The new student counselling director at Middlebury College has vowed to use “more inclusive” methods to treat student mental health, including a focus on white supremacy and social justice.

Ah. I think I see the problem.

Alberto Soto, who received his PhD. in counselling psychology from Brigham Young University, told the Middlebury Campus newspaper that… “The body and mind cannot be healed solely by self-care and focusing on surviving… At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”

When not using the word “whiteness” as a modish pejorative and “questioning Eurocentric ideas surrounding mental health,” Mr Soto plans to “challenge the historically-dominant whiteness” of the campus and thereby “create a more open environment for students.” This heavenly state of openness and resurgent mental wellbeing will be rendered upon the Earth by telling students at an upscale and statusful liberal arts college how oppressed they are and by invoking racial conspiracy theories, the aforementioned “whiteness” and “white supremacy,” as the root of all distress.

Readers will recall that Middlebury College is where students suitably gorged on “inclusivity” and “social justice” display their righteousness and mental stability by physically menacing elderly scholars, trying to trample them underfoot, and assaulting female staff, such that they require a hospital visit and, subsequently, a neck brace.

The Middlebury campus has spent the past few years cultivating its persona as one of the most active antiracist campuses in America… Yet at the same time schools have ramped up their antiracist efforts, mental health among students has only gotten worse.

Readers may wish to speculate as to why that might be, and why the phenomenon – a surge in students reporting “anxiety and depression” – predates the pandemic.

Annual tuition at Middlebury is a mere $56,000, excluding books and housing.

Via Captain Nemo in the comments, a tale of woe and trauma from party person Mr Jordan Bennett: 

Okay so I had the most DISGUSTING INVALIDATING experience at Heaven nightclub last night,

Hey, I visited Heaven one evening in the early 90s. I’ve seen what can happen.

a place where I am meant to feel free and accepted.

A big gay club for today’s downtrodden homosexual. There is, though, the small matter of security checks. For weapons and such.

Queuing to enter the club it splits into 2 lines- MAN and WOMAN – to be checked by seperate [sic] people.

Sharp-eyed readers may have an inkling of what’s coming.

I am non-binary so OF COURSE I’m gonna queue in the women’s line in sheer protest of where I know they would expect me to queue based on my appearance.

But of course. Let’s call it intersectional decision-making. Or a contrived, rather needy, excuse for drama. 

I wait to be checked nervously and then one of the security staff rudely gestures me to the other line for men. I then kindly tell them that I am non-binary whilst highlighting the pronouns on my earrings which clearly say ‘They/Them’

Sadly, however, said earrings had lost their talismanic powers:

They carried on refusing me access, repeatedly saying this side was for ‘women only’. I shamefully walk to the other side. The two distinctly separate box-like detectors for each queue added to the prison-like atmosphere. I felt invalidated and embarrassed.

Habitual self-involvement can do that, I suppose.

A left-leaning management consultant recently asked his left-leaning Twitter followers for their thoughts on the insufficiently left-leaning working class. The replies – from self-declared socialists, Guardian readers, “woke remainers,” and assorted “social justice advocates” – are, shall we say, of a type, but may nonetheless be of interest. 

Via Damian Counsell, who adds, “If you want to know why the Conservatives have an 80-seat majority…”

Also, open thread. 

I’m not sure there’s a name for this kind of thing. (h/t, Noah Carl) || Odd doggo. || Get you. || Good to know. || Access denied. || Hi, Toilet is an (almost) contactless public convenience. || The thrill of public transport, part 2,044. || Athletic ladies, 1940. || Squirrel feeder of note. || The thrill of pencil sharpening. || Possible pet. (h/t, Darleen) || Tiny monsters. || “Get with the times.” || A brief guide to medieval tennis. || “The root of all discrimination that we see in the world.” || The thrill of hair drying. || The thrill of Thames Television. || Today’s words are learning environment. || Scenes. || Bio-absorbable screws. || Hot bee sex. || This does this. || And finally, he’s taking it rather well, all things considered.

She’s tired of catering to your feelings. 

You see, when you appear to be female, and sound female, and are objectively female, and you visit a restaurant with a group of women, and the stranger taking your order fails to pre-emptively ask, as one does, whether anyone present has serious mental health issues, and instead simply says, “Hi, ladies”… Well, clearly, this is an outrage. 

Update, via the comments: 

Nikw211 adds,

I am not responsible for the state of someone else’s mental health. This is not because I lack compassion, but because anyone who makes the state of their confidence and sanity dependent on random strangers is going to be forever disappointed. It would be like bursting into tears every time you buy a lottery ticket and find your numbers didn’t come up.

It does seem an unpromising path to contentment. As noted here recently, 

This, I think, is what makes trans activism different from that of other groups with which transgender people are often equated. Someone being gay, for instance, doesn’t generally entail a demand that everyone else either hallucinate or pretend to hallucinate. Which is to say, trans activism often includes a belief that the rest of us should pretend that the physical reality we can see is somehow not the case. And unsurprisingly, people may object to being told that they should lie on demand.

A concession that would leave those so inclined at the mercy of any poseur, or prankster, or unpleasable neurotic.

Some will likewise not welcome being told to indulge, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of neurological anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to. 

Update 2:

You know what to do. I’ll set the ball rolling with some agreeable downwardsness; a state-of-the-art driving simulator circa 1967; hairs hitherto undetected; assorted slime mould; and the thrill of competitive miniature dry stone walling.

