Elsewhere (313)
Jonathan Kay on woke mysticism and the latest must-have identity niche:
[O]ne of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial.” […]
While the authors of the report were careful to source their work to Indigenous writers and interviewees, it’s interesting to note that all of the listed societal roles attributed to ancient Two-Spirited people align uncannily with the avant-garde outlook of a white 2022-era environmentalist who’s embraced intersectional conceptions of gender… We are told no fewer than nine times, for instance, that the authors are following an “anti-oppressive” approach. Colonialism is denounced more than a dozen times, including in its “heteronormative” (three times) variant.
Needless to say, the whole thing is a bit of a two-legged stool and, shall we say, not entirely consonant with anthropological evidence.
Libby Emmons on cheated female athletes and transgender overreach:
Judge Robert N. Chatigny demanded that the… attorneys who were representing the women refer to the two biological males as “transgender females,” stating that “referring to these individuals as ‘transgender females’ is consistent with science, common practice and perhaps human decency.” “If a judge dictates what words parties have to use,” attorneys said at the time, “it can bias the case. It is essential that every litigant be able to present their case to an impartial court in the way that they believe is the most accurate and true to the facts. We’ve explained in our brief how the judge’s order prevents us from doing that for our clients.”
It does sound awfully close to begging the question. But as noted before, if you mouth the first lie – that he is somehow she – then other lies and mental tangles will rapidly accumulate. Best, I think, not to give away the store in the first place.
Update, added via the comments:
Mick Hartley on pretensions, power games, and the cost of not pretending:
“I asked [teacher, Christie Hammer] how many sexes there were,” [student, Elizabeth] Leibiger said. “She said, ‘Two.’ I felt under personal attack.” Leibiger then gathered their things and walked out of class because they no longer felt respected.
Note the students’ use of the phrase “weren’t listened to,” despite them being listened to at length and being indulged to a preposterous degree. What they mean, it seems, is weren’t deferred to in our pretensions with sufficient speed and unanimity.
The tolerance of such dishonesty, and the willingness of supposedly grown adults to participate in it, and affirm it, while abasing themselves, is quite extraordinary. It seems to me a more frank and less dementing response to the students might be, “No, dears, you’re not ‘non-binary’ or some supposed third sex. You’re pretentious and neurotic, and your narcissistic psychodrama will not be indulged. Furthermore, your attempts to cow and coerce others – to bully them and have them reprimanded or fired – should make you feel deeply ashamed and an embarrassment to your parents. You pieces of moral garbage.”
Alas, there are few adults left in academia and so pretty much everyone pretends, or at least hides what they really think, and really know. Despite the cooing and rainbows, this is not a happy trajectory.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
When you combine “no judging” with “everyone is a victim” this is what you get. Now the public gets visits by police in England for disparaging a pedo.
By the way, my understanding is that in prison they do not tolerate pedos well, some get murdered. Even criminals have more standards apparently than the Woke do.
Quotes of note
It appears that billy eichner is making a career of being a public a**hole.
Now the public gets visits by police in England for disparaging a pedo.
Well, that’s one way to prevent exposure of the next Rotherham rape conspiracy.
In the spirit of open thread, found this site when trying to research how the Thomas Edison estate in Ft. Myers dealt with hurricane Ian. This is satellite imagery post-hurricane. Zooming in gets a bit sketchy Based on what I was seeing in the media, I was expecting to see much, much worse…
https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/ian/index.html
Only uneducated rubes would dare call this sort of thing “grȪȪming”.
And certainly not the American Medical Association. Yeah, I get that *most* doctors are not members of the AMA, but also *most* doctors seem oblivious to the damage the AMA has been doing to their profession for decades. Do tors have the power to stop this. They have the social position, the money, and the real science. Unfortunately most of them can’t seem to do math, especially not statistics. Nor reason the meanings of such. Bah. Oh well. It’s just western civilization. No great loss.
’tis worse in areas. Loaded up the truck and drove over (the nuber of utility trucks on I-10 was incredible) to help out elderly relatives at the northern edge of Ian’s impact. Some supplies are in good order (local WalMart is fully stocked and trucks are rolling constantly), gas is available (Gov nixed fuel taxes for the duration), and people are quite helpful. I’m still amazed at “weather”, and how much variation can exist over surprising small areas, leaving some completely untouched, while others have severe damage or are just gone…
Our family folk seemed to have weathered all OK.
