I’ve been out of academia for a few years, but this bespoke sexuality nonsense was already exploding by the time I got out. I saw two big shifts in the studentry during my academic career. The first was the catastrophic drop in academic readiness, thanks mostly to No Child Left Behind (et al. Lots of trends contributed, especially Participation Trophy culture, but NCLB is a good synecdoche). The second was the end of all-out college kid hedonism.
By the end of my last tour of duty, most college kids were dour puritans. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is the thing people keep forgetting about the Internet: People lie. I know we all know that consciously, but we seem hardwired to believe confessions. In the same way that we might not consciously watch TV — might go some distance out of our way to avoid it — but find ourselves staring mindlessly at the blinking screen when we’re in a bar or a waiting room or something. It seems to be hardwired. So when these folks start writing about all the bizarre sexual shit they’re into, we just … believe them. Sight unseen.
But y’all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I want to state, unequivocally and for the record, that my entire knowledge of undergrads’ sex lives is secondhand. I have zero personal experience in this area. But it’s a close secondhand. For one thing, there’s not much to do in College Town that doesn’t involve undergrads, so I ended up drinking at a lot of the same bars, and in vino veritas. Second, kids these days have no filter. None whatsoever. Finally, social media — my last tour was at a SPLAC, where they strongly encouraged the faculty to be “friends” with the student body on their campus social media apps.
And yeah, they SAY a lot of things … but I highly, highly doubt they actually DO much of anything at all.
For one thing, those “student” bars were lucky I and a few other semi-normal profs were still in our “drink away the pain” phase, because otherwise they would’ve gone out of business. Friday and Saturday nights during football season were still pretty lively, but the rest of the week the “downtown” bars had all the crackling energy of singles’ night down at the mortuary.
Kids just don’t socialize much IRL, and when they do, they don’t hook up. In my not-inconsiderable experience, college drinking these days is like college anything — a grim, pinch-faced, assembly-line business. They intend to get blackout hammered, and they get after it like Heroes of Socialist Labor. Pausing for a quickie in the bathroom would mean skipping a turn in the drinking game — and they all play drinking games; it’s bizarre — so no thanks.
And y’all, those are the outgoing ones. The ones who still have some slight urge to see and be seen out in physical space. The rest of ’em never leave their rooms except at gunpoint, and when you force them to, their eyes never leave their phones.
That’s why I’d bet many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that all the “kink” in their social media profiles — even their personal ads — are just for show. They’re not listing all that stuff in order to find someone to have sex with. They’re using it as an excuse not to have sex with anybody, because “having sex with” entails personal interaction and they’re terrified of that. If they ever perfect those VR sex helmets like they had in Demolition Man, watch out, but as of now the whole idea is to seem weird and daring and liberated and kinky, but with no possibility of a follow-up. Oh, you’re into aardvarks and dental tools too? Um … yay? Oh, wait, you dress up as O. a. erikssoni, and I’m only into O. a. leptodon. Sorry!
Severian, “Saturday Miscellania”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-13.
November 29, 2022
November 17, 2022
“The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented – and he had a few, that bloke – is Thanatos, or the ‘death instinct'”
Ted Gioia on the apparent death wish of the academic publishing industry:
The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented — and he had a few, that bloke — is Thanatos, or the “death instinct”. This is an alleged drive among living organisms to destroy themselves.
Many have disputed that such a thing exists. Instincts preserve life — that’s their evolutionary purpose. The idea of a death instinct is impossible, so the critics claim. It’s like that Peacekeeper Missile or soft rock or marijuana initiative or any of those other two-word combinations of things that don’t belong together.
I’ve often criticized Freud, but I’ve come to accept this Thanatos notion, at least as a sociocultural concept. It explains so many otherwise inexplicable happenings in our society.
Take, for example, academic publishers. They are clearly imbued with a death instinct, no? How else can you explain their self-destructive behavior?
Universities have been publishing books for almost 500 years — dating back to 1534 A.D. when King Henry VIII allowed Cambridge University to set up a printing press. Running one of these publishing outfits is almost a requirement if a college wants to rise in the rankings, but I wonder how much longer this can last. After all, how can you succeed as a publisher if you put so little energy into selling books?
I know one academic publisher that previously sent out two hundred or more review copies of each new book — because they obviously wanted publicity for these titles. Those days are gone. Nowadays their preferred strategy is to send out zero physical copies to reviewers. I’m not exaggerating — I’ve heard it straight from their mouths: their goal is to distribute absolutely no hard copies to media outlets and book critics.
