Attention, unwoke people. It’s time to be informed about “nounself pronouns and animal nounself pronouns.”

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Robert Schmad spots more Clown Quarter contortion:

An assistant professor at Appalachian State University recently argued that enforcing behavioural standards in public high schools is rooted in racism and unfairly affects Black students. In the article “‘Press Charges’: Art Class, White Feelings, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” [assistant professor of art education, Dr] Albert Stabler writes that the desire to punish students for violating school rules, especially when the police are involved, is the result of “the overvaluation of White feelings.”

The article, which you can poke at here, contains many wonders, generally of a kind only the woke can conjure into being. It begins with the obligatory confession of innate wrongness – i.e., “I am a white teacher” – and includes much gushing about non-white students’ “life experiences and cultural knowledge,” before which our educator is eager to prostrate himself, and which have apparently resulted in Dr Stabler’s own “learning and growth as a person.” Particulars on this point – the deep insights of teenagers – are, alas, unclear. And amid the gushing, there are notes of disharmony:

There were many students who regularly received in-school and out-of-school suspensions for what were perceived as disruptive actions.

Not actually disruptive, you see. Merely perceived as disruptive. For no reason whatsoever.

While my classroom materials and my dignity were sometimes damaged by rambunctious behaviour, more dire consequences were regularly enacted on students by school officials (not to mention parents).

We’ll get to some of that “rambunctious behaviour” in a second.

“In… schools,” we’re told, “the desire to punish is racialised,” and “white people’s feelings often have outsized consequences on People of Colour.” The example given to illustrate this alleged phenomenon is of a white, female art teacher – Dr Stabler’s immediate predecessor – who “was said to have wept at the end of every school day” and who pursued assault charges against a black student who forcibly cut said teacher’s hair. This assault, presumably intended to humiliate the woman and assert dominance over her, is passed over with remarkable ease by Dr Stabler, as if the “white feelings” of the teacher, and the implications of such behaviour – and its accommodation by leftist educators – were unworthy of exploration.

Richard Hanania on the ideological capture of state education:

[T]he movement to ban Critical Race Theory is naive if it thinks it’s going to change much about public schools… A CRT ban might mean a teacher won’t say “Ok, kids, today we’re going to learn about Critical Race Theory!” but they’ll still teach variations of the same ideas. Neither Robin DiAngelo nor Ibram X. Kendi, the two thinkers that seem to offend conservatives the most, identifies as a Critical Race Theorist. In fact, the American Federation of Teachers just announced a campaign to bring Kendi’s teachings to every student in the country, and they don’t appear to be deterred by CRT bans. This is their full-time job, and they’ll still be at it whenever public attention has moved on from the controversy of the day… A state can ban CRT, but if it does, kids are still being taught by the same people who thought CRT for kindergartners was a good idea in the first place.

Somewhat related. And also. And, you know, for eight-year-olds. 

An emeritus professor, who wishes to remain anonymous, on the ideology of “white fragility” and its trajectory:

The fundamental claim of White Fragility ideology is that income, wealth, academic, and other outcome gaps are solely the result of white supremacy and can only be eradicated through “anti-racist” measures—that is, by addressing white supremacy, white privilege, and white racism. The behaviour of individuals in groups experiencing negative outcomes is never admitted as a possible driver of disparate outcomes…

If one believes (as is asserted in White Fragility) that all inequality between whites and blacks is due to racism, then racism is a very evil thing indeed and must be eradicated. The mildest action that might be taken to attempt to accomplish this goal is the voluntary re-education of whites. However, according to White Fragility dogma, whites benefit enormously from white racism… [and] are generally unaware that they are doing this. It follows that, given the benefits whites receive from racism, their denial of their own racism, and the discomfort associated with re-education, it is unlikely that many whites would voluntarily submit to re-education. Moreover, even if whites were to voluntarily submit to re-education, according to White Fragility dogma, it is not possible for whites to free themselves of racism. The author, Robin DiAngelo, who is white, makes her living trying to re-educate whites and works very hard at trying to eliminate her own self-confessed racism, but admits that she is still not free of racism.

Or, Gratitude, Baby.

Like, you have to come out to me as cis and straight.

It turns out that if you, a straight person – or worse, a straight couple – attend a Pride event, your presence may only be tolerated if you meet certain terms and conditions. Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Also, open thread. Have at it, me hearties.

Someone not quite making the case she thinks she’s making. 

Open thread. Do chat among yourselves.

I’m not hungover. You’re hungover.

Comet Melanie Mae – that’s what it says here – is in no way high-maintenance:

My gender changes depending on the day, or week, or even depending on the hour. It also means the pronouns I’m comfortable with can change too.

To avoid a pronoun gaffe, and crushing underfoot the meek and marginalised, you must first check the colour-coded bracelets.

Pink means she/her; yellow means they/them; and blue means he/him.

