Time for an open thread, I think. You’ve got that restlessness about you.

But first, Amanda Trenfield shares a tale of romance for our times:

I had decided only the week earlier to attend the three-day event with my husband. It wasn’t in the family holiday plan, and we had to arrange care for the children, but I saw it as a perfect opportunity for us to reconnect… I believed that time away from the stress of everyday life was the perfect remedy to reignite our relationship.

Needless to say, it did not go as planned.

Ms Trenfield, by the way, is a life coach, ready to “empower” you with her expertise, while teaching you to “understand and appreciate the most important people in your life.”

Via TomJ.

Now share ye links and bicker. 

A tearful tale, care of Kelsey Smoot, “a cultural and gender theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet”:

As a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them/theirs pronouns as my terms of address, I suppose I should be celebrating this influx of discourse on the proper usage of pronouns. Truthfully, I’m exhausted.

Exhausted. Because of course them is. And issuing all those terms of address can really take it out of a girl, even one with chin fluff.

Within several of my closest relationships, the fact that I require ungendered pronouns when referring to me in the third person has become the source of deep strain and disappointment.

Specifically,

I feel duped by some of the positive reactions from my friends and loved ones when I initially came out as transmasc/nonbinary. In retrospect, that was the easy part. I was the only one changing.

More specifically,

In the years since, I have come to find that I am in constant competition with my past. For a while, I flinched when I was misgendered but said nothing. Then, I began giving gentle reminders, followed by long-winded overtures of understanding. I felt guilty and embarrassed and made sure to emphasize that effort was all that mattered to me. Recently, though, I’ve begun pushing back: “You’ll have to do better” is my new refrain.

And who wouldn’t want a friendship based on an ultimatum? A demand that you will perceive what you are told to perceive. The issue, it seems, is that friends and relatives who have known Ms Smoot for some time, as a young woman and a girl, aren’t finding it easy to pretend or to forget what they know. And what they know necessarily casts some doubt on the whole themness business.

Husband detected. || In between homes. || Bandits’ Roost, not unlike a certain alley referred to around these parts. || Cacti in bloom. || Bird synthesizers. || Kestrels at home. || Canned cake. || Stacking scenes. || Something error happen. || The progressive retail experience, parts 426, 427, and 428. || Today’s word is intriguing. || Onwards and upwards. || “Save time and water.” || She has some “shower thoughts.” || 1940s waterfront. || Today’s other words are scrotal heat stress device. || Life hack. (h/t, Julia) || All in the jaw. || Dog-fussing detected. || Heh. || Heh 2. || Heh 3. || Can you drink heavy water? || Make way for more woke innovation. See her inner loveliness. || And finally, the thrill of air travel.

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.

After turning 2 years old, my son, Avishai, started demanding that he only wear tractor shirts, and my mind spiralled into darkness.

So writes Jay Deitcher, a social worker and therapist, a declarer of pronouns, and, it seems, someone accustomed to the aforementioned mental spiralling:

I catastrophised worst-case scenarios, imagining a world where he fell for everything stereotypically manly. I envisioned him on a football field, barrelling through mega-muscled opponents. Imagined him waxing a sports car on a warm summer day.

We seem to be in a high rhetorical gear. For a two-year-old’s choice of shirt.

Mr Deitcher – who has, he says, “always judged other guys who seemed boxed in by masculinity” – airs his view of maleness:

Men didn’t hug. Men didn’t say I love you. Men were angry. Aggressive. Inept as parents. I became determined. I was going to create a bond stronger than any parent had ever achieved, but I told myself that to do so I needed to distance myself from anything deemed masculine.

This line of thought goes on for some time.

I grimaced at anyone driving a Ford car, the John Wayne of automobiles. I hated men who wore plaid. Felt ill if someone mentioned a wrench or another tool.

And because things aren’t sufficiently dramatic:

My body spiralled into panic any time I attempted manual labour.

Given these fevered thoughts, all this tool-induced upset, readers may wish to peek at the photographs accompanying the article, and which may bring to mind the words grown adult, albeit ironically. Readers may also wish to ponder the prospects of a father-son relationship premised on a dogmatic, near-hysterical disdain for maleness, for “anything deemed masculine.”

The situation did not improve. || Peekaboo with impunity. || Snack accepted. || Caught off guard. || Urge detected. || With magnets and cold aluminium. || A compilation of mishaps, near misses, and motorized morons. || And another. || Scenic route. || I expect your answers by the end of the day. || Dad skillz deployed. || He does this… er, pretty well, actually. || How to impress your friends. || How to impress your friends 2. || Playing with propane. || Invisible chair. || High anxiety. || And yes, he did survive. || Today’s words are hostage video. || How to confuse honeybees. || How to make a slightly bouncy egg. || Speaking of bouncing. || And finally, if you want all the bouncing, I can only offer you this.

Dr Erec Smith, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania, on educators who would prefer minority students not to be understood, or indeed successful:

[W]hat is perhaps most troublesome about [“anti-racist” educator, Asao] Inoue’s statement is that he is projecting negative emotionality onto students because of something—their desire to learn standard English—that would otherwise suggest a positive and confident self-image. By framing this desire to succeed as hopeless, he is encouraging healthy young people to adopt attitudes that will hinder their development.

