For newcomers and the nostalgic, some items from the archives:
Pantomime.
Sociology lecturer wants you to be disconcerted by his stockings.
Dr Cremin doesn’t seem to grasp, or isn’t willing to admit, that his craving for public transgression – to, as he puts it, “sow gender confusion in kids” – by which he means young people over whom he has leverage – reveals quite a lot about his character. And his fitness to teach.
I hate to sound prim, but if I were – God help me – a sociology student, I doubt I’d be reassured by the fact that my lecturer felt entitled to use the classroom as a venue for his transvestite fetish. It does rather suggest a pathological level of self-involvement and raises a suspicion that students may find themselves playing captive audience to – or being reluctant participants in – some personal psychodrama. A kind of power game. Some variation of, “I can do this, and you can’t stop me without being accused of bigotry.”
Let’s Do That Thing That Doesn’t Work.
In which resentful narcissists give really bad advice.
And so, we find a seemingly endless parade of preening, pretentious dolts telling us that poverty, and staying in poverty, never has anything to do with bad choices, including the choices that they themselves encourage. As, for instance, when telling us, emphatically, that “a couple cannot raise a child better than one [person] can.” And that the “diffusion” of the family unit – which is to say, absent fathers, hardship, and subsequent dependence on the state – “is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation.”
Yes, divorce, estrangement, and sudden-onset poverty. It’s all terribly exciting.
The Bedlamite Solution.
He’s a campus counsellor and he’s here to help.
When not using the word “whiteness” as a modish pejorative, and “questioning Eurocentric ideas surrounding mental health,” Mr Soto plans to “challenge the historically-dominant whiteness” of the campus and thereby “create a more open environment for students.” This heavenly state of openness and resurgent mental wellbeing will be rendered upon the Earth by telling students at an upscale and statusful liberal arts college how oppressed they are and by invoking racial conspiracy theories, the aforementioned “whiteness” and “white supremacy,” as the root of all distress.
Readers will recall that Middlebury College is where students suitably gorged on “inclusivity” and “social justice” display their righteousness and mental stability by physically menacing elderly scholars, trying to trample them underfoot, and assaulting female staff, such that they require a hospital visit and, subsequently, a neck brace.
Only Doing It For The Betterment Of Us All.
Come, dip a toe in the world of “queer studies.”
Mr Andersson tells us that during three months of, er, research, and 30 notebook entries, his mind often wandered to thoughts of other gentlemen doing much the same thing with the same publications, including the copies he’d acquired second-hand. This is described as a “feeling of intimacy.” Dozing off afterwards is described as “self-care,” which is apparently important. And we’re informed that the Cellophane wrappers of his pornography collection “signalled luxury and investment in myself.”
Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Blimey, look below. I see buttons.
An exchange of views.
Nothing says “pride”, love, tolerance, and acceptance quite like being kicked in the ass by an orange mop-haired troon.
The woman being assaulted, repeatedly, in the name of tolerance and puppies, is, in her words, a former trans-rights activist. I’m not quite sure what she was hoping to achieve, though. I mean, the people who attend such events, and who screech about how loving and tolerant they are, aren’t usually there in order to have their assumptions challenged.
Chris Elston, mentioned here, has managed to engage a few people in civil, one-to-one conversation – as opposed to howling and jostling – but that’s quite rare and doesn’t usually take place in the middle of an animated mob, at least not initially.
The Dark Triad* of personality traits correlates with membership in these “activist” movements.
* Psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism.
Or better yet the Dark Tetrad, which adds sadism to the mix.
Or better yet the Dark Tetrad, which adds sadism to the mix.
They are generally neither smart enough nor well read to be Machiavellian. Either substitute sadist for Machiavellian in the triad, or change it for “ovine” in the tetrad.
See also.
More “pride” love, tolerance, and acceptance, and thank goodness there is no bigotry, hatred, or prejudice – though threatening to kill someone on an NYC subway is a bit ironic.
Yeah, because that’s what education’s all about: making kids confused. I don’t care what someone wants to “sow confusion” about; if he’s not bringing greater clarity to his charges, he’s unfit to teach.
