Impermissible Thoughts
Via Uma Thurman’s Feet, some educational news:
The particulars of which, we’ll get to in a moment. But in the meantime, do feel free to take a guess. Perhaps it could be the basis for a drinking game.
The email to union members, sent by John Vince, the chief negotiator for Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation district 27, is positively heaving with thou-shalt-nots:
As we’ve seen, many times, some teachers and educational bureaucrats do seem rather titillated by the prospect of actively deceiving parents. As, for instance, when middle-school teachers in Missouri were urged to fabricate and publish a false curriculum, purely to hide from parents the details of their activism and what they were actually up to in class. A move pre-emptively described by its proponent, Natalie Fallert, as “not being deceitful.” And regarding which, I wrote:
But I digress. Let’s get back to Mr Vince’s emailed instructions to Ontario educators:
Apparently, tardiness is a human right. Other sins to be avoided include the words blind spot, and the immensely oppressive phrase ladies and gentlemen.
Also forbidden are:
The opinion that women who have male reproductive organs (ex. a penis) may make some women uncomfortable in change rooms or washrooms.
The notion that there are only two genders.
Disagreement that someone could be born in the wrong body or that we all have a ‘gender-soul’.
The idea that keeping secrets from parents/guardians is bad.
These, it turns out, are “right-wing” opinions, and therefore have soul-blackening properties.
Needless to say, this quoted selection is but a small sample, a mere appetiser. Teachers are also warned not to congratulate parents on their child’s performance in a school play. Why this humdrum politeness should be avoided, with the threat of disciplinary consequences, is not entirely obvious and no hints are offered as to the reasoning. It is, however, framed as equal in sinfulness to informing a parent that their child has been “snorting a white powder.”
Because if little Billy is chopping them out in class, it’s now a teacher’s duty to keep parents in the dark, you see.
The full text of the email in question can be found via the link above. Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
Oh, and by all means consider this an open thread.
Are the teachers high too?
Given the enthusiasm for deceiving parents and acting against their interests, and given how often that enthusiasm crops up, they may be high on a sense of power.
I’m heading out in a minute and don’t have time to search out links, but several X accounts, including Libs Of TikTok and Inside The Classroom, have posted quite a few clips of teachers positively exulting in the prospect of excluding and deceiving parents.
In the context of the usual stupid, as stupid as this stupidity is, it was this line item that moved the Overton Window of Stupid the most. My first time seeing or even imagining a couple of these being called out:
What bloody hell. Literally. What sort of an idiot/@sshole makes an issue of those three phrases especially? And what sort of idiots accept being told that they shouldn’t say such things? I mean, besides Canadian idiots. Obviously. This is beyond California-dumb. And the “.etc..;” is just priceless.
[ Returns from adventures, affects air of mystery. ]
So lefties are making religion compulsory now?
Pretty much.
Unintentional (or perhaps not) humor in the new York Times this morning, in an article about Joe Biden “superfans.” The caption reads “Dakota Galban, 28, the chair of the Davidson Democrats in Nashville, brought his life-size cutouts of Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to a meeting of the group last week. Mr. Galban’s partner has gently suggested that he keep them in storage.”
And naturally, it’s a religion of mysteries and contradictions. The gender woo being only one aspect of many. And so, for instance, we hear activists and educators taking umbrage about anyone referring to a mental health issue as being, well, er, a mental health issue. While, simultaneously, those on whose behalf the umbrage is aired often invoke suicidal leanings as a reason why the rest of us must indulge their unhappy fantasies.
A mental health issue, one might note, that we’re told can only be addressed by doctors, surgeons and society in general affirming the distressing thoughts and sense of alienation from one’s physical self. Unlike, say, anorexia. A mental health issue which, in a majority of cases, seems to be resolved by the experience of going through normal puberty. An experience that many activists – and activist teachers – vehemently oppose.
And then there’s the contradiction of insisting that one has some intangible ‘real’ sex that is utterly unrelated to one’s physical reality, but which can only be appeased or made whole, or made less deranging, by drugging and mutilating one’s physical reality.
Mysteries indeed.
Canada is getting a lot of publicity lately, none of it good. There’s a lot of decent, honourable and intelligent Canadians who don’t agree with the ‘malarkey’ going on there but the only ones we hear about is the quacks.
