Niall Ferguson feels put upon.

First sentence of his Times (the London one) piece explaining why he feels put upon:

It is not very fashionable to be a man these days, especially a white one.

Really? In what sense? Have men lost all their power, their privilege, their advantage over women?

Of fucking course not. What he means is that many of us have noticed the advantage and are trying to make things less unbalanced in the direction of always calling a man. He feels aggrieved because we’re no longer just taking it for granted that men should dominate everything and women should be an afterthought at best.

Last month I organised a small, invitation-only conference of historians who I knew shared my interest in trying to apply historical knowledge to contemporary policy problems. Five of the people I invited to give papers were women, but none was able to attend. I should have tried harder to find other female speakers, no doubt. But my failure to do so elicited a disproportionately vitriolic response.

Who gets to decide what is “proportionate” in these situations? Eh? Who gets to decide how annoyed we’re allowed to be when Michael Shermer says “it’s more of a guy thing” or Sam Harris talks about “that estrogen vibe” or conference after conference after conference somehow forgets to invite any women, or remembers to invite a couple but then is left in a condition of helpless bewilderment when those two say no, and can’t manage to figure out how to find more women to invite until some say yes? Who? Niall Ferguson? Why should he get to decide? He’s not a member of the class that’s been forgotten all this time, so why is it up to him to say how much and how crossly we can talk about it?

Under a headline that included the words “Too white and too male”, The New York Times published photographs of all the speakers as if to shame them for having participated. Around a dozen academics took to social media to call the conference a “StanfordSausageFest”.

Well obviously much more shocking and outrageous than the mere fact that women and non-white people were shut out of his conference. Oh no, the Times ran a story about it!

Now let’s be clear. As I recently and rather vehemently explained to the novelist Will Self, I was raised to believe in the equal rights of all people, regardless of sex, race, creed or any other difference. That the human past was characterised by discrimination of many kinds is not news to me. But does it really constitute progress if the proponents of diversity resort to the behaviour that was previously the preserve of sexists and racists? Publishing the names and mugshots of conference speakers is the kind of thing anti-semites once did to condemn the “over-representation” of Jewish people in academia. Terms such as “SausageFest” belong not in civil academic discourse but in the pages of male-chauvinist comics such as Viz.

Oh well if he vehemently explained it to the novelist Will Self, there’s no more to be said, is there. He knows. We don’t need to tell him; he’s aware. He’s not aware of how ludicrous he sounds pretending to think publishing photos of the invited men in the Times is akin to what anti-semites used to do, but he totally is aware the human past was characterised by discrimination of many kinds. Isn’t that enough?!! What kind of fanatic would expect him to act on the awareness? It’s political correctness run mad.

What we see here is the sexism of the anti-sexists; the racism of the anti-racists.

Oh, clever, no one has ever said that before!

There’s more, but it’s no better than the rest.