The Bedlamite Solution
The new student counselling director at Middlebury College has vowed to use “more inclusive” methods to treat student mental health, including a focus on white supremacy and social justice.
Ah. I think I see the problem.
Alberto Soto, who received his PhD. in counselling psychology from Brigham Young University, told the Middlebury Campus newspaper that… “The body and mind cannot be healed solely by self-care and focusing on surviving… At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”
When not using the word “whiteness” as a modish pejorative and “questioning Eurocentric ideas surrounding mental health,” Mr Soto plans to “challenge the historically-dominant whiteness” of the campus and thereby “create a more open environment for students.” This heavenly state of openness and resurgent mental wellbeing will be rendered upon the Earth by telling students at an upscale and statusful liberal arts college how oppressed they are and by invoking racial conspiracy theories, the aforementioned “whiteness” and “white supremacy,” as the root of all distress.
Readers will recall that Middlebury College is where students suitably gorged on “inclusivity” and “social justice” display their righteousness and mental stability by physically menacing elderly scholars, trying to trample them underfoot, and assaulting female staff, such that they require a hospital visit and, subsequently, a neck brace.
The Middlebury campus has spent the past few years cultivating its persona as one of the most active antiracist campuses in America… Yet at the same time schools have ramped up their antiracist efforts, mental health among students has only gotten worse.
Readers may wish to speculate as to why that might be, and why the phenomenon – a surge in students reporting “anxiety and depression” – predates the pandemic.
Annual tuition at Middlebury is a mere $56,000, excluding books and housing.
Remind me again why we need our universities.
I used to be know the answer, but I seem to have forgotten. Was it to prevent class exclusion?
Presumably, the combination of a preponderance of social sciences courses, whopping fees and student activism means this is one of those places were rich Americans place their stupider children until they can think of something to do with them?
Remind me again why we need our universities.
The reasoning was always simple – since historically, university graduates earned more money and generally enriched society with their erudition, graduating more students would proportionally increase those benefits.
What could go wrong?
‘Doubling down’.
Yet at the same time schools have ramped up their antiracist efforts, mental health among students has only gotten worse.
Yet. Uh-huh.
What could go wrong?
Since the UK has a shortage of HGV drivers (mainly due to over-regulation of their working behaviour and consequent dependence on cheaper foreign, less-monitored drivers to fill the shortfall). The government has a solution. Just simplify HGV licenses. Who could possibly need to reverse a truck?
What could go wrong?
So gaslighting students makes them anxious and depressed. Who knew?
At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”
I prefer my eliminationist racism in the original German.
At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”
But it is indeed true that there are many blacks who are very unhappy that white people exist and thrive. Many LGBTQETC who are very unhappy that heterosexuals exist. Many feminists who are very unhappy that men exist. Many leftists that are very unhappy that free people exist….
It’s been obvious for a long time that there is a lot of mental illness within the Left. But I’ve never been able to figure out which is cause and which is effect. Does leftist ideology actually cause mental illness? Or are mentally ill people just attracted to the Left?
I suppose it’s possible that both of these things happen at the same time. If so, that’s especially bad news for people whose mental health issues arise from natural causes (genetic factors, trauma, or anything else not related to ideology). Because those people would be at risk for being sucked into a political movement from which they can never escape, because simply being a part of it reinforces and exacerbates their mental illness. That sort of ideological captivity is exactly what the Left strives for.
Does leftist ideology actually cause mental illness? Or are mentally ill people just attracted to the Left?
It’s definitely both. And it’s also a feedback loop.
Many LGBTQETC who are very unhappy that heterosexuals exist. Many feminists who are very unhappy that men exist.
How do they expect to proliferate their kind rather than dying out? Did their parents never teach them about the birds and the bees?
But, of course, if anyone has the temerity to regret their existence, all the angels in Hell will be appalled and riot.
Many LGBTQETC who are very unhappy that heterosexuals exist.
Yes, but there are factions in that group who are unhappy others in that faction exist, which brings us to this story of “corrective rape”, apparently so a genuine lesbian will accept “girl dick” and not be “transphobic”.
A reply of note (Language)
mental health among students has only gotten worse
There are many contributory factors here but as so often these days the words of Inigo Montoya spring to mind.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“How do they expect to proliferate their kind rather than dying out? Did their parents never teach them about the birds and the bees?”
They think Brave New World is an instruction manual. (Only presumably the compulsory orgies will be female-only.)
@Sam Duncan
presumably the compulsory orgies will be female-only.
Yes, but 90% of those females will have a penis. And the rest will formerly have had one.
It’s definitely both. And it’s also a feedback loop.
Well, if I had to suggest a non-prison environment that would be likely to exacerbate any neurotic tendencies and generally make one feel shit, woke academia would be high on the list. Or,
As Daniel noted here not too long ago.
