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Academia Shakedowns

Rendered Tearful By The Undertakings Of White People

January 6, 2025 45 Comments

It turns out that the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University have much to offer the pretentious and racially neurotic: 

Degree courses focused on the “undertakings of white people” have made universities racist, according to a review by a Russell Group institution. The University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent undertook a joint review of their connections to the slave trade, and set out how these have created a legacy of “racism” at the institutions.

As is the custom, an operatic tone is adopted and victimhood is feigned and deployed as a credential, a basis for deference. Though particulars of any credible harm, any actual modern-day “racism,” are thin on the ground. And the reasoning, such as can be discerned, is just a tad contrived. Quite how those “undertakings of white people” – in the arts and sciences – are crushing the hopes and dreams of students, robbing them of breath, remains somewhat unobvious. Likewise, the logical or moral basis for “reparatory measures.”

Yet those doing the demanding, a group of Nottingham academics, insist that these alleged woes, these “enduring detrimental legacies,” whatever they might be, “are issues that require urgent and sustained attention.”

The report was overseen by a steering group that included six people appointed by the two universities who “identify as black.” 

I’m guessing this is where the applause is supposed to go.

Authors credited their “biological proximity to the historical atrocity of slavery” with raising awareness of “ongoing emotional pain” throughout the project.

Despite the theatre of “ongoing emotional pain,” the proponents of degree-course “decolonisation” seem quite enthused by their scolding and leverage. Their ability to wring pretentious atonement from fellow players of the game.

[The universities] pledged to make slavery reparations as a result of their review, which found that the universities’ “racially unbalanced curriculum” ignores the “equally significant efforts of people of African descent.” The report does not state in which specific subjects this parity of achievement has been ignored.

The central reasoning, such as it is, seems to be that some indirect historical beneficiaries of slavery, including those born after abolition, also gave money to universities, which, in ways somewhat mysterious, invalidates those universities’ modern-day course content and renders it harmful to People Of Pigmentation. “Reading classical European literature” and “travelling to historic landmarks” are among the activities deemed tainted and bruising.

In short, on a par with other recent efforts to “decolonise” degree courses, to purge them of the “inequities” of “white knowledge,” and thereby exterminate any trace of “white supremacy.” As when the Quality Assurance Agency, an organisation that boasts of being “trusted by higher education providers and regulatory bodies to maintain and enhance quality and standards,” demanded that computing courses address “how divisions and hierarchies of colonial value are replicated and reinforced” within the subject.

I’ll give you a moment to ponder that one.

If the particulars are, again, unclear and the reliance on verbiage unconvincing, and if readers are unsure of what “neoliberal systems of power” might be, and how they might bear upon musical notation or the Royal Veterinary College, at least the antipathy towards things deemed “white,” and thus offensive, is hard to miss and evidently relished.

Despite such causal convolution, the racial browbeating is having its intended effect:

In August, the Telegraph revealed that the University of Nottingham had removed the term “Anglo-Saxon” from university module titles as part of efforts to refute “nationalist narratives.” The university offers a leading course in Viking and Anglo-Saxon history and literature, but US academics in particular have campaigned against the term “Anglo-Saxon” because it suggests a distinct, native Englishness.

And goodness, we can’t have that.

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Written by: David
Pregnancy Pronouns Or Else Shakedowns

Bad Language

November 19, 2023 39 Comments

From the Telegraph, some healthcare news:

Cambridge University Hospital Trust under scrutiny for using the word in maternity leave policies, losing points in NHS diversity assessment.

Can you guess the offensive, verboten word?

The Cambridge University Hospital Trust, which manages a maternity hospital called the Rosie, lost points because staff use the term “mother” when referring to the policies it had in place regarding paid leave, instead of broadening it to include gender-neutral alternatives.

One might think that the employees having babies and therefore on maternity leave are, in fact, by definition, mothers. One might even think that a hospital, and a maternity hospital in particular, is a place where physical realities of this kind would be difficult to avoid. And yet.

While none of the hospitals’ current staff classified themselves as confused about which of the two sexes they are, it is, I suppose, possible that at some point one of the mothers taking maternity leave may, potentially, be sexually dysmorphic – i.e., mentally ill. But mental illness, even fashionable mental illness, isn’t generally something that one should affirm. Nor should it be a basis for the coercion of others. Farce, after all, soon loses its charm.

The scheme is commissioned by NHS England but run by trans rights groups, including Stonewall and the LGBT Foundation, who carry out the grading.

And these grifting monomaniacs appear to have their feet firmly under the taxpayer-funded table. Such that, even in hospitals regarded as doing nowhere near enough, rainbow ‘Pride’ lanyards swing freely around countless employee necks, “painted rainbow walkways” already assail the eye, along with innumerable rainbow-adorned posters and rainbow staff badges, and at least one “LGBT+ progress flag” flutters gaily from a dedicated flagpole.

