Is The Fondling On The Test?
Via Nikw211 in the comments, some classroom incongruity:
Parents of kids at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, California say this video was played to their kids in math class. The kids clearly didn’t want to watch this pride video so the teacher threatened them with Saturday school to get them to watch it. pic.twitter.com/FUnB9DKYrN
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 11, 2023
To paraphrase, but only very slightly:
Not a good look, really. Presumably, the conceit is that any gay pupils will somehow feel affirmed – rather than, say, mortified, or made complicit in something that’s naff and contrived, a vaguely weird imposition. And note that the teacher is the one scolding the kids for being “inappropriate.”
But imagine being a gay kid in the class, possibly a gay kid not entranced by ‘progressive’ politics. Suddenly, the classroom is a world of rainbows and cringe, something the rest of the class groans at and resents having to sit through, again – and it’s all supposedly being done for your benefit. It does rather suggest an unhappy dynamic.
The video, made by other students, and apparently shown in all classes, is presented as both a sentimental review of time spent at the school and an appeal for tolerance and “acceptance” – of cuddling lesbians, glitter-adorned transsexuals, and people with imaginary genders and pronouns. “Don’t forget to love each other,” intones the narrator. It’s very much framed in ‘Pride’ terms – i.e., in terms of social and political “change.” Of “fighting,” alongside “allies,” against unspecified dark forces. As if the purpose of being at school were to become some kind of activist.
Presumably, the forces being fought against include people who think that time in a maths class could perhaps be better spent.
Several people have commented on Twitter and YouTube that the video is unobjectionable and in no way “propaganda.” Well, seen as a child, without wider context, perhaps. But it seems to me that the readiness with which the children have internalised ‘Pride’ and its rainbows and non-binary woo as something unassailably benign illustrates rather well just how effective the propaganda has been.
That the ‘Pride’ movement is intensely political, increasingly extreme – one might say unhinged – and entails rather more than “tolerance” and “acceptance,” is not acknowledged, of course. Apparently, it’s all hugs and sparkles, and being nice.
That the same banners, the same rainbows, the same compelled groupthink, are invoked and deployed to sterilise and mutilate children, and to actively deceive parents, and to make a farce of women’s sports and women’s intimate spaces – for instance – remains unmentioned. And once you’ve demonstrated your acceptance of the flag and all that it entails, what could possibly go wrong? Because it’s all just so nice.
[ Expanded via the comments. Which you’re reading, of course. ]Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Attention potential employers.
And yet my cousins, and I think this is true for most MotR and right-leaning people, especially women, may privately and somewhat privately complain about extremist leftism but then proudly put on their rainbow sneakers with rainbow shoelaces etc. when they attend the Pride parade. Also, one should not raise an eyebrow about furries either. I do notice that their husbands stay home. So at least there’s that.
For the last 40 years I have found it very annoying when people whom I don’t know, or whom I am not on somewhat close familiar relations, and especially small children address me by my first name rather than “Mr.” Now we’re supposed to address f****g mental cases by however “they prefer to be addressed. Because it’s just polite”. And conservatives…”conservatives”, and especially even the more conservative-y of conservative…”conservatives” don’t just say this but tell me to do this? Yeah. Fuck that. Fuck that nine ways to Sunday.
Well, it seems to me that rewarding insufferable narcissism and pretension – or affirming the fantasies of the mentally unwell – is not the kind of thing one should be doing, really. Even assuming one had the time and inclination.
Damn near as bad as blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas.
There is no place for hate in Waterloo.
The pious burbling by the City Of Waterloo Twitter account is extraordinary. It doesn’t sound like a person was involved in anything it churns out. It sounds like a programme running. The more it burbles its inanities, the more I can understand people who feel a need to waste tyre rubber on defacing a silly crossing paintjob.
One for the Fuck That files.
Appears that this concept is becoming A New Thing™, and also belongs in the GFY Files – if you get to use “your” pronouns for yourself, I get to use mine for you, it is equitable, after all.
If it was just rainbows and cringe, that’d be one thing. But it’s not.
It’s the fact that every second of the day that a teacher spends on rainbows and cringe is a second that they aren’t teaching the subject they were hired to teach. Which disproportionately leads to learning loss among the student demographic that is least likely to have resources to recover form that loss.
If there was *ANY* evidence that spending time on rainbows and cringe helped the alphabet kids do better in school it might be worth evaluating it and figuring our why that is….but there isn’t.
Even if there was evidence that it helped the alphabet kids, there’s ALSO evidence that this kind of indoctrination damages non-alphabet kids through distraction, social contagion, etc. THAT alone would be enough to relegate this garbage to an optional after-school class.