Speaking of bringing clarity, I re-watched a couple of episodes of James Burke’s Connections the other night. Greatest TV show ever made. And one of them touched on why, uniquely, the Europeans travelled all over the world spreading their culture to every corner of the Earth. James didn’t make a big deal of it in the context of the story he was telling, but it stuck out like a sore thumb to me watching in the here-and-now. Was it because they were hell-bent on subjugation? Or might it have been because the Turks took Constantinople and cut off the infidels’ long-established overland trade routes with the far east?
Sailing across oceans with 15th-Century technology is hard. Dangerous, too. You only try it if you’re all out of options.
I disagree: I have met plenty of leftists who were very Machiavellian, maintaining a pretense of compassion and respect in their public personas, all while working to destroy our liberties and society.
It’s rather rare even in one-to-one conversations.
My leftist friends echoed They Might Be Giants and insisted “that’s nobody’s business but the Turks”.
Yes indeed:
Tolerating and supporting such institutions and individuals is akin to nurturing plague rats.
I have met plenty of leftists who were very Machiavellian
The few, the vast majority are ovine.
…echoed They Might Be Giants…
The Four Lads 1953, TMBG version is a brummagem cover.
Well, maybe. But it doesn’t matter: Pathological people do not all exhibit the same mix of dark traits.
From what I remember, the first series is by far the best.
That last detail is revealing.
It also helps to confirm my hesitancy over the use of the word bravery in the original post.
It’s one thing to remain stoical in the face of noisy abuse from that kind of activist when they try to disrupt a scheduled talk (as we’ve seen happen to, just off the top of my head, Heather McDowell, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, and Janice Fiamengo to name but a handful).
But it’s quite another to wade right into the middle of the activists’ parade, on their day.
So it’s interesting that she presumably cut her protesting teeth as one of them.
Apart from that, the most striking detail for me was the girl in the pink top and baseball cap who clocks the woman with her giant pink handbag and then turns around with a look of wonder and shock as if to say “Wow! Who on Earth did that?”
That, too, is very revealing.
Sorry – I meant Heather MacDonald.
I blame it on the unseasonal appearance of the sun.
[ Fetches Giant Pantaloons Of Shame. ]
I think one of the things that makes the activists a worse problem is that there are currently multiple issues that can be claimed to be “life or death”–climate change, the environment (if you ignore how much cleaner things are than 80 yrs ago), trans rights, general injustice, and of course racism (if you squint and ignore all the progress). 80 yrs ago, people disagreed on many issues, but they generally were not viewed as life or death.
‘Elicit’ not ‘illicit’.
I’d blame it on voice-to-text or limited spell-checkers but I’ve run into similar homophonic confusion (‘tenant’ for ‘tenet’, ‘break’ for ‘brake’, &c.).
End of peeve.
Intelligence isn’t a requirement, nor is being well read: a certain low, animal, cunning combined with ingrained malice does quite well enough.
Spelling and grammar: Everyone must tow the line.
[ Edges towards the door. ]
“ScientificAmerican Lysenkoism” is at it again, tackling the climate hysteria about (magnifies browser) mixed drinks.Trucking around slabs of ice certainly sounds eco-friendly. Maybe they use bike messengers with giant Igloo coolers on wheels.
Closed, OK – never let it be said AmLy doesn’t go to real experts.
I wonder if they use clipper ships to tote all that champagne and black currant liquor around the world, for the eco-friendliness and sustainability.
Tow the line, why not?
Nice cultural reference. And that’s where the editors at SciAm want us peons to be.
Another Repin allusion:
This blog community, commenting on the latest SciAm idiocy.
♪♫Everywhere is freaks and hairies♪♫
Indeed, often one and the same.
Don’t sweet it. I’ve been having considerable difficulty the last few years with words I once knew how to spell or use properly. Things that when I saw other people use them improperly would have made me cringe in the past. Recently someone tried to dismiss my entire point because I said ‘looser’ when I meant ‘loser’. I then felt compelled to point out to said language nazi that he missed entirely where I had also used ‘to’ where ‘too’ was the proper word. So at least under the associative principle of the conservation of vowels I was still correct.
That’s an awesome song by Toto.
