Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

“Their role as social engineers.” And so, 

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

Yes, it’s faintly absurd and veering towards comedy. But if you read the whole thing, you may well be struck by the eye-widening arrogance and vanity of the educators, who, as self-appointed “social engineers,” feel entitled to “counteract” normative gender differences, along with the preferences of parents, some of whom have complained about their children’s subsequent behaviour.

Via Ben Sixsmith. 

Now hush and approach with caution: 

My magical practice is based in African Diasporic voodoo, herbology, and root-work. I came to these rituals by studying Black slave rebellions, and unearthing the ways in which enslaved folx used hexes and curses to thwart their masters.

Not entirely successfully, it seems, given the word masters.

I turned to these traditions most open-heartedly in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests circa 2014, when I started to feel hopeless and emotionally drained after regular violent confrontations with the police at demonstrations. By wielding these protective amulets, reciting these incantations, calling upon the Orishas, and working intimately with the plants, stones, roots, and bones of my environment, I began to feel more empowered.

Because when your behaviour is so appalling that you’re repeatedly getting into scuffles with the police, what you need, obviously, isn’t a rethink of your life choices, but a magical amulet.

Quickly, my focus in the Craft moved away from damning hexes against white supremacy to community care work and deep psycho-social-spiritual healing for Black and Brown people in the struggle. As a queer Black woman scientist activist, Queer Magic For The Resistance is what I’m always giving.

The lady sharing her deep, uncanny wisdom is named Iman, a sorceress of sorts, and an affiliate of Queer Magic For The Resistance, a “collective and political affinity group based in Oakland, California.” Because of course it is. Iman, whose “whole world is magical,” describes herself as a “scientist” and “emotional care provider,” a purveyor of roots, herbs and “emotional emergency response.” As when equipping the LARPing sociopaths of Antifa with herbal teas and “healing shields.” For her, she says, “magic is resistance.”

To reality, I’m guessing.

Budget cuts. || Black Panther. || Bathroom essentials. || Will hospitals give back an amputated limb if you ask for it? || Embroidered bacteria. || It’s bigger than most. || 25 days in the life of a bean. || Boneshaker race, 1928. || Swinging London, 1967. || In need of friction. || San Francisco scenes. || Something on the floor. (h/t, Obo) || This is one of these. || And this is one of those. || Because you’ve always wanted a warp speed calculator. || While you pee. || Paranormal property. (h/t, Damian) || Popping balloons. || Thoughts on ladies’ fashion, New York, 1930. || Tweet of note. (h/t, dicentra) || Teatime view of note. || Macau, China. || Mussolini’s Rome. || Scrotum adventure. || An old machine from the Seventies, now far from home, stirs. || And finally, a horrifying shark attack.

A North Carolina State University sociology instructor contends that vegan and vegetarian men are guilty of “upholding the gender binary” and perpetuating “white masculinity.”

Imagine my surprise. 

Meatless Meals and Masculinity was written by Mari Mycek, a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the NCSU sociology department, who argues that vegan and vegetarian men have reclaimed their “previously-stigmatised consumption identity” to wield power over women by framing their lifestyle as a rational, rather than emotional, choice.

It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to, personally. But as we’ve seen so many times, the contrived agonising must never end. Especially for woke sociology lecturers who wish to remind the world of their own Brahmin status in the progressive pecking order.  

Update:

According to Cheryl E. Matias and Paul T. Le, both of the University of Colorado at Denver, the belief that the apprehension of, and substance of, scientific discoveries is independent of whatever one’s skin colour may happen to be, is a problem. One that results in the spread of “whiteness ideology,” and thereby “white supremacy.”  

Nikita Vladimirov pokes through the mental wreckage: 

According to Matias and Le, “our science is out of touch with the experiences of our students of Colour and, instead, represents post-colonial discourses of White power and control.” “Whiteness embraces White ideology, and because Whites are at the apex of the racial hierarchy, whiteness becomes normalized and is invisible to those who benefit the most from it,” the scholars observe. “This is particularly troubling because the normality of whiteness means that Whites do not believe that they are actively investing in White supremacy or racism, which keeps oppression intact.”

And Kafkatrapping, apparently, is the apex of woke scholarship.

Because if you demur, or suggest that the laws of electromagnetism don’t dramatically alter depending on the melanin levels of the person doing the maths, then you just don’t care about “students of Colour” being “victims of deculturalization” and being “invalidated.” Indeed, you are “erasing the values and culture of indigenous people,” and are bolstering “post-colonial discourses of White power and control over people of Colour via forcing the internalization of Western science knowledge.” Instead, all people of pallor must denounce themselves as oppressors, embrace “other ways of knowing” and “re-imagine what science education spaces can look like.”

Sadly, however, and despite the assertions above, the aboriginal alternatives to Maxwell’s equations and commutative algebra remain oddly unspecified.

Somewhat related. 

Update: