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Upside-down Academia
Just a quick observation about what is, to me, a perplexing aspect of today’s education environment.
We have a kerfuffle in Florida prompted by a very sensible call to prohibit the radical sexual indoctrination of kids in pre-school through third grade. The “alphabet people,” as one popular stand-up comic likes to call them, have their nickers in a twist over the possibility that other people’s young children won’t be fed a load of malarky regarding their gender identity — won’t be, at least, until they turn nine.
We have stories out of Washington state about schools informing teachers that “Parents are not entitled to know their kids’ [imagined sexual] identities. … That knowledge must be earned.” (Apparently birthing, raising, and protecting the little monsters isn’t enough to earn it.)
In the Commonwealth of Virginia we have (another) instance of the public school system deliberately covering up a horrific act of sexual predation that occurred within the school… because, apparently, parents have to earn the right to know that their kids might end up in the hospital after being sexually assaulted in school by a mob of fellow students. At least we can be thankful that there were no in-school police present, lest anyone feel triggered.
Meanwhile, in “higher” “education”:
A majority of the law students at Yale Law School have gone on record to express their opposition to free speech, after throwing a tantrum that at a more worthy institution would have resulted in disciplinary action but that, for this lot of pampered crybullies, is met with passive acceptance by the emasculated nannies who run America’s Ivy League daycare system.
At considerably less toney Syracuse University, it’s a spot of pro-Russian graffiti that has the administration babysitters scrambling to prevent a meltdown among the undergraduate toddlers. This is hardly the first example of that school’s pathetic pandering to a mewling student mob.
So what I don’t understand is why America’s public elementary and high schools seem to think the sexual misuse and abuse of teens and pre-teens is no big deal, but college administrators think ruffling the feathers of the fragile little chicks enrolled in our universities is a kind of violence.
It almost seems backward, somehow.
Published in Education
Get the government out of education. All of it. End the government curriculum mandate. Privatise the state colleges. Just say no to student loan support.
Hank, my impression is that they don’t think of the trans thing as sexual abuse or misuse. They seem to think of it as allowing children to discover their “true” selves.
This is nothing new. Pro-homosexuality indoctrination seems to have been going on since the 1990s, though it probably proceeded at a different pace in different areas, and there probably remain pockets of resistance in conservative regions.
I think that you and I disagree about the root cause of the whole trans thing. I think that it’s a logical progression from the feminist rejection of traditional sex roles, to the pro-homosexuality movement, and now to trans. They seem like much the same thing to me, supported by the same arguments.
Kids these days are growing into immaturity.
Jerry, you and I probably don’t disagree very much about the sequence of the progression, nor about the way activism has played into that progression. Where we differ, I think, is in our sense of the morality of various aspects of it.
Liberalism — the good kind that means tolerance and individual freedom — is inherently a kind of slippery slope. It starts with the very idea of individual rights, progresses through prohibitions against slavery and other blatant injustice, and eventually includes suffrage and full civil status for women, minorities, and people with unconventional lifestyles.
I don’t consider homosexuality to be a moral failing in either feeling or expression, merely a not extraordinarily rare abnormality in human sexuality. I feel much the same about transvestitism and gender dysphoria, although I think in those cases there’s a much greater likelihood that there are accompanying/contributing psychological pathologies. I don’t think there’s a moral component to the underlying phenomena.
I do have an objection to the activism, which I think seeks to ram a deranged model of human sexuality down our throats and compel us all to confess belief in the patently absurd. I think the activist alphabet people are too quick to corrupt children, perhaps because they’re abnormal adults lacking the inherent protective drives of normal adults (but I’m speculating), or perhaps because too many of them have abnormal sexual obsessions that prompt them to see the world through a sexual lens, much as race activists have a twisted sense of reality and see everything through a tinted racial lens.
But I don’t have a moral issue with men choosing to dress like women, or homosexuals lisping girly-talk at each other, however much I find such behavior silly and vaguely pathetic.
