Elsewhere (318)
Christopher Rufo on self-flattering fantasies:
This is fantasy. Hillegass and the young protesters, who work, live, and study in unprecedented peace and prosperity, are play-acting an imaginary historical drama designed to win fawning coverage on MSNBC, not to stop Governor DeSantis from building concentration camps on the beaches of the Sunshine State.
Andy Ngo shares a bedlamite horror story:
Frankly, I’m still processing the words trans therapist. On Twitter, Mr Ngo adds, “As I dig into more disturbing criminal cases involving extreme violence or child sex abuse, I’m finding many of the suspects are trans but are never reported as such by press, sheriff’s offices, or prosecutors.”
And Amy Wax on ‘equity’ versus competence:
Now, that is an Orwellian phrase. I guess I would ask, do the patients who are treated by these doctors give a hoot about “latent ability”? Do you know your stuff? Are you a good doctor? Have you mastered this complex material? And of course, the notion that “latent ability” is the same across the board is pure ideology. […]
Someone once asked me, “What do you think it means when people do poorly on the SAT or the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test]?” I said, “It means they don’t know the answers to the questions.” [So, they then said,] “Well, the test doesn’t measure anything meaningful…” Which is a falsehood – of course it does. Is it the be-all and end-all? No, but it gives you a lot of information.
I had an academic physician tell me, anonymously, that in his department, the one black fellow flunked his board exams four times. And the whole department has to mobilise to make sure he passes the next time… They’re not going to leave this doctor alone until they push him through the meat grinder somehow. But think about the patients who are going to have him as a doctor. It just makes no sense. People have to be allowed to fail, on their own level, and according to a single standard.
Needless to say, other prickly topics are touched on. Professor Wax, and her enemies, have cropped up here before.
Update, via the comments: On the subject of ‘equity’ versus competence, see also this.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
The iron law of woke projection.
Well, given that the “resistance” being championed includes threats of violence and death, mob censorship and physical intimidation, such that police escorts are required simply to leave a building – and all done in an attempt to shut down democratic governance – it is a little… rich.
*snort*
327 who are above the law.
“Deteriorating public safety conditions.“
Unexpectedly!
Perhaps someone doesn’t want the rest of us to notice any patterns.
Big LOL, because REI has long been a very “woke” company.
Chickens coming home to roost and all that.
I see the Activist-Wanker Caste has been acting up again.
Previously in the world of the Activist-Wanker Caste. From which, this:
At which point, readers may note the name of the snooker-disrupting gentleman.
When you live among the feral.
When enough people believe the fantasy, want to believe the fantasy, for all intents and purposes it is reality. And enough people do. The OMG OMG OMG CENSORSHIP!!!11!!!! reaction of many of my friends and neighbors to DeSantis’s attempts to remove porn and leftist dogma and such from our school libraries borders on…well I would say actually is hysteria. All the while these very same people ignore, or are ignorant, or pretend to be ignorant of the far worse censorship that went on previously and is even currently ongoing in our public libraries, and even into modifying the very books themselves and even dictionaries.
I have a couple of friends that while I could easily assume their politics as left, meaning mostly mainstream, old-school Democrats, who have now jumped on this “Drag is not a crime” bandwagon of BS. One of whom even was mildly amused by the leftist hysteria surrounding Trump’s election. Conservatives…”conservatives”, especially the DeSantis fans, need to remember that he became governor of this state by the thinnest of margins. And I fear this 6 week abortion ban will create a significant backlash. Why it’s almost as if it’s a setup for some sort of failure theater. There’s a lot of fantasy out there and it ain’t just the leftist kind.
On boards and MCATs:
Minor point of order, states license, boards give specialty certification. The difficulty over time is that boards have become as much revenue generators to propagate the board (the first rule of any bureaucracy) as certification agencies.
These days most board certifications are time limited, usually 10 years, have a thing called “Maintenance of Certification” whereby one has to go through all kinds of hoops and wickets most of which include paying fees in one way or the other to the board and for usually just south of two grand taking a test which (in my case) was the same as the first time I took the thing except for the new woke questions the answers to which were obvious.
The accretion of the woke crap is the real problem and one has the option of checking the block or giving real answers which would cause you to bolo that part if not the whole damn thing. Hell of a choice.
MCATs – when I took the thing there were 6 sections covering basic sciences and a couple reasoning sections. Each section was scored 1-15. Now there are four sections, two basic sciences, one social/behavioral sciences, and “Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills” (CARS) which is based on – wait for it – humanities and social science readings, so half the test is not real sciency stuff.
To make it more exciting this CARS appears to be weighted as much as the real parts so you could be the second coming of Hippocrates and Ehrlich rolled into one, so essentially unless you recite The Current Thing correctly, you are going to be SOL.
