Pretension Is Not A Gender
Speaking of educators who say things like this:
Here’s another one for the collection. This time from Mearns Academy, a secondary school in Aberdeenshire:
I’m guessing that the chap speaking means more than two. But hey, he’s a professional educator. We must make allowances.
Because acknowledging reality will, evidently, get you kicked out of class. And then scolded by a man who’s getting remarkably upset – possibly for reasons that aren’t being fully articulated.
And this,
Which seems to translate as “Just sit there in silence while I mouth obvious lies.”
The combination of feeble arguments and peevishness – and the line, “I know what you think and I know what the authority thinks” – does rather suggest that the teacher is aware of the dishonesty in which he participates. Which, I suppose, would explain his irritability.
Update, via the comments:
It’s perhaps worth noting that, despite the drama and agitation, nothing in the video, or in subsequent reports, suggests that the pupil, Murray Allan, was actually rude or mean or gratuitously disruptive. Of the two, he seems the more emotionally restrained, and the more coherent. From what I can make out, he merely responded to the teacher’s own pointed disapproval of website forms that don’t offer umpteen imaginary ‘gender’ categories. Things of this kind.
Rafi adds,
Pretty much. Again, I don’t get the impression that the teacher is a true believer. He strikes me more as someone cornered into an absurd position. Someone who knows where the power and status lie, and the consequences of being realistic, and who doesn’t want to jeopardise his own modest position in the progressive pecking order.
Which is, of course, how petty tyrannies often work.
The dynamic seen above may also be a function of just how rapidly these pretensions have spread throughout the educational system, seemingly untested and all but unopposed. I’d imagine there’s been little time, and possibly little inclination, to devise convincing rebuttals to some obvious objections, and so the response to demurral, to any hint of realism, is to chastise and threaten. As if noticing the obvious were some moral failing, an act of wickedness.
It’s also been my experience that people whose self-image and in-group status depend on mouthing things that aren’t true, or which they suspect may be untrue, even absurd – but which are still mouthed anyway – do often react to disagreement, even polite disagreement, as if it were a personal attack, or some wanton outrage. Which, again, may help explain the farcical intolerance seen above.
Update 2:
The student, it turns out, was subsequently suspended for a month, and then expelled – ostensibly, for recording the teacher without his knowledge. The only other mentioned transgression is his reply to the teacher’s claim that a website dropdown menu with only two sexes is “old-fashioned” and “controversial” – by saying that there are two sexes. A heresy that resulted in being ordered out of the classroom and then berated.
And which may strike some readers as a pretty good reason to be recording teachers.
The school’s anti-bullying policy, by the way – and which I mention for no reason whatsoever – suggests that witnesses “speak to parents” and “record the incident.”
That.
Well, nothing in the video suggests that the pupil, Murray, was rude or gratuitously disruptive. Of the two, he seems the more emotionally restrained, and the more coherent. From what I can make out, he merely responded to the teacher’s own pointed disapproval of website forms that don’t offer umpteen imaginary ‘gender’ categories.
I have to say, the dynamic reminds me of more than a few exchanges from my own childhood.
I suspect more may follow.
Is this prescience, guesswork or a night follows day certainty?
On my part, guesswork. But I’d imagine that these recordings are circulating among schoolkids, many of whom will find the new orthodoxy every bit as tiresome. People don’t generally appreciate being told to lie.
“Related”…
It’s a lesson… in petty tyranny.
Pretty much. Again, I don’t get the impression that the teacher is a true believer. He strikes me more as someone cornered into an absurd position. Someone who knows where the power and status lie, and the consequences of being realistic, and who doesn’t want to jeopardise his modest position in the pecking order.
Which is, of course, how petty tyrannies often work.
[ Post updated. ]
Biology is not an abstract concept.
I think the above is likely also a function of just how rapidly these pretensions have spread throughout the educational system. I’d imagine there’s been little time, and perhaps little inclination, to devise convincing rebuttals to some obvious objections, and so the response to demurral, to any hint of realism, is to chastise and punish. As if noticing the obvious were some moral failing, an act of wickedness.