Oh, and I think these may be teabags.

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

Loving Themselves.

Fat feminist students fight the patriarchy by gorging on doughnuts and thick, liquid pudding.

Yes, students with weight issues – issues of such magnitude that they have anger to release – will be encouraged to gorge on doughnuts and thick sugary drinks requiring an extra-wide straw, before hating themselves all over again, while pretending to be empowered and totally okay with it. You see, the way to help overweight people is to encourage the kind of high-sugar consumption that results in weight gain and inviting them to smash objects that remind them of how unhappy they are about being fat. A situation that they’ve just made slightly worse. 

One For The Ladies.

A Guardian writer tries his hand at saucy celebrity news. Things take a strange turn.

Apparently, “gay twink culture” is feeding into straight desire, albeit in ways never specified; and yet, complains our columnist, these ephebophile appetites are “nowhere to be seen in the People [Sexiest Man Alive] list.” Readers will doubtless be shocked by the revelation that the middle-aged ladies who buy People magazine, many of whom have children of their own, aren’t overwhelmingly aroused by the kind of skinny young men whose fame is based on playing skinny 17-year-old boys who get seduced by older men in the kind of art-house films loved by Guardian columnists.

The Psychology Of “Social Justice” Is A Thing To Behold.

Leftist professor advises students to say “fuck you” to potential employers. 

Readers with an academic bent will be thrilled to hear that Dr Strouse’s dissertation is titled Literary Theories of the Foreskin. This work of tremendous cultural and intellectual heft “investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organises literary experience.” It also, apparently, “demonstrates that, within the school of preputial poetics, the male anatomy queerly embodies the plasticity and multiplicity of rhetoric.”

Should you want more, by all means click here. Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. 

Applause would surely follow. 

I am a polyamorous, pansexual, lesbian and nonbinary transwoman. I’m also a furry. 

As someone quips in reply to this, “When you give yourself all the roles in the Discord server.” 

When not discussing his mental health issues – a go-to and seemingly inexhaustible topic – or deploying niche hashtags by the dozen, or modelling his assorted looks, from “hot girl summer” to “basic bitch autumn,” Mr Wildcat, quoted above, likes to remind viewers of how startlingly original he – sorry, e/er – is:

I realise my neo-pronouns are a little unique, mostly because… I came up with them. 

Readers will note that Mr Wildcat apparently finds it bewildering that someone – specifically, a female colleague – might not be entirely convinced by his supposedly unassailable womanly status:

She struggled with identifying my gender and it’s like… what? I wear low-cut tops to work.

“It was confusing. It confuses me.”

Update, via the comments:

A miracle breakthrough in child relocation technology. || “My device will prevent the flapping of the breasts.” || Butterfly repair of note. || Burly chap plus one. || Positive thinking. || Steepness detected. || Related, you may wish to tread carefully. || He does this better than you. || And they do this quite well. || ‘Tis the season. || Tom and Jerry. || At last, a robotic masseur. || Incoming. || Carved avocados. || Thaddeus Cahill’s Teleharmonium. || Across The Multiverse, a game. || Women have weird elbows. || Background noise generator. || The thrill of 1980s dashboards. || Incongruity detected. || Ant farm diversion. (h/t, Things) || And finally, because you clearly need to know, a “fun fact about me.”

Kenin M Spivak on the urge to level down:

During the last 18 months, supercharged by events after George Floyd’s death, the radical Left has… shifted its focus to the abolition of testing and standards, the evisceration of math curricula, and indoctrination in our K-12 schools. The following is a necessarily abridged summary of recent developments…

Under pressure from progressive assertions of test bias, over the last few years, many colleges decided that SAT and ACT testing would be optional. Then, to settle a lawsuit alleging racist disparities, in May 2021, the UC system announced it is ceasing the use of ACT and SAT scores. Other colleges promptly followed the UC’s lead. Without scores, there can be no disparities.

In April 2020, citing “equity” and its goal to restructure and dismantle “systems and institutions that create the dichotomy of beneficiaries and the oppressed and marginalised,” the Oregon Department of Education eliminated grades and proficiency in reading, writing, and math as requirements for graduation…

On September 9, 2020, Education Trust-West, an “advocate for educational justice,” announced its study and toolkit for K-12 math, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In Pathway, Trust-West characterised expecting the right answer, independent practice, teaching in a linear fashion, requiring procedural fluency, and requesting that students show their work, as “white supremacy.” Instead of offering a path for minority students to learn how to do math and come to the correct answer, Pathway instead advocates that schools use numbers to motivate anti-racist discussions of social justice.

On July 14, 2021, the California Department of Education issued a Mathematics Framework based on True-West’s Pathway. Chapter 1 of Framework rejects “natural gifts and talents” and calls for de-emphasising calculus and eliminating classes for gifted children in grades 6-12 to eliminate “inequity.” Chapter 1 specifies that “equity influences all aspects of this document.” The draft Framework directs teachers to use math for political discussions about “marginalised communities” and to move away from focusing on correct methods or answers.

At a time when, despite increases in school funding, almost 80% of black and Hispanic eighth graders have been deemed “not proficient” in maths or reading, it’s unclear how improvements might be made while simultaneously graduating high-school pupils regardless of their performance, or even their attendance, and while shying from the existence of such terribly oppressive things as correct answers.