The good news is that this test version has only been in place since 2015, so always ask to see a diploma, but ask everyone, it is the equitable thing to do.
Good to know.
Medical certification boards, and mandated, costly recertification may or may not be corrupt. But certainly in my field, aviation, maintaining “currency” is a necessary, expensive, and never-ending task. Rules, however, are set only by the FAA ( U.S., obviously).
Even to stay legal and safe as a clear-weather only, light plane pilot, is going to cost roughly 5-10 grand per year. Requirements for ATP, Air Transport Pilot, are vastly more.
Not to mention Type-Rating, which is about specific models of planes. Also mandatory.
LOL
When you live among the feral.
“You came in your neighborhood and fucked up your shit … Y’all let the white folks set y’all off once again”… I wouldn’t rely on her taking a principled stand if it was white people’s quality of life that was getting degraded by her co-ethnics.
Big LOL, because REI has long been a very “woke” company.
1930’s, links with Austria, Alpine/outdoor enthusiasts with Germanic/Scandinavian names, clubs, membership cards, oh dear. What percentage of non-white models do we have to dress up in crampons on our website in order to redeem ourselves for our tainted heritage?
How do we as outdoor equipment retailer reach out to blacks even though most blacks just don’t get the idea of traveling miles away from anything to get soaked and sunburned and blistered, they think it’s a crazy white thing. Let’s publish blog posts condemning our historical customer base as racist, and inviting street basketball into the category of outdoor sports. Hey, maybe the outreach worked given that the store was thought to be worth looting.
Yeah, that’s what I need. A brain sugeon that only know about 1/2 of the brain.
This pattern?
But was re-elected by a rather large margin.
Limit his practice to politicians.
But certainly in my field, aviation, maintaining “currency” is a necessary,
Nobody is saying currency is not necessary, and there are lots of ways to get there, but an IP sitting in an office somewhere isn’t demanding you turn in a DIE implementation practice improvement plan during an instrument check ride.
“He told a detective that he had been sexually abused as a child.”
Shocker.
Some hate facts about inter-racial crime.
Those damn hwite supremacist capitalist bassards Walmart for creating food and retail deserts.
You can make a case for liberals paying reparations–not for the harms done by slavery, but for the harms done by liberal policies.
No matter how many black shoes she kisses, this dumb bint should still pay reparations.
What the good Lord giveth, the good Lord may also taketh away. People are bloody stupid. They continue to be bloody stupid. The abortion issue hits women, the stupidest half of the bloody stupid population, hardest. The vast majority of them are not capable of making rational decisions. People, I mean. Not just women. But it’s worse with women. If you follow me.
Oh, I’ll take a stab at being that nobody. I could go either way on whether or not a doctor from say 1975 is better informed than a doctor today. He certainly would not have the disadvantage of the last 50 years of misinformation. And I guaran-damn-tee you he would be far, far less likely to suggest the solution to your child’s problem is to chop his dick off or slice off her developing breasts. But then agin I am rather stupid that way.
Oh, I’ll take a stab at being that nobody.
Unfortunately your stab is more like seppuku.
Your doc of 1975, if he was an orthopedic surgeon and had not maintained currency, would have no clue how to do a total hip, let alone as a same-day procedure. If a general surgeon taking out your gall bladder, he would land you in a hospital a week or so after diving in through a rather large incision instead of sending you home in a day after doing a laparoscopic procedure. Have an arrhythmia? Have some pills, he has never heard of radio frequency ablation. Diabetic – he won’t check your A1c, that didn’t really come into common use until the ’80s and wasn’t standardized till around 2000.
I could fill pages with examples, but if you want someone who hasn’t cracked a book, a journal, or done anything else to keep up to date since 1975, good luck.
Contrary to what you believe, the vast majority of docs are neither “misinformed” (having to sort through sometimes conflicting information, yes) nor invested* in the woke nonsense you have wrapped yourself around the axle about.
*(See 2015 rule above)
Further to the Amy Wax interview, here’s a student with unorthodox preferences.
Which is why you can’t refer to men as males.
https://thepostmillennial.com/alabama-woman-admits-to-killing-child-caught-playing-on-her-property
Another American inter-racial shooting except this time it’s one you’ve almost certainly heard nothing about. It was never the lead story on the bbc website.
I was unable to find any reports of President Biden having immediately rushed to “speak at length”, as the worlds media breathlessly stated, to this particular victims family although unlike the widely reported recent case of Ralph Yarl their son had actually been murdered.
Hollywood celebrities and sports stars were similarly reticent presumably having much more important matters to tweet about.
Discretion isn’t the word.
“MENSTRUAL TOILET” and decorated…
Sound like an upper m-class girls’ school I worked in. Despite the cleaners pleading with me to come and look at the mess (‘Slaughterhouse’ was the actual word) left for them in the toilets, I declined. Part of the frolic was to see how many of their sanitary units they could stick to the ceiling – so I was told.
