Reheated (90)
To keep you quiet, some items from the archives:
Activist students conjure excuses, project wildly.
In short, the students are admitting, albeit unwittingly, that in fact they are the inflexible and bigoted ones, the ones preoccupied with racist and ageist stereotypes, and are incapable of feeling “comfortable” with people whose appearance differs from their own. Apparently, for them, learning is next to impossible unless they are being taught by people who look just like them, are of a similar age, and who share the assumptions of a subset of nineteen-year-olds who are very much accustomed to flattery and indulgence.
The University of Cincinnati peddles mental poison.
But Why Aren’t People Rushing To Buy My Art?
It’s like art, but much less so.
The guide notes, rather earnestly, that the first attempt, by Mr Carvalho – to envelop his head in bread, string, and assorted meat products – prompted more amusement from the tiny audience than the subsequent repetition of it by Ms Cochrane. This is presented as an invitation to “a fundamental shift in paradigm” and some allegedly profound insight into gender politics. Or, how “different actions are read on different bodies.” Our artistic deep thinkers are seemingly unaware of the concepts of novelty and diminishing returns.
The Clown Quarter Now Has An Engineering Division.
Rigidity and stiffness, and other sins.
Dr Riley is the author of the little-read tome Engineering and Social Justice, which she describes as “an attempt to explain the lack of emphasis on social justice in engineering.” The term “social justice” is, we’re told, “difficult to define” and “resists a concise and permanent definition,” a problem illustrated by the author’s own struggle to arrive at a convincing definition, despite deploying the term on every other page.
But apparently, engineers need to spend less time doing load-bearing calculations and more time pondering “radical protest” and “Marxist traditions.” Needless to say, Dr Riley opens the book by congratulating herself for having devised “alternative ways of thinking” that are “challenging,” and which, for those less enlightened, may be “difficult to understand.”
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Jesus Titty Christ. From their own mouths…
From the obvious implications of what they say, certainly.
She’s an intellectual, you know. We must gather around her mind for warmth.
Meanwhile, just when you think you’ll never read anything anymore that will surprise you….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13317919/woman-wheels-corpse-bank-loan-staff-dead.html
Do you think she’d ever seen ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’..?
For some reason – amidst, well, everything else – the word that stood out was “carer.”
This. (And the rest of it.)
*hits tip jar*
They’re basically preening little shits whose obnoxious vanities have been deferred to and indulged far too often. Even the Times article that I quote in the post is woolly and evasive. The obvious objections to the students’ demands – and their bare-faced racism – go entirely unacknowledged. There’s a revolting spinelessness that compounds the dysfunction.
Bless you, sir. May you know your neighbours (but no more than you’d care to).
They’re basically preening little shits…
Speaking of whom, I am down with this “occupation”.
They should have been told to take a running jump the first time they tried it on.
As if I wasn’t depressed enough, I’m making my way through the four-volume “Modern Authors 1900-1950” encyclopedia. This chronicle of generations grew up in the Victorian / Edwardian eras is a collection of genre fiction writers, historians, philosophers, classical scholars, humorists, art appreciation experts, children’s book writers, and cranks (e.g., Alistair Crowley) — basically anyone who wrote a book of note.
They lived in an era where a 15-year-old boy with no educumation could become a newspaper reporter and at 18 rise to managing editor (a small town newspaper, but still). Where they could get a medical degree without going into six-figure debt. There were young men who traveled to the Yukon for the gold rush, and walk the earth finding work where they may (cattle-raising, mining, clerking). Where they could write several novels before reaching an audience.
In short, a lot of freedom to succeed and fail.
And the scholars would write books on philosophy, classical Greece and Roman, and translate important works. They put serious effort into creating works that could advance knowledge. Not always successful, of course, but they tried.
That’s only the tip of the impressions I’ve received. I’ve been highlighting them and I’ll go back and cull the best bits. I mayhap even share them with you.
Here’s what I mean. Opening at random, I found Ernest Augustus Boyd (1887-1946), Irish-American critic. Here’s the highlights that struck me:
Truly, we are living among intellectual midgets and milksops.
