I expect to be busy for a few days. However, being a gracious host, I’ll leave you with some items from the archives:
Marking Their Territory.
Two radical identity groups struggle for toilet dominion.
Naturally, the first task was to give the toilets a makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti, thereby communicating the life-enhancing qualities of prostitution: “Less abolitionism, more whoring,” and “less TERFs, more sex.” Needless to say, the conflict has escalated… With the facilities now being used by rival tribes, all gorged on intersectional compassion – and with so much graffiti to be written and responded to indignantly – students are reporting queues and “lengthy wait times.”
You’re Reading The Comments, Right?
When wokeness is ascendant and apparently quite stupefying.
Pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in
Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.
Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.
No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction, “These playing fields… are never theoretically far from plantation fields.” Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million.
The D-Words.
On supposedly racist traffic cameras.
Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.
No Relation.
“Diverse identities” and euphemistic convolutions.
I can understand the reluctance to appear indelicate or to cause needless offence; and in some situations, there may be scope for polite fudging. But pretending-as-default, or worse, pretending-as-law, can lead to unhappy farce and a kind of collective derangement. And the media presenting the reader with an obvious distortion of reality, and seemingly an expectation that we should all pretend too, is also rather offensive.
Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well.
I bring you art. And atomised dairy products.
The mighty talent featured in the following video is artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose work teeters on the edge of profundity, as will doubtless become clear, via juddering and convulsion, and the strategic deployment of 25 pounds of powdered cheese. Come, sup ye at the teats of creativity.
Consider this an open thread.
Goodness. Buttons. I wonder what they do.
(Supposedly) Einstine kept his phone number written on a piece of paper in his wallet because, why waste memorizing on something easily looked up.
Not your usual Easter eggs.
Always read the manual.
Or Einstein. Whatever. I had burgers to cook.
So many awkward facts. What’s a liberal to do?
[ Writes note to self to remind self to change chuffing oven clock. ]
Yes, but despite the faffing, think of how chuffed you will be if you get the chuffing clocks right on the first go.
It is hilarious if you think about it. On the one hand, they insist that people are interchangeable and DEI can just promote anyone into Harvard no problems. On the other, they view themselves as an intellectual elite that the lumpenproletariat should defer to because of their massive brains.
The Blank Slate by Pinker is a great takedown of this stupid view of humanity. As to Jordan Peterson, he has some interesting things to say about what should we do with people who are IQ 85 in the modern world?
They were saying much the same thing in the sixties when I was a child: Kids who did badly in high school should nonetheless be admitted to college because they would, in some unexplained way, magically catch up. Much as they also proclaimed that “social promotion” in grade school and high school would not lead to kids falling further and further behind.
Eventually, after so many generations of failure, one must consider the possibility that the left-dominated teaching profession is interested in something other than the success of the students.
I long ago threw away the user guides
I’ve found that you can generally search for PDF copies of nearly any user manual for a typical home appliance. Which is fortunate, as the single modal knob on my microwave is apparently hiding the Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail, or the true original of the Declaration of Independence. One of the three.
On the one hand…
That!
I’ve found that you can generally search for PDF copies of nearly any user manual for a typical home appliance.
Agreed, generally. But you forget, fellow countryman, they make subtle changes to model numbers and serial numbers in our country that are often not supported on-line and there is no cross reference table available so you can easily tell the Canadian equivalent of the US model.
I’ve had some appliance issues recently…
As an aside, while trying to post this comment after posting my previous comment, I got a message telling me I was “posting comments too quickly” and to slow down. I fear David must have it in for me. I don’t post with near the rapidity of pst314 or WTP.
That is, pretty much, a recurring contradiction. A signature of the genre.
And so, you’ll find English graduate Joseph Kugelmass, mentioned in the linked piece, displaying his progressive credentials via an incoherent article titled There Is No Such Thing As Intelligence. In which he insists that any acknowledgement that some people are more clever than others is merely an “essentialism… a technology of power,” and therefore something to be “abandoned.” Because it “impedes and confuses pedagogy.” And he writes this, in contrived and status-conscious language, while basking in his own imagined mental superiority over the likes of thee and me.
