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.
‘Cracker’? ‘Saltine-American’ if you please.
“trans and nonbinary are marginalized”–objection! Facts not in evidence! With all the horse shit being slung around the fertilizer shortage should soon be fixed.
I want to see sexual compensation for the ugly. It is only fair.
Just saw stats that in major cities like NYC, Chicago women in their 20s make more than men in their 20s. Because they oppressed. or something.
“trans and nonbinary are marginalized”–objection! Facts not in evidence!
Yep. Not only not marginalized but such declarations make such people minor celebrities.
As Ellen Page’s star power faded she first came out as lesbian then later lopped off her breasts and changed her name to Elliot and Hollywood swoons over how stunning and brave she is.
“Saltine-American”
Based on our esteemed host, I’ll go with “Ritz American”
How’d they miss this? “You’ll get the triumph if you have the will.”
Too obvious?
Leni Riefenshahl is turning in her grave.
Palm Springs is a resort town not exactly know for its impoverished residents…
Indeed. High average income & wealth.
…the $200K covers a whole 18.5 people which is only .04% of the population
But according to Wikipedia, Palm Springs is about one third gay/lesbian/etc. So presumably there are more than 18 trans people residing there.
But still, it seems highly likely that the local trans people are also wealthier than the average bear.
“which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material”
How is that “mastery” of the material evaluated ? Is there some (gasp) grading involved ?. Or is it back to trophies for everyone ?
Related…
“What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.”
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers?s=r
IOW, “students” who have no business being in college don’t do as well as those who do.
Solution: separate classes, separate educational institutions. Adults with anxieties about reading children’s books should be given the encouragement and support they need in a remedial literacy class. Not to mention that the place for children’s books is in schools for children.
The problem is that there’s true diversity in the classroom, where some students “get it” and other students never will, and there isn’t even consensus on “what exactly are we trying to achieve here”. She’s papering over the problems caused by that diversity by uprooting principles from a rarefied section of Western culture and pretending that they apply universally.
Her line of thought that students should be self-motivated and decide what they want out of a course rather than a grade: that’s a perfectly good attitude as long as there’s a common level of attainment and a shared culture within the classroom. If you’re out of your depth, intimidated by the “privilege” of students who can read without moving their lips, you need to walk before you can run. A student who can’t give the simple conventional answer to the simple conventional question is in no position to set their own goals or explore the diversity of approaches to the material.
If by “privileged” students she means those whose habits of reading and intellectual curiosity come from their home environment, those students probably already have an independent goal-setting attitude to their formal education. It’s an attitude rooted in European culture, Asians tending to believe that the teacher’s authority counts for more than the student’s self-evaluation, and Africans tending to have a magical belief in the certificate. And it’s probably comes easier to male students than female students not to sweat a bad grade on a quiz as long as you’re doing ok overall according to your own goals and self-evaluation.
I’m not sure that “Half these kids can’t even regurgitate the tired clichés I drone on about endlessly in class!” is the winning message this ‘educator’ believes it to be.
College: 100 yrs ago few went to college. Those who did either came from families with money or were quite smart. If your family had money and you did poorly in college, no big deal, they had a company you could run (and maybe ruin) or at least work at. The smart kids got useful degrees (law, med, engineering). Now, however, when more than 50% of kids go to college you by necessity are trying to educate the average IQ kid in a place that used to presume you were much smarter than average. IQ has a nonlinear effect. Someone who has 140 IQ can do classes (say in physics) that an IQ 100 can’t understand at all. You also have more kids who are not prepared and who are not motivated. I would feel bad for college profs but they are mostly woke so fuck em
Someone who has 140 IQ can
So these 140 IQ people…where they been lately? The last two years or so, have they been the ones promoting fear of COVID? Developing the vaccines? Writing the programs that predicted what the virus would do? Which side of the AGW argument are they on? Are any of them at all responsible for this idea of cutting the dicks off the little boys and sewing them onto the little girls? Personally, I have no idea what my IQ is though a couple of supposed “experts” have speculated. Fortunately(?) I don’t believe either of them. So what are the dummies of the world supposed to think about these issues that surely the smarty-smart-smart set have fathomed?
WTP: IQ does not protect one from believing the absurd, sadly enough. I was just talking about the ability to pass college level classes and master real skills. If you are unable to write a paragraph by the time you graduate, then you did not acquire minimal skills. Lawyers who can’t law will get clients put in jail or their corp clients to lose big $. Doctors who can’t doc will kill and maim people. Most scary of all is airlines saying they will start applying affirmative action to pilots. Please put that on the website when I am choosing my flight.
So IQ…what is it good for? Universities, what are they good for? Making dangerously egotistical people more dangerous? I don’t think we have a problem with stupid people in our colleges. We DO have a problem with educated and smarty-smart-smart people wasting years of young peoples’ lives with BS and burdening them with debt. Though…hahahahaha…as I’ve said here for years, they won’t be paying for it. You cannot get blood from a rock. The rest of us suckers will be paying.