Just poked through Quillette for the first time in months. I’d forgotten how many needlessly long and rambling articles they publish. Many of their contributors seem to have forgotten, or never known, the value of brevity.
He still won’t chop my grandson’s dick off. Nor is he likely to try to intimidate me into taking some experimental vaccine. In 1975, granted I was young, but aside from class/status I had no idea who he voted for. Nor would I have been sucked into some idiotic conversation about glow ball warmering during a checkup. Don’t know when doctors started sticking their fingers up men’s asses but apparently there never was a reason to do so. There’s a good chance a great many men would still have their unnecessarily removed prostates. Of course by 1975 they had gotten over their collusion with the ice cream companies with that tonsillectomy nonsense. He wouldn’t ask intrusive questions about how many guns we have. And don’t get me started on the dietary BS.
People lived full and happy lives in 1975 without such idiotic intrusion into our lives. Were we ignorant of some things? Yes. But many things we were supposedly ignorant of turned out to be falsehoods. We knew our doctors…well somewhat. They weren’t a bunch of corporate robots and it certainly wasn’t the Dark Ages.
Discretion isn’t the word.
Oh, it’s in Spain. They really seem to be on a well greased slippery slope straight to Hell recently. If I’m not wrong I believe they legalised bestiality, provided no harm comes to the animal of course because they’re not completely insane. Yet.
That killing got very little coverage in the mainstream news.
Similarly, there have been a number of random killings by blacks of Jewish white men and Chinese men in Chicago. Those killings were largely ignored by the mainstream news and the racial aspect was especially ignored. It is horrible that a black kid was murdered for innocently knocking on the wrong door, but here we have repeated cases of blacks going out looking for whites and Asians to kill and the liberal ruling class ignores it.
Well, my personal physician has never asked me any inappropriate questions.
And although the group he belongs to has added gender/pronoun questions to their standard patient identity questionnaire, nobody has pressed me when I left those questions blank.
Remember how, for decades, the accepted wisdom was that stomach ulcers were caused by stress and that dietary changes were the proper treatment? And now we know that ulcers are caused by a bacterium. The earlier false beliefs were not due to any political agenda, but rather to the awkward and halting way that medical knowledge sometimes advances.
For a good example of bad medicine caused by politics and ambition and bribery, look at how dietary fat was demonized starting in the sixties. Remember “butter and eggs are bad for you”?
Speaking of ‘equity’ versus competence…
Ben Sixsmith interviews Kittie Helmick.
“I apologize for the length of this letter, but I did not have the time to make it shorter.”
–Blaise Pascal
I strongly suspect that most of the writers at Quillette are untrained. But also that bloggers in general are writing in a hurry and do not take time to polish their prose–or even to check it for errors of spelling and grammar.
I favor tests which are designed to reject leftists…preferably down a chute into a scorpion pit.
Yet.
One of the people I was thinking of is a professor of philosophy.
That may support my contention. 😀
He’s just like you, ladies. One of the girls.
I’ve occasionally wondered whether my posts – as opposed to my comments, which can get windy – are too concise. This morning’s visit to Quillette has reassured me on that front. I had to plough through nearly 2,000 words of lifeless prose before reading something that resembled a point. At which point, the halfway mark, I realised that the rest of the article could be abandoned without any great loss.
“Why aren’t you letting us in?” they screamed.
People lived full and happy lives in 1975 without such idiotic intrusion into our lives.
Albeit with ailments now easily treatable. If you are going to doctors asking you the things you claim them to be asking, you make poor choices in doctors.
As far as digital rectal exams go, they have been done for ages as long before modern imaging modes, PSA, or DNA tests, the only way to examine a prostate or rectum was to go in. A DRE can tell a lot about a prostate, hemorrhoids, polyps or early colon cancer, injury, with a quaiac card, bleeding elsewhere in the GI tract.
You think you have prostatic hypertrophy? 25 cents for a glove, KY, 10 seconds of discomfort, or $500 for a pelvic MRI – your choice.
If that is not a piss take, you need to adjust your tinfoil hat.
Some ulcers, not all, for example NSAID use, and the “old” causes can exacerbate existing ulcers, and the “old” treatments can help ameliorate. Regardless, knowledge marches on, the world is neither flat nor the center of the universe, malaria is not caused by “bad air” and WTP’s ulcers, diagnosed with a barium swallow, would still be treated by his never current 1975 doc with a bland diet and antacids because H. pylori wasn’t nailed down until the ’80s, and treatment later.
There is a journalism style which does that intentionally–partly as a clickbait tactic to keep the reader longer, and partly as a tactic to disseminate irrelevant opinions to readers who just want to get to the point.