Elsewhere (310)
Ben Sixsmith on the blurring of identity and mental illness:
Of course, it is good to understand the choices people make. But is it always necessary to respect those choices? Some people who have sought out castration claim to be much happier and calmer for it. Yet auto-castration is well-known to be a sign of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. One study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine suggested that in others, the desire to castrate themselves was correlated with “abuse sustained during childhood, including parental threats of castration” and “religious condemnation of sexuality,” among other things. Would anyone insist that there are not healthier means of dealing with such traumas?
Leor Sapir on transgender swimmer Lia Thomas – and when politeness becomes unhinged:
The Human Rights Campaign warns that “contrasting transgender people with ‘real’ or ‘biological’ men and women is a false comparison” that “can contribute to the inaccurate perception that transgender people are being deceptive or less than equal, when, in fact, they are being authentic and courageous.” This is a strawman wrapped in a non sequitur. Critics of gender self-identification do not argue that people like Thomas are “being deceptive,” but rather that they are themselves deceived. HRC’s use of “authentic” here really means “sincere”: transgender women are being sincere, not deceptive, when they say they have a strong inner sense of being a woman. But that sincerity is irrelevant unless one first assumes that what makes a belief true is the fact that it is sincerely held, rather than its correspondence to objective reality.
Emil Kirkegaard on mental health and political leanings:
Back in May 2020, I published a paper provocatively titled Mental Illness and the Left. It was based on the common observation (stereotype!) that conservatives seem less prone to mental illness… Since my study was published, replications have come out. The fact that this replicates is not at all surprising because the samples were very large, representative, and results not p-hacked and with tiny p values. Here’s an overview of recent replications…
Statistical chomping ensues. And I’ll leave these items here for no reason whatsoever.
And Robert Stacy McCain on pretentious self-pity:
Taylor Lorenz has gone from the New York Times to the Washington Post, but she’s still peddling the same journalistic product, and still claiming that people saying mean things on Twitter have destroyed her life. MSNBC last week featured her on a segment in which she claimed to have “severe PTSD.” […] If we are to believe Taylor Lorenz, people saying mean things about her on Twitter is exactly like getting ambushed by the Vietcong. […] Nowhere in the mainstream media’s coverage of the so-called “harassment” directed at Lorenz does one find any useful description of what she has done over the years to attract criticism of her work… The possibility that Taylor Lorenz is a bad person — well, this never occurs to anybody in the liberal media.
Oh, and in other media news, this amused me. Particularly this.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
And I’ll leave these items here for no reason whatsoever.
Stunning and brave. No wait. Batshit insane.
Stunning and brave. No wait. Batshit insane.
One does wonder which particular brand of bathroom cleaning product was being smoked.
Needless to say, there are many other examples in the archives.
Stunning and brave. No wait. Batshit insane.
And it’s interesting just how often woke pieties sound like an attempt to excuse, even champion, gratuitously obnoxious and pathological behaviour.
“We have to placate the trans people.”
“Why?”
“For their mental health.”
“So is transgenderism a mental health disorder?”
“Of course not. They’re being authentic to themselves.”
“So why do they need special treatment and recognition?”
“For their mental health.”
Is it me or are we living in an ongoing performance of Waiting for Godot?
If Musk is African American surely he must be black?
or, at least, a noticeable tan.
I have literally not stopped shaking and throwing up on my desk since I found out.”
Must be into the dry heaves by now…
Wouldn’t it be great if Trump decided to buy 10% of Twitter as well.
Is it me or are we living in an ongoing performance of Waiting for Godot?
It’s not you.
Is it me or are we living in an ongoing performance of “Waiting for Godot”?
We’re not that Lucky.
On the mental illness thing: there are real mental illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia. But much of what the Woke suffer from is self-indulgent emotionalizing. Like TDS. The mental contortions the left went through as cities burned for 2 years and they said this is fine are NOT a mental illness but conscious decisions to embrace evil. Conservatives have embraced a (mostly) coherent world-view (work hard, family, country, decency), which leads to much less mental anguish. The Left embraces nothing but contradictions (trans vs women’s rights), impossible things (we’ll just shut off all fossil fuels…rainbows will take over), and the venal (US is a racist country, whites are evil). With this as your set of beliefs, it will be nightmares and anguish 24/7. No medicine nor therapy (except reality therapy) can cure this.
But much of what the Woke suffer from is self-indulgent emotionalizing.
There’s also the fact that if your worldview is premised on so many false assumptions – assumptions that are contradicted, often quite vividly, by reality – and if the list of things one must pretend changes all but weekly, while always getting longer, then this isn’t exactly healthy, psychologically. All that contortion and pretending takes a toll.