But we all know that’s bunk.
This is all about fomenting a social and political revolution.
Why do they want a revolution? They don’t have a reason. They haven’t thought through the ramifications, other than they think it’d be cool and they’re rich, foolish, and bored.
There is also no place to reply to their tweets for us normies.
“I’m not letting you film children”
Odd way to say “We don’t want you to show what we are really showing them“, but OK, I guess.
Negligent really isn’t the word. This is being done with malice aforethought.
But that’s the very definition of a “sane revolution”. D. H. Lawrence explained this in one of his pens. It was even featured in a Mott the Hoople (band name) album. If you question this you’re just a stupid philistine who should not be listened to about anything else. Ask me how I know. Go ahead. The Cancel Culture Club (band name) is nothing new.
Shouting “There’s children everywhere” is probably not the W she thinks it is.
Shouting “There’s children everywhere”…
Meanwhile, at the Tate Museum…
Mott walked the tightrope between brilliant and ridiculous to perfection. They had a great time, never took themselves too seriously if at all and made records that still sound good 50 years later. As a teenager I loved them.
Tate Museum.
Something has gone horribly wrong in Stamford Hill.
Not your fathers Yeshiva.
Nothing to see here, it identifies as a mongoose.
And I as well. Which was why it stuck with me. It’s just so bloody stupid. Back then it seemed like right about the time I started liking a band, someone important in it would die or they would break up or they would show something about themselves that was undeniably stupid. After a while I tried hard to not pay attention to such things which was very difficult given the music focused crowd that I ran with. Getting a real job helped, I must say.
Music was a huge deal when I started at my all-male secondary school. The need to “fit in” was every bit as important then as now.
On one hand there was the Yes, ELP, Genesis, Pink Floyd faction with their polar opposites being into Black Sabbath, Led Zep, Deep Purple and Ten Years After. A very hip sub-sect had even discovered Poco and the Allman Brothers. Everybody liked Bowie.,
Bands like Mott and Thin Lizzy provided enormous fun to those of us in the middle while retaining a degree of respect from both extremes who were probably secret fans anyway.
The problems with rainbow etc presentations in schools:
1) It is explicitly sexual and presented to children.
2) It wastes school time (as someone noted)
3) It is overt political brainwashing–only representing one view of the world. Where is the presentation on abstinence and going to church?
Mott walked the tightrope between brilliant and ridiculous to perfection.
Ian Hunter had a lot to do with that. I followed him for a while when he went solo. His back-to-basics musical style was a great relief from the over-the-top prog-rock of the time. He played at my University when I was in first year. Great show.
Speaking of open thread…
Amazon cancelled a guy’s house, because his doorbell was racist.
I fucking kid you not.
I hear that leftists’ favorite band is Motte the Bailey.
And a deranged, fantastic, view it is.
I’m still trying to work out how someone could hear “racist remarks” from “Excuse me, can I help you?”
I’ve lately been very suspicious of how many “celebrities” have *transkids*.
Suspicions confirmed.
Thing is, it wasn’t.
Corporations are not your friends.
Sounds white supremacist to me. What sort of privilege does that exude? Honky bastards.
Is of course the culturally approved greeting.
Probably the same way people are oppressed by others not using their pronouns.
Economy sized narcissism.
Corporations are not your friends.
And it is just another reason why our house will never be “smart”.
I even look suspiciously at the printer when it makes noises on its own.
Amazon cancelled a guy’s house, because his doorbell was racist.
Talk about setting yourself up for failure – three strikes, and yer out.
Racist doorbell.
Damn. I was so hoping it played “I wish I was in Dixie”.
“while retaining a degree of respect from both extremes who were probably secret fans anyway.”
I remember members of XTC, when they were starting out as a punk band, having to keep secret their love for music outside their genre (like classical), because their punk fans would have hated them for it.
Good musicians follow a wide variety of music to learn and grow, which is one reason why they’re good.
Economy sized narcissism.
More like Giant Family Size.
Note that in the photo of her overflowing seats she is using as an arm rest a portable oxygen generator and her nasal cannula tubes are clearly visible, which just screams “positivity” and so Pickwickian she can’t tolerate 6000 foot cabin pressure pO2.
“Healthy at any size!”
Another Brobdingnagian chimes in. Horseshit. Being 6’2″ is not a choice, being 5’2″ and 400 lbs is.
I think I first read about the Tate’s descent into trendy “woke” lunacy around 20 years ago. Probably in The New Criterion or a column by Theodore Dalrymple.
But, but, I thought punk was all about rejecting the imposition of categories and mandatory ideas. /sarcasm
The climate change made them cold so they had to keep warm somehow, I guess.
