Quotulatiousness

August 28, 2023

Charter school students do better academically, yet are funded at a lower level than other students

Filed under: Education, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jack Elbaum on recent studies that show charter schools in the United States have higher academic success rates than ordinary state-funded schools, despite a significantly lower funding rate:

If you thought charter schools received anywhere near the same amount of funding as traditional public schools, then think again.

A new, massive study from the University of Arkansas finds that “On average, charter schools across 18 cities in 16 states (…) receive about 30 percent or $7,147 (2020 dollars) less funding per pupil than traditional public schools.” Over the past two decades, this funding disparity has remained relatively stable.

The gaps are, predictably, more severe in some places than others. The study notes that “Atlanta has the largest percentage-based charter funding disparity (about 53 percent), while Camden has the largest disparity in dollars ($19,711). Houston has the smallest disparity in terms of percent (three percent) and dollars ($417).”

Importantly, the regression analysis run by the authors did not suggest differences in the proportion of students in poverty or English Language Learners are the reason for the disparity. However, it did find that after taking into account differences in the number of special needs students, the disparity dropped considerably — although it remained significant ($1,707).

[…]

Based on these data alone, it would not be unreasonable for one to expect that these charter schools had worse educational outcomes than their traditional public school counterparts.

The only issue is that this is not the case.

A recent study from Stanford University, for example, found that charter school students gain 16 days’ worth of reading and six days of math per year relative to those in traditional public schools. These benefits were particularly pronounced among minority students who were also in poverty. Education Week reported that “Black charter students in poverty gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools, and Hispanic students in poverty gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.”

Economist Thomas Sowell’s 2020 book Charter Schools and Their Enemies also offers compelling data suggesting the efficacy of charter schools. He studied a set of charters and traditional public schools in New York City that served essentially identical populations. In many cases in the study, a charter school and traditional public school would even occupy the same building.

August 25, 2023

Only an extreme right-wing bigot would say that “BDSM is not for four-year-olds”

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Noted extreme right-wing arch-conservative Brendan O’Neill somehow seems to think that the full panoply of LGBT sexual identities are not appropriate for the pre-school set:

This may not be an accurate portrayal of the book in question, by way of Blazing Cat Fur.

BDSM is not for four-year-olds. Apparently, that’s a controversial statement these days. Only a bigot would want to protect little kids from images of old blokes in fetish gear snogging the faces off each other in public. If you think under-fives should be reading books about hungry caterpillars or tigers coming for tea, not books featuring pictures of ageing men in dog collars and studded leather underwear, you’re a queerphobe and you need to pipe down.

Truly we have reached the seventh circle of woke lunacy. This week it was reported that a mum and dad in Hull in the north of England pulled their four-year-old daughter from a pre-school after she was shown a book called Grandad’s Pride which contains illustrations of “men who are partially naked in leather bondage gear”. The pre-school’s response? According to the mum and dad, it branded them “bigots”. Yes, who else but a hateful phobe would want to stop a toddler from seeing a tattooed, half-naked, grey-bearded homosexual kissing his boyfriend?

Grandad’s Pride is written by Harry Woodgate, an award-winning children’s author who uses they / them pronouns. Of course he does. Or of course they do. Whatever. It tells the story of a girl called Milly, who is playing in her gramps’ attic one day when she happens upon an old Pride flag. She asks what it is and grandad suggests they organise their own Pride march in the village. As you do. Then come the iffy illustrations: old men in fetish gear; a “trans man” (ie, woman) with mastectomy scars under her nipples; an activist in a spiked dog collar waving a placard that says: “Break the cis-tem”. And you thought Where the Wild Things Are was scary.

You don’t have to be a prude to think this is ridiculous bordering on sinister. My view is that consenting adults should do whatever they want. Wear chafing leather trousers, pierce your cock, whip your friends in dim-lit dungeons. It’s not my cup of tea, but knock yourselves out. But it’s not for kids! No four-year-old should be looking at illustrations of a mutilated woman who now identifies as a “man” or of pensioners in leather suspenders. And it doesn’t make you Mary Whitehouse to say so. When you read to little kids, you want them to ask questions like, “Can we have a tiger over for tea?”, not: “Why does that man have stitches on his chest?”