Do not ask for whom the bell curve tolls; it tolls for thee.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand I found it creepy that some college professors took such pride in the weed-out factor. As if it wasn’t their actual job to at least try to make seemingly incomprehensible subjects comprehensible. Or at the very least show some degree of sympathy, much like the opening paragraph of a relatively famous thermodynamics text.
’tis worse in areas.
Oh, agree. But the devastation, as terrible as it is, is not absolute, which is the impression most people have. I found that link quite interesting and plan to make use of it. For which I am sure I will take plenty of crap.
Weed out courses: in intro physics many yrs ago, on my first test the prof went through and put a check next to every answer (ie I got 100) but since he would not allow A in his class, he went back and took points off for the quality of my sin wave “sketches”. So yes there are jerk profs out there. This guy at 84 might have been slipping mentally too. On the other hand, students really really don’t want to work hard these days. So I doubt we have the full story here.
On the other hand I found it creepy that some college professors took such pride in the weed-out factor…
I’m not seeing that “pride”. It’s just a fact of life, and the weeding-out process is necessary.
…As if it wasn’t their actual job to at least try to make seemingly incomprehensible subjects comprehensible.
I’m not seeing that “lack of try” either.
Organic chemistry is a weed-out class, that’s just reality. Like Diff Eq’s and Quantum. There are weed-out classes in every STEM field, because there are topics which are particularly difficult and demanding but are essential to future progress. Better that students should find out sooner than later if they have what it takes to succeed in those fields.
“Cram it in, jam it in, students’ heads are hollow. Ram it in, jam it in, plenty more to follow.”
“And now reader,–bestir thyself–for though we will always lend thee proper assistance in difficult places, as we do not, like some others, expect thee to use the arts of divination to discover our meaning, yet we shall not indulge thy laziness where nothing but thy own attention is required; for thou art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended when we began this great work to leave thy sagacity nothing to do, or that without sometimes exercising this talent thou wilt be able to travel through our pages with any pleasure or profit to thyself.”
–Henry Fielding, quoted in epigraph to Elementary Quantum Mechanics by David S. Saxon
pst314 isn’t wrong. I know someone who was passed along in engineering because female and then simply could not do the work in the next level of classes. At. All. Lowering standards is how we are getting a society where web sites don’t work and bridges fall down.
Chemistry majors typically took Organic Chemistry and Differential Equations in the same semester. A tough row to hoe. I knew some chemistry and pre-med majors who, acting on advice, took a reduced course load that semester–either no other courses, or a gut course.
Lowering standards is how we are getting a society where web sites don’t work and bridges fall down.
Exactly.
Who the hell cares how much time and effort you put in if you get substandard or wrong results?
Organic chemistry is not that hard to begin with, but it does require some brute memorization, the ability to think logically, and about how things connect, abilities which are required to slog through the basic load of basic science courses in the first two years none of are exactly theoretical physics levels conceptual complexity.
“Well, sure Zotz did an outpatient appendectomy in 45 minutes, but Baggadonuts clearly is a superior surgeon because of the time and effort it took him 12 hours to do an uncomplicated appendectomy and only perforated the large colon twice”. I suppose we could use the Civil War surgeon criteria that those with bloodier and filthier clothes were obviously better.
Organic chemistry is not that hard to begin with
All my undergrad STEM major friends would disagree with you. But maybe if you qualified your statement to say “…in comparison to graduate level courses”.
Do not ask for whom the bell curve tolls; it tolls for thee.
Charles Murray weighs in.
But maybe if you qualified your statement to say “…in comparison to graduate level courses”.
No, it is time consuming (unless one has a photographic memory) , but it is not conceptually involved as, for example, basic calculus, doesn’t require advanced math (or much math at all), and it sure as hell isn’t p-chem.
The people in my classes who struggled generally just didn’t put in the effort, however, there are always those who, whether it is academics. sport, music, or whatever, regardless of effort or desire, just don’t have the ability.
I used to tutor Organic Chem 1 as an undergraduate, both while taking Organic Chem 2 and after. It’s a hard course. It requires a lot of memorization – mechanisms, functional groups – and even if you put in hours of effort, sometimes it just doesn’t click. That’s why it’s a weedout course. It took me an ungodly amount of effort, but I am a determined nerdy type, and after banging my head against homework problems, extra homework problems in the supplementary workbook, flash cards, drawing mechanisms out on the board – it did actually click, and I could “see” where the electrons were supposed to go, and why the different functional groups behaved as they did. But if you don’t show up to class, pay attention in class, or do the homework problems, just skimming the book before the test isn’t going to cut it.