And likewise, you find Lani Guinier, a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and advocate of “critical thinking,” whose egalitarian pretensions compel her to insist that standardised testing is “racist” because “talent is equally distributed among all people.” And she does this while denouncing those who beg to differ as mentally inferior to her own glorious self.
Or senior philosophy lecturer and Guardian contributor Nina Power, who tells us that she and their peers no longer need to be knowledgeable or competent in any conventional sense, on grounds that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – well, just because – “everyone is equally intelligent.” While simultaneously bemoaning insufficient taxpayer indulgence of people such as herself. Our self-imagined betters.
It is well known that the BBC produces all kinds of Woke™ dreck, but to celebrate Good Friday the German equivalent, ARD, says Halte Mein Bier.
Chuff and chuffing are excellent words. The possible meanings, depending on context, are quite varied. I think we’ve discussed this before, some years ago.
One can, for instance, be chuffed, as in gratified, delighted. “My daughter won first prize. I was dead chuffed.” This is not to be confused with the noun chuff, which can mean anything from a disagreeable person – though it’s often used sarcastically or affectionately – to cannabis, or a downstairs orifice or either type.
“I can’t pull away from him – he’s right up my chuff,” as Jeremy Clarkson once said, excitedly.
But, as an American, I enjoy “misunderstanding” Britishisms for comic effect.
Demonic possession?
Therapist attempts to shame normal people who don’t want to participate in the delusions of the gender-confused.
There do seem to be a lot of therapists who are themselves more than a little insane, sometimes even malevolent.
More boneheadedness from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.
But is it really boneheadedness, or is it malice disguised as “principled right-leaning libertarianism”?
I. See. What. You. Did. There.
[ Successfully resets microwave clock. Roars with triumph. ]
“Critical thinking” has become a euphemism for “lying”. And an example of how the left corrupts language for evil purposes.
It is well known that the BBC produces all kinds of Woke™ dreck, but the NHS says “Hold my propofol infusion”.
Well, there’s not much thinking, for a start. Nothing that resembles autonomous mental activity. And the things of which they’re prepared to be critical are remarkably narrow and predictable.
The list of terms in service of wiping away even the idea of sexual orientation has grown again.
Another thing that has been true for decades. It’s rather safe to say this now, but imagine trying to get people to understand this decades ago. Even amongst conservative types. And it’s not just “a lot”. It’s virtually the entire profession. The Jordan Petersons are a barely significant minority.
IIRC Clinton was going to nominate her for SCOTUS seat eventually filled by The Notorious RBG. So there’s that…blessing.
Given the circumstances, the proper way to deal with these narcissistic reprobates.
Today is “Transgender Day of Visibility”. Like this. And this. And this. And this. And this.
Curious about that. Link? Not clear exactly where the demarcation line twixt IQ 85 and IQ 90 lies. I would presume an IQ 85 can still care for themselves, hold some sort of a job, and partake in basic social functions. It’s not so much of a deviation that it cannot be made up with a little extra effort. What more than the standard guidance one might give a teenager would such a person need? We shouldn’t need to *do* anything with them. They should still belong to themselves. They do need a strong moral and rationally based society in which to function, but hey, don’t we all?
Well TBF he is somewhat onto the oft observed problem of how people who are perceived to be “smart” based on their station in life and/or breeding (so called) create disasters. But then again he’s likely a function of that very problem.
I just noticed that in my comment regarding Einstein up above, I f’d up the paste of the context, re:
At my state comprehensive, the span of ability ranged from a girl who’d memorised the entire periodic table, and could happily discuss it, to people who didn’t know their own postcodes and couldn’t be relied on to find out, or to retain the information until the following day.
Very bright people often come across as profoundly stupid outside of their domain of expertise. Some of this is a function of The Spectrum thing but others it is a matter of fitting in. Consider Einstein’s buddy Kurt Gödel. There was a story I read in a book about various scientists and such that Godel needed to get his American citizenship. For some reason circumstances had now required it and they were a bit nervous if he would/could pass the test. I believe they even had to seek out a friendly judge to administer it. People with 85 IQ’s are naturalized all the time. Imagine if by some terrible circumstance this same biological being lost his parents in some tragedy and was consequently raised by well intentioned, say 85 IQ parents with no connections nor means of getting him into a university, even assuming that possibility occurred to them.
