Reheated (135)
Because some things bear repeating, a few items from the archives:
Our Betters Solve Our Problems.
A “non-binary” barista opines.
“I’m a Starbucks barista at a drive-through,” says they. “I’ve de-escalated situations with people with guns… I’ve cooled shit down faster and better than a cop could.”
Readers are welcome to share clips of lively scenes to test this rather boastful hypothesis. It would, I think, have the makings of a compelling reality TV show. With preening, mouthy woke-lings encountering the realities they’ve so carefully ignored.
The subsequent tears and meltdowns could constitute a drinking game.
Mathematics is “saturated in whiteness.” Selfish inadequates hardest hit.
Even more frequent is use of the term “whiteness,” an alleged phenomenon on which the paper is premised. Though readers in search of some clear and convincing definition, or some compelling evidence of its existence, may find their hopes dashed. We are, however, assured that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”
Readers will note how any feelings of incompetence and not being welcome are immediately blamed on external causes, on some ectoplasmic “whiteness,” that Befouler Of All Things. As if such feelings had nothing whatsoever to do with the choices and behaviour, and the personal shortcomings, of the students themselves.
Instead, Dr Jasien and her colleagues expect the teaching of mathematics to be driven by the goal of “healing… intellectual trauma,” by paying “attention to the minds and bodies of students.” The students being, it seems, much less obliged to pay attention to anything beyond themselves.
And so, we’re told that “exclamations” and “cacophony” are “to be both expected and valued.” Because when you picture a maths classroom and people getting to grips with differential equations or vector calculus, the first thing that springs to mind is the word cacophony.
Culture for the implausibly delicate.
So, to recap. Students must now be forewarned that Macbeth, a somewhat well-known tale of murder, includes scenes of blood and guilt – sorry, “psychological trauma.” And that Romeo and Juliet, one of the most famous tragedies in all of literature, contains, er, tragedy.
The modern sensibility, then, the approved outlook on things, is one in which we are to view cross-dressing perverts striding into schoolgirls’ changing rooms as in no way provocative or untoward, and regarding which one mustn’t bat an eye, while simultaneously trembling at the prospect of Shakespeare’s The Tempest containing dramatic approximations of bad weather.
A mindset in which almost any dramatic work that predates Instagram must now come with spoilers. Which does rather appear to defeat the object.
The World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken wants to correct your primitive lifestyle.
Says Ms Auken, “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” All these things, these beastly capitalist products, would be “free.”
And not yours.
For those craving more, this is a pretty good place to start.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Encouragement can be conveyed via the tip jar buttons below.
When do we start?
The idea does, I think, have potential.
Oh no. We have a super-diverse classroom machete situation. Code red. We need the non-binary de-escalating barista.
These wankers shouldn’t be anywhere near a school.
Their ability to subtract functionality, to make things much worse, is the only remarkable thing about them.
Ah but, in their mad mental world, being asked to behave in maths class – say by not screeching and throwing things and disturbing other students – constitutes “whiteness,” which inflicts “mathematical violence” and “intellectual trauma.” Even when the alleged sufferers have no discernible intellect.
And “whiteness” is defined, insofar as it’s defined at all, as “a sense of urgency,” “objectivity,” and the customary expectation that students should arrive at correct answers and hand work in on time.
This, then – this “whiteness” – is what’s “toxic,” apparently. Not the misbehaving students, the ones being obnoxious, hugely self-indulgent, and undermining the efforts of everyone else. Or the preening inadequates who champion this anti-social behaviour. The ones who want to see more of it. In classrooms where your kids may be trying to study.
As an inversion of reality, a feat of moral perversity, it’s quite a thing. As I’ve said before, so much progressive posturing isn’t just wrong or dishonest. It’s psychologically disgusting.
As Finno noted in the comments,
Yes, it’s pretending. It’s fundamentally dishonest. An attempt to avoid an obvious reality. But this is the progressive mindset. It’s pathological.
Well, one of us is going to have to move.
I’ve rewatched that part of the clip several times looking for the tells I feel must be there to indicate the lie.
And yet I can’t see any, not even the hint of the most subtle of traces.
The ability to use lies as a casual act of defiance is as unnerving to me as it is self-defeating for her.
We know she’s a woman just as we know she’s never “de-escalated situations with people with guns” in a “Mexican stand-off” and we know she knows we know that.
But she does it anyway because now the pressure is all on us to prove her the liar we know she is and she knows we know she is, too.
Absolute sociopath.
Plus Starbucks. So she can’t even make decent coffee.
What? I’m just sayin’.
I’ve just been thinking along similar lines after reading the following summary of a podcast I stumbled across this morning:
Everyone should, in principle, have access to adequate healthcare regardless of whether or not they speak “the majority language” or what God they worship and so on.
But in suggesting that the source of inequality of access is in the health services provider, not the health services seeker, I cannot help but feel certain rather more obvious questions have not only not been addressed, but not even brought into consideration. As if such obvious questions somehow exist outside present reality in some abstract far-off and unknown region of the cosmos.
I can’t speak for the US or elsewhere, but I find Starbucks in the UK not only overpriced, but completely undrinkable.
I like good coffee, which is why I avoid Starbucks.
Oh it’s totally arse.
They seem to aim for inoffensive and I can’t say they succeed even in that. I’ve tried a handful of their brews, in three different branches, but they’ve all been weirdly insipid, other than a vague taste of scorching.
On each visit, I sat there, in a place I don’t particularly like, drinking a drink I don’t particularly want, because the drink I did want, they seem unable to make.