An aspect of upside-down-ness in academia is that (at least according to some professors) the students are in charge at many universities, and that the professors live in fear of the students.
I did get some comfort in a headline in one of the legal newsletters that appeared in my in-box that a federal judge is trying to get his colleagues to refuse to hire for coveted judicial clerkship positions any of the Yale law students that participated in the protest to shut down the Federalist Society debate. It would be nice to see such students suffer real consequences for their ignorance. Were I still hiring lawyers, I’d probably start refusing to hire any recent graduates from several of the formerly prestigious law schools like Yale, Georgetown, and others that now produce intolerant narrow-minded snowflakes.
Yes, that pleased me also. The judge is Laurence Silberman, and Powerline reported on it here.
And in the meantime, please, please get your children and grandchildren out of this toxic system. How better to “defund” the indoctrination system than to starve it of students?
But, the first order of business is protect and educate your children and grandchildren. It’s the moral responsibility of every parent.
Academia now makes students more racist (because treating people of different colors the same is patriarchal) it makes them more neurotic because it offers guilt without redemption. It makes intolerant of different opinions and discourages critical thinking and research.
Lispy gays seem kinda fake and they seem like they are trying too hard. But the ‘regular dude’ gays I’ve met seem pretty alright.
Unless you were in charge, I expect you would be ordered not to do so, because of the lawsuits.
And if you were in charge, you’d just get the lawsuits directly. Then you get to decide if turning down Yale grads etc, is worth going out of business.
Because the customer is always right.
And the identity of the customer in public education has become a bit blurred.
These are not educators. These are sexual indoctrinators. They are attacking impressionable kids with lies, abuse and ideology. It is time for parents and freedom-loving people to oppose this madness. These people are despicable!
Wrong, Henry Castaigne, wrong! If I didn’t lisp I’d have to hand back my Gay Card and would also lose my fast lane shopping privileges. It’s really important.
It seems the feminists’ arguments for rejecting traditional sex roles made possible this new idea of gender. Unexamined acceptance of the feminists’ arguments also made possible dishonesty, denial and confusion about biological sex and this new idea of gender. I doubt any of the 1970’s feminists ever meant to paint themselves into the kind of corner in which they couldn’t object to men calling themselves women, and invading women’s spaces, without contradicting all their previously made feminist claims about sex and gender.
There’s a book I never read: The Inevitability of Patriarchy, I think is the title. One of these days I’m going to read it to find out if the guy who wrote it thought at the time, as I’m starting to think now, that human beings are naturally patriarchal.
What if they are ? Well, then you can have a nice patriarchy, a Judeo/Christian type of patriarchy—I mean a patriarchy in which the strong protect the more vulnerable, and respect the equal humanity of the more vulnerable—or you can have a not so nice patriarchy—-something like Afghanistan, or something like the way Ancient Rome got in its decline when there was a lot of gender bending and homosexuality, and when the children of the poor, male or female, were casually abused sexually by the rich.
I agree with Western Chauvinist that step one is to get our kids and grandkids out of schools in which there are people conditioning children, especially preadolescent children, into a sexual outlook and behavior their parents know is disordered.
My fear is that parents will talk themselves out of making the sacrifices they have to make to get their kids away from the toxic indoctrination they witnessed during the pandemic. It seems to me, to do what they have to do, a lot of parent couples need to free up one of them to have more time to pay attention to what their kids’ learning environment is.
I things I’m hearing about some public schools make me think parents teaching kids about unacceptable touching, using a doll, might be a very good idea.
That AND getting them out of the schools.
Schools and other organizations with a pro-gender diversity orientation are part of a wider culture that tolerates grooming.
Public schools can’t be fixed as they are run and by whom they are run. Neither can most of our universities. If we want to save the idea of a Republic we have to start anew in both places. Do something like what what New Zealand did with their schools to take them from the bottom of the west to the top, in one year.. Make them all independent of the government and each other by giving the money to parents to pay tuition so that schools have to compete and become what parents want and the country needs. We mistakenly believed that the one area where socialism works is education. Utter nonsense, but we can’t seem to get it out of most heads.