One of the most frustrating things for freedom-lovers like me is that when we raise questions about age-inappropriate woke crap in schools, we get lumped with the religious right or PC fanatics who previously waged war on classic texts like Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (too much talk about menstruation, apparently) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (too many utterances of the n-word). Nonsense. Of course schoolkids should read Blume and Steinbeck. Teens in particular should be expected to engage with challenging texts, even ones that contain racial epithets or girls eagerly awaiting their first period. Schools should err on the side of being open with literature, though let’s hope they don’t start stocking American Psycho or The 120 Days of Sodom.

August 15, 2023

“Babies are nature’s little smoke detectors”

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rob Henderson covers some evolutionary arguments on how “we” became who we are today, including some of the ways parents and babies interact:

“Crying Baby” by iamprince160812 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Intriguingly, some researchers have suggested that infant crying is a signal of vigor that evolved to reduce the withdrawal of parental care.

The idea is that in the ancestral environment, inert, inanimate, lifeless infants were considered by parents to be physically weak or possibly in poor health and thus unlikely to survive. In contrast, being loud and relentlessly fussy demonstrated high energy, strong lungs, and good health. Indeed, infant crying is calorically costly, with a 13% increase in metabolic rate compared to resting.

Exhausted parent: “I’ve tried feeding you, changing you, holding you…What is it that you want?”

Crying baby: “To demonstrate to you how robust I am!”

This is likely why babies will often cry even when there is seemingly no immediate need, such as distress or hunger. Their unconscious, evolutionary aim is to ensure caregivers don’t neglect them or withdraw care or resources from them.

Of course, like most signals individuals send, babies don’t “know” they are doing this.

Infant crying also falls under the framework of error management theory. The idea is that it is more costly to under-react to potential dangers than overreact. In this case, it is better for a baby to be oversensitive and cry even when there is nothing wrong than to be under-reactive and not cry when something is wrong. A variation of this is the smoke detector principle.

A smoke detector produces a piercing, unmistaken alarm in the event of a fire. But it doesn’t actually detect fire — it detects smoke particles and activates upon the merest hint of potential danger. A false positive (e.g., alarm in response to burnt toast) is far more favorable than a false negative (failing to activate in response to flames). Thus these devices are calibrated to be annoyingly over-reactive.

Babies are nature’s little smoke detectors.

August 13, 2023

QotD: Modern education

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Our schools have fulfilled the liberal educators’ every dream, abandoning educational achievement as their goal and systematically replacing it with nurturing self-esteem — or at least self-conceit — leaving their pupils unaware of their own disastrous ignorance, unable even to read properly, and without a counterweight to their chaotic home environments.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Murderess’s Tale”, City Journal, 2005-01.

Update 14 Aug: City Journal has changed their site structure since that article was posted, so I’ve updated the URL to the new location. H/T to somercet1 who called my attention to this.

August 10, 2023

“… most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school … boys are treated as defective girls”

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sarah Hoyt on the plight of boys and young men these days:

It’s far worse for the kids, because most of them are not even working at what they trained for. Or if they are, they are working at a level as though they were never trained.

But there is a bigger problem: most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school. If you’re older than me, you might think I lost my mind. Heck, if you’re younger than me, and never looked closely at what your kids’ school is doing, or you have no kids, you might think I’m nuts.

Well, I might be nuts but not on this. Starting at about middle school, boys are treated as defective girls. Because women are the majority and treated like a protected minority, every school is afraid of not “treating them fairly” which means giving them primacy. Now just your boy’s behavior as a boy will be punished, but assignments are geared for how girls/women think (which means they also annoy the living daylights of atypical females like myself), they are oriented to group work (which by and large punishes males, though again, atypical females ain’t too happy either), and they’re geared to at least external compliance (which again is a female trait.) Most of the teachers are not just women, but they’re women indoctrinated in a system that tells them that male work is superior and that women are unfairly discriminated against for “being kept out of it.”

If at this point you’re puzzled over my referring to male and female characteristics, and to male work, let’s take the gloves off and speak like adults, instead of the mush most of us have been fed our entire lives.

While we’re rational, thinking creatures, and creatures with our own will power, and therefore can work on a lot of our characteristics and change them: there are differences between men and women. Innate, inborn differences, starting in the uterus with the “hormone baths” that guide development of different sexes. Period.

No real scientist would ever deny that, unless of course he/she feared for his/her job.

