Friday Ephemera

A typical Alaskan street fight.
Nah. A typical Alaskan street fight involves a Palin.

The “Fifty Shades of Grey through a Marxist lens” analysis you’ve been waiting for.

Re the Pig War, if President Polk had simply stuck to his guns regarding the 54-40 line, that ugly little mess could have been avoided.

The “Fifty Shades of Grey through a Marxist lens” analysis you’ve been waiting for.

‘I’ve been a very bad girl,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘I need to be punished.’ ‘Very well,’ he said and installed Windows 10 on her laptop.

Re: Dead malls
Central City Mall / Carousel Mall: San Bernardino, CA
The last time I was there, there was a gangland gun fight in the parking lot (I am not kidding, and it was in broad daylight). The time before that, my car was broken into. I can’t believe that dump stayed open as long as it did.
(O_O)
For what it’s worth, there used to be a wonderful hobby shop across the street from the mall, with very little parking, which was always full, so I usually parked in the mall parking lot.

The “Fifty Shades of Grey through a Marxist lens” analysis you’ve been waiting for.

WHERE NEWS MEETS ITS SCHOLARLY MATCH

Lemme guess, these self-absorbed, arrested-adolescent Marxists are certain Cathy Newman destroyed Professor Peterson.

hydration-sensing… underpants
Erm…

posture-correcting, hydration-sensing, Bluetooth-enabled biometric underpants.
Do they vibrate when you get an update?

Do they vibrate when you get an update?
That was a feature in the alpha test phase but some of the female testers experienced loss of consciousness during major updates so it was deprecated in the beta release.

TO be fair, they are doing as good a job as the Afghan Border Police.
The coordination bodes well.

Old: Food Pyramid.
New: White Supremacy Pyramid.

Debauchery, perversions, the bizarre, the weird, general oddness and…Tim Newman has written a novel.
I fit right in, I think. Thanks!

biometric underpants
Prior art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfq3B9JvIcQ

1477 glasses.
So a glowing red globe is now in charge at Riedel?

Biometric vibrating blogging thongs?
I can’t even.
( I find that stupid phrase unreasonably irritating, by the way, especially with periods [its, not mine; happily, I am now free of the monthly nuisance.] “I. Can’t. Even.” Can’t even WHAT? Form a sentence?)
Grumble.

Lean times have fallen upon Fat Studies.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10393

a socially statusful, self-flattering belief system that actively inhibits apprehending certain facts or entertaining rather obvious lines of enquiry
*clicks link. watches video*
Symbolism. 🙂

I think I’m noticing a pattern…

Fallout.

Australia Day is almost upon us, and with that comes the usual hand wringing and stroking of beards as to whether to change the date so as to not offend the Aboriginal populace. Me being Aboriginal myself, I couldn’t give two flying fornications about this issue. There are bigger concerns to worry about such as domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, health and finding employment. Captain Cook of course landed in Botany Bay on this date, January 26, and the usual crowd, led by the detestable Greens, wish to have the date changed because we blacks are apparently still afflicted by ‘genocide’. Last I looked I didn’t see any jackboots go around and round us up and shipped onto trains. The stoking of racial disharmony are kept in motion by the Left and as long as they are around, then it will continue until thinking Aboriginals see through the facade that the Left care not for anyone but their socialist friends in Brunswick sipping chardonnay or vegan lattes.

I had a touch of influenza this year; had the flu shot but they are not very effective this year. Even the abbreviated flu is a LOT worse than the sniffles.!

I always imagined genocide to be permanently debilitating
It’s not much of a genocide if we can still hear them bitching.

Daniel,,
It’s not much of a genocide if we can still hear them bitching.
Or that there’s at least 10 times as many of them now than when the “genocide” supposedly began. On that note, I’d say the Israelis are conducting the most incompetent “genocide” in human history.

On Dalrock, he refers to doing It as “riding the alpha carousel.” Which also made me giggle. Has anyone else ever heard makin’ whoopie called that? I forgot to ask.
I will now brace for an onslaught of British euphemisms.

I’m 58 and I still get good results working under that assumption!
😄

riding the alpha carousel
No, that means something rather more specific. It refers to women in their 20’s enjoying their high sexual market value by engaging in promiscuous sex with high value men – “alphas”, in the manosphere parlance, until they hit 30, realize they can’t attract the high value men any more, get off the carousel and decide to settle for some schmuck with a good job.

@Sam Duncan: “That’s the test: a friend of mine who’s a nurse once told me if you put a £50 note on the other side of the room and the patient can pick it up, it ain’t the flu. “
In an NHS hospital, you can substitute the £50 for a Big Mac.

I worked under the assumption that any phrase that I didn’t immediately understand was a euphanism for sex…
Clearly related, I’d like to thank Jeremy Clarkson for teaching yet more British slang when in pointed out it was odd that the US Navy pilots who drew the penis in the sky were punished even though they were flying F-18 Growlers.

Hey Pogonip, how’s your father? 🙂

Theresa, he died in July of 2016.

Ahem
Oh, no… here we go.

I had a touch of influenza this year; had the flu shot but they are not very effective this year.
Ditto the shot, but hell, what I had was not a ‘touch’. Fever 99-101.8 for 3 days, stuffed head, chest congestion, and the feeling like I have been beaten all over by the ugly stick.
My eldest is an RN and I learned that she can be very bossy when I’m sick. I was able to score some Tamiflu during the optimal 48 hr window and it got me through. Took 10 days before I was recovered enough to return back to work.
Flu is serious stuff (my 28 y/o nephew died of complications of the flu 3 years ago Jan 16)

@Rafi
I look forward to charging my underwear overnight.
Just remember to take them off before you start charging them…

@Farnsworth,
Montclair is offering safe spaces for “fat-identifed” BLTWTF students.
I take it that Caleb Luna is a charter member…
http://www.themilitantbaker.com/2017/04/current-crush-caleb-luna.html

(Please excuse the length – I hadn’t meant this post to be quite so long).

“[T]teachers choosing a lesson plan based on what’s popular can be a problem”

Yes, well, at the very least it most certainly can be problematic in the eyes of Dr Katy M. Swalwell, an Assistant Professor of Education at Iowa State University and author of Educating Activist Allies: Social Justice Pedagogy with the Suburban and Urban Elite, the Introduction to which begins (my italics; Swalwell’s capitalisation of White):

A few years ago, I presented a workshop entitled “Addressing Wealth Inequality with Students in Affluent Communities” at the Northwest Teachers for Social Justice Conference . A wonderful event that can inspire even the most demoralized of educators, … I wondered if my focus on affluent students would attract anyone among a group of such committed and talented social justice educators, I was stunned (and relieved) when the room filled to capacity with curious conference attendees.
One by one, the teachers introduced themselves and shared why they had come to the session. Almost all of them worked at private suburban public schools primarily serving White students from affluent families. They expressed frustration with how to challenge their students’ meritocratic perceptions of the world. They gave examples of student apathy, wilful ignorance, or missionary zeal in response to a social justice curriculum. And they talked of pushback to their teaching from parents, administrators, and fellow colleagues. Perhaps movingly, they expressed gratitude for a space to talk about doing this work with these kids. “I’m embarrassed to say where I teach when I come to things like this,” one teacher told me. “It’s like if I really cared about social justice, then I shouldn’t be working in this kind of school.”

(As an aside, if the room for the workshop was “filled to capacity” and every participant “introduced themselves and shared why they had come to the session” one after another as well as discussing all the “pushback to their teaching” they had received, it’s a wonder there was any time left for Swalwell to give her workshop. Even with a relatively modest audience of say, 20 people, those introductions could easily have taken up at least 40 of the workshop’s 90 minutes, which makes me curious as to just how many people were actually there.)
Swalwell goes on to describe the purpose of Educating Activist Allies as helping “[t]eachers committed to social justice … open students’ eyes to the world around them, even when they are reluctant to see things that are painful, disturbing, or in contradiction with their original beliefs about the world.” (Chapter 4 of the book is ominously entitled: “Social Justice Pedagogy in Action: ‘Bursting the Bubble’ and ‘Disturbing the Comfortable’”).
But anyway, back to those pesky teachers and their “choosing a lesson plan based on what’s popular” – the bastards.
What Swalwell is busy ‘problematising’ in that quote is Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT), a website which “offer[s] more than 2.8 million free and paid resources, created by educators who understand what works in the classroom”. According to this PBS report, “[t]he average TPT lesson plan sells for $5, and the company takes a cut of 20 percent or 45 percent” and according to the site’s owners, “TPT paid out more than $100 million to teacher authors across the country” last year.
But despite this seeming to be a case of teachers ‘seizing control of the means of production’ from giant global educational publishing companies such as Pearson and others, or at the very least of sharing knowledge and expertise on a massive scale with little or no interference from hierarchical bureaucracies – both of which you might reasonably expect Swalwell to celebrate – she is nevertheless unhappy because (my italics):

“teachers may focus on what’s cute and catchy, rather than on content that’s high-quality […] It maybe is fun for some of the kids, but it isn’t ever just about fun. There’s always social lessons that are being taught underneath.”

Apart from wondering quite what Swalwell would consider high quality content, this seems to be rather arrogant and presumptuous about the ability of professional teachers’ to discriminate between what constitutes high and low quality materials for the specific group of students they teach in their particular milieu.
Had this same comment been made by a Minister of Education, and especially one from a conservative administration, but from any administration really, it would inevitably have provoked howls of outrage and indignation.
Referring specifically to an example of a lesson aimed at 3 and 4 year-old kindergarten children which uses the device of a mock wedding ceremony to teach the idea that the letters ‘Q’ and ‘U’ are ‘married’ to one another, Swalwell comments:

“The girls’ vows were often pretty sexist, that they have to support the boys going out with other letters, that that’s what they need to do, that their job in the relationship is. They also talk about how the boy’s letter is what gave them a voice. Otherwise, they couldn’t make a sound in the world.”

To the uninitiated, that Q/U lesson seems to be little different from what Sesame Street has been presenting spelling to pre-school under 5’s for decades now, but Swalwell demurs, reproaching kindergarten teachers who have bought the lesson for not exercising the appropriate degree of capital ‘C’ Criticality.
You would think that the obvious solution to Swalwell’s problem here would be for her to create alternative lesson plans of her own and then launch them on TPT. But then as Swalwell herself adroitly observes in her book, Educating Activist Allies:

While it may be relatively easy for academics and theorists to envision a “revolutionary critical pedagogy” that calls for an overthrow of a racist, capitalist state in theoretical terms (e.g., McLaren, Martin, Farahmandpur, & Jaramillo, 2004), …

Yes, that’s an actual quote.

… my time with these teachers in the field convinces me that grappling with how far to push their pedagogy in communities of privilege without alienating their students, being accused of indoctrination, or losing their jobs is an incredibly difficult task [ … ] My analysis of these teachers should not interpreted as a defense of what McLaren et al. (2004) refer to as a “defanged and sterilized” pedagogy that works “to the advantage of the liberal capitalist state and its bourgeois cadre of educational reformers” (p. 140).

Hey, it’s time for a new episode of “Laurie Penny Presents…”!

“We have been told…”
?? I didn’t get the memo.

and why on earth would anyone publish it?
You don’t think there’s a market for victimhood, conspiracies and flattering lies?

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles …

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles …
Believing they’re helping their cause in so many ways… (>_<)

We? Really? Told by whom?
Was it not the Unfortunate Coin herself who’s reaction to certain Islamic indiscretions targeting British girls coming to light was, in essence, ‘Shut up!”?

meanwhile somewhere in Italy…
[ maintenance worker looks around for a stick to “whack his pee-pee” ]
[ finds one ]
WHACK!!!
=^D
(I noticed an appearance of the ass-kicking pants in the replies. Nice.)

If you’re expecting…
#MeTooButNotYou

#MeTooButNotYou
Cathy Young pretty much nails it.
And speaking of consistency:

Our betters.

Indeed.
That’s the thing. Intellectual consistency, like realism and reciprocity, tends to place limits on the range of things you can demand or imagine yourself entitled to. And Laurie, like the clowns in the photo above, is very keen on demanding things and feeling entitled.
Let’s not forget this telling episode.

I thought women were equal. why is she being carried by a man?
Also, why is Oxford extending test time limits ?

Oxford University has extended time for maths and computer science exams in a bid to help women get better grades.
Undergraduates were given 105 minutes to complete their papers, rather 90.
There was no change in difficulty or the length of questions and female students were said to do better as a result…
The proposals were put forward to reduce the ‘undue effects of time pressure’ which the prestigious university believe effects women more than men, reports the Sunday Times.

How can that be, there are no differences, they tell us.

However, critics have slammed the changes as ‘sexist’ as they believe it suggests that women are the weaker sex.

Of course, back to the old “let’s have it both ways”, routine.

“‘No!’ [Meg] cried. ‘“Alike” and “equal” are not the same thing at all!’”
—A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L’Engle

And speaking of consistency:

As a friend of mine noted on Facebook, that tears it for Comrade Corbyn…