As Lionel Shriver put it,
And again, that dishonesty, that complication, all that avoiding of the obvious, is not without cost.
See also Amy Wax, here.
But much of what the Woke suffer from is self-indulgent emotionalizing.
Speaking of which, two new genders, update your flash cards accordingly, please.
In case you were wondering why the “elite” universities suck, I give you Harvard.
Part the First:
Part the Second:
The Reveal.
Y’all do realize that the woke along with the woke-bur-in-denial-of-being-woke make up a majority of our civilization? Sure, maybe you see someone like Biden’s poll numbers falling because he’s failing, or other woke pols are failing. Much of the shift against these people is because they are being blamed for the failures of woke. That they fail because they are not woke enough. While I do see some encouraging signs on the right of people getting woke to the dangers of woke, we still get a GOP governor from Maryland criticizing DeSantis for the anti-grooming bill in Florida. The crazy isn’t just crazy. It’s what runs the world right now. In a “perception is reality” perception world, this crap isn’t going to burn out on its own
…we still get a GOP governor from Maryland criticizing DeSantis for the anti-grooming bill in Florida…
A GOP governor in Maryland (about 70% democrat) is as GOP as Manhattan grits or Iowa lobster rolls.
A GOP governor in Maryland (about 70% democrat) is as GOP as Manhattan grits or Iowa lobster rolls.
Yes. The state that gave us Spiro Agnew. But GOP nonetheless. The GOP aspires to be Manhattan grits, Iowa lobster rolls, or anything else that gets it elected to office. Hence my point.
Yes. The state that gave us Spiro Agnew.
Who was in office two whole years (67-69) and since whom there was only one other for four whole years before the present “GOP” governor.
Hence my point.
Isn’t, as a leftist in GOP clothing is still a leftist, and everyone who voted for him knew he was. Your perception of the level of wokeness being the “majority” isn’t reality (outside the Acela corridor and west of I-5), or places like Florida and Virginia wouldn’t have wound up with DeSantis and Youngkin.
To build on what David said about convoluted reasoning and mental illness: If all your premises are wrong about everything, you see only power relations (oppressed and oppressors) and not the common humanity in each person, you exaggerate all the dangers (not wanting trans XY in ladies showers is “erasing” them), and you see people as cartoons (men are just symbols of the patriarchy), it will cause untold anxiety and the inability to make good decisions about daily life, therefore making your life hard. If you further are proud of your emotional freakouts and build them up rather than working to overcome them, you will just get worse.
The claim that GOP are trying to control people’s sex lives is absurd. Aside from some subset of conservatives viewing abortion as murder (a reasonable view), please tell me where is there any policy or law anywhere about who you can have sex with or what birth control (besides abortion) you can use? Do they imagine that gay sex is illegal? Only if you have a time machine or go to China or the middle east (oh, yes, irony is ironic). It is a fever-dream of imagined oppression, like a fake hate crime.
Rob Reiner on Twitter: It’s simple. There is only one reason the 11 Republicans on Judiciary Committee voted against Judge Jackson. They’re racists.
———————————————–
Reiner does the heavy lifting so we don’t have to.
Rob Reiner: so glad an unfunny comedian is there to analyze world events for us. It must be great having such a simple philosophy: “anyone who disagrees with me is a racist”. Boom, analysis complete.
it will cause untold anxiety and the inability to make good decisions about daily life,
If, for instance, the only permissible explanation for demographic variations in behaviour is sexism, or racism, or “white supremacy,” or some other, ever-more convoluted and intangible form of oppression, visible only to the anointed, then you’re going to have to ignore many aspects of reality, along with any number of begged questions and the accumulating contradictions. Tying yourself in knots while learning not to notice – learning to pretend – is pretty much inevitable.
These are not good mental habits. But this is wokeness.
places like Florida and Virginia wouldn’t have wound up with DeSantis and Youngkin.
Apparently you have no idea how close we came to having Gillum as governor. As close as less than 34,000 votes, a margin of 0.4%. Gillum. Whose only experience at anything was as a Tallahassee city commissioner from 2003 until 2014, first elected at the age of 23. Gillum, whose character was so stellar that he was one of three men, one of whom was suffering from a drug overdose, who were found with “plastic baggies of suspected crystal meth” in a hotel room in Miami Beach. The person who overdosed has been reported by numerous outlets as a gay male escort.