Smart people…smaaaart…gave us the open classroom concept. Though I see from this article we blame you Brits for its origination. I am so bloody f’n sick of smart people. Idiots.
To my mind, there is a difference between “smart” and “intelligent”.
“Smart” people can remember and repeat things other “smart” people, or “experts” say, so that a “smart” person will say (and believe) that 2+2= 4, or 5, or whatever the answer has been decided on today. You can tell the smart people, because they are always right, and they will let you know it.
“Intelligent” people will work out 2+2 for themselves, using whatever method (objects first, probably, working up to higher math), and come up with 4. They will be able to replicate that answer, and have some fundamental understanding of why the answer is 4. Intelligent people may not appear very “smart” on the surface because they don’t have the quick, easy answer the “smart” people do. I guess I think of intelligence as the ability and willingness to learn. Some people can go farther than others, but most can figure out 2+2=4. You have to be very smart to think 2+2=5…
I think I am a fairly intelligent person. I don’t know what my IQ is, though. Stuff (be it words or numbers) doesn’t come easily to me, but if I beat my head against something long enough, I can gain some understanding of the underlying concepts. I don’t consider myself “smart”, though, and if I am agreeing with my buddy on how so super smart his wife and kids are, I’m not really meaning it as a compliment.
Intelligent
Smart
Bright*
Wise
Not all the same thing, though probably a good deal of overlap.
*Bright in the original meaning, not the meaning that some atheists tried to force it to mean a while back.
A sharp dressed teacher offers an opinion.
Cisladies, you’re in this together, this chap says so.
Smart, intelligent, bright people do all the things I described above. The math models, the COVID crap, the Frankenstein work on little children. ALL of it done by highly educated, intelligent, “reasoning” people. Cave men could not do any such things. Nor could your typical/average plumber, car salesman, nor educator. You have to be (insert any word for intelligence here) to do these things.
As for wisdom, my observations on that mostly come down to the simple rule of “just don’t do anything”. In the vast majority of situations, doing nothing is considered the “wise” thing to do. But if that doesn’t work out, just wait for someone to come along later, someone “wise”, who after the fact can tell you exactly what the wise thing was that wasn’t done.
Cave men could not do any such things. Nor could your typical/average plumber, car salesman, nor educator.
You seem to be conflating education and intelligence, and I think we have had more than enough examples here that those two are not the same.
And frankly, I’d trust the common sense of the average plumber or car salesman when it comes to balancing risks and benefits on, say, COVID lockdowns or the toxic hormonal treatment of prepubescent children.
So he just played himself in All of the Family. Once a meathead, now a tofuhead.
Wow. I appears that there aren’t remedial versions of said class nor are there advanced versions of the same in his college.
Or the overly worried “professor” couldn’t (for whatever reason) tell the low performing students to drop his class and take the lower level version as well as telling the overly high performing students to take the advanced version of his class or else he will fail them.
At this point, one is forced to believe that such colleges are simply there to fleece the student sheep of their money versus trying to maximize the amount of knowledge they can absorb during their stay.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10684927/Former-Archbishop-Canterbury-urges-ministers-include-trans-people-conversion-therapy-ban.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field
“Sacred journey”??????????
Where are Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton when we need them?
On a related note, from That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis (Miss Hardcastle speaking to Mark Studdock):
The letter said: ‘To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole.’
Hence the chemical poisoning, mutilation, lies, affirmation of derangement, etc.
Somewhat related:
Ace of Spades, here.
The opening quote, on comorbidities and how gender dysphoria can be a secondary effect, a symptom of something else, very often childhood abuse, is worth noting.
But hey, sacred journey.
No, I’m trying to fight the problem of conflating education and intelligence and whatever else.
And frankly, I’d trust the common sense of the average plumber or car salesman when it comes to balancing risks and benefits on, say, COVID lockdowns or the toxic hormonal treatment of prepubescent children.
This. Mostly. What is it about intelligence, or so many of its synonym shades, that pushes out common sense? I remember in college getting the idea/feeling from the general thought environment that “common sense” was for stupid people. Now that idea came more from the “smart” ones, the “educated” ones, yet I don’t recall any of the “intelligent” ones pushing back on it. Also, one could make a good argument in favor of COVID lockdowns as being common sense. An uneducated and probably stupid argument. Thus here we are. Also, wouldn’t it be simple “common sense” to trust experts? And again, here we are.