In the same hospitals, unused tampons are abundant in the men’s toilets, and the womanhood of expectant female patients is being dutifully downplayed – one might say marginalised – lest the pretentious and unhinged feel in some way anomalous. Hospital staff are expected to introduce themselves to patients by gratuitously announcing their pronouns. As if their sex might otherwise be difficult to fathom.

The “diversity” assessments also insist that gynaecology services must “take… additional action to support trans and non-binary patients.” Specifically, dysmorphic women – women who wish to be perceived as men – should be spared having to sit in “a busy, gendered waiting room,” where the presence of other women may induce psychological discomfort and feelings of “dysphoria.” Instead, such women should be provided with “an adjoining waiting room that matches their affirmed gender.” In short, a waiting room for men in need of gynaecological attention.

We’re also told that gynaecology departments should remove “gendered names (e.g. ‘Women’s Health’),” as this may also make transgender visitors feel unhappy. The words “mother” and “woman” should, we learn, be replaced with the word “client.” The feelings of other, non-dysmorphic female patients on this matter, or on any of the matters raised, are not explored and are seemingly of zero interest.

Regarding the demanded erasure of the words mother and woman, another complaint is aired by our “diversity” overlords:

This change is only happening slowly across the service due to an already existing backlog.

A backlog of other “diversity” demands, that is. The ones being churned out at a boggling rate and with manic enthusiasm.

Among which, a demand that the term “heterosexual partnership” be replaced with “opposite-sex partnership,” on grounds that “bisexual people in opposite-sex partnerships” may “not classify themselves as being in a heterosexual partnership.”

Despite actually being in one.

At which point, readers may wish to imagine a bisexual chap, one in a relationship with a woman, arriving at a hospital with a fractured wrist and having the time to complain that his paperwork doesn’t allow him to stipulate that his heterosexual relationship with said woman is merely conditional and doesn’t preclude other, more manly entanglements at some future date.

Because when you’re fixing a chap’s fractured wrist, you obviously need to know about his bisexuality. And hey, priorities.

As part of the “diversity” assessment, feedback from hospital staff is solicited, presumably to determine the exact level of ideological conformity. However, much of this feedback has been denounced as “transphobic,” or “homophobic,” or insufficiently affirming of “pansexual” or “asexual” people. Examples of such inexcusable wickedness are included in the sixty-eight-page assessment report. For instance,

The sexuality or gender identity of my colleagues is not relevant to the job they do. Like everyone else, they should come to work and focus on their patients.

And,

I feel like I am surrounded by LGBTQ+ too much.

For readers on the verge of hyperventilated gasping, paper bags can be found under your seats.

Other supposedly scandalising staff comments are offered:

It gives me the impression that the hospital is prioritising trans rights over all other protected rights. Sex is a protected characteristic… and yet I am afraid the hospital will not protect the rights of female patients… Might a woman find a fully intact man who claims he is a woman in the next bed?

And,

If a patient asks for a female healthcare practitioner for an intimate procedure, can they be sure that person will be a woman?

The feedback quoted above is of course deemed worthy of a “content warning” and is prominently flagged as both bigoted and a “cause for concern.” One warranting “further investigation” by the employee’s superiors. Apparently, for Stonewall and the LGBT Foundation, and by extension the NHS, these are questions that needn’t be answered – and indeed one mustn’t ask.

Behold the new unsayable.

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Reading time: 4 min
Written by: David
Academia Science Shakedowns

You Will Pretend It Has Great Value

December 14, 2022 62 Comments

Or, Grifters Gonna Grift.

At Montreal’s Concordia University, even light is being “decolonised.” Because “colonialism in contemporary physics” is a thing, you see. No, really, it is. A thing that must be “countered” in the name of piety. By people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy:

The effort, funded by the Canadian government, seeks both to explore “ways and approaches to decolonise science, such as revitalising and restoring Indigenous knowledges” and to develop “a culture of critical reflection and investigation of the relation of science and colonialism,” according to the project’s website.

The project occupies the time of “equity, diversity and inclusion advisor” Tanja Tajmel and Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies Louellyn White, and draws on the magical almost-brownness of Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, a member of the Turtle Clan from Kahnawà:ke, and who was hired by Concordia to “facilitate anti-colonial training.” Combined, their efforts will be,

presenting western science in its historical and sociocultural context

I suspect this is where the words bad whitey will be inserted. After all, there ain’t no grift in a context that isn’t heaving with pretentious guilt.

and treating indigenous knowledge about concepts such as those related to light as bodies of knowledge with which physicists and other scientists should be familiar.

Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work, the important stuff, the thing that pays the bills, in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. 

