How to use a chair. || How to sell bread. || Biodegradable shoes. || These black holes are bigger than yours. || Suboptimal situation. || Incoming. || Kuru, the laughing death epidemic of Papua New Guinea. || How to kill weeds. || Wheelchair of note. || Wheelchair of note 2. || “He would put on the voice of an elderly woman, then ask the call handler to describe their feet.” (h/t, pst314) || Can I touch? || Candle smoke. || Cat trees. || Accidentally gigantic spiders. || Which kind of rain would you like? || Candy Wrapper Museum. || Jam session. (h/t, Darleen) || Life skills. || The sounds of learning. || Serving suggestion. || When The Pie Was Opened, 1941. || And in ever-updating pronoun news, “This makes perfect sense.”

When the topic of gender and genitals came up…

In pre-school, of course. 

Koe Creation, the rather animated lady above, is, she says, a “second-generation queerspawn” – by which she means the product of a polyamorous household – and is allegedly, via some unspecified process, an expert in “sex-positive parenting” and “non-violent communication,” on which she offers “guidance.” She – or rather they, because pronouns – works within the “polyamorous and kink communities” and holds workshops in bondage and sadomasochism, and is therefore, obviously, spending lots of time with small children and talking about their bodies.

Update:

Ms Creation, also known as Valkyrie Jacobson-Smith, is now upset that “the trolls” have found her public announcements and have not been overly impressed or encouraged by them. Insufficient enthusiasm – and any kind of demurral – apparently warrants the designation troll. Presumably, the wider public – those outside of “polyamorous and kink communities” – should be thrilled to discover that pre-school children are being taught by a self-styled “expert” in bondage and sadomasochism, and being quizzed on their genitals, and being used as a basis for “intergenerational dialogue around relational identities (such as polyamory, sexuality… and kink).”

Because, hey, there’s nothing creepy or concerning about that at all.

Yes, dear reader, it’s terribly unfair when people fail to affirm your radicalism and subversiveness, with children aged three and four – a subversiveness of which you’re so proud – based on “moments when that rhetoric happened to come up in the classroom.”

It just happened, you see.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Via TomJ in the comments:

The head of one of Scotland’s biggest rape crisis centres has suggested “bigoted” rape survivors should be re-educated about transgender rights as part of recovering from their trauma. Mridul Wadhwa, a transgender woman, said people would not truly recover unless they addressed their “unacceptable beliefs” because “therapy is political.” She said: “We will work with you… but please expect to be challenged on your prejudices.” The comments imply rape survivors may be treated differently according to their political views.

So, a woman who has just been traumatically violated by a man pretending to be something that he isn’t, i.e., a lover, and been forced to submit to his fantasies, is now to face another man pretending to be something that he isn’t. And will be forced to submit to his fantasies.

Update:

Wadhwa, a self-styled “strategic thinker,” insists that “therapy is political” – which apparently means that a woman who’s been raped by a man and then seeks help from other women will be told, on the orders of a man, that she “can’t really… recover from trauma” until she “reframes” that experience to incorporate the most modish and deranging iteration of transgender ideology. Failure to do so is “unacceptable” and will of course be “challenged.” Because priorities.

The centre is currently advertising for a chief operating officer, who must also be a woman, and says applications from trans women would be “especially welcome.”

Must be a woman – or even better, not.

As STG says in the comments,

Imagine going to your first counselling session after being raped and realising that the counsellor considers their problems more important than yours. And then realising that, in addition, the therapist wants emotional support from you, and that if you don’t give it, you are considered a bad person. And this is policy.

Indeed. Readers are invited to imagine, too, the precise level of self-preoccupation required in the scenario above. To insert one’s own psychodrama into that situation, of all situations. It’s practically sociopathic. Yet here we are.

Helping hound. (h/t, Darleen) || Major sheddage. || Adventure sheet offers wetness protection. || A guide to the immune system and its tiny, violent dramas. || Upscaled micro-organisms. || New York, 1900. || On the neurotic farce of woke classical music. (h/t, Sue Sims) || Sales may have suffered. || Field lines detected. || Colliding light. || “The toilet… can generate half a kilowatt hour of electricity.” || It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage. || Snack bar of yore. || Bicycles for animals. || London Picture Archive. (h/t, Things) || Leftist parenting. || A pathologically self-involved nightmare on legs. || Racial narcissism. || Lo and behold. || And finally, progressively, “I’m going to try my best to respect that.”

By “suspending proficiency requirements” in the name of “equity”:  

An Oregon high school diploma does not guarantee that students who earned it can read, write, or do math at a high school level. Governor Kate Brown dropped the requirement that students demonstrate they have achieved those essential skills by signing Senate Bill 744 into law. She declined again Friday to comment on why she supported suspending the proficiency requirements… Charles Boyle, the governor’s deputy communications director… said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements will benefit “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of colour.”

You see, having one’s academic capabilities and fitness for employment thrown into serious doubt is now a benefit.

Meanwhile, in the public schools of Baltimore.  

And somewhat related, this. 

From academia’s Clown Quarter, rumblings of radical import:

Gender and Women’s Studies Professor Sami Schalk suggested she may cease wearing a bra to work, citing, among other things, male “policing” of women’s bodies. “I don’t want to wear a bra to work,” Schalk said on Twitter. “It’s harder on my body & expensive AF.”

Nothing signals gravitas quite like a juvenile abbreviation for the words as fuck.

“All so [sic] some students think my tits don’t sag or don’t know I have nipples? Why?! As person with large breasts my body has always been heavily policed bc of how other people, mostly men, respond to it.”

An educator, remember. A shaper of young minds.

Schalk has gained notoriety on the UW-Madison campus for her outspoken opinions ranging from twerking to anti-police rioting. In 2019, wearing a cape that declared “I AM 100% THAT BITCH,” Schalk twerked with rapper Lizzo at a Madison show. In a column at Vox, she declared it “an act of political defiance.”

And a grown woman.

The event in question, this act of political defiance, and preparations for it, can be witnessed here. 

“When Lizzo joined in, booty to booty — my butt blessed — it was pure Black Girl Magic,” she recalled.

When not exulting in her blessed buttocks and their magic blackness, or sharing boudoir photoshoots, or referring to the police as “fucking pigs,” Dr Schalk offers snacks and advice to rioters and arsonists, including reminders not to video each other while indulging in said rioting and acts of arson, as this may be incriminating and result in consequences, and subsequently harsh the buzz of being so terribly radical.

Recently, Schalk has focused on her right to be freed from the constraints of clothing and undergarments. When one Twitter [user] counselled that it was okay to occasionally “show some ass,” Schalk heartily agreed. “My ass is great,” she responded. “Sometimes I like to share it with the world.”

American readers will doubtless find comfort in this use of their tax dollars. $102,000 per year, or thereabouts.

But hey, bras are expensive as fuck.

“My pronoun, like, preference has changed three times today.”

Please adjust your schedule and commitments accordingly.

Update:

Clarifications ensue.

Update 2: 

Remember, citizens, always closely monitor those bracelets and earrings. Because you couldn’t possibly have anything better to do.

Also, open thread.

Slow-motion moths. || The most intelligent lifeform on planet Earth. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || The Museum of Everything Else has an Instagram page. (h/t, Things) || Also, mice farm. || Burly tumbleweed. || The thrill of budgerigars. || Talking Dog. || Cats will do that. || Cat versus cobra. || “Vasily was generously rewarded.” || Viewing dispute. || Pearls detected. || “Completely waterproof.” || The thrill of South Korean candy manufacturing. || They increase in mass. || Just like normal people. || Unhappy conversions. || Highway liveliness. || Illusion of note. (h/t, Julia) || Christopher Lee reads Sherlock Holmes. || Honing skills. || One woman and her bear. || And finally, the thrill of cleaning.

Razib Khan reviews Charles Murray’s Facing Reality: 

Comfortable white people—“nice white parents” in affluent neighbourhoods who support efforts to “defund the police”—can refuse to look into the data or insist that those data are the product of racist systems and structures. They can “interrogate their privilege” and “confront their white supremacy,” or better yet, demand that others do so. But they won’t be any closer to understanding why poor African Americans and Latinos in inner-city neighbourhoods want more police officers in their neighbourhoods and not fewer, nor why poor African American parents clamour for access to strict charter schools that activists condemn for being “anti-black.” Principled ignorance might be a costless gesture for affluent progressives, but they’re heaping additional injustice onto the backs of those who can least afford the wages of social signalling.

Ben Sixsmith on when paedophilia was avant-garde: 

The German Green party was especially notable for its enablement of child abuse. As the Times of London reported in 2015, “a paedophile network was active in the Berlin branch of the Green party until the mid-1990s, with potentially hundreds of victims.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading student activist in the 1968 unrest and a prominent member of the Greens, wrote fantasies about sexual contact with children which he later awkwardly described as “irresponsible” and “a type of manifesto against the bourgeois society.” Cohn-Bendit was not, as you might assume, a hair-brained student when he wrote that filth, but 30 years old. Perhaps the bourgeois society had something — at least something — to be said for it.

Hans Bader on woke bigotry and a dishonest news media:

Attention, unwoke people. It’s time to be informed about “nounself pronouns and animal nounself pronouns.”

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.