As to the students’ self-reporting of their own perceived time and effort I think that holds about as much truth as most dieters’ self perception of the number of calories they are consuming.
Farnsworth: How about “Different people have different cognitive strengths and weaknesses. One person aces every math class but struggles with Organic Chemistry, while another takes to Theory of Electromagnetism like a duck to water but never masters Quantum Mechanics. Some are great at theory but mediocre in the laboratory, while others are the opposite.”
P-Chem was another hurdle, yes.
Where did I suggest lowering the standards? The job is to teach. Imparting information and understanding is the goal, not just pulling weeds. Though weeds do need to be pulled they will fall out either way. “Cram it in, jam it in, students’ heads are hollow. Ram it in, jam it in, plenty more to follow.” And what actual good does that do if they do not understand the material? How is a student better able to deal with more advanced subject matter if all they did was memorize some facts? Now this:
Organic chemistry is not that hard to begin with, but it does require some brute memorization, the ability to think logically, and about how things connect, abilities which are required to slog through the basic load of basic science courses in the first two years none of are exactly theoretical physics levels conceptual complexity.
should be the point, not brute memorization or distraction with trick questions that are themselves subject to debate. I had a statistics professor in college who insisted on being wrong about the Monty Hall problem because “luck has no memory”. He wasn’t trying to teach, he was trying to indoctrinate. Far too much emphasis on lecture and repetition and not enough on ensuring that the students actually understand the material. The weed-out attitude (though tbf that statistics course was not technically a weed out course) is part of the problem with academia.
on my first test the prof went through and put a check next to every answer (ie I got 100) but since he would not allow A in his class, he went back and took points off for the quality of my sin wave “sketches”.
Heh. I had a similar situation with a processes course (forget what it was called but a lot of simulation about waiting in lines) where on a test we had to design a program. I misunderstood the question about whether or not we were supposed to draw the diagram. This professor was a bit of an odd bird and the things he would ramble on about were not always clear to the point. So anyway, I got a 94% on the logic of the test but because I failed to put that logic inside some silly, useless flow-chart like diagram he cut my score in half to a 47. I admit I should have lost points, maybe as much as 10, but the diagram in no way was worth half of the subject matter.
Meant to add…Weed out would not be necessary if colleges and universities did not bring in so many students that are not qualified to be there in the first olace. The “weed out” should be happening in the admissions offices.
But if you don’t show up to class, pay attention in class, or do the homework problems, just skimming the book before the test isn’t going to cut it.
Yep, and yep to the perceived time and effort.
Farnsworth: How about …
True enough, but there are things that will only be grasped by those 3 or 4 SD to the right, and things that can be grasped by those one to two to the right which would be the expected minimum for anyone attempting organic chemistry – not that there aren’t those below. I will grant that it is easier, based on my N=2, for people who tend to be visual thinkers.
Do not ask for whom the bell curve tolls; it tolls for thee.
From the linked article:-
“Kent Kirshenbaum, another organic chemistry professor, discovered students cheating during online tests. Citing poor conduct in his decision to reduce grades, students protested by saying ‘they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.’”.
How many lives have been saved by this principled man?
Weed out would not be necessary if colleges and universities did not bring in so many students that are not qualified to be there in the first olace. The “weed out” should be happening in the admissions offices.
Not true. The admissions office can only do basic weeding out. It is impossible even for the professors in each department to know which high school students will have what it takes to excel at the college level, be it chemistry, physics, biology, math, or whatever. Taking the courses is when the professors and students find this out.
I recall Isaac Asimov recounting how he had breezed through high school math, only to hit a wall (sort of) when he took calculus (Or was it advanced calc/diff eq? Not sure.) He passed (he got his doctorate, after all) but math was ever after somewhat of a struggle.
Where did I suggest lowering the standards? The job is to teach. Imparting information and understanding is the goal, not just pulling weeds. Though weeds do need to be pulled they will fall out either way. “Cram it in, jam it in, students’ heads are hollow. Ram it in, jam it in, plenty more to follow.” And what actual good does that do if they do not understand the material?
I fail to see how the professors are at fault: It is certainly the job of the professors to teach, but they can only do so much: The students must do the work, and the students must have the aptitude to do the work successfully.
