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.
Google: they have lost their way. I recently did a search on banks in my town to look for CD rates. It pulled up 3 and then a long list of ads. The same thing happens for repair services or anything. Used to be it was more like the phone book with all the X in your town. Now it is maximizing revenue while fucking up utility to the user. .
I have had the same experience: A search for a particular type of business may fail to return businesses that I know exist while including businesses that in no way fit my search criteria. Searches will also include businesses far outside the zip code or city specified.
My experience with Google searches, too, is now largely a waste of time with a preponderance of irrelevant and unrelated results..
Yup. Google search now seems primarily to be a tool used by Google to hide information they don’t want you to find. It’s as good as ever for non-contentious subjects like food recipes for example, but their creeping, creepy censorship is invading any vaguely political, commercial or activist area.
I fear those recipe searches will not survive unsullied for much longer.
Maybe it’s just a cope because of that one-boob-bigger-than-the-other thing that women get. Some women anyway.
re Google, I think I related that I first noticed it going downhill about 2017 or so when I was puzzled how a perfectly normal search on a technical programming thing I was troubleshooting returned a few political/news links. I don’t recall the exact word I was using that caused this but I do recall the moment when I realized that one of the words in the search had been recently politicized or in the news or something. It might have been something related to ‘kafka’ as that was the tool I was using at the time. I don’t think it was ‘kafka’ itself but it might have been something down in the topic/cluster/partition aspects of the tool.
Now it is maximizing revenue while fucking up utility to the user.
Same with their hellspawn Youtube and the new 2+ minute infomercials you can’t skip past, ads randomly popping up rather than during logical breaks, and their trying to block adblockers so you don’t have to put up that that crap.
If they don’t already it wouldn’t surprise me if they started inserting ads based on the content of the email in emails of people mad enough to use gmail.
The robot trundles around every day, and gets emptied every day, and yet there was a lavishly furnished bird’s nest worth of fluff in the thing.
Do you have carpets or hardwood floors? I am guessing it’s a combination of carpets and the mechanism by which a robot vacuum works being different than the larger Hoover or Dyson types. The robot vac mainly uses brushes to sweep the dirt into a compartment (I think?) instead of suction, and so a minute bit of carpet fiber may come up with the dirt particles, which, cumulatively over a day, may bond to the dust, shed skin, hair, soil, and other things to form “fluff”.
There’s a whole shedload of research now on “microplastics” and “microfibers” being shed by the act of washing your clothes, which probably does occur (friction), so it doesn’t seem farfetched thinking of a robot repeatedly brushing the carpet and removing micro-bits via friction.
I’ll see myself out now – gave that way too much thought.
[ Startled, he remembers to check his unloved Gmail Inbox ]
Dammit – I missed a website-pimping opportunity!
Worry not!
[ Glides across fluff-free walnut floor. ]
Ours does both, and surprisingly effectively. It also mops, though not always with the same success. More of a slightly damp wipe.
We waited for days, you know. Tears welling in our eyes.
Needs a soundtrack.
There’s a whole shedload of research now on “microplastics” and “microfibers” being shed by the act of washing your clothes
Which means clothing is the next thing you’ll have to give up for the planet. You’ll wear nothing, and be happy.
Is the inability to render a swastika another Google’s ‘improvements’?
Or making the point polyurethane doesn’t convey much in the way of sensation.
Zelazny stuffed rather a lot of sarcasm into Creatures of Light and Darkness. One of the many reasons I miss his writing.
I did find out recently that he wrote two children’s books – Way Up High and Here There Be Dragons, both illustrated by Vaughn Bodē.
Well, there was a time…never mind…
Still banned from IHOP?
Dude, it was Waffle House and Kid Rock thought it was hilarious. He was going to write a song about it but my lawyer asked him not to.
That reminds me: The Feast of Saint Pancake is March 16. Waffle Day is March 25.
Which means clothing is the next thing you’ll have to give up for the planet.
Well, only cheap synthetics. I guess “natural” fibers are ok. But, yes, that is exactly the hysterical conclusion to which this sort of research leads. It started with that elementary school kid’s crappy science project on straws and ended up with big grant money but it had to pass Climate Hysteria to get there. Microplastics were the hot sexy thing for awhile, but not enough scare until they filtered fine enough to discover synthetic microfibers and then they could amp it up a lot more.
The idea that friction causes micro-bits to slough off clothing, skin, fur, etc is nothing new – we used to call it “dust” and get on with life. Now it’s planet-ending hysteria, because they can go after oil-based synthetic fabrics and fabric blends.
Next up – how to make ice (for when it gets warmer and you can’t go ice fishing anymore).