(Sorry I’m blathering on. David, is there a word limit to comments?)
Not that I’ve noticed.
I dunno, but heaven help you should put a link in there!!
[ Mutters darkly about Düsseldorf ]
Indulging such bare-faced claptrap only encourages more of it, and louder.
When Preening Little Shits spend their time publicly and emphatically slandering others, insulting them, and falsely accusing people of being racist – based on nothing beyond their own moral and cognitive shortcomings – and while demanding unilateral exemption from normal educational proprieties, including factual correction, as this is deemed too stressful – then those Preening Little Shits should expect – and deserve – some quite vigorous pushback.
Public derision at the very least.
But instead, they encounter shoe-gazing, hand-wringing, and accommodating mumbling, safe in the knowledge that the more obvious explanations for their academic underperformance will go unmentioned.
[ Strokes comment box toolbar, feeds it biscuits. ]
Am reminded of this, about a somewhat similar man:
Actual LOL
I’ve upped the number of permissible links to 6.
[ Awaits gasps, applause. ]
It’s gloriously unhinged and utterly oblivious. I mean, how dare those engineering students waste all that time on understanding materials, and stresses, and load-bearing calculations, when obviously they should be learning about “Marxist traditions,” “radical protest,” and “diverse ways of being.”
We need a really big machine that can slap all of these fuckers simultaneously. And as often as necessary.
Also:
“He has no feelings. It is the secret of his success”
–Oscar Wilde .
Taken from this website dedicated to odd books by cranks, crackpots, and frauds.
Public derision at the very least.
Speaking of which…
Tangerines celebrate cis-patriarchy and misogyny.
However Health and Safety are on it:
This could be a bit problematic at the “studio” because “We serve a selection of drinks and snacks before the performance and during the interval from our bars on each level”.
We live in profoundly stupid times.
…accusing people of being racist – based on nothing beyond their own moral and cognitive shortcomings…
Speaking of which…
Because there was never a black country singer before Beyonce pretending to be one, and the dearth of blacks in (cleans glasses) blues is deafening.
I suspect that for “Holly G” there was no history prior to her birth, and I grow supremely weary of every thing having to be “welcomed” and/or “welcoming”, and/or people not “feeling welcomed”.
This right here is the root of 95% of our civilization’s problems. In the post-WWII era we have demanded delayed adolescence from our young people, delayed responsibility, delayed starting families, etc. etc. etc. All with the supposed goal of (supposedly) needing people to be “smarter”. It’s a giant mind-f*** that we need to wake up and recognize the damage that it is doing.
I knew there was something suspicious about Karl.
Sigh. I remember museums before they went woke: Endless exhibits devoted accurately describing the real world without injecting ideology.
[ Recalls the somewhat fascistic imagery of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”. ]
Engineering is racist: Boeing illustrates what happens when a company de-emphasizes engineering calculations in favor of DEI. Ironically, engineering schools are dominated by foreign non-whites (unless you count middle-east and asians as white) who do not seem deterred by their brown skin from doing calculations.
If black students insist on having black professors, there are in fact dozens of black colleges still out there. Of course, not as prestigious as Yale. One of the reasons for the overt resentment from black students admitted to the Ivies is that they are unprepared for such schools, a fact of no interest to the promoters of special admit programs.
As if that ever worked.
We’re gonna freeze.
I believe Boeing’s problems are rooted not in DEI but in cost-cutting measures imposed by ivy league “smart boys”, outsourcing engineering jobs normally done in-house, driving out old experienced engineers, and punishing whistleblowers.
The consequences of DEI hiring will bear fruit, of course. Poisonous fruit.
Fascism is bad, except when black people do it, and then it’s praiseworthy.
I vaguely recall it was a surprisingly tinny album, given the title. Lots of bright, top-end clattering but a bit lacking in bottom-end oomph.
Boeing illustrates what happens when your company gets infested by MBAs. DEI was a secondary infection, taking hold after the MBAs enervated the company by putting the management cart in front of the engineering horse.