College students are spending 26% less on textbooks this year. That’s a bloodbath for the publishers. But this is the inevitable result whenever you assume the customer has no choice — because, sooner or later, they actually do.
Okay, I don’t blame the publishers entirely — just consider how rarely the New York Times reviews books from academic presses. You might think the cultural elites in New York would give some support to their fellow travelers in idea-mongering, but no dice. They treat those academic books like they’re toxic.
(By the way, I’m grateful to the Times Literary Supplement over in London, which still takes time to tell me about important scholarly works, most of them ignored in US media. But even that last holdout in Britain feels precarious — I fear they’ve been too contaminated by Yankee values.)
Yankee values? That’s up there with the Peacekeeper Missile.
But the lack of review copies is just one symptom among many. Let’s look at a few others.
Just consider the flurry of rebranding efforts in academic publishing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, successful organizations rarely redesign their logos or “refresh” their brands. They don’t have time for such nonsense. But even more to the point, when you’re thriving, your logo is part of that success — it’s a sign of your strength, and you just don’t mess with it.
But that’s clearly not the case in academia nowadays.
I could give you countless examples from college campuses — where “rebranding” is more popular than a hot high school football prospect on a recruiting visit. But I’ll settle for two instances:
My only disappointment is that these brand redesigns didn’t come packaged with a new slogan. May I suggest something along the lines of: Information Solutions for a Changing World.
Or maybe, if we can be a bit more boastful: The Ultimate in Handheld Data Storage.
Does anybody still believe in this rebranding malarkey? Surely any reasonable person can see it’s all smoke and mirrors? But that hardly matters, because the brand redesign has tremendous symbolic value.
That’s why they do it.
The road to hell was once paved with good intentions — but nowadays we settle for symbolic gestures. They’re much cheaper than good intentions. And there’s no shortage of symbolic gestures nowadays — more than enough to pave that whole damned highway to hell.
It’s a shame that symbolism doesn’t pay the bills. Or fix problems. And it certainly won’t sell books.
QotD: The Dummies’ Guide to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Who: Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor in the mid-late 2nd century AD. The last of the “Five Good Emperors”, Marcus spent much of his time dealing with barbarian incursions and plague. There are some good biographies of the man, but Wiki covers the high points.
What: Because of the above, the Meditations were something like Marcus’s private self-help manual. He’s reminding himself to remain literally Stoic in the face of serious, seemingly unsolvable problems.
When: Late 2nd century AD. Greco-Roman philosophy was well-developed at this point; Stoicism was part of the classical tradition.
Where: In general, the European part of the Roman Empire. Specifically, on campaign against the barbarians – Marcus wrote a lot of the Meditations at the front.
Why: Because this man was the richest, most powerful individual in his world … and hated it. As a Stoic, he believed that virtue was its own — and, indeed, the only — reward, but as Roman Emperor he was forced to do un-virtuous things all day every day. It’s good instruction for how to live with yourself — how to be a man in a world that so often forces you to act like a snake.
Essential Background: Not much beyond the above.
Nice to have: The basics of Stoic doctrine. Specifically, their belief that “living virtuously” and “living according to nature” were basically synonymous, and that they were the only way to true happiness. A little Stoic epistemology, too — as their way of life depends on seeing the true nature of things, their standards for knowledge (what we’d call “justified true belief”) are extremely high. A statement like “pain is indifferent” is clear, and useful, on its own, but knowing the Stoic view of knowledge helps one appreciate just how prevalent the “indifferents” are, and how tough being truly indifferent is. Also nice to know: The wholesale adoption of Marcus by medieval Christians. There’s a very strong Stoic streak in Christianity’s first 1500 years; Marcus is always up there with the very best of the “virtuous pagans”.
None of these are necessary, though — you could lightly edit the Meditations (taking out the “thank you’s” at the start of Book One, explaining a few allusions) — and publish it today as a self-help manual. Also not necessary: Any real background in ancient philosophy. Back then, “philosophy” meant “a way of living”, not “a system for investigating the world”. Since Marcus is convinced of Stoicism’s truth, he doesn’t spend any time engaging the doctrines of other schools.
Severian, “Reading the Classics: An Illustration”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-14.
November 16, 2022
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien … arch-dystopians?
