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For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and over 130,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year-summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.

If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.

Now share ye links and bicker.

“Why is your mouth making that noise?” || 83 metres. || Today’s word is meaty. || The thrill of teapot-making. || Meanwhile, in fairness and inclusivity news. || The fine dining experience. || “The longest fart ever is over two and a half minutes long.” || You’re embarrassing him, you see. || Two-bed flat, Islington: “The underground bunker is very spacious.” (h/t, Things) || Rinse and repeat. || The thrill of tunnels. || How to hypnotise a crab. || And what do you do with your surplus pieces of wood? || Scenes from progressive utopia. || Progressive law enforcement. || A coincidence, I’m sure. || Customer feedback. (h/t, STG) || The wife will love it. || And finally, while it’s hard to be sure, I think fun is being had.

My daughter’s father called her “princess” yesterday and I had to lecture him… again.

It’s a short video, but quite a lot is implied. Not all of it, I think, intentionally.

Update, via the comments, where Burnsie adds,

Watching that, I can certainly understand why her “daughter’s father” is not her daughter’s mother’s husband.

Well, quite. “We do not use that term in this house,” says our Queen of Indignation and Overreach. It’s a “harmful word,” we’re told. Though I’d imagine rather more harm is being done to said daughter by her having the kind of mother she apparently has.

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

If what I’ve been saying is true, then you could say, within the white cultural racist imaginary, black bodies are different, black bodies can suffer, black bodies should suffer.

I wonder if Dr Derek Hook, the agitated educator quoted above, the one mentioned here recently, needs to lower his dosage. Or up his dosage. Or to smoke some entirely different kind of bathroom cleaning product. Either way, “whiteness,” or “the white big other of the racist domain,” appears to be pressing on his nerves. When not suggesting, in a bizarrely circuitous and somewhat manic way, that white people, as some collective entity, secretly fantasise about harm befalling random black people, via “damage” and “mutilation,” Dr Hook apparently endorses the idea that “white people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” in order to “castrate whiteness.”

So, no concerning patterns of thought there, obviously.  

And in other educational news.

She’s “challenging a broken system,” you see.

Needless to say, if you poke through the archives, you’ll find countless examples of educators whose racial neuroticism and mental contortions, often with racially sadistic overtones, are quite remarkable. And again, it’s not just that the ideas on display – and very much in fashion – are obnoxious, or contorted, or morally deranged, or a blueprint for ruin; it’s that the kinds of people who find such things titillating or life-consuming, as Dr Hook and his peers evidently do, tend to be… psychologically marginal. Which is to say, the kinds of people you wouldn’t generally want anywhere near your children.

And yet.

Time for a few days off, I think. A long weekend. Play nicely. Use coasters.

Update: Above, Derwent Dam, as seen by your host and photographed by The Other Half. 

We seem to be living in an age of extinction-level stupidity: 

There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything [during the pandemic]. It’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.

So says Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union. A union representing 33,000 teachers and associated educational staff.

“Education is political,” says Ms Myart-Cruz, who boasts of her ability to act with near-impunity, and whose list of Intolerable Things includes cognitive testing, “structural racism,” border controls, policing, and the supposed “privilege” of parents who would like their children to actually learn things, including times tables. Our Mistress Of Higher Purpose struggles to comprehend why parents might object to their children’s education, even in basic skills, being supplanted by the nakedly self-serving and increasingly weird activism of the people paid to teach them those basic skills. Instead, she endorses claims that such objections must be driven by “white-supremacist thinking.”

Needless to say, the UTLA is vehemently opposed to voucher systems that would allow parents to spare their children a stay in what are not so much schools as activism farms. Where Ms Myart-Cruz and her “babies” can prioritise “fighting for… social justice.”

“We’re re-envisioning what the future of public schools will look like,” says she. 

Via Darleen. 

It’s a bank holiday hereabouts, so before doing other things, I thought I’d share this guide to online advertising.

Provenance unknown. Also, open thread.

Because it takes practice, a chance to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll kick things off with an answer to the age-old question of whether eyeballs bounce; an obliging doggo; a job that’s perhaps not for everyone; an inn of note; scenes of wartime London; and why a non-lethal knockout is harder than you might think.

Entertain me, I dare you. 

Heard in class: 

“Can everybody look up from their phones? Hello, you guys, look at me.”

As someone quips in the replies, “Is this on the test?”

Mr Zoa is a “performer and educator” who uses the word black as if it were a credential, an obvious accomplishment. Preferred pronouns, because of course, are “she/they/he,” and areas of expertise, of which there are so many, include “loving myself,” “hair micro-aggressions,” and gyrating in heels like a stripper. Readers may note how these daringly individual people – the ones so busily, and so loudly, being themselves – so often default to the same tedious cartoon.

Update, via the comments:

Mr Zoa also thinks that employers shouldn’t object to him going backless at work, on account of his non-binary fabulousness. Which, it has to be said, doesn’t suggest an encouraging set of priorities, or a mind focussed on the task for which said person is being employed. The imagined right to parade around the workplace in a cloud of self-absorption, forever on the cusp of voguing, in some backless, strapless ensemble is a strange hill to die on. For a high-school teacher.

But Mr Zoa seems to regard his hashtags – #lgbt #nonbinary #gay – as amulets of some kind, as protections against criticism, while seeking ever-greater indulgence.

Also, open thread.

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.