Furthermore, the weeding out process filters out not only the students who simply do not have the talent to succeed. It also filters out those who can pass the courses only with unreasonable amounts of help: The student who takes 7 years to get a BS in chemistry is going to do even worse at the graduate level and will never become a successful scientist.
I would feel very sorry for a student who was led on by an affirmative action program to waste years of his life on a lost cause. I would also feel sorry for the professors who wasted their time when they could have spent that time on more promising students.
To re-iterate: Weeding out has always been an element of college education. It long precedes the decline in stanndards mandated by affirmative-action policies.
Lowering standards: I did not suggest that anyone here suggested that. I am talking about the constant pressure of students to make their own lives easier. It is insisted by the Woke that the only possible reason blacks do badly in college is racism, thus preferences will fix it. In fact, poorer performance can be attributed to: 1) poor inner city schools, 2) kids from broken homes where 3) there are no books and no encouragement to study 4) in a culture that derides study as “acting white”, with maybe 5) a lower average IQ and 6) academic mismatch due to affirmative action.
By the way, lowering standards and students taking “studies” courses hurt all races. Plenty of white kids from rich families graduate with no knowledge and a useless degree.
It is insisted by the Woke that the only possible reason blacks do badly in college is racism, thus preferences will fix it.
And professors have been reporting pressure to lower standards for the sake of poorly performing black students. Complaints and accusations from black students. Pressure from deans and other administrators.
…homes where…there are no books…
I know some college-educated people who do not read books for pleasure or for general education outside their professions. I worry a bit about their children, because children do learn by emulation and are therefore less likely to become lifelong readers if their parents are not. I know that the good habits I acquired were ones I saw my parents practice while the good habits I struggle to develop were ones that I did not see my parents practice.
…homes where…there are no books…
In the great majority of black American homes there are no books and the parents do not read.
“ In January, a traditional medicine seller was arrested after a man drank a ‘bullet-repelling’ liquid and was shot dead.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11279901/Nigerian-boy-12-shot-dead-older-brother-fathers-rifle.html
“In January, a traditional medicine seller was arrested after a man drank a ‘bullet-repelling’ liquid and was shot dead.”
It’s disheartening that such magical thinking persists. It’s more disheartening that “woke” intellectuals demand that we not criticize such garbage.
I sneeze in threes
Arthur C. Clarke wants to know if you are a Raman.
Not true. The admissions office can only do basic weeding out.
True. At least at my land grant college where an 1000 SAT score was pretty much in-like-Flynn. When I took one look around at many of my freshman year dormmates, decent guys but not exactly “college material”. Not that that means all that much to me in general but given the assembly line style instruction our academic institutions are based on I could pretty much tell who was going to still be around in a couple years. More fru-fru schools might be different. But then I suppose those institutions have to weed out legacies and such. And women working on that M.R.S. degree.
Though I might argue most actually *should* be weeded out. A college education is a waste of time for even most professional people and has been shown to do significant damage to society in general.
True enough, but there are things that will only be grasped by those 3 or 4 SD to the right
Earnest Rutherford has been quoted as saying something to the effect that a scientific theory was suspect if one could not explain it to a barmaid. Now while I believe that to be a bit of an exaggeration, it has some degree of merit in many regards. There are things that may only be grasped by such people in an academic environment. People who fail to grasp many other things. There are those who ‘grasp’ things because they are told them. Others only grasp things when they are examined from different directions. I trust the latter much more than the former. Academic world puts more trust in the former.
Few dropped out at my university, but its admissions process was pretty selective (SAT and ACT and interviews.) But plenty of freshmen did get weeded out of the chemistry and physics programs by those first two semesters of chem, phys, and calc. Nearly all of them switched to other majors rather than leave the university.
…There are those who ‘grasp’ things because they are told them. Others only grasp things when they are examined from different directions…
Deep understanding usually takes a while: The Feynman Lectures on Physics were aimed at undergraduates, but Feynman and the rest of the Cal Tech faculty found that they were much more suited to grad students. And the Cal Tech students were top-tier.
I know some college-educated people who do not read books for pleasure or for general education outside their professions. I worry a bit about their children, because children do learn by emulation and are therefore less likely to become lifelong readers if their parents are not.