In The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons considers the literary warnings of well-known dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, but makes the strong case that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were even more prescient in the warnings their works contain:
Which dystopian writer saw it all coming? Of all the famous authors of the 20th century who crafted worlds meant as warnings, who has proved most prophetic about the afflictions of the 21st? George Orwell? Aldous Huxley? Kurt Vonnegut? Ray Bradbury? Each of these, among others, have proved far too disturbingly prescient about many aspects of our present, as far as I’m concerned. But it could be that none of them were quite as far-sighted as the fairytale spinners.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, fast friends and fellow members of the Inklings – the famous club of pioneering fantasy writers at Oxford in the 1930s and 40s – are not typically thought of as “dystopian” authors. They certainly never claimed the title. After all, they wrote tales of fantastical adventure, heroism, and mythology that have delighted children and adults ever since, not prophecies of boots stamping on human faces forever. And yet, their stories and non-fiction essays contain warnings that might have struck more surely to the heart of our emerging 21st century dystopia than any other.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
The disenchantment and demoralization of a world produced by the foolishly blinkered “debunkers” of the intelligentsia; the catastrophic corruption of genuine education; the inevitable collapse of dominating ideologies of pure materialist rationalism and progress into pure subjectivity and nihilism; the inherent connection between the loss of any objective value and the emergence of a perverse techno-state obsessively seeking first total control over humanity and then in the end the final abolition of humanity itself … Tolkien and Lewis foresaw all of the darkest winds that now gather in growing intensity today.
But ultimately the shared strength of both authors may have also been something even more straightforward: a willingness to speak plainly and openly about the existence and nature of evil. Mankind, they saw, could not resist opening the door to the dark, even with the best of intentions. And so they offered up a way to resist it.
Subjectivism’s Insidious Seeds
The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.
When Lewis delivered this line in a series of February 1943 lectures that would later be published as his short book The Abolition of Man, it must have sounded rather ridiculous. Britain was literally in a war for its survival, its cities being bombed and its soldiers killed in a great struggle with Hitler’s Germany, and Lewis was trying to sound the air-raid siren over an education textbook.
But Lewis was urgent about the danger coming down the road, a menace he saw as just as threatening as Nazism, and in fact deeply intertwined with it, give that:
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientists in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be “debunked” and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape at will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people …
Unfortunately, as Lewis would later lament, Abolition was “almost totally ignored by the public” at the time. But now that our society seems to be truly well along in the process of self-destruction kicked off by “education in the spirit of The Green Book“, it might be about time we all grasped what he was trying to warn us about.
This “Green Book” that Lewis viewed as such a symbol of menace was his polite pseudonym for a fashionable contemporary English textbook actually titled The Control of Language. This textbook was itself a popularization for children of the trendy new post-modern philosophy of Logical Positivism, as advanced in another book, I.A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism. Logical Positivism saw itself as championing purely objective scientific knowledge, and was determined to prove that all metaphysical priors were not only false but wholly meaningless. In truth, however, it was as Lewis quickly realized actually a philosophy of pure subjectivism – and thus, as we shall see, a sure path straight out into “the complete void”.
In Abolition, Lewis zeros in on one seemingly innocuous passage in The Control of Language to begin illustrating this point. It relates a story told by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which two tourists visit a majestic waterfall. Gazing upon it, one calls it “sublime”. The other says, “Yes, it is pretty.” Coleridge is disgusted by the latter. But, as Lewis recounts, of this story the authors of the textbook merely conclude:
When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall … Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “sublime”, or shortly, I have sublime feelings … This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.
For Lewis, this “momentous little paragraph” contains all the seeds necessary for the destruction of humanity.
November 13, 2022
QotD: Your “true self”
Unfortunately, the search for the true self has a tendency to go on for years or even for decades. I used to ask my patients who said that they were in search of themselves how they would know when they had found it. The true self, after all, is not like a mislaid pair of cuff links. They said that their unhappiness would fall away when they found it, presumably like the outer mold of a casting. But they had no real idea of what a better life than the one they were leading would be like. Mostly they thought of the better life as one of luxury and more consumption, bathing in ass’ milk rather than in mere water. When I suggested that they needed to lose rather than to find themselves, they asked how one lost oneself.