Possibly because expectations of failure, and cultivated resentment, are more exploitable by race-hustling educators. People whose paycheque depends on propagating misery.

Implicit in Inoue’s statement is the notion that the only way “students of colour”—particularly black and Latino students—can successfully navigate American society is to be phony and put on an act for white people’s approval. The thought of a black person seeing the pragmatic benefit of standardised English, or of a black person coming to college already proficient in it, are by this standard of black or Latino authenticity either impossible or reprehensible.

Authenticity being defined, it seems, as inarticulate ghetto knucklehead.

For Dr Inoue, a minority student wishing to be articulate, precise, and understood by a wider audience, by being fluent in the language of his academic peers and potential employers, is “selfish” and “immature.” Opting for comprehensibility and success is, we’re told, to surrender to “white supremacy” and “capitalist-inflicted bullshit.” “You can… mouth the words that are white, but… they’re coming from a [black] body,” says Dr Inoue, as if expecting applause.

Dan Springer on Seattle’s woke, broke public transport:  

At a recent Sound Transit Board meeting, the outgoing CEO summed up the situation. “Our fare collection system relies overwhelmingly on an honour system,” Peter Rogoff said, “and our increasingly acute problem is that our riders aren’t honouring the system.” By one measurement, as many as a staggering 70% of all passengers are free riders. But even that is only an estimate as there is almost no fare enforcement. Sound Transit did away with fare enforcement officers after a study revealed people of colour were disproportionately getting fined.

Sound Transit Board member Claudia Balducci appears untroubled by this trajectory, insisting that “People are feeling more welcome on our system and less afraid to use it because there’s less of a fear of fare enforcement.” Apparently, this is a good thing. The views of local, law-abiding taxpayers, who are subsidising this experiment in social progress, are left to the imagination.

Ben Sixsmith on the steep decline of Swedish education:

Many of the problems [Magnus] Henrekson and [Johan] Wennström diagnose will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the British education system. Grade inflation has masked declining standards, which, in Sweden, manifested themselves with a Wile E Coyote-esque fall down the PISA rankings. […] Sweden has, in recent decades, undergone an extraordinary demographic transformation. As of 2020, a quarter of Swedish residents had a foreign background. In 2015, research by Dr Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren suggested that “the change in pupil demographics due to immigration explains almost a third of the average decline between 2000 and 2012: 19 per cent in mathematical literacy, 28 per cent in reading literacy, and 41 per cent in scientific literacy.” 

And Emil Kirkegaard on super-progressive Ontario, where “diversity” trumps standards: 

It is now illegal to use a math test to make sure that math teachers know the material they would be teaching.

The motives for removing tests of educator competence soon become apparent. The likely effect on students – including minority students, in whose name competence is being sidelined – is a topic on which readers may care to speculate.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Emotional drama at the dentist. || Some dunnies are nicer than others. || Cheeeldren of the night (daytime version). || How to turn a health supplement into the smell of death. || Humpback and hand-crank. || To please her, you must hallucinate. || How clouds are made. || A little too close for comfort. || Capturing a special moment. || “Endless love and happiness.” || They do say the laundry never ends. || Danger, Will Robinson. || The brightest and best, you know. || Stunning and brave. || Not quite what I expected. (h/t, Ben) || Today’s words are preschool teacher. || The popular music of ancient Rome. || Pyramids ahoy. (h/t, Julia) || Process accelerated. || And finally, the thrill of footwear.

Update, via the comments:

In coping news, a thread. Somewhat related:

In diverse-identity news,

Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public.

If you detect dissonance in the headline, you’re a very bad person, obviously.

Chloe Thompson, 42, was caught rubbing herself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself in an alley in Middlesbrough, Teesside, on August 13 last year. A couple shouted at her and she ran away. On the same day, she exposed herself on the street where she lives and thrust her hips into a fence. A witness said Thompson looked at her and the group she was with “as if Thompson wanted them to notice her.” Once she was inside her house, she exposed her bum and thrust against her window.

And remember to steer clear of the words mental health issues. These are merely “challenges,” according to Judge Stephen Carroll.

Update:

In the comments, Mags highlights the woke dishonesties in the quoted paragraph:

Chloe Thompson, 42, was caught rubbing herself himself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself himself in an alley in Middlesbrough, Teesside, on August 13 last year. A couple shouted at her him and she he ran away. On the same day, she he exposed herself himself on the street where she he lives and thrust her his hips into a fence. A witness said Thompson looked at her and the group she was with “as if Thompson wanted them to notice her him.” Once she he was inside her his house, she he exposed her his bum and thrust against her his window.

FTFY

It is faintly surreal, even setting aside the novel use of a wheelie bin. And Thompson’s history of indecency and molesting children.

I can understand the reluctance to appear indelicate or to cause needless offence, and in some situations there may be scope for polite fudging. But pretending-as-default, or worse, pretending-as-law, can lead to unhappy farce and a kind of collective derangement. And the media presenting the reader with an obvious distortion of reality, and seemingly an expectation that we should all pretend too, is also rather offensive.

Also, open thread.