…woke academia would be high on the list.
Grade schools and high schools, too. Even kindergarten schools.
Human mental well-being is increased by having a positive goal focus such as one’s family. Focus on being oppressed and hating others will send you over the edge. You also get victim points for claiming to be mentally damaged (OCD, suicidal, bipolar etc). Focus on neuroses can make them worse.
It is also sadly true that civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism. It is not that hard to stir up, esp young people, to be savages. Mao harnessed this madness to horrific effect. People can get very excited to start a war. At evergreen college a few years ago the students were roaming campus with baseball bats, looking for trouble. This guy is hoping to do the same at Middlebury.
It is also sadly true that civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism.
What seems to have happened is a wholesale ignorance of the fact that civilization often requires very uncivilized behaviour to maintain. Orwell’s “rough men” quote, etc. There’s supposed to be a kind of informal Geneva Convention at play domestically, where as long as you behave in a civilized manner we will reciprocate, but if you step over the line it’s going to be a metaphorical Dresden and don’t you forget it.
Society as a whole has forgotten how to apply the necessary Prisoner’s Dilemma response to malefactors. The result is exactly the Prisoner’s Dilemma game: the malefactors have figured out that civilized behaviour is always the less advantageous choice.
Metaphorical Dresden
Band name ?
Or a public sauna that serves flame grilled meats ?
Daniel is exactly right. The whole “crime is caused by oppression (ie the cops)” leads to the absurd result that people just walk into stores and take stuff and the kid who shot up a school is out in 4 days because “he was bullied”. Kim Fox in Chicago is refusing to prosecute thugs involved in a OKI Corral style shootout because it was mutual shooting. heh. There is willful blindness to the response of criminals to incentives: staying out of jail is an incentive. No jail? whooeee! crime time! No no no the left insists, people are angels if you just stop oppressing them.
Well The Shat is back, looking no worse for wear. Listening to those women flight commentators though…sheesh…
Lead the impressionable out onto a tightrope, then shake it underneath them with one hand while offering to save them with the other.
[..] the absurd result that people just walk into stores and take stuff and the kid who shot up a school is out in 4 days because “he was bullied”. Kim Fox in Chicago is refusing to prosecute thugs involved in a OKI Corral style shootout because it was mutual shooting
Well, there’s another common trait to all of those perps that more likely explains the lack of law enforcement response.
Though more on-topic…Every time I see another story about how far over the edge Middlebury has gotten, it depresses me. Not that I was a big fan of the college myself but a very close high school friend and her husband went there. Her brother and I were best friends until he got a little weird and failed to launch. We were very close. She graduated top 10 in our rather large high school class. Spent a semester at the London School of Economics. A good athlete. Someone I would consider about as normal, though just a tad introverted, as anyone I know. I’m still in touch via FB with her mother, one of my favorite adults from the old neighborhood. Yet after all that has transpired at Middlebury, my friend and her construction worker/supervisor ex-hockey player husband sent their oldest child to this $56K/yr institution. These are not filthy rich people. Grandparents had some money but I’m sure that’s been filtered out over generations now. They’re upper middle-class/maybe lower upper-class if you get real liberal about the latter demarcation line. Live in a decent neighborhood but nothing outstanding. I don’t get what any normal person would see in such an institution when there are soooo many other, much more reasonable options. Then on top of that, they just sent first born son to Oberlin. I don’t get it. Crazy, filthy rich, NYC elitists with more money than brains, sure. Social climbers, sure. Normal people? I get the legacy thing but this seems a bit much and surely as alumni they know much more about how far left this school has gotten than most people.
The Woke Insanity that says that even science noticing the differences between males and females is “hate speech”
“At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”
That is one hot take on Freud, I gotta say.
Replace Freud’s psychosexual babble with modern-day woke babble, and presto! Here’s your PhD. in counseling psychology.
I’m confident the new student counselling director at Middlebury College will make student mental health measurably worse during his tenure, if this quote is any indication of his “counseling.”
No jail? whooeee! crime time! No no no the left insists, people are angels if you just stop oppressing them.
I’ve talked about the huge rise in crime in CA that started in 2011 when Gov. Moonbeam got “Prison reform” (AB109) passed. Then the one-party state started passing hug-a-thug legislation like Propositions 47 & 57, banning bail and electing District Attorneys like Boudin (Frisco) and Gascon (Los Angeles) who have turned their offices into quasi-public-defender offices.
So you get stuff like Walgreens closing 13 stores in Frisco because of wholesale shoplifting and the “Progressives” in Sacramento not only say to our face there is no connection but then double down with stuff like this:
A lot of the group-invasion shoplifting – where bunches of organized thugs run out of stores with armfuls of merchandise are gang crimes.