… and because we live in retarded times, let me explain that though our bodies and brains are completely different and run on two models, yes, how much that difference manifests is a spectrum. First, because development has glitches. I.e. some people don’t get the right hormones at the right time, and might outright have a brain that leans more the way opposite their body. This is very rare. It is also, btw, not covalent with gender dysphoria. It’s mostly 100% living frustrated by the rest of humanity and assumptions made. But there are other issues. Other types of characteristics might emphasize/mitigate/mimic the way of thinking of the opposite sex. Autistic females tend to think more like males (go figure) and ADHD women might appear to (though it’s not necessarily true.)

Also, like every gendered characteristic, there is a spectrum. Gender doesn’t exist on a spectrum (mostly because it’s a grammatical construct and those are very binary/trienary) but GENDER EXPRESSING CHARACTERISTICS do. Every adult knows tall, hairy men with deep voices, and slight, almost hairless males who are tenors. And every combination thereof. This without regard to maleness/fertility/orientation. And every adult knows vavaboom females that look like they should be painted on the nose of WWII planes, and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females and every combination in between. And these women might or might not be straight/fertile without regard to those combinations.

And yes, all of us know strong women and weak males, though testosterone unreasonably favors males from early development.

[…]

Look, to level set: if you have a son, even a relatively high performing one, chances are he’s working under a level of throttling-down. And most boys are checked out. They no longer care. They’ve been told they’re oppressors and evil by reason of being born male from the moment they were conscious of being male. They no longer care. They no longer want to do anything. Burned out before they even start their lives.

And under it, because they’re males, with testosterone, there’s a level of anger that women will never understand, unless they live surrounded by males and really, really work at understanding. This means that this treatment of boys is creating that much ballyhooed “toxic masculinity” which idiots confuse with “being male”.

Yes, some boys are finding their way into professions the feminists have no interest in, and bless Mike Rowe, whatever his issues, for showing the way to a bunch of males.

But that’s not going to solve our problems as a society in general. Because, sure, we need machinists and HVAC technicians. But we also need engineers who are more fascinated with the “thing” that is the main part of their job, than with office politics. We need researchers who will work hard at figuring the problem, and not spend most of their time figuring out on whom to step to get higher. We need doctors who are gruff and not particularly good at “customer service” but view disease as an enemy to be conquered. (I could go for days about medicine. I’m not going to. But part of our favoring women in medical school is that we are importing most of the people involved in actual day to day doctoring — a dirty, unpalatable position educated women tend to disdain — from countries without the same standards of training. This is one of the idiotic consequences of denying biology in favor of bizarre Marxist social engineering. And not that, yes, I have several female doctors among the regulars. Yes, females can be good and passionate doctors. And several of them are. But those who read here are old enough they were admitted on an equal footing with males. No one was trying to make it 80% female, which is what I’m complaining about. That level of discrimination distorts everything down the line.)

We are INTENTIONALLY blocking males from pursuing their interests and talents, while pushing women to pursue what are traditionally male interests and talents.

This extends from professions to modes of behavior. Women are encouraged to join the hook up culture, with no emotional attachments and behave like BAD and IRRESPONSIBLE men of the 50s (or at least the popular image of those. None of us lived them. Wait. Some of you did. But I didn’t. And those who did as adults are, at this point, a minority.)

The only possible conclusion is that our culture has gone insane and thinks that male modes of work, and male modes of social behavior are VASTLY superior to females. And that females would normally behave like males, unless they were prevented. So, women must have been prevented for MILLENNIA. MILLENNIA. And now, we’re taking revenge for all those oppressed women, by making men behave like women and women like men. Ah. See how they like being oppressed!

Stated like this, openly, it sounds completely insane. It’s like these people are bizarrely misogynistic aliens, who never met a human. Which is largely true. They’re Marxists, for whom every human is a widget, interchangeable with every other human.

July 26, 2023

Justin Trudeau’s odd choice to agitate Muslim Canadians over his LGBT beliefs

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the weekend’s roundup post from the editors of The Line, one of the topics discussed was Prime Minister Trudeau’s attempt to blow smoke up the collective butts of deeply religious Canadian Muslims that the only reason they were upset about his blatant dedication to LGBT issues was due to brainwashing by extreme right-wing Americans:

this week offered us a video clip of Trudeau that was just too interesting for us to pass up. Readers may recall a story from a few weeks ago in which several Muslim students in Edmonton absented themselves from Pride events and were lambasted by their teacher, who told them that they had to support this event or they “can’t be Canadians.” We didn’t make much note of it at the time because our colleague and friend at the National Post Colby Cosh had the definitive and winning take: that is, the teacher is a fucknut. These kids didn’t protest or object to pride or make their peers feel uncomfortable in any way. They just declined to participate. And in a pluralistic society, politely absenting oneself from ideological events with which one disagrees and instead hanging out at the Orange Julius or wherever the hell kids spend time these days is about the most perfect and Canadian response.