We’re not exactly on the moral high ground over here.
Not sure that’s a comfort, but still…
Indeed. Any bets on whether the ‘gender-soul’ is infused at conception?
“Ensuring women’s and girls’ rights.“
That would be here, I assume.
Not entirely unrelated:
I suspect future generations may look back and wonder what the hell some of us were thinking.
Related? – maybe, maybe not
Spermatozoa
Seminal boy-band name (definitely not trans)
[creeps out into the undergrowth]
[ Orders undergrowth-thrashing machine. ]
Woo woo.
What gender are you?
Nah. It’s the nose rings.
Because they’re too “nice” to say anything, to push back. Obviously not ALL Canadians are idiots (BTW, when and how did the extreme of ‘all’ become the default when speaking of a group unqualified?), nor (obviously?) are they all ‘nice’. And per David re UK, none of us in western civ, Americans, Floridians, Texans, whathaveyou, are covering ourselves in glory, but Canadians, considering their smaller population, are outperforming in the stupid lately. I don’t fault them, nor us, for the individual crazies. Idiots happen. I fault the tolerance of it. And Canada’s reputation for being ‘nice’ is quite the accelerant for stupidity on a broader scale.
The Left used to base its positions on things that were exaggerations but not outright insane. For example, the wage gap for women, which probably did exist at some point. Now it has moved on to completely insane things that are obviously false: shoplifting is not a big deal, crime is not a big deal, trans treatment is totally safe and effective, men don’t ruin women’s sports, all whites are racist, western civ is the most evil ever, and finally, the family is evil and must be destroyed. Oh, of course, not allowing explicit sex books in schools is “book banning”.
A while ago, I was chatting to an elderly neighbour who tentatively and in passing raised the issue of gender woo. Obviously keen to appear nice, she made some diplomatic noises that it was fairly obvious she didn’t actually believe.
By the way, I’m stealing accelerant for stupidity.
He’s a union negotiator accustomed to low-trust environments where the default is to reveal nothing and concede nothing, and he’s telling his members that if they don’t want their retirement plans blown up by vexatious human rights cases, they should treat the classroom as such a low-trust environment. Abandon any idealistic concern for the development of the whole person, just teach the book.
School play: he’s listing it second hand as something that might get a teacher in more trouble than it’s worth, but I suppose the original concern was to avoid a tragic Dead Poets’ Society scenario of a secret gay secret theater kid.
I take that as snarky commentary, perhaps even brave in the context. Maybe you have to get your fun and your pride where you can.
And I live in Ontario and yes, my oldest kid was indoctrinated and yes, we were kept in the dark for 4 years before we found out. Not living in the dark ages here. The school system absolutely was against us. Kid was living a double life as she was trying to figure it out. School system affirmed that she was a he. Hormone therapy and surgery scheduled – all paid for by our tax dollars so there is no barrier, not even an age barrier, to having that done. If I had beaten my kid, abused, been a drunk, unemployed and nasty, I’d understand her backlash. But the school system was the nasty abuser. My second kid is fine, because she saw the manipulation my oldest went through. Mine you, she’s been taught and believes there are 73 genders that can switch at any time….
I once met a male feminist who was so devoted to “combating sexism” that he would say “ovular idea” instead of “seminal idea” when discussing intellectual history.
Band name.
Band name.
OK, Spermatozoa is their first album then
Via Julia, and for no reason whatsoever, I’m just going to leave this here.
And speaking of Americans being stupid, ” conservatives” especially, Ramaswamy points out exactly what I was thinking when I saw 9-0. Don’t spike the football on the 45 yard line. And if that American football reference offends any Canadians…well…
There are days when it seems giving up on the pillory and the stocks was a grievous mistake.
The manifestations differ from place to place but the underlying psychosis is singular – the notion that reality is optional.
Damn. Sorry doesn’t begin to express it. I had people trying to tell me that such stories were fake or exaggerated in about that timeframe. “Oh, these things you are seeing are just one-offs”. They’ve gone a bit quiet in the last year or so. Have you been able to stop the hormone therapy before it started at least?
You shouldn’t have.
I felt an urge to share. I’m generous that way.
I do have more.
What about tar and feathers?
This does not bode well.