Speaking of language stuff… has anyone else noticed an increase in the use of not-logic in legal stories? Things to the effect of “The Supreme Court declined to review a lower court’s rejection of the challenge to Governor Bumpkis’s veto of the legislature’s bill to prevent local communities from banning widget blockers”?
Also…Tow Toe, band name and album cover:
Spelling and grammar: Everyone must tow the line.
Oldie, but a goodie…
I know you meant ‘tow the lion’.
Don’t know about the bottom three, but hard to argue with the top two.
Bowie tune?
Update
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/professor/karlandersson
And more
https://karla74.userpage.fu-berlin.de/
From the link:
and:
We are dealing with monsters.
Or, instead you could just, you know, not bother pretending.
The university’s oddly belated response, months after the fact, and the indignant, contrived defences of Mr Andersson by other academics, didn’t exactly help on that front either. Nor did the public’s discovery of what now passes for scholarship.
The actual paper is remarkable only in the author’s self-involvement and how little there is there. The lines quoted above – about a “feeling of intimacy” and the wrappers of Mr Andersson’s porn stash – are much of the supposed substance of the thing. The rest is largely narcissistic rambling – as “autoethnography” usually is. Apparently, the author saw no need to “explore” the moral and legal ramifications of his own preoccupations, or the pathologies. Ditto, the supervisors who accepted his “research.” And this, it seems, is considered good enough for academia’s Clown Quarter.
And then we were treated to equally ludicrous affectations of innocence. According to which, hoarding paedophilic pornography, and having produced it for many years, with sexualised photos of small boys juxtaposed with headlines about the rape and murder of children, apparently has nothing whatsoever to do with the real-world abuse of children. “Why would we think that?” he asked.
As noted in the original thread:
It’s almost surreal.
On the subject of academic nonces gathering round to protect one of their own let us not overlook the fact that earlier this week MPs, including 25 conservatives, voted to derail a bill which would have gone a long way towards curtailing gender transitioning in schools.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12239043/Bid-ban-social-gender-transitioning-schools-narrowly-killed-MPs.html
it is worth noting that nearly 89% of MPs did not even bother turning up to vote presumably having more important things to do with their time.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/29/thames-water-crisis-feargal-sharkey-sunak/
But has anybody asked Limahl of Kajagoogoo what he thinks?
Contrived defenses which the public is expected to accept uncritically.
Once again, Theodore Dalrymple:
And:
pst
That applies to so much these days. Not least the UK government/establishment, for they are one and the same, and it’s professed claims to be really trying to halt the endless flow of fighting-aged males being shepherded across the channel
by our navy and lifeboat charity to a luxurious and open-ended free stay in a 4-star hotel safe in the knowledge they will never be obliged to leave.
“But we’re really trying to do something, we hear you, it’s just that (insert excuse)”.
You’re the fecking government. You can pass laws.
And there are already enough laws, yes? But the politicians won’t enforce them.
As I’ve said elsewhere if the government, with their 80 seat majority, somehow pass a law:-
It will already have been delayed and watered down in the House of Lords.
Civil servants will immediately say it’s not possible to implement it and refuse to do anything.
A taxpayer funded law firm will appeal in the courts.
So will numerous taxpayer funded “charities”
The bbc will do a “Panorama” exclusive the same evening.
A different taxpayer funded law firm will then go to the Court of Appeals.
Backed up by more charities.
And the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And Gary Lineker.
A third taxpayer funded firm will then go to the Supreme Court.
Then the ECHR will step in.
So will the UN.
President Biden will make clear threats to severely damage our economy.
So will the EU.
And finally all this is assuming our Monarch will have signed the bill to give Royal Assent. That’s not a gimme.
Speaking of feking government, oh look, we will learn when it is TEOTWAWKI if we don’t cut back on energy use according to this (cleans glasses) billboard sized energy sucking LED screen doomsday clock.
Can I take these off yet?
They chafe in somewhat surprising places.
Sure, people outraged by something are just producing performances. Literary crit comes to destroy the real world.
[ Fetches pantaloons made of coarser material. ]
The denials of intent, and his general disingenuousness, were particularly farcical and unpleasant. As if we weren’t meant to know that Mr Andersson has spent his entire adult life propagating and trying to normalise the sexual abuse of children. An activity he finds arousing.