Perhaps not coincidentally, upon receiving such clear signals about the conduct that is now expected of a Canadian, Muslim parents are organizing ever louder protests against what they deem to be LGBTQ “indoctrination” in schools. And if you’ve been paying any attention to the logic pretzels that have been spun about intersectionality, lived experiences, the importance of listening to minority voices in majority cultures and so on, this is about the point at which you’re going to grab the popcorn, because what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide clash of values between competing minority interest groups.

So we give the prime minister a lot of credit for meeting with Muslim parents in a Calgary-area mosque last week to discuss the issue. And we mean that! Genuinely! Heading face-first into a mob of angry parents is a really difficult thing for anybody to do. He deserves credit for doing this.

However, the response that was recorded by attendees was also very, very interesting. The furore over LGBTQ issues in schools is much ado about nothing, he insisted; the result of right-wing extremists spreading “a lot of untruths about what’s actually in provincial curriculums”.

Trudeau continued: “They are weaponizing the issue of LGBT, which is something that, yes, Islam has strong opinions on …. That is something that is being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community.”

A few notes about this response: The first is that it is undeniably true. There are anti-LGBTQ activists who are trying to mobilize the Muslim community because this minority population has greater moral suasion among the intersectionality set than socially conservative white Christians. There are right-wing commentators out there who focus on cases, videos, examples and books that they claim demonstrates a pervasive trend of “indoctrination” on LGBTQ issues in school environments. The examples are out there, and some are age-inappropriate. However, we have no sense that those examples are representative of what’s happening in most classrooms. Are there a lot more non-binary 12-year-olds in middle school nowadays? Sure. Is that a problem? We don’t know. Maybe? But we’ve yet to walk into an elementary school hosting a 24/7 Pride Parade with naked men and women throwing rainbow glitter and condoms to the kiddies. We are savvy enough media consumers to know that in a social-media age, edge cases have a habit of being falsely portrayed as routine.

Our snark aside, Trudeau’s response is interesting because it is also a dodge. Trudeau doesn’t actually want to deal with the hard problem of how to accommodate competing minority rights. So instead he pretends there is no problem. He blames the perception of a problem on disinformation agents. Marvellous — right up until the moment we see some video from a Toronto school of a teacher screaming at eight-year-olds that there is no such thing as boys and girls and that the whole concept of biological sex is an expression of imperialism and white supremacy. (Ed note: pin this graf for future victory lap.)

Or, just as an example of the sort of thing that just maybe could happen, when an ostensibly trans shop teacher shows up to class in a wig and Size-Z prosthetic breasts with armour-piercing nipples and the school board responds by saying “This is not a problem, you bigot,” and then it turns out that the teacher in question hasn’t been entirely upfront about their life! Or until, well, some teacher tells a bunch of Edmonton kids that skipping pride to head to the mall makes them un-Canadian. Oops! Wait, so who’s lying now?

The second reason we found this response interesting is that it’s become this government’s go-to deflection. All criticism is just disinformation. Anybody who disagrees with the Liberals is a baddie because can’t you see how awesome and empathetic and genuinely well intentioned they are? Throw in a little threadbare virtue, a touch of white saviour: “you, poor, deluded, Muslims, are just being manipulated by malign forces and can’t possibly understand what you’re saying or what you really believe,” and you’ve got a pitch-perfect urban progressive Canadian non-comment. It’s a mask slip moment, when we see exactly how Trudeau seems himself, and how he sees the people he’s talking to. Oh wait: actual Muslims find this statement condescending and insulting? Don’t they know whose side they’re supposed to be on? Maybe they’re just watching too much Matt Walsh. Why does anybody need to define what a woman is anyway? Maybe we need a new law for that so the plebes stop getting so confused …

You see where this logic takes us. We may wade into this one a bit more at The Line in coming days and weeks, so enough said for now. But for now, it’s enough to note that this is not how a mature, pluralistic society handles irreconcilable differences in values and beliefs. Generally speaking, everyone is pretty content to let adults live and let live, but when you bring kids into any ideological agenda, expect matters to get ugly quickly. And you’re going to need a better response to legitimate concerns about how an emerging secular ideological consensus around gender and ideology crashes against deeply held religious values than: “YouTube lies”.

