Elsewhere (312)
Anna Slatz on when an 80-year-old lady encounters the pointy end of transgender ideology:
When [Julie] Jaman asked… why no signs had been posted informing women that males could potentially be in the locker rooms, she says she was told: “‘We post pride signs, and we assume that lets women know what to expect.’”
What is expected, it seems, is that women who are not entirely comfortable with dysmorphic men using ladies’ changing rooms and showers, and watching small girls undress, should simply pretend that it isn’t happening. As is the custom, a kind of farce ensues, including accusations of “hatred,” bigotry, and being “unscientific.”
Heather Mac Donald on the woke capture, and corruption, of medicine:
Medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession… Black students are not admitted into competitive residencies at the same rate as whites because their average [second year ‘Step One’] test scores are a standard deviation below those of whites. Step One has already been modified to try to shrink that gap; it now includes nonscience components such as “communication and interpersonal skills.” But the standard deviation in scores has persisted. In the world of antiracism, that persistence means only one thing: the test is to blame. It is Step One that, in the language of antiracism, “disadvantages” underrepresented minorities, not any lesser degree of medical knowledge…
Medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants. From 2013 to 2016, only 8 percent of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat… Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs, and 31 percent of Hispanic students with those scores, were admitted, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situated white college senior to be admitted to medical school, and more than nine times as likely to be admitted as a similarly situated Asian senior.
In light of which, claims of being “marginalised” and “excluded” seem somewhat doubtful. See also, the world of woke dentistry, and the third item here, in which would-be maths teachers must be spared any attempt to fathom their competence in mathematics.
And in rampant phallus news, The College Fix reports on an artistic scandal at Imperial College London:
While [Antony] Gormley, “one of Britain’s leading sculptors,” said the piece is intended to evoke an image of a person “balancing on the balls of the feet while squatting on its haunches,” the [student] Union claimed the sculpture looks like “a person baring their erect penis.” It added the piece will tarnish “the image and reputation of the college.” The Union also said the phallic interpretation was “exclusionary” as women (or those who identify as such) comprise only 42 percent of Imperial College’s student body.
Those with nerves of steel can behold said sculpture here.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
US is becoming very much an authoritarian regime. They stopped the Tea Party movement by simply not letting them incorporate for years. They are getting media corps to do their bidding–you now can’t say “recession” online. The FBI is now poised to harass all conservatives. The FBI director in congress just declared “violent right-wing extremists” a big threat when there is no such thing, at all. For example, The Proud Boys got in a few fist fights with Antifa. Big whoop. And the best thing about it is that all these agents of oppression don’t even need the white house to direct them–they take orders from the Dems.
The raid on Trump is leading to an indictment for keeping “top secret” docs, the very thing Hilary Clinton had thousands of on her personal server (so she could launder money) and nothing happened. That is, they want to put Trump in jail so he can’t run. This is scary as shit.
This is scary as shit.
The Democrat Party is not doing anything that run-of-the-mill liberals disapprove of. I am convinced, after listening to liberals all my life, that most liberals favor fascism and any rhetoric to the contrary is pro forma.
libs and fascism: libs today have pet ideas that they want everyone to abide by (climate change, race equity, whites are racist, you must recycle, cars are bad) and favor force to make them.
libs and fascism: libs today have pet ideas that they want everyone to abide by (climate change, race equity, whites are racist, you must recycle, cars are bad) and favor force to make them.
This.
And speaking of “race equity”, such policies in education and law enforcement have been a thing since my early childhood. They kept failing, but the liberal response was always to double down and demand more “equity”.
The Democrat Party is not doing anything that run-of-the-mill liberals disapprove of.
Nor anything that many Republicans disapprove of. Including many whom I personally know. I f’n despise virtually everyone I ever worked with at defense contractors and in the space program. They are all-in on anything anti-Trump. Based on some conversations with them both direct and indirect, I really think a good number of them would sell me out to FBI/IRS/etc. if I were innocently vulnerable simply because they insist that Trump told people to drink bleach or that the Jan. 6 bs is exactly what Dick Cheney’s demon seed says it was and I have adamantly disagreed.
Nor anything that many Republicans disapprove of. Including many whom I personally know.
Agreed. I have seen that, too.
I f’n despise virtually everyone I ever worked with at defense contractors and in the space program. They are all-in on anything anti-Trump.
Anyone who threatens government workers’ rice bowls is an enemy. Anyone who promises increased spending, leading to more jobs, no matter how useless the projects, is their friend.
Anyone who threatens government workers’ rice bowls is an enemy.