I know a good number of such people myself. They are most of the people that I know. Rarely have I had the sorts of conversations we have here with anyone in meat space. The one guy IRL I’ve had most such conversations with is blind. Literally cannot think of anyone else right now. My parents read books occasionally but I would not call them lifelong readers. Though after he retired my father read a decent amount of history. But most of that was WWII and similar American history with which he was both familiar and a reluctant participant. They were not directly familiar with the GreatBooks, so called. It was my curiosity to read them. While I gathered a great deal from Twain and Tolstoy and Tolkien and beyond, much of that time was wasted on crap. I worry about people who spend too much time reading and not enough time doing. A young man learns more turning wrenches under a car that he is restoring than he is likely to get from J.D. Salinger or Nabokov.
I worry about people who spend too much time reading and not enough time doing. A young man learns more turning wrenches under a car that he is restoring than he is likely to get from J.D. Salinger or Nabokov.
Victor Davis Hanson would largely agree with you. He has remarked that most of the academics he has known were clueless about “the real world”, utterly lacking in mechanical skills, and neurotic to boot. But I am sure that he would say that his academic education was also valuable and the problem with education is not education itself but its current divorce from the real world. Few people with PhD’s are like the Greek tragedians who were also farmers, soldiers, etc.
But apparently, we must now go to the cinema to support causes, or swear fealty or something. Which actually sounds like a terrible reason to go to the cinema.
That.
Organic Chem was just not that hard. And it really does come in handy in medicine.
That.
It does rather suggest a mindset accustomed to deference and indulgence. Of being, as it were, fabulous by default.
To gleefully badmouth straight people in general as “idiots” and “homophobes,” and to disdain non-leftist gay people, and to then complain when those same people, the ones being insulted, find better things to do with their time and money is… a bit rich. As if the self-inflicted dramas and niche in-jokes of a tiny, self-regarding subculture – uniformly middle-class, leftist homosexuals who live in New York – were, or should be, catnip to the rest of us.
Talk about vanity.
And regarding Mr Breslow.
Based on what I was seeing in the media, I was expecting to see much, much worse…
Thank you for this link, I will pass it on to a dear friend in Dublin. Last October she and I were in Florida to photograph a wedding and spent a couple of days at her brother’s home in St. James City on Pine Island. I zoomed in and, as I expected, his home is intact. He chose to stay and the odds were in his favor since he builds homes – his house is as “hurricane-proof” as can be expected with specialized material. I daresay he has a very busy year ahead of him to rebuild his town.
Happy to see the tiki bar across the street from him made it, too.
No no no, the box office failure was fault of audience to show up … cuz homophobia or something.
According to this link, Bill Eichner has a lifelong hatred of heterosexuals and masculine gay men. (Link courtesy of Sarah Hoyt at Instanpundit):
This is of a piece with the film’s ideological slant, which is entirely positioned from the LGBTQ+ or queer philosophy, which rejects the larger, mainstream culture as “heteronormative” and oppressive.
Anger and resentment against the larger culture runs through the film. Consider a revealing moment when Bobby bitterly recounts events from his youth when authority figures in the form of acting teachers pointed out to him that his flamboyant, camp mannerisms will likely restrict the type of roles he will be able to play.
The script lets this indignation spill into the rest of the film, as not only does Bobby express his disdain at Aaron and Aaron’s high school friend Josh (Ryan Faucett) for being masculine gay men, but they’re also basically dismissed as not being the right kind of gay man.
They’re not “queer.”
they’re also basically dismissed as not being the right kind of gay man.
Reminiscent of the “butch” lesbians of the 60’s and 70’s who despised feminine lesbians.
For that matter, it’s also reminiscent of the gay men who loathed women and the lesbians who found men physically nauseating.
Pay attention, kids, a sociologist is speaking.
Pay attention, kids, a sociologist is speaking.
I did like this reply:
Again, it starts with the first lie. After that, absurdities are pretty much inevitable.
These couple of posts clarify something for me. There are butch and lipstick lesbians. There are very effeminate and more masculine gays. But according to the current zeitgeist, the effeminate gays are actually women and the butch lesbians are actually men. Apparently lots of homosexuals have been doing it wrong for generations.
The guy’s drama teacher was right.
Yeah, without sharing bathrooms women would not know they are women. FFS. Say anything.
Pay attention, kids, a sociologist is speaking.
If you poke about, you’ll see that Mr Hope, our sociologist – sorry, ethnographer – has the obligatory attributes – modish pronouns, rote leftist politics, mental health problems, magical thinking, and an inability to sustain coherent argument when things don’t immediately go his way.
Still, we should “dismantle” the belief that these people exist, when clearly they don’t exist, at all, because a woke sociologist says so.
If you laugh at this, you’re a terrible, terrible person.