To solve WTP’s dilemna: we are herd/tribal animals. Through the past million years your survival depended on being a member in good standing of a small social group (30-100). To be cast out was to die. So the desire to belong is very very strong. All social madness results from this desire. For not so smart people, it is simple–just keep your head down and “belong” mainly based on supporting the local sports team. Cubs fans through decades of never winning for example. But intellectuals can build more elaborate concepts of belonging such as communism or vegetarianism or religion. There is a great book Intellectuals by Paul Johnson who showed how venal and contradictory many of the “great” intellectuals were.
There is a great book Intellectuals by Paul Johnson who showed how venal and contradictory many of the “great” intellectuals were.
The chapter on Marx is very good.
we are herd/tribal animals. Through the past million years your survival depended on being a member in good standing of a small social group (30-100). To be cast out was to die. So the desire to belong is very very strong.
Agree. Intelligence has value. My point being that these other factors you state have much, much greater value than we want to believe. I think…if I understand my point correctly…
Cubs fans through decades of never winning for example. But intellectuals can build more elaborate concepts of belonging such as communism or vegetarianism or religion.
A lot of intellectuals are Cubs fans, but yes a lot of idiots as well. George Will comes to mind. I’ve heard of Johnson’s book and, not that I’ve sought it out but I’m kinda afraid to read it. Some things about Isaac Newton that I’ve read about make me question why an apple falls from a tree.
…highly educated, intelligent, “reasoning” people.
“Highly educated” != intelligent, or even reasoning. In fact, depending on what subject your “highly educated” parchments are in, “highly educated” !== intelligent or reasoning at all. IMHO, “highly educated” = “very smart”, in the cases WTP is thinking of. I think dependence on computers, computer models, etc has actually made us less intelligent. The machines do the thinking, and the very smart people parrot whatever they spit out, unquestioningly. My biggest peeve with computer modelers is they often don’t question the results of their model. Fancy math went in to making the model, the calibrations – “tuning” – come out perfect, the p-values are tiny, et viola – the answer must be right! Highly educated, very smart people don’t have to think about the results or even understand them, because they know they are right, and they never question the orthodoxy. That’s how you get “Believe in Science” like I have to accept The Science as some sort of lord and savior. Superstitious and religious, but not reasoning. Intelligence is reasoning. The very smart people are not reasoning; they are parroting.
Now some very intelligent people are likely going along with the very smart people in the parroting, through cowardice, fear, self preservation, and whatnot. I agree that universities have become useless diploma factories, training mindless parrots. Even in STEM the rot has set in deep, but it will be a long time before the effects are seen. There’s a lot of ruin in a civilization, as someone said.
Now some very intelligent people are likely going along with the very smart people in the parroting, through cowardice, fear, self preservation, and whatnot.
And for “intelligent” people, how intelligent is that decision? Now throw the question of the ‘wisdom’ of it in there as well.
Another aspect of this is the silo. Many of these “smart”/”educated”/”intelligent” (note: I do not mean these as being synonymous) people, and not just the autistic (or whatever) types, do not have much breadth of knowledge nor responsibility. They are held in high esteem (maybe “esteemed people”) for their brainisms (worse word but I may go with it) because they haven’t been distracted by the numerous other factors in the world around them. They are generally not “well rounded” people, at least in the sense it was once meant. The engineer who has broad musical tastes but has never heard of Kant or Wittgenstein. Or perhaps knows them but has zero understanding of current events but for some reason has a Ukrainian flag on his desk. Substitute ‘doctor’ for ‘engineer’ then ‘banker’ for ‘doctor’, wash, rinse, repeat. And then, how many of those will step up and take some sense of responsibility, not necessarily in a crisis but ahead of time. Such that some crises do not ever happen?
Agree. Intelligence has value. My point being …
Being an idiot, I bargled that. Meant to state that I agree with ccscientist said but I felt I was going too far down the anti-intelligence road and didn’t want to be accused of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Also, my wife has a totally off topic question that I cannot explain…why do so many people with some degree of bank want to move to Costa Rica and start a yoga retreat? I mean, I think I know the answer but just thought I’d throw it out there. For some stupid reason.
WTP: another factor is that in much of academia these days you don’t even need to be smart (in the IQ sense) to get a Ph.D. Sure you do in pure math but not in anything liberal arts or education. Especially in “studies” programs. You just have to be willing to put in your time as a student, be conformist, and borrow enough money.
When I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons as a spotty youth, I had some difficulty right out of the gate with understanding what the six primary ability scores were supposed to represent. At first it made little difference, because we were just playing make-believe, having fun killing goblins and accumulating absurd amounts of gold and magic items.