And because this arrangement isn’t sufficiently complicated, or enough of an imposition on your time and sanity, said bracelets can be combined. It’s fully customisable. So do pay attention. 

See also Laurie Penny and her ongoing project of self-description. 

Somewhat related. 

Via here. 

Speaking, as we were, of rotundity, here’s a hot intersectional take, delivered with beaming certainty:

Actively not wanting to be fat is fatphobia, and therefore you’re fatphobic. 

You see, while “literally nobody is saying” that you must want to be fat, you should do nothing to avoid it or to delay the unsightly expansion of any body parts. Readers who find this a slim distinction must learn that “there is little to no evidence that we have any control over our size” and must therefore “just stop wanting size changes in general.” Readers who regard weight gain as a “size change,” and not a welcome one, should presumably say nothing and act casual. 

Your ignorance and wickedness thus identified, you must,

Commit to unlearning your fatphobia.

Now just stand there and be scolded, damn you.

Mr William Hornby, whose ponderings are shared above and whose pronouns are announced, is an “advocate, TikToker, actor and singer,” and is soon to graduate from Temple University with a degree in musical theatre. He is, of course, “raising awareness,” a mission that entails steering his followers to a Fat Liberation Syllabus For Revolutionary Leftists, where we learn that,

Fat liberation is a radical anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-state movement that was started by fat Black and Brown disabled queer and trans people.

And where we’re told, quite emphatically, that a reluctance to become fat is,

intrinsically entangled with white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and capitalism.

And therefore, obviously, really, really bad. The goal, then, for all chubby-and-enlightened people, is to “abolish capitalism and settler colonial states like the US,” along with “abolishing prisons and police,” and dismantling the “fatphobic logic of productivity, discipline, and personal responsibility.” One can only hope that this revolutionary project doesn’t involve stairs or significant exertion.  

Mr Hornby’s list of relevant resources also includes a therapist search engine. Though whether that’s for the weight issues or the revolutionary leftism, I couldn’t say.

This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil… I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favour.

A dementedly racist woman, Aruna Khilanani, a woman who happily shares her fantasies of killing random white people, is invited to Yale to lecture the young and credulous. 

She’s a psychiatrist, by the way, presumably with paying patients. 

Note that if you challenge Ms Khilanani’s incoherent rambling, or her wildly arrogant generalisations, or her evasiveness and disregard for actual evidence, this is because you are “defensive,” being white, and are therefore “unable” to process her deep and radical wisdom. Including her conviction that “white people don’t eat bread.”  

Her talk, we’re assured, was “very well received.”

Update, via the comments:

Ms Khilanani is eager for the world to understand that she is a thinker, an intellectual. In large, bold letters, we’re told that,  

I may be one of the only [sic] psychiatrists in the country that has a Masters level body of knowledge in theory on marginalised identities… I majored in English at the University of Michigan, and completed a Masters of Humanities at the University of Chicago focusing [sic] gender theory, race theory, African American Studies, Embodiment, Post Colonialism, Sexuality, queer theory, Culture, South Asian Studies, and Marxism.

Grammar and proof-reading are not, one assumes, among Ms Khilanani’s many, many areas of focus and expertise. And curiously, the result of all this fierce rumination is a woman who struggles to support, or sustain, any kind of argument, and who appears unable to think in straight lines, such that one thing follows from another. Evidence is reliably absent, as is logical connective tissue. Instead, we get a series of bald assertions, quite a lot of blathering and deflection, and unrelated fragments of what can only be described as a bizarre conspiracy theory. We’re told, for instance, that expectations of racial reciprocity, mutual civility, would be a “false equivalence,” though why remains unclear, beyond the claim that white people are inherently defective, are “psychologically dependent on black rage,” and “have five holes in their brain.”

For newcomers and the nostalgic, more items from the archives:

The Sound Of Wringing (2).

The Guardian’s Theo Hobson sticks pins into his eyes, rhetorically.

Despite Mr Hobson’s claims, rejecting “liberal guilt,” as manifest all but daily in the pages of the Guardian, doesn’t require an indifference to, or denial of, real injustice, merely a dislike of pretension and dishonesty. As, for instance, when Mr Hobson’s colleague Guy Dammann looked at the stars and howled, “Am I fit to breed?” Or when Alex Renton told us, “Fewer British babies would mean a fairer planet.” Some Guardian regulars declared their plans to make us “better people” by making us poorer and freeing us from the “dispensable accoutrements of middle-class life,” including “cars, holidays, electronic equipment and multiple items of clothing.” While others chose to agonise over peanut butter residue.

And then there’s Decca Aitkenhead’s classic piece, Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame.

Apocalypse Averted With Collective Juddering.

Just another day at the Guardian.

The paper’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

Passionate Attachments. 

The strange, tearful world of “water-bottle separation anxiety.”

Or, Being One Of Our Betters, She’s Risen Above Such Things.

Apparently, her mother is the one “making the world a miserable, miserable place.” 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.