If
global coolingglobal warmingclimate changeclimate emergencyclimate catastrophe (hope that’s right) does cause earthquakes, why in Heaven’s name hasn’t the San Andreas fault given way & dropped California into the ocean?Heh. The sarcasm writes itself.
classic writers: this reminded me–my major prof as a young man back in the 50s worked his way through college as a cowhand and a boxer. Tough sonofagun. A number of movie stars of 30 or so years ago were actual war heroes. Steve McQueen if I’m not mistaken saved a bunch of sailors overboard in the 1950s. John F. Kennedy, whatever his faults, was an actual war hero. Others come to mind. Even Ahhnold was a self-made millionaire before getting into movies. The current crop are suburban wimps.
Shielding people from reality does not build character.
As well-socialized college students, me and my classmates could recite the credo that a college education is about being challenged by exposure to diverse views; this with no more, in fact less reflection than our predecessors saying that education was for the greater glory of God. But in reality, the advantages of being in college were the advantages of a lack of diversity. Because everyone in the room had the same type, age, talent level, interests, the professors could go pedal to the metal in pushing us to our limits without having to worry about stragglers. You could express a half-understood intuition in the classroom and somebody would fill in the blanks of your thought instead of people looking at you like you were an idiot. As for the advantages of devil’s advocacy, the challenges to one’s sloppy thinking came from the professors and the star students, the most well developed exemplars of the type we were striving to be, and not from outsiders who were resentful because they couldn’t cut it.
As for the contention that the professors were indulging the white males monopolizing classroom discussions, I don’t think the professors of the School of Oriental and African studies would put up with that, I don’t think white female students would put up with it, I think the white males themselves would have been socialized since adolescence to defer to sexual/ethnic minorities, and last but not least the concept of high self-esteem/high ethnic-esteem blacks being turned into shrinking violets by some 22 year old Sanskrit nerd is just too absurd to believe for a moment.
“a college education is about being challenged by exposure to diverse views”
At the state university I attended (1980-1982), we heard from Daniel Ellsburgh, Louis Farrakhan, and G. Gordon Liddy. No protests at any of them, and I don’t think anyone would have begun to think about doing anything other than listen and ask questions.
Beyonce covers country songs: stunning and brave.
Luke Combs covers “Fast Car”: ZOMG cultural appropriation!
Rumor has it that the Chinese are trying to destroy our industries using ESG and DEI to hollow them out, and that gutting Boeing was part of it. How else to explain the nihilism of skimping on safety?
Because there was never a black country singer before Beyonce
Oh, oh, I know this one Alex. Who is Charlie Pride?
Hehe. They’re the clever ones, right?
I would guess… perhaps not.
As Joan noted in the original thread, the students complain about tutors having “lower expectations of black and ethnic minority students,” a sly conflation of different groups with different average outcomes, as if only this could explain their own academic shortcomings, and while behaving in ways that would very much warrant lowered expectations.
And so, while the students may struggle with course material and with conjuring solid arguments, they have learned to feign an implausible victimhood, to invoke “structural racism,” and to do so entirely without evidence, such that they are supposedly oppressed and traumatised by factual correction. Even being disagreed with in class is, we’re told, a cause of “stress and anxiety.”
And all of this is done with a practised chutzpah that suggests the students are accustomed to being indulged and deferred to, seemingly on account of their Magic Blackness. Which again, rather calls into question their pretensions of being crushed and downtrodden, and therefore supposedly entitled to insult and bully others.
[ Slurps orange juice, compiles tomorrow’s Ephemera. ]
The new CEO of NPR, deep-state operative Katherine Maher, previously served as CEO of Wikipedia, where she boasted of her “active approach” to censorship of public discourse “in response to the upcoming U.S election and as a model for future elections” and, of course, “in conversations with the Government“.
Wow, she sounds just perfect for heading up a “news” organisation!
Ooh, and if you’d like to see the TEDx embodiment of smug entitlement – why here it is!
And so, things that one might formerly have regarded as red flags and perhaps instantly disqualifying, at least for a prominent role in supposedly impartial news broadcasting, appear to have been inverted and reframed as credentials.
Well, that kind of depends what your aims are.
Quite.