Discontinued Lines
In the pages of the Los Angeles Times, Jade Sasser, an associate professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside, informs us,
She then asks, somewhat bizarrely,
Bringing another person – specifically, a baby – into a society in which people don’t always agree on every subject is a new and terrifying scenario, apparently. One entirely unprecedented in all of human history.
In an attempt to make this opening question, and its implications, seem less peculiar and contrived, our fretful educator searches out other, likeminded beings:
The purpose of this racial filtering remains a tad mysterious, beyond a modish obligation to bolt race onto every conceivable subject, ideally with implications of victimhood. The nearest we get to an explanation in the article is the claim that “climate emotions like anxiety, fear, and trauma” somehow weigh more heavily on the minds of “marginalised groups.” A purported phenomenon that will “become an increasingly important component of climate justice in the United States.”
Other categories of assumed downtroddenness are mentioned too:
Badges, so many badges. See how they catch the light.
Hold that thought as we dive into the wisdom of these brown and suffering souls:
“I think I may not have children although I do want them,” she notes. “Just because, with all of the things we see going on in the world, it seems unfair to bring someone into all of this against their will.”
Readers are welcome to suggest how one might bring someone into existence – a child, say – with their consent. And no, you can’t use a time machine.
Melanie adds,
Such sorrow. Such sweet, pretentious sorrow.
Clue.
Punchline incoming.
Whether the latter is a function of sexual dysmorphia and compulsive pronoun stipulation, or of art school, I leave to the reader.
For some reason, the words natural selection come to mind.
Not having a dad is indeed regrettable. And so, naturally, Elena makes a point of rejecting any potential fathers:
As part of her reasoning for shunning motherhood, and by extension, shunning a stable relationship, Elena also invokes a dread of “really weird weather patterns,” should any arise. Yes, I know. The word reasoning is creaking under the load.
Other interviewees envision a future in which they are free to focus on themselves. Which may strike readers as a mixed blessing.
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And they wonder why people talk about the ‘woke mind virus’…
As I was reading the article, I kept thinking of my nephews and nieces, and their ability to have children, and to find meaning and gratification in it, without the pretentious, neurotic agonies seen above.
Pretentious, neurotic agonies that seem to have been inculcated. In the name of progressive education.
We are the carbon they want to reduce.
What’s shameful is telling kids that having a family (and being happy) will KILL THE EARTH.
Elena must be a fun first date. I wonder how she even finds time to bring it up, what with all the smashing the patriarchy, ending capitalism, banner waving, protesting, and social justicing.
On the bright side, do we really want their genes in circulation?
Given the results quoted above, the dynamic does seem rather… abusive.
I’m still mulling how you’d get permission from a child you haven’t had yet for initiating said child’s existence.
It has the makings of a science fiction novella.
It calls to mind the cliché of the sulking teenager who shouts, “I didn’t ask to be born.” And who then slams the door before storming off upstairs.
It’s also worth noting that Ms Sasser bemoans the social and political polarisation of American society, while carefully avoiding any reflection on whether this social divergence might have anything to do with her own questionable assumptions. Her own begged questions. Her own peculiar worldview.
I and some others have noticed a lot of that lately: Women we haven’t heard from in years are popping up daily in our social media feeds, posting things that are full of red flags–hysterical political rants and various all sorts of random memes/remarks indicating emotional problems.
A clue that maybe, just maybe, certain demographics really should be regarded with distrust. The sorts of people who, by statute, should be outside the town limits by sundown.
Neither their genes nor their ideas.
I think I see the problem.
This. A thousand times this.
Coincidentally, just yesterday I saw a snide comment from a leftist women announcing to the world that she doesn’t miss all the people who cut off contact with her after COVID/the Saint George Floyd riots/the 2020 election. And yet the only such cutting offs I know of were initiated by her.
Well, reading the thing, my first – and lingering – impression was of how predictable yet alien Ms Sasser’s mindset is. It’s so dense with fashionable assumptions, so short on evidence to support those assumptions, and so riddled with contrivance and unrealism. It’s one begged question piled upon another.