Heh…yes, similar here. I have a broad range of interests in music so it was sometimes a when-worlds-collide challenge to keep the Yes/ELP/Genesis/Pink Floyd guys away from the Black Sab/Led Zep/Deep Purple/Van Halen/Cheap Trick guys. The latter of whom could find some common ground with the George Thorogood/Muddy Waters/Johnny Lee Hooker crowd. Then when you throw in the B52/Talking Heads/ABC/TearsForFears(God help me) it gets real dicey. And then there were the Reggae/Ska guys to really mix things up. It got rather complicated at times.
My college roommate was of the Led Zep/Kiss/Yes/Guitar Gods variety with a touch of Rockabilliy thrown in. He was the sound guy for a band that I used to hang out with. The guitarist of this band (Jack Sizemore) went on to be guitarist for Jason Aldean’s band. Which kinda surprised me and kinda not. They played pretty much the Led Zep/Van Halen/Rolling Stones/Black Sabbath stuff with one or two of their own thrown in.
Corpor not your friend: about 10 yrs ago I tried google ad words for my side gig consulting. I tried a couple of word combos, all innocuous, and then was banned for life from using ad words for a crime they would not explain. I am guessing it looked like spam but when I called and tried to explain they just said the decision was final. Remember when their slogan was “don’t be evil”? hahaha
XTC were very good musicians, didn’t spit and didn’t have spiky hair. More New Wave than Punk. This was about as edgy as they ever got. Catchy tune though.
https://youtu.be/9_Zg_ZWfYkg
WTP
Have you seen the YouTube videos of Cheap Trick playing alongside one of their heroes Roy Wood of Move/Wizzard/early ELO fame. All of them having the time of their lives. Absolute magic.
Yes and no. I was a fan for a while. I can’t recall the specifics but I remember some interview they did where they espoused some sort of commie dogma and from that point I couldn’t ignore the posturing in some of their lyrics. Specifically I recall “Working for paper and for iron/Working for my right to keep my tie on”. Yes. Yes. Having a bloody job is slavery. Yes. As I may have been saying above, the less you know…
We live in an age of strange bedfellows.
Indeed. Murray AND Bindel agreeing? T’is surely the end times.
I had to look up that poem by D. H. Lawrence. Talk about fatuous!
God Save Us from intellectuals. So many of them lack wisdom and even human decency.
But speaking of D. H. Lawrence, I was just recently listening to an interview with Theodore Dalrymple in which he commented on the intellectuals who spoke in defense of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, even lying on the witness stand because they didn’t want it to be banned. (It wasn’t great art; it was very bad art.) But we already know that those same intellectuals were Strangely Silent all their lives when the left set out to destroy careers and reputations and lives.
especially women, may privately and somewhat privately complain about extremist leftism but then proudly put on their rainbow sneakers with rainbow shoelaces etc. when they attend the Pride parade
It is always, always, always about seeking elevated social status in the herd, regardless of the consequences.
There is no place for hate in Waterloo.
Sadly there’s not much place for sanity there any more either. Lived most of my life there, and the city is 100% beholden to the economic activity of the two universities. Once upon a time the city set fairly strict boundaries on how much left-wing douchebaggery they were going to accept – the occasional attempts at Critical Mass traffic disruptions never made it out of the WLU parking lot – but over the last decade university hangers-on have managed to get themselves into local city politics and the bureaucracy.
It’s ironic to recall that twenty years ago Waterloo ended up taking over the municipal functions of its neighbour, Kitchener, because Kitchener was a dysfunctional, corrupt shithole.
Re XTC. That’s so often the way. Joe Strummer was an absolute prick but a seminal musician. Tom Robinson made a mint out of singing protest songs like Right on Sister and Glad to be Gay, then once his career had died down woke up one morning to realise he’d been straight all along and shortly afterwards had a wife and family to prove it. In those more innocent days you could be cutting edge without actually cutting anything off. Even Bowie while pretending to fellate Mick Ronson on stage was in reality banging the cute Scottish songstress Lulu at home (as any musicologist should know this is why she recorded Man who Sold the World). Which indirectly brings us full circle back to Mott the Hoople although I’m pretty sure no banging was involved in All the Young Dudes.
The thing about ambitious mediocrities is the ambition grows – as does the mediocrity.
Which indirectly brings us full circle back to Mott the Hoople although I’m pretty sure no banging was involved in All the Young Dudes.
And no “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” either. Mott turned down the opportunity to record Suffragette City.
Something reminded me of the book “Intellectuals” by Paul Johnson. Excellent dissection of some big name brains of the past 200 yrs who were truly awful people and whose ideas killed millions but who academics loved loved loved.