My own default morning stimulant is nothing fancy – some Sumatra Mandheling made in a cheap plunger cup, but – and this detail is fairly important – it does have the appealing properties of coffee.
On two occasions, I’ve seen migrants who didn’t speak English getting annoyed that English healthcare employees aren’t by default skilled in every human tongue spoken on every inhabited continent. As if the subsequent failure to communicate must, simply must, be the fault of the receptionist at whom they’re shouting.
Had communication been possible, I might have asked why someone has chosen to move to a country whose language they do not speak, at all, and why they haven’t bothered to learn it to any meaningful extent, despite having been here for some time.
Certainly, for long enough to know which freebies to demand, and to know that the word racist, seemingly the only English word they’ve mastered, must be thrown around frequently.
But if you prove her a liar it will give her the sads and you’ll be the meanyhead for making her upset.
Canada as Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
I’ve been compiling Friday’s Ephemera and fell down my own chuffing rabbit holes, twice. Lost an hour in there.
[ Starts scraping together some belated lunch. ]
I might believe this of a bartender or a doorman at a dive bar. A Starbucks barista? No.
Recall the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which delivers a liquid that is “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
I don’t want the situation de-escalated. I want the perp’s vital signs de-escalated.
And…the post is gone already. Again.
Wesley Yang.
I can’t speak for the US or elsewhere, but I find Starbucks in the UK not only overpriced, but completely undrinkable.
I can speak for the Starbucks in the US, and here also it is consistently overpriced, undrinkable, and as you all have mentioned – faintly scorched-tasting.
And as I think about the idiot Starbucks baristas here on campus, who couldn’t process a coupon or gift card if their lives depended on it, I very much doubt the “non-binary” person in the OP has managed to pull her head out of her own fundament long enough to de-escalate anything.
I once had to de-escalate a slightly quarrelsome comment thread.
[ Examines fingernails, awaits applause. ]
Just a twee bit . . .
By pouring everybody drinks? [Applause]
Interesting theory.
Second attempt.
You went for a pub lunch & left them to sort things out. Not quite Horatius Cocles.
If memory serves, I offered to run them a hot bath. So they could soak those tensions out together.
That calmed things down.
If the migrant is not in a coma, you have not beaten him enough.
The true racists are the progressives. They do not believe there is any possibility of minorities controlling themselves or learning and therefore we must dumb down everything, eliminate all standards of behavior, to accommodate the worst of the worst. Not a cheerful future.
Nieman Marxist.
(via)
[…] some of the most unpleasant folk in the kingdom
An appropriate epithet:
[ Struggles in vain to make joke about “spherical
cowsbastards in a vacuum. ]Anyone drinking french press Sumatra is OK in my book, David.
I’m sure you are vastly relieved to know this.
French? French?
I’m totally fine doing calculations based on bastards in a vacuum, spherical or not. The more, the merrier!
I now live in Washington state … the place that spawned Starbucks — though, that was in Seattle. I wonder how Starbucks got to be a hit since their coffee has always been lackluster at best. Especially since the rest of WA seems to love coffee with numerous shops/kiosks/drive-thrus even in the smallest towns. I’m between two towns, one has 2500 people and two coffee places, the other 900 people and one place and all are heads and shoulders above Starbucks.
Customers are buying the appearance of coffee, the taste obscured by whipped cream and flavoured syrups.
It’s cosplay – coffee is an adult beverage so they must be adults since there’s coffee in their somewhere.
Starbucks: they are aware that they burn their beans. It is their intention to do so. Their coffee makes me gag.
Was in Sydney airport desperately in need of coffee. Went to the coffee shop and asked for a plain coffee (the menu board was not helpful)–they just stared at me. I asked for an American coffee–more staring. Finally, a bloke in line behind me said “you want a Long Black”, which it turned out was what I wanted. I never ever would have guessed that. hahahahah
Ok, that’s a good one. Palo = stick
I’ll have to remember it.
The origin of ‘paling’?
Curious – it does seem related.
Band name.
It was right there, people.
Always respect the media.
One more time:
In service of which, they’ll merrily burn all credibility, of themselves and their captured institutions. It’s a strange compulsion.
One might use the word pathology.
I believe this is in your ambit, is it not?
Do be a dear and report back on what you find.
And so, we have a formerly prestigious science publication peddling outright lies and indulging in a ludicrous sleight-of-hand, in defence of a repeatedly proven liar, a chronic fabulist, while quoting statusful figures at other supposedly reputable institutions who themselves resort to bizarre omissions in order to arrive at a predestined conclusion.
Such that those who revealed Arday’s deceptions and the clearly racist assumptions of his enablers are themselves denounced as racists. Because, hey, what other motive could there be in exposing the eye-widening wrongdoing of a black person whose deceptions were being actively enabled, for racial reasons, by a powerful and statusful institution? One supposedly entrusted with the pursuit of truth.
All this, in an editorial riddled with logical contradictions, and in which Arday is described as both an obscure and “vulnerable” academic figure, someone undeserving of even basic scrutiny, and, simultaneously, a “scholar who inspired a generation.”
One whose supposedly shy and retiring media appearances included the BBC’s flagship political debate programme Question Time and the guest editing of Radio 4’s Today, and whose fabulist memoir was about to be published by Simon & Schuster.
It’s almost surreal.
Now remembering sweaty teen me nervously supping on a brew of mushroom tea.
Quite an evening, as I recall.
I’d say that’s certainly a big part of it. If the coffee were good, the idea of adding syrup or whipped cream would, I think, be unappealing. If, however, the coffee is piss-poor, and it is, any distraction may be welcome, indeed necessary.