Another great moment in Clown Quarter contortion:

“How to assess writing without judging its quality.” 

We’ve been here before, of course. 

Also, open thread. Feel free to share links and bicker.

Via Mr Muldoon, a peek into the comment pages of the Guardian, where Ms Ngaree Blow attempts to sell the merits of prehistoric healing:

Healthcare systems in Australia that are considered “mainstream” are fundamentally colonial organisations: designed, established and informed by Western paradigms and biomedical models of care.

Going with what works and works reliably. How very dare those damned colonials. With their Western paradigms.

At present, the norm is those who will fit within the constraints of the Western worldview of health… Ultimately, this results in a health system which is not fit for purpose,

The term fit for purpose is one to keep in mind. But first, some self-flattery – the urge to self-inflate being a Guardian staple:

First Peoples are the antithesis of colonial; we are inherently disruptive to how the healthcare system (and many other systems in fact) operate in Australia… As a doctor, I have embraced disruption and have chosen to reject conventional medical training pathways.

How terribly daring. With other people’s wellbeing.

Our disruption has historically been, and continues to be, rejected by the mainstream.

Intimations of victimhood being another Guardian staple. Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.”

Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior, as evidenced by a lack of traditional practices in these services.

Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.

In the world of the woke, where all shoes are clown shoes, a little pushback: 

A teacher in Minnesota who had complained about racial quotas in school discipline has been awarded over half a million dollars in a settlement. Aaron Benner, who’s black, alleged retaliation by the St Paul Public Schools in the form of four “personnel investigations” following his criticism of discipline policies… Benner said, “We are crippling black students with racial equity plans that do a disservice. We should not be telling minority students they will not be disciplined the same as other students when their behaviour is unacceptable and sometimes even violent.”

Those ‘progressive’ discipline quotas – essentially, a racial ‘free hits’ policy – have of course been mentioned here before, along with their predictable and horrifying consequences.

As I noted at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else.

Such that seven different experiments, in seven different cities, resulted in seven dramatic surges in classroom violence, up to and including actual riots. While white teachers who found themselves being punched in the face, resulting in trips to hospital and permanent injury, were subsequently lectured on their “unconscious biases” and “white privilege,” and told to take comfort in free emergency whistles.

This, then, is “racial equity,” according to our betters. See how it shines.

Update, via the comments:

Matthew Continetti on the competitive pieties of woke schooling: 

Parents opted their children out of standardised tests, which they deemed “structurally biased, even racist, because non-white students had the lowest scores.” Without tests, there was no way to measure the progress of the student body. The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral. At a Parent–Teacher Association meeting, families split into warring factions. One side was furious at the school for making such an important decision arbitrarily and autonomously. “The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels — and not just on the bathroom doors — led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.”

Mr Continetti is referring to this first-hand tale of bewilderment and woe, in which there’s much to widen the eyes. Regarding the toilet drama mentioned above, this bears quoting:

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms… As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

Update, via the comments: 

We’ve been here before, of course:

Parents only discovered the campaign – which asserts that white pupils are complicit in an “invisible system of privilege” – when their children began complaining about it.

Also, open thread. 

And the glare is dazzling: 

Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina.

I’m sure the following detail is entirely unrelated:

Dr Gagliano… [had] been volunteering at an herbalist’s clinic, and had begun using ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew.

Dr Galgiano tells us that her embrace of indigenous Amazonian traditions, including medicine songs and bathing in tree pulp, and presumably the occasional snifter of ayahuasca, has resulted in the uncanny acquisition of “healing knowledge,” told to her by plants.

And because a cake needs icing: 

The New York Times (unsurprisingly) points out that Gagliano also “speaks thoughtfully” on subjects such as the “legacies of colonialism [and] capitalism.”

The University of Sydney is ever so lucky. 

Also, open thread.