“By being interested in something outside of and other than oneself,” I said.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
Here the weakness of my advice became apparent to me. I have been interested in many different things in my life, usually in succession, and my library is a testimony to my tendency to serial monomania; but I have never been interested in nothing, and therefore have no idea how people develop the capacity to be interested in something (that is to say, in anything) ex nihilo, so to speak, nor do I have any recollection of how I did so myself. I suspect (though I cannot prove) that modern education, which lays emphasis on the relevance of what is taught to children’s present lives rather than, as it should be, on its irrelevance, is partly to blame for the very large numbers of people who cannot lose themselves, and therefore are left to the vagaries of entertainment provided for them under our current regime of bread and circuses. The unassuageable thirst for entertainment is both a manifestation and a symptom of a profound boredom with the world. Indeed, entertainment is also one of the greatest causes of boredom in the world, inasmuch as everyday reality can now rarely compete in raw sensation with entertainment. But since dealing with everyday reality remains a necessity for most people, it results in boredom because it is compared with entertainment. Only a deeper engagement with the world can avoid or overcome this problem.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lose Yourself”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-11-10.
November 4, 2022
Ontario parents brace for yet more school disruption as CUPE threatens a Friday walkout
Matt Gurney, writing in Toronto Life, recounts a fairly typical Ontario parent’s concerns at the latest stand-off between the Ontario government and the non-teaching educational workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE):
It’s one thing to watch the news as a journalist and wonder how to cover it. Over the last week or so, though, I’ve just been another parent wondering if my young kids are going to be out of school for an extended period. Again.
It’s all very familiar by now, of course. Can I shuffle my deadlines? Should we get rotating playdates going with neighbours so we can have some quiet in the house when we have an important Zoom call? Do we still have the number of that tutor we used during Covid, and should we call her again if this drags on? Anyway, there’s always the grandparents, right?
This is stress we don’t need — a kick in an already tender spot. I remind myself that, all things considered, others have it way worse: people on shift work, single parents, parents of kids with special needs, those for whom a missed shift means a missed rent payment or a skipped meal. But, even among the affluent and privileged, the frustration, the sense of weariness at more of this, is strong.
[…]
Let me repeat that: my son, now in the third grade, has never had a normal year of school. Preschool and JK? Sure. But then Covid struck mid-senior-kindergarten, in a year already disrupted by job actions from teachers during contract negotiations with the province. (Once the pandemic began, deals were quickly reached.) Schools closed and didn’t reopen. The next year, his first grade, was a complete fiasco, with schools opening and closing as the virus surged and waned. The second grade was better but still had a lot of shifting rules and a relatively brief shutdown after Christmas. This year was the first shot for my son to know a normal school year.
And there are thousands of other kids like him out there, each with a parent (or two) who worries that their child has already lost too much.
Don’t discount the guilt parents feel. We spent years telling our kids, “No, you can’t do this.” Denying them birthday parties, family trips, sports and activities, even just playdates. If you aren’t a parent and don’t understand why people might get so passionate about whether their kids stay in a classroom, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all about the lesson plan or just a desire to ship them off so that the house is quiet for a few hours. Those both matter, but the bigger concern for many is that we’re tired of saying no to our kids. We’re tired of telling them that they can’t do things. We’re tired of having things taken away from them.
We knew that measures to limit the spread of Covid were important. We went along, for the most part. We waited. We got our jabs. Many of us got our kids jabbed. In exchange, we want normalcy back. Not for us but for them.
The Ford government’s treatment of CUPE is undeniably heavy handed — probably on purpose, to send a signal to other unions. It’s also unnecessarily nasty. Ford could have struck a better deal with education workers, like imposing a short-term contract with a higher wage boost to help them ride out inflation, as I proposed weeks ago. That might have eased the concerns of parents out there who, though worried about their kids, don’t like Ford or what he’s doing.
I think Jen Gerson has it right here:
October 22, 2022
QotD: OCS in the era of the snowflake
But — and this is the point — college these days is the END of what you might call the “special snowflake” pipeline.
They can put medicos through that “just learn where to stick the insignia” course because medicos aren’t line officers, are never expected to be line officers, and will probably never come within 500 miles of the sound of gunfire. Kids recruited out of college, on the other hand, are going into line units. What kind of Special Snowflake is going to put up with even a tiny fraction of the chickenshit even the loosest army in the world is going to put them through?
And it doesn’t help sticking them with the service troops, because in any army I’ve ever heard of, the chickenshit is actually much worse in the rear with the gear. All of which is the deepest possible affront to a Snowflake’s amour propre, which is why xzhey will never sign up …
… or, worse, consider the kind of Snowflake that would sign up. I think “a Dunning-Krugerrand who is also a diagnosable sadist” would probably cover it.