Hell, I can generally excuse someone who feels that their physical life or liberty is at stake. These people will sell themselves out for status symbols, promotions, and virtue signals. All the while with pretenses of being more patriotic and noble than the common prole. Or coworker.
I really cannot argue against that point of view, except that the “self discipline” bit is only focused on the athletics and not, say, going after pussy.
One of the big deficits these days is lack of ability to concentrate on anything. Media and even education are creating an ADHD generation. Understanding the world, including politics, requires longer trains of thought than just “orange man bad”. Studies have shown that chess clubs in minority schools help the kids grades. How? It teaches you to focus and maintain a train of thought. This carries over to classwork. I would suggest that sports also do this to an extent. The dems love it that no one can focus because they are all about one word policies (“repubs are nazis!”, “covid is deadly”) and hate it when you bring up the side-effects, cost-benefit analysis, or ineffectiveness of their policies. I’m sure it is similar in UK. Masking children and zoom schooling pushed to the limit when kids almost never die from it and masking doesn’t work, as an example. we’ve become like pavlov’s dogs.
I really cannot argue against that point of view, except that the “self discipline” bit is only focused on the athletics and not, say, going after pussy.
Is that equally true of the women’s teams? I’ll let myself out now.
When the foot is in the other boot
There’s an Amanda Bynes vehicle called She’s The Man based on Twelfth Night[1] where her star girls’ soccer team champion character can’t get on to the terribly sexist boy’s soccer team because she’s a girrrrrl and so she impersonates her twin brother and tries out for the boy’s soccer team at his school instead.
Doesn’t make the team. Doesn’t even make alternate. She spends nearly the entire movie drilling every spare moment with the team captain to get good enough to be a sub.
I have no idea how that movie got made, with its brutally realistic depiction of boys’ vs. girls’ sports.
Anyone who threatens government workers’ rice bowls is an enemy
Everyone is a communist about their pet interests. I know dozens of soi-disant conservatives who decry the terribly wasteful spending by the US government yet will applaud ever more billions being spent on NASA because they watched too much Star Trek as children.
I would suggest that sports also do this to an extent
There have been excellent results from athletics coaching programs in all-minority middle/high schools for this reason, but an important difference is that the athletics are there to support the education and not the other way around. Don’t keep your grades up or don’t abide by the honor code, and you’re off the team, no appeal. That’s what it should be and why I don’t think athletics should be completely excised from an academic environment (Xenophon and all that) but the professionalization of teams needs to stop.
Is that equally true of the women’s teams?
Well…softball.
[1] There was a weird period when Hollywood was making a ton of teen comedies based on Shakespeare for some reason
Daniel Ream: The only reason women’s sports exists at all at the collegiate level is massive Title IX lawsuits that force colleges to redirect funding from sports that bring in money to sports that don’t.
That’s a misstatement. Colleges support many “non-revenue” sports for men as well as women: track and field, swimming and diving, gymnastics, tennis, golf, cross-country, lacrosse, wrestling, baseball… Title IX had nothing to do with this.
And while Title IX did cause a great increase in support for women’s sports, there was significant intercollegiate competition long before Title IX was enacted. The first national college golf championship for women was held in 1941.
But there is no question that Title IX requires funding for women’s sports well beyond the natural demand. Women simply aren’t as interested as men. This has forced some some schools to shut down men’s programs so there will be “equal participation”.
Daniel Ream: …that thing is a dong. It is obviously a dong.
The horizontal piece is at “knee level”: halfway between the “feet” and “hips”. But the vertical panel (on the left side only) starts just below “hip” level – like the phalluses of Bronze Age statues.
My first impression was exactly the same as the protesters. Maybe from in front it would look different. Sometimes even fools are right.
I know dozens of soi-disant conservatives who decry the terribly wasteful spending by the US government yet will applaud ever more billions being spent on NASA
Or the military industrial complex. Having worked in both the only difference I saw was in the MIC one works very, very hard. Many hours with considerable bureaucratic stress. At NASA, many jobs you hardly work at all, even when you really want to. Mostly due to flight delays that cause scheduling conflicts that lead to longer flight delays. Boredom brings its own stress. Though I would say the resulting/end productivity is essentially the same in both.
I know dozens of soi-disant conservatives who decry the terribly wasteful spending by the US government yet will applaud ever more billions being spent on NASA because they watched too much Star Trek as children.
What’s the opposite of Instalanche?
I know dozens of soi-disant conservatives who decry the terribly wasteful spending by the US government yet will applaud ever more billions being spent on NASA
Or on science in general.
There are conservatives who want more-or-less the same gigantic, corporatist State that the Democrats want, but with a balanced budget.