[ Consults dusty, arcane books of boilology. ]
In Europe I believe they have banned mixed fibers, so that clothing can be composted. So no more tough synthetic fibers for the stitching…as if anyone composted clothing.
As for straws and plastic bags–almost none of what is in the ocean comes from the developed world. Big rivers in Asia and India wash crap out to sea because people dump their garbage in the river AND ocean-going ships can just dump their garbage overboard which was fine when it was all degradable. No reason on earth to ban straws and plastic bags. Plastic bags are far better for the earth than paper.
Well, OK, he is a Methodist, but I guess he confused their classes on “love thy neighbor” and “how to draw a swastika for thy neighbor”. Apparently flunked that one anyway.
Most of that is from ‘recycling’ companies that sent it over there.
One of the few remaining?
It’s a fierce love. A progressive love.
So I had the TV on in the background playing old episodes of McCloud, an early-70s cop show set in NYC.
Here comes a bureaucrat into the precinct, announcing that the city is anxious to promote racial proportionality in the ranks. And given that white people make up X% of the population, “we’ll have to fire 11 black cops and a Puerto Rican.”
The eye-rolling among the characters. It was presented as a “you gotta be kidding” moment of levity. The bureaucrat became nervous and eventually left.
50 years ago. They saw the implications 50 years ago, but even in Hollywood they knew it was absurd.
And yet here we are.
If it were the month of May around here, it would be the cottonwood trees fluffing off.
Like in Leviticus?
I suppose one has to ask an obvious question. When you’re both A Man Of God and insufferably woke, and you champion every fashionable cause, and you then spend your evenings furtively indulging in the kinds of harassment and creepy antisocial behaviour that you claim very loudly to stand against – and then, when challenged by the victim, deny it, despite being caught on camera – exactly how messed-up, how psychologically aberrant, do you have to be?
It reminded me of Kerri Dunn, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, who screeched about a “crisis of hate” on campus, and then slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages, before walking over to puzzled onlookers and asking if they’d seen who was responsible.
Borderline Personality Disorder?
Well, I think we can assume Madam was not entirely well.
More on which tomorrow.
[ Slurps coffee, considers toast. ]
At the time of the original post, I was trying to imagine what it must’ve been like to be one of the bewildered onlookers. Watching some unhinged far-left educator, a professor of psychology, vandalising her own car. And then – because the scene isn’t mad enough – she walks over to you, feigning victimhood and distress, and asks you if you saw the “white supremacists” who did it.
The obvious answer is, “Yes. Yes I did see the white supremacist who did it.”
And to then realise that you’re in an educational environment, a fiefdom of progressive piety, in which hysteria is ascendant and actively encouraged, and in which utterly unhinged people – supposedly professional educators – enact their weird psychodramas.
They are The Beasts That Shout Love at the Heart of the World–although the perpetually indignant Harlan Ellison would volcanically object.
It must be quite strange to inhabit a worldview that’s loudly and hysterically announced, on a pretty much daily basis, and which departs all but entirely from observable reality. A worldview so dependent on fantasy that its inhabitants have to repeatedly fabricate evidence for their breathless, ludicrous claims.
I mean, it’s strange enough just to observe them.
In a related manner we find ourselves in an intersectional crisis during what would have been a routine traffic stop in Philadelphia, “I work for the mayor!”
It occurs to me that a person accustomed to saying that, to using it as an all-purpose excuse, is quite likely to behave in ways that result in being handcuffed. And starring in faintly ludicrous YouTube videos.
Woke clergy: if your job is to be empathetic and help people, as a clergy-person, the temptation to go woke must be extreme. After all, you are fighting evil. That you might do the most good by leaving people alone and keeping your mouth shut…well.
Only if the border is massive.
I suppose so. Though the woke people I’ve featured here over the years, and those I’ve encountered personally, don’t strike me as particularly empathetic. In fact, I’d say that their worldview pretty much requires a failure of empathy. Along with a near-total blind spot when it comes to the actual values and assumptions of, say, those who look at wokeness with a raised eyebrow.
Such that, for instance, you spend your time exulting in traffic obstruction and the recreational frustration of countless random motorists, even emergency vehicles. Or vandalising art galleries with paint and hammers. Or pouring oil onto busy roads, an act morally analogous to sabotaging the brakes of random cars and motorbikes. Or furtively scrawling swastikas on a Jewish neighbour’s groceries.
Things of that kind.
Regarding the kinds of people who, for shits and giggles, can gloat and feel powerful while frustrating a random man desperate to get to work, or to get his child to hospital, or who can gleefully immobilise an ambulance or fire engine… well, empathy isn’t the word that comes to mind. Quite the opposite.