Think of what that must do to morale … and from that, to effectiveness in general.
Severian, “Alt Thread: Officer Psychology”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-12.
October 14, 2022
QotD: High school
You didn’t understand this back then, of course, but your parents did, and — crucially — your teachers did. If you wanted to be a Metalhead this semester, they’d treat you like a Metalhead, complete with the “Why are you wasting your potential (and ruining your ears) with that godawful noise?” They’d make a show of having a Very Serious Conversation with you about the dangers of drugs and satanism … knowing full well that you weren’t on drugs, weren’t sacrificing virgins to Moloch (if for no other reason than you didn’t actually know any girls), and would, in fact, come back as a clean-scrubbed Preppie after summer break your junior year.
The key word in “adolescent rebellion”, after all, is adolescent. All of that stuff was just practice. If it proceeded in the normal way, what going through all the permutations of high school identity taught you was:
- you’re a fairly normal person; and
- that’s ok.
In other words, you are not a collection of externals — clothes, music, hairstyles. You’re you. The externals can change, fairly radically — remember that one summer you broke your nose trying to be a skater? — but there’s a core in there that’s you. Which is great, because it means that you are just a person who takes customer service calls in a cubicle farm to pay the bills; they’re not going to put “Here lies Bill, a Customer Service Representative” on your tombstone.
Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.
October 12, 2022
QotD: Luxury beliefs
An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]
I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.
David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.
October 10, 2022
QotD: The joy of teaching
It’s all the other bullshit — which is 98% of academia — that I couldn’t stand.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-01.
October 8, 2022
QotD: Does homework, well, work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg Cooper 2006) is terrible.
Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn’t.
One minor complaint about this methodology is that we don’t really know if anyone is reporting time spent on homework accurately. Cooper cites some studies showing that student-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates with test scores at a respectable r = 0.25. But in the same sample, parent-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates at close to zero. Cooper speculates that the students’ estimates are better than the parents’, and I think this makes sense — it’s easier to reduce a correlation by adding noise than to increase it — but in the end we don’t know. According to a Washington Post article, students in two very similar datasets reported very different amounts of time spent on homework — maybe because of the way they asked the question? I don’t know, self-report from schoolchildren seems fraught.
But this is the least of our problems. This methodology assumes that time spent on homework is a safe proxy for amount of homework. It isn’t. Students may spend less time on homework because they’re smart, find it easy, and can finish it very quickly. Or they might spend more time on homework because they love learning and care about the subject matter a lot. Or they might spend more time because they’re second-generation Asian immigrants with taskmaster parents who insist on it being perfect. Or they might spend less time because they’re in some kind of horrible living environment not conducive to sitting at a desk quietly. All of these make “time spent doing homework” a poor proxy for “amount of homework that teacher assigned” in a way that directly confounds a homework-test scores correlation. Most studies don’t bother to adjust for these factors. The ones that do choose a few of them haphazardly, make wild guesses about what model to use, and then come up with basically random results.
Both homework proponents (Harris Cooper) and opponents (Alfie Kohn) briefly nod to this problem, then take these studies seriously anyway. If you do that, you find that probably homework isn’t helpful in elementary school, but might be helpful during high school (though some people disagree with either half of that statement). But why would you take these seriously?
Scott Alexander, “Nobody Knows How Well Homework Works”, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-07-07.
October 6, 2022
QotD: Life in grad school
After a few years of this, you forget what normal life is even like. You come to understand the deep and longstanding grievances the Poststructuralist Feminist Marxists have with the Marxist Feminist Poststructuralists. Oh, there’s scads of “diversity” on campus — all those recruiting brochures they mail to dumb parents in the ‘burbs aren’t lying — but there’s one thing you’ll never, ever find: The thought that maybe politics doesn’t matter all that much.
That’s the answer, right there. Academic “humanities” work is mostly bullshit because most people just don’t care about politics. To normals, if they think about “politics” at all, it’s in Schoolhouse Rock terms — some guys in Washington vote on some stuff, and that’s how a bill becomes a law. They certainly don’t mean ideology, which is pretty much the only thing academics mean. That a normal person could walk into the voting booth without really knowing if he’s going to pull the lever for Trump or Hillary fries an egghead’s circuits…
… and yet, as we all know, the majority of American voters do this, every single time. There’s something profound about normal person behavior that academics just can’t — or won’t — grasp.