And again, the worldview she conjures – and which she seems keen to propagate – is so removed from that of any of my friends and family.
That’s a red flag
Another red flag
A yellow flag, by FIRE’s rankings.
And Jade Sasser’s profile is itself a big red flag.
Space alien? 🙂 I was listening to a podcast this summer in which the interviewee mentioned the “lizard people” meme that figures in some political conspiracy theories. The interviewer pointed out that psychopathy is not uncommon in politics, and that some psychological dysfunctions manifest as behaviors which might be characterized as lizard-like. Note, for example, how some sociopaths/psychopaths are often excoriated as “reptiles”. I believe Emperor Caligula was called a reptile by contemporaries.
[ Blearily reviews the comment thread. ]
Please excuse any grammatical errors as being due to insufficient coffee.
[ Strokes mug of coffee. ]
Intense Amazonian, since you ask.
anti-establishment artists
So they actually produce aesthetic art without a bunch of agitprop?
One of the built-in problems with artists is that they tend to be creative personalities, but being creative has nothing to do with being right: Most ideas are wrong, and must be tested against the real world to assess their truth and usefulness. And yet such testing is anathema to “progressive minded people”.
[ Slides bowl of chilli-flavoured toenail clippings to Ted. ]
Granted, the arts do currently attract many people who are not genuinely creative but want to be. Hence all the art bollocks that David has been reporting on.
As parents I think we all have days where we regret our choice to have children, not because of any guilt that we are subjecting them to the world’s evils – without their consent, mind you – but simply because they too can be real pain in the asses.
I would be interested to hear from the parents of those being interviewed.
We mustn’t forget Professor Alan Dettlaff, who feels entitled to loudly denounce as racist and “white supremacist” anything that catches his eye, without being obliged to offer evidence of any kind, even when this is being done in a supposedly academic journal. Or his cheerleading colleague, Leigh Kimberg, who was also outraged and oppressed by expectations of even minimal logical and scholarly rigour.
As I said at the time,
But this, it seems, is where we are.
You have to wonder how you would sustain, or even begin, a remotely realistic discussion with such people. I.e., people who don’t feel that they need any evidence, or logical coherence, in order to be right, and therefore deferred to.
People who seem to believe they should win an argument by default. Just because.
American society feels more socially and politically polarised than ever.
Only because she and her vacuous and otherwise unemployable ilk are busier than the stokers on the Titanic keeping it that way because their livelihoods depend on it.
Allowing leftists into academia was a mistake.
As Instapundit often quips, “Maybe letting the enemies of our civilisation teach our children was a mistake.”
Letting our enemies do anything was a mistake.
That casual sex is going to dry up. Getting old alone isn’t much of a win.
And on top of all that, what if the apocalypse, on which so much has been staked, fails to materialise, or proves instead to be some fairly minor inconvenience?
This is slightly off topic, but if you thought Zoe Williams was bad, this guy (who is a teacher, of course) is going for the crown of worst father in the world, and the Don’t Blame The Criminal Sweepstakes. Seen via Ace:
“Accidentally” driving without a licence, into oncoming traffic, and ramming a school bus.
The guy actually did the Norm Maconald take. RTWT
We’re gonna need many, many large buses.
Indeed. I recall reading off-hand comments by gay men that casual sex is easy for young attractive men to obtain but gets more difficult on an exponential curve as those men age. Old men in gay bars hoping without hope that some young beauty will not reject their advances. And so there they are, alone, having failed to build a family and the resulting network–ever growing network–of close relationships upon which they can rely. But they did it to themselves, they and the narcissistic, psychopathic culture they were tempted to enter.
I haven’t seen anything about why he crossed the center line and drove into the bus: Was he drunk? (Very common among these immigrants who come from cultures where drunk driving is widespread and accepted.) On drugs? Falling asleep? Or did he lose control due to distracted driving?