I may have copied
someall of that from Wiki. Had I the time I could make it sound even worse. Meaning, more accurate. The GOP has moved left because the voting public has moved left. Failure to address the root problem there will only lead to more failure. The majority of people in western civilization are self-indulgent, emotionally moralizing fruitcakes. Read what people write, pay attention to what they say in man-on-the-street interviews. Especially the young. While the tide may be turning, it is far, far from a sane world out there. This was my biggest fear over the last few decades, that the left would finally mobilize enough of these lazy worthless idiots to get out and vote. The only demographic advantage the right has had is with “likely voters”.Tying yourself in knots while learning not to notice – learning to pretend – is pretty much inevitable.
This. But in more ways than I think was originally intended.
Farnsworth, David Hogg spouts his grandmother’s trite 1970’s button slogans like he thinks they’re original and deeply meaningful. I’d love for him to explain on Twitter exactly how a woman’s right not to be raped isn’t universal.
This.
And so, we get middle-class intellectuals, or pseudo-intellectuals, writers for the New York Times, telling us that they’re oppressed by pedestrian crossing signals. Because every stone must be upturned in The Great Unending Search. Every crumb. Every atom.
These are the mental habits being encouraged and rewarded.
Again, wokeness corrodes probity and realism. It makes a person absurd.
And, David, wokeness takes up mental space and time from solving real problems. We are bombarded with diatribes about pedestrian crossing signals and “ok” signs being racist and patriarchal and white instead of learning about the origin of covid or what the true side effects of the vaccines are or how the oil industry really works or why batteries can’t possibly fill the gap if we ban fossil fuels. Of course all real journalism is a lot of work. Nah. Just report on the fake hate crime of the day.
Gillum. Whose only experience at anything was as a Tallahassee city commissioner from 2003 until 2014…
That, and Mayor of Tallahassee from 2014-2018, so not exactly an unknown, and presently DeSantis is leading Crist by an average of 8.8 points (6-21 spread) and Fried by an average of 12.8 (9-23 spread).
Read what people write, pay attention to what they say in man-on-the-street interviews.
Go talk to actual people outside the Homestead-Jupiter megalopolis.
Go talk to actual people outside the Homestead-Jupiter megalopolis.
Yes. Forgot to cut/paste the part where he was mayor. Of Tallahassee (spit). I am outside the H-J-megalopolis. Actually, there seems to be considerable pro-Trump pride down there now. Sure things are starting to change in Florida…now. Voter registrations have flipped from +200K Dem to +100K GOP. Because we have the most visible, loved, etc. etc. etc. governor/politician in the country. Yet that still doesn’t sway voters. So instead of squeaking by, perhaps next time around (this year) he wins by 334,000. Which would be what? 4%? So 52-48? Though I will grant his huge popularity might pull something closer to a landslide, depending on who they actually run against him.
What sways voters is culture, and the culture is still predominantly woke. Especially in the rest of the country as the concentration of left/right shifts geographically more so than it expands/contracts in the aggregate. Shifts in concentration do not mean that on the whole the woke are losing. They rule the media (mainstream and mostly otherwise), they rule the sports franchises and all major (and even minor) leagues, they rule Hollywood, they rule the tech, they rule the medical community (don’t deny it after Covid and the medical cowardice in the face of this tranny BS), they especially rule the psychology/psychiatry end of medical.
And on top of that Trump is not popular with some Florida prior Trump voters. They, even though conservative…”conservative” they are not immune from being self-indulgent, emotionally moralizing, and some even fruitcakes. He failed to be perfect, thus he’s a failure. Waaah! My taxes are too high! Waaaah! And no one is protecting my industry! Waaah!
Circle back (heh) to the rest of the country/state, try discussing the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman thing or whether Trump is a racist with a lot of these people and then tell me woke doesn’t still hold sway. In spite of everything that has transpired since 1/2021. Just make sure you put your bullet proof vest on first. Woke rules because woke talks. I was recently reading a FB post about the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine that was in my feed. My God, the leftist delusion in there. It was thick and it went unanswered for the most part. See, things are terrible here in Florida, Covid is running rampant, there’s measles, rubella, all kinds of diseases. Because DeathSatansis!
Doing my weekly mask/not-masked survey of the first 25 customers I see at the grocery store today, even here in FL where masks have not been required for quite some time now, I have watched the percentage of masked people move down from around 36% to about 12% last week. However, this week it was up to 24% and could easily have been 28-32% by accident of sampling. Was there some signal that went out this week that my tin-foil hat saved me from? It’s kinda hard to tell if that thing really works. Though, I do know people who hate DeSantis and Trump who do not wear masks here anymore. But they still wokey-woke-woke. OK, some just woke-in-denial. But still. Woke rules.