July 8, 2023

Iowa votes to re-impose child labour in ways that violate federal labour laws

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray covers the breathless excitement of national media covering recent changes to Iowa labour laws:

Suddenly, though, this message is all over social media:

These messages are not exactly false, and not entirely true. They take note of a real development, but strip away all the limits and caveats to fake up the creation of a 21st-century Upton Sinclair novel. But the effects of this successful legislation — this is where it gets complicated.

Start here (or here) with Iowa Senate File 542: signed into law in May, took effect on July 1. A bunch of the first-glance shocking details are more complicated than the outrage-farming Twitter takes suggest: 16 year-olds can serve alcohol in restaurants, with at least two adults to supervise, but not in bars; 15 year-olds can work on assembly lines in school-based work training programs, with parental permission; teenagers can work until 11 p.m. in the summer, but not during the school year. Allowing a 16 year-old coffee shop waitress to bring you a beer strikes me as … not the end of the world?

But all of those details aside, the new Iowa law expands child labor (while ending some earlier measures allowing even younger workers to do a few jobs like migrant farm labor), and will, in fact, put 14 year-olds to work in what will look a great deal like adult settings. So red state legislatures are expanding child labor at the moment they’re banning gender mutila— uh, gender-affirming medical care for teenagers, and making that latter choice on the highly defensible grounds that teenagers lack the maturity to make decisions like that. So a 15 year-old working in a factory lacks the maturity to make adult decisions, is where we end up when we put all of this together.

July 5, 2023

Intersectionality showdown

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray on the major break in progressive solidarity caused by non-white American Muslims’, Ethiopian Christians’, and Peruvian Catholics’ unexpected reaction to woke teachers wanting to sexually indoctrinate their children:

We’re wading through this culture war sewage because we have a political class that’s deliberately pumping it into the culture to keep us from noticing that, how can I put this in a sophisticated way, they suck.

But this really tedious maneuver is increasingly leading to moments like this — and Twitter still won’t let Substack writers embed tweets, so click to watch video, but here’s the substance of the thing:

The fake conflict is increasingly likely to be a dozen sanpaku-eyed AWFL’s against a thousand genuinely multicultural parents, battling over insane questions like the “book bans” that remove highly explicit sexual content from elementary school libraries. In 2023, the culture war is rapidly cooking down to STOP PREVENTING US FROM TALKING TO YOUR EIGHT YEAR-OLDS ABOUT SUCKING DICK, YOU NAZIS.

If you’ve never read what I wrote about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, please take a moment to go read this. About 900 people died at Jonestown in 1978, but Jones started in Indianapolis in the 1950s. He moved his church to a rural property in California, and then to Guyana, by constantly telling his parishioners that they were threatened by hostile forces outside the church that were maneuvering to destroy them. The frequent recourse to invented threats is a sign of a sick movement, not a sign of something the grows and flourishes.

That’s where we are. We’re watching a sick thing die. The question, now, is how long it takes to die, and how much damage it does in its death throes. But the increasingly hysterical tone, against an increasingly matter-of-fact response — a thousand parents saying calmly that no, we won’t let you inflict this curriculum on our children — suggests that the inflection point is getting closer.

June 23, 2023

QotD: Children and fire

Filed under: Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

UCLA anthropologist Dan Fessler argues that during middle childhood (ages 6-9) humans go through a phase in which we are strongly attracted to learning about fire, by both observing others and manipulating it ourselves. In small-scale societies, where children are free to engage this curiosity, adolescents have both mastered fire and lost any further attraction to it. Interestingly, Fessler also argues that modern societies are unusual because so many children never get to satisfy their curiosity, so their fascination with fire stretches into the teen years and early adulthood.

Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, 2015.

June 14, 2023

Wednesday web-droppings

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 22:22

A few items that I didn’t feel required a full post of their own, but might be of interest:

June 6, 2023

Australia’s “teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowdon on Australia’s determination to stamp out vaping … even at the cost of vastly increasing the number of tobacco smokers:

More bad news from the supposed world leader in tobacco control. Official figures show that teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023, from 2% to 12.8%.