The claims that every little thing you do, using a straw, plastic bags, breathing, are going to destroy the Earth, can certainly cause anxiety. But the claims are bogus. Pollution in developed countries has been falling for decades. If you take the most extreme forecasts of the IPCC seriously, even those do not lead to destruction, just to some disruption. The middle forecasts portend warming, very much increased plant growth, and rising wealth. It is insane.
Navel gazing does not lead to insight if no one is home. Too much internet. These people need a productive hobby.
Unfortunately that always ends in them believing they have earned subservience from others.
Oh, this isn’t an exclusively left-wing thing. When I was 11 years old, attending a fundamentalist Presbyterian school for the first time, we were fed Biblical doom and gloom right before Christmas. This was as the Yom Kipper war was winding down. The Bible said that no one would know when the end of the world would come so what a better time for the end of the world to come than at Christmas when everyone was distracted by the horrible secularism that Christmas had become. Santa is an anagram of Satan, you know. So me being 11 and wanting to live at least to 16 so I could drive a car at least once decided to take it upon myself to concentrate on the world ending with every moment available to me. At least through Christmas. And you know…here we are. But has anyone ever thanked me for saving the world back in 1973? No. No one cared. Because it’s always about the fear. It distracts from the real evil going on.
FTFY
Bingo. Even, and especially lately, the supposedly more “stable” and “smart” ones. The valedictorian and salutatorian types. Top 10. National Merit scholarship finalists. Etc.
But only once in many cases.
Only half the milk then?
Again, from another perspective…let’s come back to this sometime after November. Or after January 20 perhaps.
Fig. A
Narcissism is the enemy of family. My first concern is the well-being of my wife, kids, grandkids. Not myself. I don’t need much. Infants have valid immediate needs and none of those needs is to comfort your anxiety or validate your politics. The rewards of a family are infinite. As I get older I see that I would be living a pretty sad life without them.
I have also seen many women who claimed to not want kids and then in their mid-thirties become desperate to have them. Don’t deny your biology.
[ Has hankering for bacon and brie sammitch. ]
[ Dabs greasy chin with napkin. ]
Having a child is a potential consequence of having sex. If you don’t want children don’t have sex. The purpose of sex is reproduction.
If women truly wanted control of their bodies they wouldn’t have sex that might result in reproduction
I haven’t seen anything about why he crossed the center line and drove into the bus:
As usual, facts that will only come out much later as it was not, in fact, a 60 y/o yte dude, but regardless, unless he was driving a cement truck, how the hell fast was he going to knock a bus so hard to end up like this (slight embankment notwithstanding)
Duh. Don’t you understand? That’s what MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) is for … so people can, um, deny consent to being born!
On the bright side, do we really want their genes in circulation?
Indeed, no forced sterilization required with this crowd. Odd how progressives seem to always return to eugenics.
I recall when I was in university there was a phenomenon known as LUG, Lesbian Until Graduation. Presumably to satisfy the need for sex and intimacy without risk of pregnancy and without unpleasant interactions with predatory males. (How else to characterize sex with someone you will never see again after end of term or after graduation?) The expression was used without reprobation, only light amusement.
Harvested by short-tempered Yanomami and roasted by fierce Scythians?
“climate emotions like anxiety, fear, and trauma” somehow weigh more heavily on the minds of
“marginalised groups.”[people who suffer with anxiety, fear and trauma.]There. Fixed it.
The cult of college, and its various tributaries and offshoots, has done more to destroy our society than the actual commie crap it was being used for to push. Even those who did not fall for the brainwashing had their lives corrupted in innumerable ways.
[ Weighs merits of Intense Amazonian versus Hot Lava Java. ]
Hot Lava Java – Software development book name.
Sooner or later someone will market a cheap blend called Krakatoa East of Java.
Mocha Boom?
[ Checks tomorrow’s links one last time, hits schedule. ]
[ Wipes brow with oily rag. ]
Yeah, well… Here’s the common issue, here:
People educated far past the level of their actual functional intelligence.
