Friday Ephemera

This guy?

Run, Logan!

Marvel’s film music is insufficiently humworthy.
Oh, right, come to think of it, There once was a man named Oedipux Rex . . .

You can also use it as a soap dish.
Does madam speak from experience?

My favorite quote of the week:
The presence of the polar bears has made carrying out meteorological observations difficult.

Why anyone who lives south of the Line of Mason and Dixon will attest, the only thing that should be done with fire ants is killing them wholesale. Once, trying to get rid of the damn things and not having had much luck with the poisons of the day, I figured that if they are fire ants they might like fire, but only succeeded in messing up my lawn.
This gentleman, however, has raised the process of getting rid of them to an art form.

Video of the process.

One for our host.
Heh. As this is published in the Women’s Studies International Forum, I’m assuming it’s meant to be a complaint. Not a basis for hope.

Note that the Guardian is once again misinforming its readers.
Release Claude Rains!

Laurie Penny might have been happy at the anarchist Home commune. That said, the thought of Laurie, the anarcho-nudist nose-picker, makes me turn to the mind-bleach.
(And put that photograph back in your digital drawer, David. Yes, that one of Laurie ‘excavating’.)

In case you feel the need to detox your whiteness: https://www.facebook.com/events/1807684066117731/permalink/1812042135681924/
They also offer a 10 week class in self-hatred social justice consciousness raising—complete with a 67% discount if you sign up soon: https://compassionateactivism.leadpages.co/healing-whiteness-program/

BTW, that photo is on the walls of any number of Japanese sex-bot manufactures emblazoned with the word “No” in fifty different languages.

Testing defences.
The conspiracy theorists in the comment thread are hilarious.
Guild of evil? I didn’t get the memo.
Neither did I. Does the Guild have a rival?

“This one?…I just wanted to be sure.”
Yes; but a little restraint from you, even self-censorship, would not have gone amiss in the circumstances. Anyway, let’s be grateful that she’s not ‘excavating’ in full anarcho-nudity.

This is apparently a Bad Thing.
Why, it’s almost as if modern feminism were little more than a conspiracy theory.

Oh dear I’m going to add to the feminism in this thread (you can never have too much of the stuff, after all)
“Oh boy,” my son said, rolling his eyes. “Not rape culture again.”

a regime of rationality still operates in the academy
Heaven forfend! The very idea that clear thinking, theories based on practical evidence, and concise communication of ideas might befoul their safe spaces is quite simply too horrible to contemplate.

Has The Grauniad reached yet another peak of race baiting drivel excellence in journalism?

Great typos of our time.

O.M. Ken ‏@elevate67 16h16 hours ago
@jvgraz @Mihero @jimmy_dore omg is “angry white me” the opening band for “dicking bimbos”?

With bandnames even!!!

Great reading about Baghwan Shree Ranjneesh (‘Bagwash’ in Privateyese if I remember rightly) in your last link, David. I’d forgotten about him. Wasn’t the Blessed Bernard Levin a fan at one stage?

@ Fred the Fourth –
Here you go

a regime of rationality…
Speaking of which, on Amazon, Clarkston, Hammond and May are back 18 November…

Regarding the Smithsonian African-American building (to be renamed as soon as “African-American” falls out of favor):
A century in the making, and now completed by Britain’s David Adjaye, the Smithsonian’s gleeful, gleaming upturned pagoda…
A pagoda ? What a minute – an African-American black Brit designs a pagoda – isn’t that cultural appropriation and, given he is a Brit, neo-colonial ?

Yet more words of wisdom emanating from the LSE’s favourite Nottingham-born sociologist, Dr Lisa Mckenzie here.
The first image to appear in the video (around the 18-second mark), the one accompanied by the line below, seems to be especially rich in untended irony.

“If there’s no resistance, if there’s no pushing back, then we have totalitarian states; we have fascism.”

Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Let a 19-Year-Old Dropout Run a Medical Company

She thinks she’s Steve Jobs
“At Theranos, Holmes preferred that the temperature be maintained in the mid-60s, which facilitated her preferred daily uniform of a black turtleneck with a puffy black vest — a homogeneity that she had borrowed from her idol, the late Steve Jobs.”
. . .
She employed a government-level security detail
“She left the war room for her car — she is often surrounded by her security detail, which sometimes numbers as many as four men, who (for safety reasons) refer to the young C.E.O. as ‘Eagle 1’ — and headed to the airport.”
. . .
Her dad worked for a little family company called Enron
“She talked about how she didn’t play with Barbies as a child, and how her father, Christian Holmes IV, who worked in environmental technology for Enron before going on to work in a number of senior government jobs in Washington, was one of her idols.”