I’ve previously used the term recreational sociopathy. Which sounds about right.
Weaponized recreational sociopathy
As noted here:
But hey, maybe that’s just me.
And this seems apposite.
In a society without consequences for these sorts of behaviors, where those who oppose these sorts of behaviors are far more likely to face real consequences for their even most passive objections, what would reasonable expectations for outcomes look like?
Do I have something stuck in the spam filter or did I not hit post ‘properly’?
Nothing in the spam filter.
Is it possible you’re intoxicated?
Is it possible you’re intoxicated?
More likely your excessive lint and fuzz has clogged it, it is important not to keep it too close to the Link-O-Matic 9000™.
Unlike in the days of Typepad, when the spam filter was a topic of much comedy, comments are now only likely to be intercepted and held for approval if they include five or more links.
[ Strokes Link-O-Matic 9000™. ]
…comments are now only likely to be intercepted and held for approval if they include five or more links.
Well, sure, if it not clogged with fuzz and lint. It is like a dryer that way, only works if the vents are clear.
Unfortunately, no. No as in not currently intoxicated but yes, lately that probability at any given time has gone up rather remarkably. If at first you don’t succeed…speaking of drinking…
In case anyone is looking for something to do in GA for St. Paddy’s Day…
Heh. I see you’ve been huffing marker pens too.
By the way, this is not to say that comments with many links are frowned upon – they may be justified – but they will most likely end up in my ‘pending’ folder until I remember to poke about in there.
In between dealing with Muldoon’s hourly grumblings about my choice of commenting software and its formatting toolbar, pictured below:
[ Strokes Link-O-Matic 9000™. ]
[ Strokes Link-O-Matic 9000™. ]
I’d recommend caution, those things have been known to go off prematurely. Ugly business.
Clergy: to clarifty–In the early days of civil rights protests, clergy were rightly in the forefront of protests. Recently, however, some have continued to support for example BLM in spite of their clear Marxist leanings, financial corruption, advocacy for shooting cops, and involvement in riots (not protests). Some clergy have become very very left-wing, supporting causes from the pulpit that are directly contrary to scripture. Interestingly, social justice denominations have been bleeding membership whereas more conservative churches have been growing. Another version of get woke go broke.
Remember the Sandinista nuns?
Are you sure it’s not actually a Lint-O-Matic 9000™?
Remember the Sandinista nuns?
Remember the present Pope?
[ Glares indignantly ]
I was about to post that.
But in reality the Lint-O-Matic 9000™ removes lint from the Link-O-Matic 9000™. Eventually David will discover that he always needs another -O-Matic 9000™ to deal with the problems caused by the latest model purchased.
Time to distract David’s ire with grumbling about the local Wensleydale drought.
Are you sure it’s not actually a Lint-O-Matic 9000™?
It would explain a lot.
Can go for days without doing so.
Heh. Kinda like the present VPOTUS. Maybe for similar reasons.
he always needs another -O-Matic 9000™ to deal with the problems caused by the latest model purchased
You jest, but this is literally how the consumer electronics industry works.
Like in Leviticus?
Wouldn’t want just anyone walking around pretending to be a rabbi, now, would you?
Oh! Spectacles, spectacles, wherefore art thou?
Remember the Sandinista nuns?
I read that as Sandynudist nuns. Mother Earth sect.
The things you learn, all this time I thought to understand it all you had to know it was to keep the Scots and Mexicans out.
It’s an effing cult.
Well that was an odd comment spam.
I think there should be an “About” link at the top, explaining where you and your other half live and what the two of you do other than producing this blog.
…explaining where you and your other half live and what the two of you do other than producing this blog.
What? Give away the air of mystery and intrigue, not to mention the location of the HQ of the Guild of Evil?
These days the rozzers would be on him like a duck on a junebug.
He also gets 15% more pay for being a mother and his his own room in the barracks.
If you are going to game the system, might as well go for broke.
If you are going to game the system, might as well go for broke.
Interesting, the different cultural approaches to fighting the Woke cult. In the North we attempt to critique the trans away with rational argument. Down South they’re attempting to spam it to death.
I guess we’ll see which approach wins.
“…but on the inside, I am a lesbian,”
Aren’t we all
I suspect we are all in danger of multi-year prison terms for what we’ve said here.
I guess we’ll see which approach wins.
“Look at me. I’m the Cloward-Piven strategy now.”
You kind of have to imagine the Captain Phillips screenshot.
Sure is working against sanctuary cities!
And the denouement’s headshot?
Sounds like a very messy post-credits scene 😂