At a less extreme level of intelligence, there were people whom I worked with who were considered useless in one department or corporation yet when I happened upon them elsewhere or heard of their subsequent employment, they were doing quite well and were appreciated. The reverse occurred as well. People who were doing quite well in the departments or companies in which I worked, others from the domains which those folks came were a bit surprised that they were working out.
Peterson has talked about this in a number of his podcasts and lectures. He frequently cites a United States Army study which found that people with an IQ below about 85 (83?) simply could not be trained to fill any useful role in the military. He also relates a very sad experience he had trying without success to give vocational training to a cognitively challenged young man.
So, Peterson asks, given that about 15 percent of the population has an IQ of 85 or below, what do we do with them in an increasingly technological society? Do we just warehouse them and forget about them? Do we try to maintain some set of jobs that can be done by low-IQ people? Do we subsidize their employment?
[ Notices that earlier comment is trapped in the spam filter. ]
Curses upon the Spam-o-Matic 9000 for functioning as intended and as we were warned!
I have a low tolerance for sitting through podcasts and lectures but I make exceptions for people like Peterson. I take it your links that should appear shortly are regarding this.
OK, so we are talking below 85, which I guess I could have inferred…but that’s a wide range itself. If we take a 75-85 range, I stand by my point with slight modifications in degree. We’re talking about people who can, for the most part, take care of themselves. They just need the sane and rational structure of a sane and rational society more than the rest of us.
I imagine not much – unless destruction is an accomplishment.
I don’t have any saved links. However, you could go to his YouTube page and search his podcast and lecture channels for “intelligence” and “IQ”.
Want.
The young man could not even master the task of stuffing envelopes for an NGO.
Ignore them. They’re quite practised in that.
Malice, combined with pretensions of intellectual superiority.
Even those with Down Syndrome or related conditions thrive when they have structure and purpose. My late sister-in-law was such a person. She lived as independently as possible … a small apartment (with her similarly situated boyfriend) near public transportation, held jobs (e.g.pizzeria folding boxes and other small tasks), was part of a supportive church community and was looked after by her parents and a social worker who all lived nearby. My late in-laws took them on trips and we all gathered for family holidays. She was happy, talkative and didn’t need to be institutionalized given the support system she had.
I’ve been getting bombarded with spam recently, hence my tweaking of the spam filter. The number of false positives should reduce quite quickly. (Do note, however, that comments with five or more links included will likely be intercepted and held for my attention.)
Apologies for the inconvenience. Comments released.
Hence my self-mocking comment about the Spam-o-Matic 9000.
And no apologies needed: I’ve been wondering how much spam you’ve been forced to deal with which we don’t even see.
Not your fault. It’s the spammer’s fault.
Well, yes. Quite.
So, Peterson asks, given that about 15 percent of the population has an IQ of 85 or below, what do we do with them in an increasingly technological society? Do we just warehouse them and forget about them? Do we try to maintain some set of jobs that can be done by low-IQ people? Do we subsidize their employment?
Even Huxley’s society in Brave New World had a need for Epsilon Minus Semi-Morons.
[ Eye twitches. ]
Apologies for the inconvenience. Comments released.
A comment I made last night got held for moderation. It had no links in it. The message was, I was posting too fast and needed to slow down.
I did notice I was generating considerable heat on the keyboard.
In which he insists that any acknowledgement that some people are more clever than others is merely an “essentialism… a technology of power,” and therefore something to be “abandoned.”
It’s not surprising that these idiots are drawn to an ideology which dismisses objectivity. We’re all intellectuals now. All one has to do is make a silly assertion and ignore everything which disputes it. Rinse. Repeat.
See almost anything here tagged academia. Also, the pages of Scientific American.
Brave New World was written in 1932, when there was far less automation, though.
My understanding is that most jobs which the sub-85 population can do also require government subsidy or other concession to make them economically viable for the employer. What’s more, there is a move afoot to abolish laws allowing subminimum wages for people with disabilities and move those people into the regular job market. How this is supposed to work I don’t know, as the rationales seem to me (admittedly an outsider) to be ill-founded. I suspect it is being done chiefly at the behest of trade unions and utopians.