As we got older and the campaigns grew a little more sophisticated, we stopped cheating on our ability rolls and started playing characters with actual weaknesses, because it was a new kind of fun. It was only then that I started looking at interesting contrasts in player abilities. The ‘Sickly Strongman’ (STR 17; CON 7) who could lift damn near anything one time but could barely climb up a flight of stairs without blacking out. The ‘Village Mayor’ who was utterly average except for a high Charisma score — people loved him, though they could never tell you why. But the one I actually played for quite some time was the Misguided Mage. Intelligence 18, Wisdom 7. Here was a guy who could put together the most elaborate plan for building a machine or breaking into a fortress, without giving the slightest thought to whether these plans were a good idea at all. (It helped that a friend played a manipulative little shit of a thief, and used to give our Dungeon Master fits by talking my character into pursuing the most absurd and misguided plots he could think of.)
Anyways, that’s my long-winded way of saying that even Gary Gygax understood the difference between intellect and wisdom, and did a decent job of trying to enlighten my generation on the concepts.
And now I see that WTP beat me to the punch on Wisdom anyway. *sigh*
And for “intelligent” people, how intelligent is that decision? Now throw the question of the ‘wisdom’ of it in there as well.
That reminds me of a meme on intelligence and wisdom I’ve seen where an large hound dog and a skunk are on the back porch of some rural dwelling, and the skunk is eating the dog’s food out of the bowl, while the dog sits there and watches.
I’m guessing that people will sit and watch the skunks eat their lunch in the hopes that the skunks will eventually fill up and go away, and that the people can then procure more for themselves. The skunks will inevitably overstep the bounds, though, and there are none so desperate as those who have nothing left to lose. But it could take a long time before enough people have been stripped of everything, have nothing left to lose, and fight back against the woke skunks.
…none so desperate as those who have nothing left to lose.
Separate from having nothing left to lose is the idea that the skunks have only one weapon, and once it’s been used they have nothing left in the arsenal. Once the dog has been sprayed, there’s no reason for him not to savage the skunk that’s taking over his space and eating his food.
How many normal people still cower in fear over being called ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ or ‘transphobe’ at this point? When the threat to ruin somebody’s reputation and professional life is no longer feared, what then?
When the threat to ruin somebody’s reputation and professional life is no longer feared, what then?
We got a hint of “what then” when normal, average people donated a few bucks to the trucker protest in Canada, and we discovered that the skunks have more than one weapon in the arsenal. With nebulous “emergency powers” still in place in many western countries, the skunks aren’t limited to spraying -ists and -isms and ruining professional lives. With woke corporate takeovers and current governments’ desire to squash opposition, they can take away your ability to pay for food, housing, and your ability to find another job, regardless of whatever Constitution, Bill of Rights, Charter, or whatever else is in place as protections on the citizenry. Oh eventually this new weapon may make it through the courts and be found to be illegal, but enough judges are skunks that I don’t trust that to happen in the slightest.
I agree – many normal people may no longer be cowering in fear of being called racist or losing their jobs over it, but I bet many more are definitely wondering if their bank accounts can be frozen if the skunks decide they are guilty of wrongthink. And I think the skunks know that their stink is not as feared anymore, since it seems everyone is racist or transphobe these days. Thus the introduction of a new, more potent weapon to threaten the masses with.
Heh. Penny Red is upset.
I think there are signs of people standing up to the mob, but when The Bee and Tucker Carlson and Trump can all get banned from Twitter and Canada can freeze bank accounts and parents can be called terrorists, we have not yet reached peak reign of terror.
Psychologically stable model citizen.
when The Bee and Tucker Carlson and Trump can all get banned from Twitter and Canada can freeze bank accounts
Those two aren’t even in the same spiral arm of the same moral universe.
Last I checked, Twitter does not have an armed cavalry division that tramples elderly women with impunity.
Now that Elon Musk has done a fairly trivial thing that will have little to no effect on anything[1], all of the “sOcIaL mEdIa Is A pUbLiC uTiLiTy” loons are shrieking again.
[1] I am reasonably certain it’s a pump and dump scam; he’s done them before
The whole issue of people like the swimmer Lia Thomas competing–unfairly I believe–against women is being carefully being ignored by the woke. For me, the fact that this person developed muscles and mass as a growing male and that gives him a huge advantage. He did not ‘transition’ as a small child and play with dolls and splash around in the shallow end: he was as a male competing as all athletes do from an early age against people of similar growth/development. As a male swimmer he trained and developed those muscles and honed his technique against equally competitive men. When he proved he was average to the required standard for medal success (and I note he was almost certainly a far better swimmer as a man than the majority of males, but not good enough to scoop many medals in a bigger pool) his decision to pretend he is a woman came late, having already given himself many years of male development and growth.
This is where to me it is all false. I will happily watch women compete against each other, but as soon as a fully developed male appears among them there is no point in continuing. I have seen games of football (soccer) in which talented girls have played against boys (one game I saw recently had a sensational 14 year-old girl playing in defence against similar age boys but what made her stand out was a tremendous ability to ‘read’ the game and organise her team), but for the most part their development levels do not seem to impact until their mid teens.