Severian, “Ignoring the Human Factor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-14.
September 27, 2022
Is Kayla Lemieux the leading edge of LGBT tolerance or a “dude gaming the system”?
Back on September 16, I posted a link to the then-breaking story of the teacher in Halton whose prosthetic breasts had poked into news headlines everywhere: “This is either the teacher of the year (come on, you know that’s inevitable because reasons) or someone doing an epic physical and psychological parody of our culture right now.” It’s nearly two weeks later, and we’re still not really clear on which of those two possibilities is closest to the truth. At PJ Media, Athena Thorne is making a case for the epic prank case:
There is the most titillating rumor being bandied about the interwebs right now. And while it may or may not be true, it’s certainly food for thought. It concerns “Kayla Lemieux”, the infamous trans-woman shop teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS) in Ontario, Canada.
An anonymous poster on an online forum recently made a claim about Lemieux’s shop class back when “Kayla” was still Mr. Kerry Luc Lemieux. The post reads:
This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop redpills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.
He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation… No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman.
File this allegation under “Huge if True” (lol). Imagine for a moment that the anonymous person is telling the truth. If that is the case, then this teacher is the greatest hero the sane world has fronted yet.
If Lemieux is indeed pranking the school board, then he is a genius. When images of the trans-busty high school shop teacher began spreading like wildfire online, the outrage was swift and formidable. OTHS and the Halton District School Board (HDSB) went on the defensive — and it quickly became evident that they had painted themselves into a corner with their mindless commitment to “inclusion”.
“We are aware of discussion on social media and in the media regarding Oakville Trafalgar High School. We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate to our community that we are committed to establishing and maintaining a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff”, said OTHS in an email sent to parents and obtained by feminist news site Reduxx.
September 26, 2022
“We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless”
Chris Bray on Vivek Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc.:
Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to close a deal, so he went to do some relationship building over dinner at an investor’s house. As dinner ended, the investor’s son came downstairs to greet the visitors, and he turned out to be a high school senior who was applying to Harvard. By the most remarkable coincidence, Vivek Ramaswamy is a Harvard grad, so the kid asked for some advice on getting in. Stand out, the Harvard grad told the Harvard applicant. Have something that makes you different than all the other applicants. Oh, the kid said, yeah — I got that. It turns out the seventeen year-old son of a venture capitalist had started a non-profit to fight against global sex slavery, which did indeed impress the admissions office and did indeed get him into Harvard. When Ramaswamy ran into the kid again, a few years later, he was shopping for Wall Street internships — and had moved on from the whole sex slavery thing, which had by then served its purpose.
Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc., a title published last year that seems to be gaining new momentum now as its author takes on corporate ESG posturing, accurately promises to take readers “inside corporate America’s social justice scam”, though I don’t love everything he offers as a solution. He clearly is reporting from inside: He’s a Harvard grad, a Yale Law grad, a former hedge fund employee, and a former pharmaceutical CEO. (Those credentials make you trust his argument, right?)
The thing the kid did, dummying up a quick thing to fight global sex slavery to get it into his admissions package, is a version of a maneuver that Ramaswamy finds all over the woke corporate world. The highly woke consumer products company Unilever is passionate about taking deep notice of intersectionality and serving women of color, and it partners with UN Women, “a nonprofit branch of the UN dedicated to advancing gender equality and empowering women”. Also, dozens of women who work on a Unilever tea plantation in Kenya were gang-raped in front of their families, an event that was coupled with a dozen or so murders, and Unilever declined to provide them with substantial support or assistance: “Unilever said the attacks on its plantation were unexpected and therefore that it should not be held liable”.
Unilever provides money to UN Women, Ramaswamy concludes, and UN Women provides Unilever with “moral cover for the Kenyan massacre”. Woke Unilever is a façade for, you know, Unilever. It’s a strategy, one example of many, and Ramaswamy argues that the “arranged marriage” between wokeness and corporate capitalism was born out of Occupy Wall Street: Here’s a check, now let’s stop talking about TARP and start talking about white privilege.
You should read Woke, Inc., so I won’t go on summarizing. But without going deeper into Ramaswamy’s argument, which reflects a series of increasingly familiar observations about social class and the function of wokeness, the point is the inauthenticity and shallowness of corporate social justice posturing, all of which is meant to protect the core of the project — to provide cover for business practices that might otherwise be criticized. It’s a show, a performative and manipulative posture. You could easily make comparable arguments about wokeness and power in academia, media, or government.