You know, I did warn you about the disadvantages of those steampunk keyboards.
[ Slides bottle of Dibbler’s Elixir down the bar. ]
In less than 4 hours Scotland’s new “hate crime” law goes into effect, outlawing anything less than praise of all “sexual orientations”. I suppose that many of my comments here will go into their Thought Crime database, so I might as well add one more: Scottish politicians really screwed the pooch on this one.
Are you respecting Avery’s pronouns?
He’s very proud, you see.
Being “a whole woman” and all.
Having to respond to a text is violence, and other utter horsecrap from the “Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle” struggle session at Rutgers, which used to be a respectable school.
As the “Trans” Day of Visibility wanes, I can’t believe we have to wait till November for “Trans” Awareness Month. The LSTNKVD+# folx will be nigh invisible till then.
(duplicate – deleted)
From that same account, bystanders applaud.
I’ll assign him some pronouns: deranged/barking/moonbat.
[ Eyes unopened bottle. ]
You know it’s good for you ’cause it’s got herbs.
And alcohol. Lots of alcohol.
The world’s greatest Wikipedia edit.
Jeremy Clarkson finds something about America to praise.
But what do sharks have against the UK?
Mike is still whistling past the graveyard here but I sense the whistle slowing down as he realizes the things he has had to ignore, or pretend to ignore, are having real, serious consequences.
It’s not just some great misunderstanding. There has been a conscious effort by the people who present themselves as unbiased observers of the news, of society, of the culture in general to destroy Western civilization. They were burned very, very badly by the collapse of communism. The popular travel writer Bill Bryson even caught me a tad off guard when he lamented this. When the 2008 financial crisis hit within the lifetime of these goons, they saw the opportunity to drive the wedge hard. To prove that they were right all along. These people have huge egos that were not going to pass quietly. Not while their leadership was still capable of ginning up another great emotional surge. Stupid, stupid conservatives…”conservatives” got pulled in just like with the Great Depression and let the left define reality, the collective illusion, the culture and push the Overton Window hard left. While Mike may be right in asking “But are we really?”, what matters is the illusion, the mass psychosis not just with all this tranny stuff and the TDS, etc. but the culture much more broadly. That’s the only “reality” that matters.
Trans Day of Visibility: 117 year old Portland church destroyed in arson attack
Why let the jets have all the fun?
Trans Day of Visibility: COS shooter, Denver shooter, Aberdeen shooter, Nashville shooter, Philadelphia shooter, Perry shooter.
“critical thinking”–by this the Left means “be critical of anything traditional, no matter if it seems to work” the “thinking” is just an add on word.
The delusion that all humans are equally capable is simply a figleaf to cover envy by people who cannot build, create, innovate, or do art. In fields in which output can be quantified, the range of output is staggering. For example, in academia (where they all think they are smart) and counting only the sciences in schools where publication is part of the job, lifetime output of profs ranges from 0 to 200+ publications. When I met I.J. Good, the mathematician/statistician/chess master when he was about 60, he had over 1000 publications.
IIRC, :Unix was mostly written by 2 guys whereas Microsoft had 1000 people trying to update Internet Explorer and could not succeed.
How to show “critical thinkers” the respect they deserve.
Pre-emptive detention looks better and better.
[ Glances at clock. ]
Scottish Parlament…sheep…Scottish judiciary…sheep…Scottish police…sheep…Scottish intelligentsia…sheep…Scottish voters…sheep…
Have to lengthen the cycle. 15 minutes should do.
I have a black friend, a plumber, who I admire greatly. He has no use for race grifters or separatists. I am always aware that I am way way smarter than he is so I have to not use my stories and jokes that would be over his head. But we are great friends. He was telling me about as a kid in chicago he was told not to cross some street because blacks had to stay in their neighborhood. He said, “can you believe it?” we laughed.
In an Oliver Sacks book he talked about a young many so disabled that he could not function but when he sang in the choir he seemed to rise above his disability, to join in community and devotion.