You need to embrace your inner Freddie Mercury.
(Although he was more bisexual to be honest)
It’s insanity. The left no longer even thinks, they only respond to their leaders who tell them what the new rules are for them to follow. It doesn’t matter if they make sense, they are the new rules, and aren’t they special to be able to follow and promote these rules? They’re special people, and gosh darn it, people like them.
Well, it is a moral failing. It’s the very definition of perversion. It’s a free country, people have a right to be perverts. It’s also a free country and we don’t have to pretend it’s not perverted.
I disagree, but this isn’t in the realm of the objectively provable, Skyler. We’re talking about personal standards of moral conduct.
Note that I did not say that homosexuality is NOT a moral failing. I said that I don’t consider it to be moral failing. You do. That’s fine. But, just to be clear, I am not “pretending” that I don’t consider it immoral. I simply don’t consider it immoral. I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that some people do consider it immoral.
I have friends who think it’s a sin to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. I don’t subscribe to that view, but I understand that they do. As you say, it’s a free country.
The private lives of consenting adults—- people who aren’t preying on children or teenagers or promoting their lifestyle to my grandkids—-are no business of mine. I’ve had gay neighbors. We got along very well. I liked them.
I’m sorry, this isn’t hard. You just hire the people you want, for reasons other than where they went to school.
This is dead-on based on my experience with my brother-in-law.
I’ve told this before. 15 years ago or so, he was laughing at me about Republicans referring to Democrats as socialists. I didn’t know what to say. Last election he had a Red Bernie sign in his yard. His other sign was Elizabeth Warren, who just copies whoever she thinks is are going to get her over the line, in this case Bernie. When I pointed this out to him, he gets really worked up and he says that all he cared about was getting rid of Trump and he caucused for Biden. So, somehow that makes sense. (I think he was freaked about Biden’s mental state because he’s a neuropsychologist.)
To make a long story short, I told him I prefer to stick to public policy in discussions about, well, what you are supposed to talk about to select how are you vote. (lol) I keep burying him so much in every conversation that he finally announced that he doesn’t know anything about public policy and he’s not talking about it anymore. If you’re going to put socialist signs in your yard, I don’t think that makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Strange but true.
I think what it comes down to is, they need to do anything to justify creating more and more non-public goods. So they invent social issues or social problems, then they force things around with that excuse to “solve” it. The Democrat party doesn’t exist unless they are pushing things around with government force more and more, which obviously just creates a bad feedback loop.
Breitbart News Daily had a great guest about this yesterday. Hey he is an ex-Intel analyst for the military. PhD in clinical psychology. There’s nothing on the web for it because they were using a guest host. Cody McGinnis. I can’t find anything else on this guy anywhere. It was basically about how political operations and countries try to shut down critical thinking.
The Minnesota left is getting fired up again about “full-service schools”. You load up schools with all kinds of extra services to make up for the fact that nuclear families are falling apart and it makes it hard to educate kids. And if you just add dorm rooms, you get instant communism. lol
I saw somewhere that the Feds spend 30 million a year on it doing who knows what. And they can never keep the funding going in Minnesota for some reason.
Why do teachers need to talk about anything political or psychological?
This drove G. Gordon Liddy crazy in the 90s. I didn’t get it at the time, but he was totally right.
Dennis Prager has been talking about it for decades. The Left and their LGBT agenda is intent on destroying the distinctions between men and women — male and female He made them. Everything good, true, and beautiful is under attack from the Left.
And, can’t you just picture it? It’s a dystopian movie where all the people are dressed in matching gray jumpsuit “uniforms” with short hair. They’re automatons.
The Left is about conformity — destroying individualism.
They will tell you it is to “Counteract toxic ____________ .”