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
Sad but true. See “lemmings, cliff”*
(*yeah, it’s a myth. Sort of)
The school’s anti-bullying policy, which I mention for no reason whatsoever, suggests that witnesses “record the incident” and “speak to parents.”
As I like to say, you can have as many genders as you want.
But there are still only two sexes.
[ Post updated again. ]
That.
As I like to say, you can have as many genders as you want.
Even if gender is “socially constructed” I still don’t see this as a free-for-all where you can have as many as you want. Our society has still only constructed norms and expectations for two genders.
I know this is OT, but this is really the definition of FAFO when it comes to hiring people based on other criteria than expertise.
he didn’t hire “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t “inspirational.”
All right, now he can be inspired as he expires.
No worries: The way I see it, this blog is about all sorts of individual and societal dysfunctionalities and delusions.
Truly delusional. “Woke” gets people killed.
Caveat: We do not yet know what caused the loss of the submersible, so we cannot be sure that this foolish attitude played a part. But it seems very possible. And remember what pilots and NTSB investigators say: When a plane goes down, it is rare for there to only one cause; usually there are a number of failures both mechanical and human.
(Deleted. Comment box cannot handle .webp files.)
And:
Badumtish!
Once the Lysenkoists get hold of it it is.
Don’t quite get the ‘Nonce is invalid.’ message that shyly peeks out from under the banner sometimes.
Heh.
? Not seeing that.
Er, wut?
My initial reaction exactly.
Shows up every now & then when trying to post a comment.
I’ll try & screen shot it next time it happens
… how he didn’t hire “50-year-old white guys” …
Said the 61 year old white guy. I’d have thought that these wacky Jules Verne adventures catch the imagination of whites more than non-whites, and that women are more likely than men to be alarmed by the duct-tape contrivance and corner-cutting.
The teacher in the video was born say 1955-1965, is a product of 70’s/80’s teacher training, so his entire career he’s been enforcing sex/race/sexual-orientation inclusivity as a policy. It might be going further than he’s able to defend articulately, but that’s the ideal he’s stuck with.
You might also try viewing the page source when it happens.
Band name. That is all. Promise.
he didn’t hire “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t “inspirational.”
The flip side, you are a billionaire who wants to see the Titanic.
A) Triton 13000 Titanic Explorer, a proven platform made by a proven company that makes a variety of submersibles;
B) Some one off contraption made by “inspirational” people of apparently uncertain experience with OTC parts and reported safety concerns.
The choice is clearly B, you don’t get to be a billionaire by blowing a few million when you can go for a measly $250K.
I can do the same with an aeroplane – doesn’t mean I’ll do it successfully.
The school’s anti-bullying policy, by the way – and which I mention for no reason whatsoever – suggests that witnesses “speak to parents” and “record the incident.”
So if it is school policy that you are allowed, or even encouraged, to record incidents, why was he expelled for recording the incident?
Well obviously it doesn’t apply to the great & good, just the unwashed.
On identifying as cats.
[…] the glitter of ‘rainbow politics’.
“Western Culture used to pride itself on moving beyond the historic abuses of children which we still see in the third world…”
Unfortunately, Alfred Kinsey is already dead, so it is too late to have him executed for his lifelong efforts to normalize evil through fraudulent research.
Just close your eyes and think of England.
$30 dollar game controller…
Just to be a devil’s advocate, that controller has been been tested, retested, subject to no end of juvenile abuse, and so on.
Or OceanGate could have designed a controller from scratch, which clearly would have been superior. Sometimes, ‘Off The Shelf’ is not wrong.
Think about who protects and enables these criminals.
Then think about whether society should tolerate such traitors.
“anybody can drive the sub” with a $30 video game controller.
If you’re only paying $30 for a video game controller we shouldn’t be surprised by the result. Who knew stick drift could be so deadly.
