Who wish to damage others: 

One [activist] non-profit, which the Fund for Santa Barbara paid to provide “social emotional learning (SEL) certification workshops,” is called AHA! Santa Barbara (Attitudes, Harmony, and Achievement). It gathered students into circles alongside adults, including one who served time in prison, to share intimate details of their lives. The programme was created by Jennifer Freed, a “certified astrologer & psychotherapist” who tells people she can understand them based on “cosmic DNA.” […]

Just Communities is an offshoot of a now-defunct group called NCCJ whose offspring have a disturbing record of mistreating children in the name of social justice. At another NCCJ-related camp in Northern California, students were “ordered to separate by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation… while their peers are instructed to call out every slur and stereotype they know about them,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2018. If students were too kind, the adults twisted the dagger by using the most painful of stereotypes, according to the report. After students called out “good at math” for Asians, staff yelled out “small penises.”

Luke Rosiak on the woke child-abuse industry.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Ben Sixsmith on the blurring of identity and mental illness: 

Of course, it is good to understand the choices people make. But is it always necessary to respect those choices? Some people who have sought out castration claim to be much happier and calmer for it. Yet auto-castration is well-known to be a sign of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. One study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine suggested that in others, the desire to castrate themselves was correlated with “abuse sustained during childhood, including parental threats of castration” and “religious condemnation of sexuality,” among other things. Would anyone insist that there are not healthier means of dealing with such traumas?

Leor Sapir on transgender swimmer Lia Thomas – and when politeness becomes unhinged: 

The Human Rights Campaign warns that “contrasting transgender people with ‘real’ or ‘biological’ men and women is a false comparison” that “can contribute to the inaccurate perception that transgender people are being deceptive or less than equal, when, in fact, they are being authentic and courageous.” This is a strawman wrapped in a non sequitur. Critics of gender self-identification do not argue that people like Thomas are “being deceptive,” but rather that they are themselves deceived. HRC’s use of “authentic” here really means “sincere”: transgender women are being sincere, not deceptive, when they say they have a strong inner sense of being a woman. But that sincerity is irrelevant unless one first assumes that what makes a belief true is the fact that it is sincerely held, rather than its correspondence to objective reality.

Emil Kirkegaard on mental health and political leanings: 

Back in May 2020, I published a paper provocatively titled Mental Illness and the Left. It was based on the common observation (stereotype!) that conservatives seem less prone to mental illness… Since my study was published, replications have come out. The fact that this replicates is not at all surprising because the samples were very large, representative, and results not p-hacked and with tiny p values. Here’s an overview of recent replications…

Statistical chomping ensues. And I’ll leave these items here for no reason whatsoever.

Lifted from the comments – which you’re reading, of course – regarding this rather animated chap and his gushing sisterliness:  

And if you ladies would rather not find Camp Creepy Manic Guy in your bathroom or changing room, this is, he insists, proof of your own “internalised misogyny,” and it’s “up to you to unlearn” your foolish female ways. Because, you see, it’s “patriarchy” when women don’t want to get undressed in front of a mentally ill man. To avoid said “patriarchy,” you must submit. To him. 

He describes himself, modestly, as a “gender educator.”

Update, via the comments:

Chappie above, James, is apparently an “actress.” And “annoyingly hot.” As you can doubtless tell from his pretty nails, which he seems to regard as some ultimate measure of womanhood, and from the numerous videos of him parading around in his underwear while somewhat tightly wound. And remember, ladies, our “gender educator” only feels like a woman sometimes. So those visits to your bathrooms and changing rooms could go either way. A comfort, no doubt.

Update 2: 

Somewhat related, this.

From The Independent, a new moral crisis:

A plus-size content creator and traveller who said seatbelts on planes cause “emotional damage” is now sharing tips on how to avoid the trauma.

It occurs to me that the thing causing the annoyance – sorry, emotional damage – is not in fact the seatbelt, or asking for an extender. If, say, a person of average proportions found that all plane seatbelts had suddenly been reduced in size by 38%, this might well be irritating, and somewhat surreal, but it would not, I think, be a likely cause of similar “emotional damage,” let alone psychological trauma.

Likewise, if you’re rendered incensed by the fact that a plus-sized bath towel is still insufficiently commodious, then the cause of any sorrow and agitation probably isn’t the towel, but rather what you’re trying to fit in it. However, it seems that certain obvious realities must not be acknowledged – and so we get performative indignation about how oppressive towels are.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding airborne stowing dramas, readers may recall the delightful and ladylike Lindy West, a “fat activist” whose “work focuses on pop culture, social justice and body image.” In a tearful tale shared in Jezebel, Ms West insisted that she should always be accommodated, regardless of practicality and inconvenience, as if her own choice to be, and remain, notably overweight could have no bearing on the issue. While struggling to squeeze into her plane seat, Ms West decided to pick a loud verbal fight with an adjacent male passenger, and then amused herself by deliberately knocking him with her luggage as he tried to sleep. She then complained, seemingly without irony, that “nobody wants to sit next to a fat person on a plane.”

When not writing about herself for Jezebel and the Guardian, or testing the endurance of plane seats and fellow passengers, and insisting that her difficulties fitting into seats and other spaces are nothing whatsoever to do with her choices, Ms West makes videos of herself eating biscuits and junk food.

Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi on the woke indoctrination that parents aren’t supposed to see:  

In workshops such as “Integrating Healing-Centered Engagements Into a DEIA School Program” and “Racial Trauma and the Path Toward Healing,” we learned how DEI practitioners use segregated affinity groups and practices such as healing circles to inculcate feelings of trauma. Even students without grievances are trained to see themselves as victims of their ancestors’ suffering through “intergenerational violence.”

The next step in a school’s transformation is “inclusion.” Schools must integrate DEI work into every aspect of the school and every facet of the curriculum must be evaluated through an antibias, antiracist, or anti-oppressive lens. In “Let’s Talk About It! Anti-Oppressive Unit and Lesson Plan Design,” we learned that the omission of this lens—“failing to explore the intersection of STEM and social justice,” for instance—constitutes an act of “curriculum violence.”

Children of kindergarten age are defined, enthusiastically, as “natural social-justice warriors” and “small activists.”

Regarding the above, a professor of political science doesn’t want you to notice: 

Dr Tabachnick, above, also thinks that “critical race theory,” of which we’ve spoken many times, is being targeted with a “smear campaign.” As opposed to, say, being revealed as stupefying and pernicious, and its boosters and practitioners quoted verbatim.