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Written by: David
Academia Anthropology His Pretty Nails Pronouns Or Else Shakedowns

The Bedlamite Hustle

June 7, 2022 91 Comments

Christopher Rufo mingles with the dysmorphics of “Decolonizing Gender”: 

The panellists represented a wide range of idiosyncratic identities, expressed in a mixture of New Age and intersectional language—the more obscure and oppressed, the greater the status within the community. The main presenter, trans activist Malcolm Shanks, said he was a descendant of black slaves and Taíno tribesmen and “used to identify as gender fluid,” but has been “identifying more recently as a little bit more gaseous or plasma-like.”

Needless to say, the educational content is somewhat outlandish, often farcical and stupefying – essentially, a shit test for the neurotic, the credulous and the chronically pretentious. Mr Ganesha Gold Buffalo, for instance, a trans activist and prostitute, tells us that his expertise is rooted in “Waking up at four in the morning, five in the morning, every morning, to sounds of my ancestors screaming from outside my window, coming from the ground, coming from the earth.” His mind, we learn, “was decolonised” in nearby woods by howling “nature spirits.” Mr Buffalo, who identifies as many things, bemoans his “constant struggle under colonialism,” and his need for affirmation as a woman with a penis:

I one-hundred percent want to still be able to look in the mirror and see every part of myself as a woman, see every part of myself as a two-spirit trans woman, a beautiful being: my moustache, all of my facial hair, my untrimmed brows, my fat ass, my belly, my big dick, everything.

Other participants – again, self-styled educators – air equally challenging demands, including a belief that they should be addressed with seemingly random words, depending on whim and state of mind at any given time. “I want you to call me ‘Mommy,’ ‘Queen,’ ‘Daddy,’ if I want you to,” says Randy Ford, a transgender activist for the Lavender Rights Project, and whose pronouns are she, her, and goddess. Other terms of address include cyborg, unicorn, and Wakanda.

Along with the lists of stipulated pronouns and honorifics, and repeated demands for cash “reparations,” and tales of ghostly visitations by long-dead ancestors, the decolonisers of gender also share their extensive scientific knowledge. Specifically, that “There’s no such thing as male genes or female hormones or a male body.” You see, these things, which don’t exist, are merely diabolical constructs of the white devil. Hence the reparations, of course.

Videos of the bedlamites and their teachings can be found here.

The organisations mentioned in the piece all receive taxpayer funding, and all have programmes aimed at children.

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Reading time: 2 min
Written by: David
Anthropology Parenting Politics Psychodrama Shakedowns

Yes, But Have You Purged Your White Devil Ectoplasm?

August 25, 2021 70 Comments

Or, She Works With Children.

Whiteness…. is hostile, it is violent… it is annihilating… That is something we always need to be mindful of as white people.

A reminder that woke anti-white woo doesn’t have to be convincing or coherent, just signalled often, regardless.  

Note the implication that “whiteness,” being white, equals racism and is therefore by default a thing to be discussed in terms of pathology, a thing to be cured. “Colour-blindness” – i.e., not being weirdly fixated by race – is, it turns out, deeply problematic, and must give way to deconstructing “the whiteness=greatness fallacy in white psyches.” Which is what “white psyches” are all about, you see.

This self-confessed “white lady,” Natasha Stovall, is a child psychologist, a stater of pronouns, and an avowed “anti-racist,” which is to say, a seeker of woke status. And hence the racism, of course.

Dr Stovall “specialises in warmth and empathy.” Her rates are between $120-$250 per hour. In case you were tempted. 

Update, via the comments:

Dr Stovall tells us that she is terribly progressive and a child of progressive parents – presumably, the Less Bad White People – and is therefore “part of the solution.” Though one can’t help wondering if the phantom bigotries she invokes and then casually ascribes to others, seemingly based on their pigmentation, may have more to do with her own racial neuroticism – what with her being so terribly progressive and a child of progressive parents.

Commenter sH2 asks, “What the hell is ‘psychic energy’?” – a term, one of several, deployed as if self-evident. Alas, with all of the nebulous rambling and unfinished thoughts – all the y’knows, likes, and kind-ofs – it’s hard to be sure. Beyond the claim that this energy is a thing being “drained” by “whiteness,” a malevolent phenomenon, and which in turn is like a “ghost.” Or something.

Readers who watch Dr Stovall speak, in her area of alleged expertise, may not be given an impression of mental clarity, or of ideas that have been thought through and subjected to stress, even of a routine kind. It seems we must make do with a series of disjointed pronouncements surrounded by rhetorical gas. Such that, were Dr Stovall to sit there chanting “Bad Whitey” over and over again, the dogmatism and idiocy might be slightly more obvious, but the informational content would remain much the same.

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.