(via Theodore Dalrymple)
Time honoured but should be reserved for exceptional cases.
As this gender reassignment thing to children goes, it will never happen but I would be cool with having the people responsible for this madness surgically altered themselves. They can live life just as happy one gender as another.
There seems to be a great discomfort with ambiguity in current society. If you are 1/4 black and aren’t very dark, you still must choose to identify 100% as black even if you rarely experience discrimination. If you are a tomboy, that must mean you are really male. I know a female engineer–was married, had a son. She doesn’t dress terribly feminine (no nail polish, short nails) but is still clearly female. Why can’t she just live her life as she is? If you recognize that society is imperfect, the current view is to go all the way to “worst society ever”. If an historical figure did great things but did not have the perfect current social views, we must disavow them. It is all extremes all the time. But life is ambiguous and messy. Great people can be jerks sometimes. Saints are boring and can be jerks. Who the hell can we look up to?
Isn’t that just alcohol?
“Ensuring women’s and girls’ rights.“
Again with the man-hands! (but he’s got nail polish on so auto-female!)
The double chin doesn’t quite mask his adams apple, though. At least he doesn’t have the wide, bulging-eyed look so many have, like that bearded lady who keeps banging on about cat-fur dildos or something.
Has the head-tilt down pat tho…
some teachers and educational bureaucrats do seem rather titillated by the prospect of actively deceiving parents
I was ten years old or so when my mother began volunteering at the local primary school, which meant her friend group included a lot of teachers. Because she was a volunteer, she was considered an honorary teacher rather than a parent. I can confirm for at least the last forty years, teachers in Ontario have held the general opinion that parents are incompetent and should have no business in the raising of their children; that should be left to the teachers.
Also the Ontario government is owned lock, stock and barrel by the teachers’ unions.
There’s a lot of decent, honourable and intelligent Canadians who don’t agree with the ‘malarkey’ going on
There really aren’t. The vast majority of Canadians want this, voted for it, and will continue to vote for it. The urban/rural divide is much, much starker here; half the population of Canada lives in just three conurbations. There’s no voting your way out of that.
Because they’re too “nice” to say anything, to push back
The late pundit Kathy Shaidle authored a pamphlet called The Tyranny of Nice on this theme some fifteen years ago.
We’re not exactly on the moral high ground over here.
Britain and Canada both rely on something called “the common law tradition” to restrain the power and abuses of government. We can see how well that’s working out.
(In all fairness, explicitly restraining the power and abuses of the government in the Constitution doesn’t seem to be working out that well for the US, either.)
You mean this bearded lady here?
Hey, I’m just getting newcomers up to speed.
And sometimes, oftentimes AFAIC, being a jerk is what enables their greatness. I’m sure King George III regarded the US founders as jerks. Dumping tea into the harbor rather than being a loyal subject and paying the taxes? Jerk. Nailing 95 thesis to a door? Jerk. Demanding perfection from the underlings working in your lab or cube farm and then taking the majority of credit for their hard work and inventions? Jerk. Implying that You are the Son of God, chasing vendors out of a temple? OMG OMG OMG, Big Jerk.
There seems to be a great discomfort with ambiguity in current society
If you believe Piaget, the inability to think in anything but absolutes is characteristic of young adolescents. By late adolescence/adulthood they’re supposed to be able to think in terms of tradeoffs, probabilities and ranges of results.
I think there’s a great deal more evidence than just this that society as a whole has degenerated into a kind of puerility and immaturity of thought.
Well as I have tried and tried and tried to ‘splain to my American brethren, the Constitution only works if decent people remain involved in their own governance. But they only get mad at me. Again, cargo cult explains a lot of this. It’s like civilization is some sort of ether that just IS.
Alcohol wears off. Ideologies persist.
It worked well enough ’til the progressives decided the Constitution wasn’t really intended to restrain the government what with it being such a force for good and all.
N.B. – the first progressive presidents were Republican. There’s something disheartening about a party formed in opposition to slavery being in the forefront of an ideological project intended to enslave the entire populace.
Ream said:
We have extended adolescence by removing consequences until many avoid adulthood altogether. We even have parents helicoptering their college age kids. People who are shocked when they encounter consequences. 20-somethings who avoid work and shun the ladder of promotions while still complaining that their job doesn’t pay enough.