I actually believe that Progressives are inflicting criminals on the law-abiding, middle/working class as a means of control. “Social justice” is a lie.
Another factor in lenient treatment of criminals is race: There are blacks who think that they are entitled to steal and rob at will.
Some of them are politicians and “activists”. Others are teachers and professors. And you will encounter them all the time when reading about black thugs who are shot while committing crimes. “He was a good boy.”
When you encourage mental illness among your students it seems a bit rich to be perplexed by a rise of mental illness among those students.
It might be more accurate to say there are those who are being told, incessantly, by Soto, Kendi, et cetera, ad nauseam, that they are entitled to steal & rob at will.
The Left wants a race war because that’s the Bezmenov playbook: destabilize society by fomenting internal division to the point that it can’t defend itself against external military force. Class warfare doesn’t work when free markets and opportunity mean anyone can have class mobility if they want it; the Left had to fall back on immutable biological characteristics.
It might be more accurate to say there are those who are being told, incessantly, by Soto, Kendi, et cetera, ad nauseam, that they are entitled to steal & rob at will.
That is partly true. But there has been a black culture of crime for a long time, long before there were pro-crime black intellectuals in schools and universities.
Not just black criminals. Also blacks who get angry and riot when a black criminal is arrested/punished.
The same could be said of other races in various countries. One of the things I found striking in Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom was the similarity in behavioural pathologies between the British, white, underclass & the American, black, underclass.
A cultured culture of resentment, sustained with governmental subventions, seems a common thread.
A cultured culture of resentment
In my experience black culture was already pretty bad in the sixties. It’s only gotten worse since then.
…similarity in behavioural pathologies between the British, white, underclass & the American, black, underclass.
See also Irish immigrants in America before Dagger John. Those “Irish need not apply” signs became well known for reasons beyond “bigotry”.
So you get stuff like Walgreens closing 13 stores in Frisco because of wholesale shoplifting…
And soon we will hear the accusations that Walgreens (and CVS, Costco, Safeway, Vons…) are failing in their civic obligations, destroying communities by creating ‘food deserts’ (or ‘shopping deserts’ / ‘commercial deserts’) and must either be compelled to return to the crime-infested neighbourhoods that Newsom has created, or otherwise made to bear the cost.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the State of California will enter the retail sector to address this ‘market failure’ caused by unbridled corporate greed.
Those “Irish need not apply” signs became well known for reasons beyond “bigotry”.
Indeed. Groups of young Irish men would wander through public parks on Sunday afternoons, looking for people to fight. They would harass and assault German families out for a picnic.
Patrick O’Brian alluded to this more than once in his Aubrey-Maturin novels, when Stephen Maturin notes that dueling was vastly more frequent at Irish than English universities.
”… whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”
The “etc” is the hilarious bit. Can’t be bothered to mouth all the pieties, can we buddy?
‘Obviously, the growth in Critical Race Theory in the schools, while a goldmine for Critical Race Theorists, has done nothing to boost the objective achievement of black students. In general, CRT encourages blacks to complain, slack off, fantasize about oppression and, in general, not hit the books… How could it possibly have happened that eight years of telling blacks how oppressed and entitled they were didn’t make them work harder at their math homework?’
https://www.unz.com/isteve/whats-the-long-term-impact-of-crt-in-schools/
Whiteness is just a warmed over form of bourgeois. The left bitches and moans about having to learn about “dead white males” but their rhetoric always seems to be derivative of one we all know.
we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”
Squirrel!
Squirrel!
Heh. Pretty much. As illustrated many times, wokeness entails an awful lot of displacement.
During Great Awokening, White-Black NAEP Test Score Gap Grew by 20%
I think we all know what the woke solution to that particular problem is?
Speaking of Bedlamites beating the words “white” and “whiteness” like a red headed rented mule, here we find a Tahoma (Maple Valley Washington)* school district’s “equity leader”.
From the comments, it appears this one has been canned, but I imagine you could bet the riverboat it is only because she said what the other “Equity Committee” members are thinking.
*(pop. 27,000, 8,500 students K-12. I can’t believe they are getting by with a mere 50 people)
From the comments, it appears this one has been canned
Yes, she was fired. But it’s safe to assume that she was fired only because she got caught: The school administration already knew what she was when they hired her, and her toxic radicalism is why they hired her.
News headline from the BBC
Letitia Wright denies airing anti-vaccine views on Black Panther 2 set
What were they thinking?
Seriously asking.
Black culture – actually, a sub-culture, even among blacks – was bad but diminishing. The ‘Great Society’ did much to institutionalise & buttress this sub-culture, halting, & in some cases reversing, the progress of the black community.
