apple store on Fifth Avenue. In fact, Richard Dubrow, marketing director at Macklowe Properties, which built 432 and that Apple store, described the penthouse “wet rooms” (or shower rooms) in just those terms.

Everyone wants a window, said Vickey Barron, a broker at Douglas Elliman and director of sales at Walker Tower, a conversion of the old Verizon building on West 18th Street. “But now it has to be ­ a Window.” She made air quotes around the word. “Now what most people wanted in their living rooms, they want in their bathrooms. They’ll say, ‘What? No View?’ ” …

If there’s a view, there should be glass,” [Minimalist architect John] Pawson said. “It’s not about putting yourself on show, it’s about enjoying what’s outside. Any exhibitionism is an unfortunate by-product. I think what’s really nice is that at this level you’re creating a gathering space. You can congregate in the bathroom, you can even share the bath or bring a chair in.”

On a recent Thursday, there were seven people standing in the master bathroom of an apartment on the 20th floor of 737 Park, another Macklowe project that’s a new conversion of a 1940s building by Handel Architects. (The apartment, three bedrooms in 4,336 square feet, is listed for $19.695 million.) At 21 by 11 feet, there was certainly room in the bathroom for a few more. Along two opposing walls, two toilets and two showers faced off behind glass walls. The by-now-familiar egg floated in the center of the room.

“Some people don’t mind showing a little, and some don’t mind showing a lot,” said Gary Handel, the principal of Handel Architects. “They are totally comfortable in their bodies.” …

Nine of the building’s C-line apartments expressed an even clearer idea: a wall of glass with two toilets at either end and a shower in the middle, which raised many an eyebrow among brokers and their clients because the toilets face each other. Design clarity — and a well-lit room — suggests questions about how private we want to be in our private spaces.

Jill Roosevelt, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens who has been leading her clients through a few of the new, glassy offerings, said 737 in particular sparked conversations about habits of intimacy. “It’s about how much proximity do you want to your partner who is performing these tasks?” she said. “It doesn’t affect sales, but there is always a reaction, ranging from nonchalant to amusement. It depends on how comfortable you feel with your spouse or partner. My traditional couples will say, ‘We’ll frost the glass.’ ”

One couple — “this would be the amused couple,” Ms. Roosevelt said — pondered the dueling commodes of the C-line at 737 Park with interest. “Well, I guess we could watch each other read the newspaper,” the wife said finally. …

Privacy, of course, is not an absolute value, but a value that has changed over time and circumstances, as Winifred Gallagher, an author who has written about the behavioral and psychological science of place, pointed out.

“And like everything else, the rich can buy more of it,” she said. “In the city, privacy is about shielding yourself from all the stimuli. Most of us can’t drop the shield entirely even when we’re in our own homes, because the city is right outside. But if you’re high enough, you can waltz around pretending you’re in the garden of Versailles.”

Furthermore, Ms. Gallagher added, for many the bathroom can be the focus of a lot of anxiety. “You have the scale and there’s the magnifying mirror so you don’t put your makeup on and look like a clown,” she said. “And imagine yourself striding around the bathrooms with all that glass. It puts the pressure on you to be thin and fit, which are also perks of the rich. If you’re thin and fit, why wouldn’t you have this jewel box to show yourself off in?”

Read the whole thing.

Ann Althouse observes: “the rich folk of New York don’t mind if you look at them naked while they use the bathroom… as long as you have to look way, way up.“