I guess I’m not up on modern culture. When I read the sexual orientation “greysexual”, I think it’s somebody who has the hots for old people.
They seem to think that all positions at work are essentially sinecures, as if my ability to perform a particular task better than most people had jack-all to do with getting hired.
“Hey, she’s white,” said the universe, “let’s randomly give her a bunch of stuff so that non-whites can’t have it.”
I taught Spanish 101 as a TA at an Ivy. Spanish 101 has no prerequisites. Theoretically, anyone can come off the street and be in the same boat as everyone else.
The black students who came from the inner city still struggled with the basics of what it even meant to acquire a language. Their handwriting betrayed an absolute lack of teaching. (This was the 90s, when handwriting was still a thing.) And their abysmal performance on tests indicated not a lack of study but a lack of learning ability.
I felt really bad for them. They had a good attitude and were obviously the types of people you want in your society, but they were WAY in over their heads, to the point there was no path to catch up.
Imagine not knowing anything about organic chemistry and suddenly you’re in a third-year course. You would pick up on absolutely nothing, because you wouldn’t have the fundamental framework in place. Every word would be gibberish to you.
nota bene: I wouldn’t have qualified to be an undergrad at an Ivy, either.
It’s because the welfare of the black students isn’t the top concern: having a racially diverse freshman class is all they care about. The black students are just props in university administrators’ psychodramas, there to goose the numbers so that university presidents can preen before their peers.
Makes me mad. Those kids are being dished up a steaming heap of failure on a silver platter, when they could have done better in a less-prestigious school that was more their speed.
You think you hate college admins enough, but you don’t.
The git commits alone had to be pretty gnarly, and the merges/rebases would never end.
Regarding those bothersome heritable traits. A thread.
From the replies, exactly what I was saying earlier:
Also, the comments about many progressives believing, or acting as though they believed, that if some aspect of reality – say, regarding intelligence – is ideological uncongenial, or sounds a bit mean, then it can’t possibly be true.
And the comments about progressives expecting parents – normal people – to disregard the evidence of their own eyes, regarding their own children, in order to show woke fealty.
This is not parody.
From the BART link:
Expansive gender is n+1?
Oh, bugger! Sorreee…
[ Fixes shameful formatting. ]
The blockquote button is your friend. Stroke it. Tickle it. Make it purr.
We await the “I am being stabbed” cards. And the “The man next to me is masturbating” cards.
It has the makings of an unhappy board game.
See Price’s Law (or Lotka’s Law) which states that half the publications in an academic field come from the square root of the number of contributors. Something like that seems to also work in such non-academic fields as software engineering. If there are 4 professors of X (or engineers), 2 will produce half the output. If there are 100, 10 will produce half the output. And so on.
This jolly sight came to mind:
No, don’t thank me.
There is a tendency for software tends to start out with a coherent design/structure but to lose this over time as numerous people make fixes and enhancements while either unaware of the original design vision or unable to make the new features fit into that design. Short term expediency is a frequent sin. Eventually it becomes desirable to just do a complete rewrite. And then there is the problem of having to support quirks which a large user base has become accustomed to.
[ Looks askance at America’s ruling elite. ]
Maybe I shouldn’t cast too many stones at the Scots.
Especially since failure is very likely to so demoralize them that they will won’t try a less prestigious school but will just give up. And some of them become politically radicalized, persuaded that their failure was not due to a mismatch between their abilities and the school but rather was due to a racist conspiracy to keep blacks down.
Same goes for “social promotion” of unqualified students regardless of color: The Marxist religion of radical equality demands that countless children be sacrificed on the altar of the Blank Slate.
Ditto high school and grade school educationists.
We condemn as evil those pagan religions that practiced human sacrifice. We should condemn this modern religion on the same grounds and to the same degree.
The Queer and Fat Club has a membership issue.
The blockquote button is your friend. Stroke it. Tickle it. Make it purr.
Nice pussy
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own.
With bonus open thread.
Is that a euphemism for “men who use saline injections to enlarge their scrotums“?
Theirs are.
Can you cast too many stones at the Scots?
Cue Harry Roy & His Bat Club Boys.
Gotta save some stones for American liberals.