Kidding aside, I see this attitude a lot in software startups – CEOs/CTOs with a superficial understanding of the technology their company is built on absolutely convinced that all those pesky “best practices” and “high availability” architectures are just myths created by The Maaan designed to keep down edgy young[1] iconcoclasts like themselves out to reinvent ${MARKET_SEGMENT}
Alfred Kinsey is already dead, so it is too late to have him executed for his lifelong efforts to normalize evil through fraudulent research
We have lived to see Kinsey demonized and Frederic Wertham vindicated.
[1] These people are mostly in their early forties. I wish they’d just buy a convertible and a twenty-something blonde and deal with their midlife crises that way.
But is it possible to demonize someone who was demonic?
I have the impression that advanced software tools, combined with limited experience, do seem to facilitate related delusions. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.
I have never commented before, but I wanted to about the submersible. I don’t think he was actually “going woke”. I think every experienced person in the industry either told him that this would kill people or that it cost more than he wanted to spend to make safe. I think the inspirational talk was just to cover up what was going on. Too bad he took four other people with him when he died.
That. Woke crankiness 101.
Well, it is a thing. And once spotted, often seen. And again, the speed with which such woo has been propagated and made obligatory, despite its obvious shortcomings and aggravating overreach, does seem to have left some educators ill-equipped to deal with dissent, short of hair-trigger condemnation.
Apparently, pupils are now, quite suddenly, obliged to not find peculiar or contestable things like this:
Which is, as they say, a big ask.
No use to me as the list doesn’t include “Male”.
On identifying as cats.
Were I the teacher, I would fail the student and explain to the parents, “Your child consistently gives the wrong answer in class. In response to a question, catself said, ‘Meow’ when the answer is very clearly ‘Miaow’, accent on the purr.” And I would do it with a straight face, too.
[ Compiles tomorrow’s Ephemera, considers an early lunch. ]
ONIFFASS
In another 85 minutes in my case.
I have no idea what that is.
Internet search fails to yield any hits at all.
[ Steels self for imminent haircut. ]
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.
It’s not AI, it’s not Moore’s Law, the biggest challenge facing the IT industry is and has always been the Dunning-Kruger effect.
As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known knowns, and known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. And even worse than unknown unknowns are the things people think they know that just aren’t so.
[ Returns from hairdresser A RADIANT BEING. ]
“And lo, how the light did blaze forth from the master’s bald pate, for the sign painter’s boy had gilded it.”
–Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
[ Shakes hair in slow-motion. ]
Here, you have a few stray hairs. Let me trim them.
The rise of Feminism Inc. was intended to obliterate male privelige, power and position. It failed, miserably. The “new hotness” is thus not “female is superior to male”, but “there is no male at all!!!”, i.e., if there is no gender, then there is no “male” to be overcome. An infinitly shifting collidiscope of genders renders each of them, individually, indistinguishable, and thus unimportant. The assertion, as a hypothetical example, that, say, men do better on math tests than women, can be instantly dismissed with “what is a man”? So much simpler that way…
In part, because of the incoherence as well as the contra-factual nature of feminist theory. I recall being told (instructed) that (1) women are equal to men, (2) women are better than men, (3) women are the same as men and any perceived differences are purely due to patriarchal culture. As the cherry on top of the sundae, it was said that it would be just fine for male-female crime rates to equalize through women becoming as violent and crime-prone as men.
Feminism: almost entirely led by and with key literature by lesbians. Sure, ladies, that could not possibly go wrong.
Women choose men 3-4 yrs older, who make more money than them, who are 4 inches taller than they are, and who have deeper voices. This is THEIR choices of dating and marriage. Not patriarchy (well, feminists will claim women are just so weak they are brainwashed but that is incoherent, isn’t it?). One minute women are just fine to go into combat (but they really think no one does that anymore) and the next minute women need safe spaces and special treatment. Yes, incoherent. But if it is all just cultural and not biology, then they really can’t complain about the trans or furries, can they.
I’m looking forward to asking such questions of the feminists I used to know. Or rather, I’m looking forward to their reactions.