Forbes said on Wednesday that it has lowered its estimate of Holmes’ net worth to “nothing.”

@Darleen
Regarding Ms. Abdel-Magied’s remarks, I’m reminded of the comments made by one Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Nobel jury on why American authors haven’t won the Nobel Literature Cookie in awhile:
“There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world … not the United States,” he [Engdahl]told the Associated Press. “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature …That ignorance is restraining.”*
So, one cannot participate in the “big dialogue” of literature if one is “isolated” and “insular.” But, trying to broaden one’s horizons to remedy these faults constitutes “appropriation” and “unfettered exploitation.”
Right, then.
I think I’ll go off and watch clips of Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
*Said comment made one year before the Nobel committee awarded the literature prize to Herta Müller for writing novels about her life as a Banat German in postwar Romania, a truly universal, non-insular theme if there ever was one.

So this is long and probably boring, so if y’all want to split early and go to the bar by the upstairs hot tub (the one where the henchlesbians take their breaks), feel free.
We begin with a not-too-awful opening intro:
“This paper explores how faculty utilize feminist perspectives in social science courses that are crosslisted with women’s studies in one Canadian university and the phenomenon of student resistance to such content.”
“Included in the discussion of student resistance is an analysis of anonymous student course evaluations that the faculty participants shared with me for this project.”
But we are immediately disappointed.
Method section:
One notes that this is an unbiased, in-depth and broad study:
“This paper draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with twenty-two participants (twenty-one women and one man): eight faculty, five teaching assistants and nine students. [at a single university]”
I just have to include the following for its sheer “Thank you Captain Obvious” ness:
“Interviewing the participants allowed for a dialogue to take place between myself and each interviewee.”
Regarding the 9 students, the selection scheme leaves so much to be desired that even the
author notices:
“I used a snowball method of recruiting student participants, beginning with a student with whom I was acquainted. While this proved a reliable method of recruitment, I failed to secure the participation of non-feminist friendly students. The feminist friendly student with whom I started the snowball process provided the name of another feminist friendly student and the process continued from there. The snowball method did not yield any students who were non-feminist friends. Thus, this article lacks an important standpoint.”
Actually, the most frightening thing about the above is the implication that there is more than one “snowball method”.
“Also notable about this research site is the preexisting acquaintances of several participants with the researcher.”
So, yeah, no chance of bias there, I guess, though kudos for being open about it.
Also missing, of course, is any mention of blinding, controls, statistical analysis, error analysis, reproducability, or any of the other impedimenta of boring old conventional science.
There are 11 pages of content. Out of this roughly 1.5 pages are selected quotes and paraphrases from participants, plus author comments. She received 533 evaluations of 12 courses, and the 1.5 pages include roughly 21 short quotations from these. 21 is an awfully small sample, since there must have been at least, say, 2000 student comments in those 533 evaluation forms. (The evaluations were submitted by the participating professors to the author. It just occurred to me to wonder if the student evaluators were aware that their evaluations might be used in this way. Ethics? What’s that?)
The author’s “analysis” consists of author commentary on each quote. Before and after the quotations section the paper consists entirely of references to previous works in the field, and commentary on them.
This is my favorite sentence in the whole paper:
“Veronica recalls there being rumblings in her classrooms.”
Rumblings. Huh. Comment would be superfluous.
The following indicates that perhaps the professors are too tender to be out in the world, even the cloistered academic world:
“All the faculty note the body language of their students who resist their feminist content. Rolling eyes, huffing, crossing arms, and snickering are all indicators of resistance…”
Rolling eyes and crossed arms. Call out the Mounties!
Perhaps I should note that the majority of students in all of these courses are women. There are so few men that the paper addresses the professors’ various tactics to acknowledge their rare presence.
There is no attempt to be quantitative beyond noting the total of 533 student evaluations of 12 courses received. That and the breakdown of the interviewees is literally all there is.
Conclusion:
“Feminists have taken the position that there is no ultimate authority and that professors need to not represent themselves as all-knowing and need to acknowledge and negotiate the relations of power that exist between themselves and their students. At the same time one could argue that this practice might contribute to the construction of feminist knowledge as somehow less real or accurate. Feminists then are undermined to a certain extent by their own philosophy and practices.”
Amusing implication there, that perhaps the solution to the problem is for the faculty to speak only ex cathedra. (Actually, not a bad idea, since “When asked how they feel when feminist perspectives are introduced in their courses, the overwhelming sentiment is best illustrated by Alicia’s response of “Praise be”. “)
But then, sadly, the author fails to note and conclude that she is advocating for a religion. some things are just too obvious, I guess.