What sways voters is culture, and the culture is still predominantly woke.
As Mark Steyn has often quoted, politics is downstream from culture. The Left’s Long March Through the Institutions is complete and Bezhmenov’s demoralization of a generation – possibly two – has already occurred. And if he’s right it’s irreversible.
Soi-disant conservatives need to stop waiting around for a political saviour to drag the Overton Window back to where they want it because that doesn’t work. The American political system was set up to make that damn near impossible. IF they want the Overton Window moved they’re going to have to put boots on the ground and do it themselves.
Critics of gender self-identification do not argue that people like Thomas are “being deceptive,”
I do. Will Thomas shows no signs of dysmorphia or CPTSD. He’s a grifter, and I give him credit for realizing that all he needs is audacity and less hair than I had in university. But a grifter nonetheless.
IIRC, a white South African born student at an American high school ran for some student government position as an African-American. The howling from the perpetually aggrieved was loud & sustained.
Waiting for Godot?
I would have chosen Marat/Sade.
No, not a joke.
“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jill. No one can stop you if you have the will.”
Or, more likely, the will-y…
…as the iconic gametime snack launches “a new face” to recognize women in sports…
What LabRat said.
Besides, shouldn’t it be Wypipo Jill, Caucasian Jill or something like that? I am so triggered.
Sorry “cracker” is a bad word, must censor it. Oh, wait, it is derogatory for poor whites (in the South) so never mind.
And it’s interesting just how often woke pieties sound like an attempt to excuse, even champion, gratuitously obnoxious and pathological behaviour.
She sounds
nicemental.“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jill. No one can stop you if you have the will.”
How’d they miss this? “You’ll get the triumph if you have the will.”
Too obvious?
She sounds
nicemental.Well, the pathological implications, and stupefying consequences, aren’t hard to tease out. They’re right there. All but announced by an awful, damaged person who fancies herself as an “educator,” a bringer of light to our dim and tiny brains. A task she’ll undertake, selflessly and heroically, by abusing and bullying anyone she identifies as weak, or timid, or just polite.
This is not an uncommon pattern.
And this appalling woman will often be shielded from criticism – and from anyone drawing attention to her obvious mental health issues – because she is “queer” and “non-binary,” and must therefore be spared any statement to that effect.
…a bringer of light to our dim and tiny brains.
Meanwhile in Virginia, grades, scmades, who needs ’em?
Well, not grading does make the teaching “workload” a tad lighter, I guess, and not having to perform likewise the students’.
OTOH, if one goes into a course with little (or no) prior knowledge and studies hard he may earn high grades from the start, knowing that he is being graded, after all.
IOW, “students” who have no business being in college don’t do as well as those who do. This is truly ground breaking stuff, but no less would be expected from one whose, “…research focuses on the relationships between children’s and young adult literature and education, and especially how various minoritized statuses affect those relationships…” and is also, “…also interested in mindfulness in education.” Whatever that is.
All I know is that is another $77,400 well spent.
Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.
So Ms Gruner, how much time (that you saved by not grading) did you devote to teaching those deprived students HOW to write an A or B paper?
Palm Springs, California, population 44,500, to give “universal income” to self identifying “trans” and “non-binary” residents.
$200,000 has been set aside for this and one gets it regardless of income. It is unclear how the $200K will be divided among the 44,500 “trans” and “non-binary” residents of Palm Springs.
“which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material.”
Grading, how does it work again?
Here I believed that mastering coursework, no matter how little I understood at the outset, led to good grades…
That must be too difficult for teach to comprehend.
Palm Springs, California… to give “universal income” to self identifying “trans” and “non-binary” residents.
So, naturally, they’re handing out $900 a month regardless of whether the recipients are, in fact, economically marginalised. Instead, the largesse is “solely on the basis of… identity,” or claimed identity.
My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes…
So the experimenter’s experiments confirm the experimenter’s priors. Isn’t this why Real Scientists use double-blind experiments?
Isn’t this why Real Scientists use double-blind experiments?
There are none so blind as… 😉
Palm Springs, California, population 44,500, to give “universal income” to self identifying “trans” and “non-binary” residents.
But what about people who identify as a teapot? This inequity must not stand!
So, naturally, they’re handing out $900 a month regardless of whether the recipients are, in fact, economically marginalised.
The whole thing is transcendentally stupid, ignoring the fact that Palm Springs is a resort town not exactly know for its impoverished residents, the $200K covers a whole 18.5 people which is only .04% of the population, and we all know because they tell us nigh incessantly, “trans” and “non-binary” are about a minimum of a third of any population.