All these black folk talking about how they understand white folk. They don’t understand white folk. This black man understands white folk. Well the true red neck ones anyway. You might want to turn diwn the volume a skoosh.
Quoth Tahoma (Maple Valley Washington) school district’s “equity leader”, “There’s no safe place for BIPOC to exist, when whiteness is present.”
Doesn’t that necessarily imply that for the sake of the BIPOC, we should have rigid segregation? That the whole project of integration was wrong-headed from the beginning, and the South Africans had it right with apartheid? Is that what she intends to say?
Well, no, what she intends to say is that the correct choice is genocide against white people, that is to say, me and anyone who looks like me. I don’t think the white population is going to be down for that.
The industry publication said Disney, which owns Marvel, is introducing a system this month where people in a production’s main zone who have been vaccinated will wear a yellow wristband, and those who have not will not have one.
Well, you can’t say they haven’t learned anything from history. This time around it’s the Übermench wearing the yellow patches!
…her toxic radicalism is why they hired her.
Indeed, but what I found her amusing was ranting about the yte debil and claiming…
…and that BIPOCs can’t achieve the “American Dream” as she wanders through what appears to be a typical well appointed middle class home (as one gets with the average “American Dream”).
Letitia Wright denies airing anti-vaccine views on Black Panther 2 set
“Disney, which owns Marvel, is introducing a system this month where people in a production’s main zone who have been vaccinated will wear a yellow wristband, and those who have not will not have one.”
At some point, actors like Letitia Wright are going to have to follow Jon Voight, Ron Silver, Kevin Sorbo, Dean Cain, Adam Baldwin, et al and just say “you know what, I’ve made enough money to comfortably retire. I’m walking away from this.” Wright could sink the sequel if she walks, it’s commonly assumed she’s slated to be the next Panther.
Also I note the MCU is introducing the sociopathic Riri Williams, which ought to be good for a hoot.
I found her amusing was ranting about the yte debil
So clicked on said linkage – WTF? This broad is whiter than me… and outweighs me by a few hundred meals.
Ah well.
WTF? This broad is whiter than me…
I suspect this PoP appearing lot claiming to be BIPOC will trot out the old “One Drop” rule and have some sort of identifying QR code or something, it being the progressive way.
some sort of identifying QR code or something
Might I suggest another colour-coded armband?
As was pointed out at Takimag (IIRC) some time ago, many of the loudest honkers in this Great Enracening are 1/2 black at most, and were raised comfortably in middle-and-above income, mostly white areas. They are narcissists latching on to being “black” as the lowest effort path to importance.
They are narcissists latching on to being “black” as the lowest effort path to importance.
This kind of identitarian attitude – being, as it were, professionally black or whatever – is also a way to compensate for not having much in the way of an individual personality. Instead of a personality – or at least one that’s remotely tolerable – you can instead have a cartoon identity, ready to wear. And in which, the script is already written and the star is always you.
On a lighter note, speaking of stereotypes…
1/2 black at most
Given the available research on adopted children’s difficulty coping with a lack of genetic connection to their adoptive family, I wonder if there isn’t a similar disconnect at play in mixed-race children of middle-class parents.
“wear a yellow wristband”
Livestrong ver 2.0?
a way to compensate for not having much in the way of an individual personality. Instead of a personality – or at least one that’s remotely tolerable – you can instead have a cartoon identity, ready to wear. And in which, the script is already written and the star is always you
Yet another way in which the woke are indistinguishable from teenage girls. To continue an earlier thread about unintentional red-pilling, the final episode of MTV’s tedious cartoon Daria accidentally sent the message that the only truly happy character in the series was the terminally unhip band geek, because he legitimately didn’t care what anyone else thought of him and wasn’t trying to be anything but himself. He ends up with the “dumb” cheerleader he’s been hitting on the whole time because he’s the only one not trying to turn her into something she’s not.
While setting someone straight on DEFCON levels at work I ran across this on Wikipedia:
Do not tell me that it is no longer possible to make a good James Bond film.
Where is everybody?
[ Looks around for David’s bush-whomper ]
Yet another way in which the woke are indistinguishable from teenage girls.
The archetypal Mean Girl does seem to be the preferred template.
And as a bonus, when people object to your shortcomings as a human being and choose to avoid you, you can always blame any avoidance on racism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, etc. As a way to avoid acknowledging unflattering realities – say, being a tiresome, shitty person – it’s quite effective, and widely employed.
The archetypal Mean Girl does seem to be the preferred template.
Re-reading that thread, I found this comment from Adam: “There are 1415 actual activists in the US, inclusive of all issues and causes.”
How is he so sure? Have they all been hunted down and tagged? And if not, why not?