It’s amazing to me how the Uni’s have gotten themselves so deeply into the business of policing sex — and not only sex, but the comprehensive penumbra of talk about sex and things that have some more or less tenuous connection to sex. Is this phenomenon limited to the USA? Have Uni’s elsewhere made themselves quite so ridiculous?

Some things never seem to go away. To adapt a phrase from the great Viennese doctor, it’s the return of the repressor.

I recall when I was an undergrad there was an elaborate Talmudic corpus of rules about who could be where when: whether a door could be open or shut, and if open, how many inches open; how many feet needed to be on the ground and how firmly. There were rules about skirt lengths and the tightness of trousers.

The late Sixties appeared to have swept all that away, but now it’s all come roaring back in the guise of liberal high-mindedness. Civilization — if you can call it that — still apparently has its discontents.

How we would have laughed, back in the day, at the idea of a guy claiming sexual assault after receiving — or no, having been the victim of — an unsolicited BJ (you should pardon the expression).

So many invariants, under the transient superficies. For example, it now seems clear that the Crimean War never really ended and continues to this day, though Prussia did create a couple of temporary distractions. For the moment, however, Prussia seems to have signed on, so all is well.