It’s fundraising week over at my place, the last one of the year.
If you’d like to help keep a blog afloat, and keep it ad-free, by all means do.
We Don’t Want Your Sort Round Here
She Reeks Of Class
Assorted Friday oddments, including a lesson in reciprocation; the classy dame of your dreams; scenes of the undead; the joys of feminist geography; and a selection of slightly underwhelming library books.
Deviant Detected
The rumours were spread – not just rumours, emails, including from the student government – that I was a white supremacist coming to campus with my white nationalist followers to target minorities… They organised safe spaces for my visit. They organised safety teams to guide people to safe spaces with glow sticks if they couldn’t find the safe spaces. In the library, which was the main safe space, they had colouring books for students—college students. It was the craziest thing.
Links Ahoy
Assorted oddments for the weekend, including the hazards of test-walking new shoes; how to unmix your music; some teachable moments; synchronised boobies; a brief history of Soviet cannibalism; and an unusually entertaining traffic-blocking protest.
Those Poor Little Darlings
The Atlantic invites us to feel sorry for thieves caught in the act for the umpteenth time:
Ms Fairley – who invokes racism as a cause of her local notoriety, and whose extensive cache of stolen belongings included other people’s credit cards – is described to us at length and in the softest possible light. We learn of her dysfunctional upbringing, her struggles with a mouldy apartment, and her various drug habits, including “trekking daily to a methadone clinic,” a heroic feat, apparently. Ms Fairley’s inability to attend numerous court dates – for petty theft, mail theft, receiving stolen property, possession of heroin, and child endangerment – is, we learn, due to her having “a lot going on” in her life. In at least one instance, it turns out that what was going on was stealing from a resident she’d previously targeted, and who, while being robbed, again, was waiting to see Ms Fairley appear in court.
The fact that Ms Fairley is gay is mentioned too, as if that were somehow relevant or an explanation for credit card fraud and chronic thieving. We’re also told, touchingly, that she has “family members’ names tattooed on her neck.”
I Don’t Think They Want Candy
The basic message of the masked night-time visitors – a message illustrated vividly elsewhere – seems fairly straightforward. ‘You see who we are, and show others who we are, and so we will punish you.’
More jolly larks in the world of Antifa, where not-at-all-unhinged people spread love and compassion.
Scrapings Of The Internet
Assorted Friday oddments. Including… When your telekinetic powers fail you; a questionable public bathroom design choice; more joys of public transport; some hardcore oversharing; and what appears to be the aftermath of a traumatic collision.
17 Divided By 6 Equals ‘Ow, My Feelings’
It should be apparent that implementing [‘Social-Emotional Learning Theory’] necessarily presupposes some dilution of the traditional nuts-and-bolts curriculum — the diversion of finite class time to topics and methodologies that have nothing to do with mastering, say, long division. The gurus of SEL make no apologies for this. Rather, as [New York mayor, Bill] de Blasio insists in his Fortune piece, “These are hard skills… just like reading and math, that must be taught, practised, and strengthened over time.” SEL’s unflinching emphasis on the so-called “non-cognitive factors” in cognition is bad news for all supporters of no-nonsense education — that is, the kind that doesn’t encourage students to devote class time to communicating their current emotional status to their peers via emojis, as has happened in some SEL implementations.
Steve Salerno on woke education. One of these.
Class War!
Imagine being so self-absorbed and self-flattering, so untroubled by normal boundaries, that you don’t anticipate how your own disruptive behaviour will tend to be viewed by the wider public – the people on whom your behaviour is being inflicted. A wider public that for the most part can’t afford to spend days on end indulging in Student Union theatrics.
Question Of The Day
How dare you defend yourselves?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Selection Box
Oddments for the weekend, including some unconvincing prayer; the joys of public transport; how to augment your breasts on a budget; how to steam eggs; and the musical genre named ‘dungeon synth’.
You First
In the pages of the Guardian, Ms Ngaree Blow attempts to sell the merits of prehistoric healing:
Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.”
“Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior, as evidenced by a lack of traditional practices in these services.”
Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.
For “Social Justice,” No Doubt
This And That
Oddments for the weekend, including scenes of Freudian dining; Shakespearean street passions; teaching AI to play hide-and-seek; art made of breasts and adhesive tape; and some seat-of-the-pants tree surgery.
Inversions Of The Left, #3,065
Seven different experiments, in seven different cities, resulted in seven dramatic surges in classroom violence, up to and including actual riots. While white teachers who found themselves being punched in the face, resulting in trips to hospital and permanent injury, were subsequently lectured on their “unconscious biases” and “white privilege,” and told to take comfort in free emergency whistles.
And This Is Your Brain On “Social Justice”
The school, without telling parents, changed all of its bathrooms, “from kindergarten to fifth grade,” from single-sex to gender-neutral. At a Parent–Teacher Association meeting, families split into warring factions. One side was furious at the school for making such an important decision arbitrarily and autonomously. “The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels — and not just on the bathroom doors — led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.”
Pudding First
It occurs to me that if you start demanding that small children be allowed to vote in general elections – largely because you assume that their choices, their politics, will tend to mirror your own – then perhaps it’s time to ponder why your own politics correspond with the imagined preferences of children, who are, by definition, unworldly and irresponsible. Such that you grudgingly concede that, “Enfranchising everyone [i.e., including small children] will make the electorate less informed on average.” The rest of us, meanwhile, may wish to ponder whether a leftist’s desire to exploit the ignorance of small children in order to further her own socialist vanities is not only farcical, but degenerate.
Something For Everyone
Assorted oddments for the weekend, including a breakfast cereal amplifier; some close calls; a toilet-related submarine mishap; how to build your own wooden hurdy-gurdy; and when mislabelled baldness medication inadvertently results in some really hairy children.
Vanity Is A Powerful Drug
The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.