Which is a factor stemming from the over-success of our civilization, in that these types aren’t busy making actual lives for themselves through hard work out on the coalfaces of the world. Years ago, this set of idjits would have had to literally “root, hog, or die…”, and they’d have never had the time or inclination for all of this self-destructive navel-gazing.
I think that the use of “IQ” in everything these days has had actual identifiable damaging effect on everything, mainly due to the misidentification of “what the hell is intelligence, anyway” inherent to the whole concept.
IQ testing and all the rest of the academic-industrial complex relies on the early identification and rewarding of an abstract form of “intelligence” that only addresses a narrow section of what actually constitutes “intelligence” when the average person thinks of it. It decouples that abstract thinking from performance and effect, as well: Provided you “do well on the test”, you literally can get away with murderous incompetence based on your credentials. Nobody is going to look at the results; they’re going to be so dazzled by your Ivy League diploma and voluminous CV that they’ll never notice disaster has ensued everywhere you were put in charge of something.
Here’s a truism for you: If the results of putting the “high IQ” types in charge of things are widespread disaster, as we see all around us today, then what we’re looking at with “IQ” probably ain’t really all that smart. If it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid; likewise, if it is “smart” and doesn’t work, then it ain’t actually, y’know… Smart.
Modern life has created too great a divide between “result” and “theory”. The theoreticians are running the world, and they pay not the slightest head to whether or not their theories prove out in practical effect and result. They’re all in love with their ideas, the things that live in their heads, and they won’t look at the real world around them to see if those things are actually workable there. They cannot or will not actually observe things as they are; the ideas in their heads warp everything.
I think Western civilization really started going off the rails back around the 1890s, when the academics started weaseling their way into running things. Woodrow Wilson was a disaster, and he wasn’t the only one of his ilk. What you see around you, today? That’s what they wrought. Most of the progress we’ve made was accomplished by the pragmatics among us, and was actually impeded by all the daffy dreamers of the academic theoretical world. Witness what Musk is dealing with in the bureaucracy; they’d rather keep hounding SpaceX into bankruptcy than allow him to succeed at getting humanity off this planet.
‘Educated’ implies the imparting of knowledge and that isn’t what’s happening. They’re being instructed on what attitudes to hold.
This might offer a partial explanation.
A favorite aphorism:
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.
<i>American society feels more socially and politically polarised than ever.
Is it right to bring another person into that?</i>
Absolutely not!
We must halt immigration immediately.
@aelfheld…
Perhaps “credentialed” would be a better construction?
In any event, what is going on here is that they’re taking people who actually aren’t all that “functionally intelligent” and then weaponizing them with credentials and ideology such that they mimic the intelligentsia of past times, enabling them to take over and dominate much of our public sphere as supposed “intellectuals”. Reality? Most of them can’t even pass the high school matriculation exams of the 1890s, let alone the ones that conferred college-level diplomas during that era.
My maternal grandmother was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar in her college days during the late 1910s and early 20s. I’ve had my hands on her high school transcript, from a “good” high school in Portland, Oregon; the syllabus she had to get high marks on would probably confound many university students today. There is no doubt in my mind that we have literally gotten dumber, mostly at the behest of the idjit class running the various “education” mills during the intervening years.
What’s ironic as all hell is that I’ve seen first-person accounts written by veterans of both WWI and WWII, men who had limited educations, and those men produced far more lucid and understandable prose, with far wider vocabularies, than many of the officers I served under while I was in the Army could manage with extensive preparation. What we’ve lost is astounding and depressing.
Two birds . . .
I’m old enough to remember when remedial education courses became a staple at colleges and universities.
Indoctrinated.
An inevitable consequence of “affirmative action” policies and of the foolish idea that everyone should go to college.
Most jobs can be done by someone with a solid high school education.
[ Slides bowl of chili-flavored toenail clippings back to David. ]