Now, to take all of this and pivot to an argument that will satisfy absolutely no one, if the social justice façade is a façade — shallow, performative, calculatedly purpose-serving — then there’s a good chance the branch managers of the globalist project will drop it when it slides out of fashion. The kid who, wanting a career on Wall Street, did the sex slavery nonprofit thing just long enough to get into Harvard: That kid is a middle manager now, and he’ll recite slogans about white privilege or not, as Current Thing demands, as long as the checks still cash. We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless.
September 25, 2022
The five-paragraph essay straitjacket
In Aeon, David Labaree discusses the good intent and terrible results of forcing students to rigidly follow the “five paragraph” model of essay writing:
Schools and colleges in the United States are adept at teaching students how to write by the numbers. The idea is to make writing easy by eliminating the messy part – making meaning – and focusing effort on reproducing a formal structure. As a result, the act of writing turns from moulding a lump of clay into a unique form to filling a set of jars that are already fired. Not only are the jars unyielding to the touch, but even their number and order are fixed. There are five of them, which, according to the recipe, need to be filled in precise order. Don’t stir. Repeat.
So let’s explore the form and function of this model of writing, considering both the functions it serves and the damage it does. I trace its roots to a series of formalisms that dominate US education at all levels. The foundation is the five-paragraph essay, a form that is chillingly familiar to anyone who has attended high school in the US. In college, the model expands into the five-section research paper. Then in graduate school comes the five-chapter doctoral dissertation. Same jars, same order. By the time the doctoral student becomes a professor, the pattern is set. The Rule of Five is thoroughly fixed in muscle memory, and the scholar is on track to produce a string of journal articles that follow from it. Then it’s time to pass the model on to the next generation. The cycle continues.
Edward M White is one participant in the cycle who decided to fight back. It was the summer of 2007, and he was on the plane home from an ordeal that would have crushed a man with a less robust constitution. An English professor, he had been grading hundreds of five-paragraph essays drawn from the 280,000 that had been submitted that June as part of the Advanced Placement Test in English language and composition. In revenge, he wrote his own five-paragraph essay about the five-paragraph essay, whose fourth paragraph reads:
The last reason to write this way is the most important. Once you have it down, you can use it for practically anything. Does God exist? Well you can say yes and give three reasons, or no and give three different reasons. It doesn’t really matter. You’re sure to get a good grade whatever you pick to put into the formula. And that’s the real reason for education, to get those good grades without thinking too much and using up too much time.
White’s essay – “My Five-Paragraph-Theme Theme” – became an instant classic. True to the form, he lays out the whole story in his opening paragraph:
Since the beginning of time, some college teachers have mocked the five-paragraph theme. But I intend to show that they have been mistaken. There are three reasons why I always write five-paragraph themes. First, it gives me an organisational scheme: an introduction (like this one) setting out three subtopics, three paragraphs for my three subtopics, and a concluding paragraph reminding you what I have said, in case you weren’t paying attention. Second, it focuses my topic, so I don’t just go on and on when I don’t have anything much to say. Three and only three subtopics force me to think in a limited way. And third, it lets me write pretty much the same essay on anything at all. So I do pretty well on essay tests. A lot of teachers actually like the five-paragraph theme as much as I do.
Note the classic elements of the model. The focus on form: content is optional. The comfortingly repetitive structure: here’s what I’m going to say, here I am saying it, and here’s what I just said. The utility for everyone involved: expectations are so clear and so low that every writer can meet them, which means that both teachers and students can succeed without breaking a sweat – a win-win situation if ever there was one. The only thing missing is meaning.
For students who need a little more structure in dealing with the middle three paragraphs that make up what instructors call the “body” of the essay, some helpful tips are available – all couched in the same generic form that could be applicable to anything. According to one online document by a high-school English teacher:
The first paragraph of the body should contain the strongest argument, most significant example, cleverest illustration, or an obvious beginning point. The first sentence of this paragraph should include the “reverse hook” which ties in with the transitional hook at the end of the introductory paragraph. The topic for this paragraph should be in the first or second sentence. This topic should relate to the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. The last sentence in this paragraph should include a transitional hook to tie into the second paragraph of the body.
You probably won’t be surprised that the second paragraph “should contain the second strongest argument, second most significant example, second cleverest illustration, or obvious follow-up to the first paragraph …” And that the third paragraph “should contain the third strongest argument …” Well, you get the picture.