It’s been over a decade since Australia introduced plain packaging, a policy that the Southern hemisphere’s wrongest man, Simon Chapman, likened to a vaccine for lung cancer. Australia has had the highest cigarette taxes in the world for ages, the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been illegal, and all they have to show for it is an insanely big black market for both tobacco and e-cigarettes, more children smoking and a whole bunch of people using unregulated vapes. The wowsers just can’t stop winning, can they?

Naturally, this has led to much soul searching among the tobacco control elite who are having to reassess their assumptions in the face of this overwhelming evidence of policy failure.

I’m joking, of course. They are doubling down again.

If you spoke to someone from the reality-based community, they would tell you that children find it easier to access a product when the market is in the hands of illicit traders because illicit traders don’t care who they sell to. They might also point out that the Australian government has gone out of its way to portray vaping as being at least as bad as smoking. School children in Australia are taught that vaping causes brain damage. Public health agencies produce websites that purport to tell people the facts about vaping but actually tell them lies and misleading half-truths.

June 3, 2023

Kids, obesity, and the woke agenda

Filed under: Education, Food, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a fan of the “healthy at any size” mantra, especially when it comes to kids:

If I were a kid today I’d be out scouting the neighborhood for a home school or church to take me in as long and teach me latin and math and give me a reading list as long as I didn’t have to have someone’s jiggly bits pushed in my face or be shown diagrams of sexual positions, and asked ceaselessly about my food intake, my BMI measured (25 states mandate this) and no doubt entirely invasive questions about my family and father and weird uncles and so on. It would be like living in a perpetual inquisition, danger everywhere, with no privacy in any area of one’s life, with every sentence and expression evaluated on whether I am being a good member of the inclusive collective and will step aside so someone less privileged can have a chance.

But I am not nine and therefore spared all that, but God in heaven I feel sorry for them. Schools have stepped up to take the place of the at-home mother who had a relationship with her kids strong enough so that their emotional needs were being met and they didn’t have to stuff food down their throats for a relief from the ceaseless pressure to conform, and severe emotional loneliness from the absence of a family system.

Instead of your mind, the dominant focus seems to be your body, and at the most vulnerable time in your life. I know they think they are raising good little socialist citizens, who are acutely aware of the struggles of the less fortunate, but add in the bullying of Middle School and little wonder 49% of kids are overweight or obese, and the rest stuffing their feelings 24/7. Great for the food pushers, sucks for the medical system.

Virginia Sole-Smith who is the anointed high priestess of Fat Positivity Culture, has been pushing fat is AOK and in fact, possibly superior to thin-ness, which she never fails to excoriate, for the New York Times, Slate and Science and various other high-end publications for 20 years. Her latest book Fat Talk, which sits on the NYTimes bestseller list is about raising fat children, or not fat children, it’s kind of confusing. Ok, to be fat, but not obese, but you can’t put obese kids on a diet because that will make them fatter, and besides everyone is criticizing them and that has to stop.

Every leftie cliché is brought out of the barn and groomed within an inch of its life. White privilege, thin white privileged women, BIPOC exclusion, thin privilege in sport, entertainment, business, and so on, a system systematically prejudiced against fat people.

Basically, however, Sole-Smith is staking her ground and that is that “small fat”, which is how she defines herself, is normal and we should adjust our eyes to see pudgy tummies as “something to aim for” – as she states in her last chapter called “How to Have The Fat Talk”. We have to start “reclaiming (sic) fatness as a perfectly good way to have a body”.

May 14, 2023

QotD: The original tabloid journalist

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tabloid journalism begins with W.T. Stead, who as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s brought news and scandal to the newly literate masses, transforming public culture and politics with it.

The son of a Congregationalist preacher, Stead grew up in a strict religious household in Northumberland, in a home where theatre was “the Devil’s chapel” and novels “the Devil’s Bible”. Taught to read by his father, the newsman’s nonconformism would inform his campaigns after he moved from the Northern Echo to the Gazette in London.

Stead was most of all famous for the first great newspaper investigation, in 1885, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon“, on the scandal of child prostitution. Stead had bought a girl called Eliza for £5, on the premise that she was to be taken to a brothel on the continent, using quite dubious methods that got him sent to jail for three months.

Despite this, the story succeeded – a national scandal which led to a change in the law, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. The idea of English girls being trafficked into sex outraged and horrified the public, Stead’s story imprinted itself deeply into the public psyche, to the extent of influencing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — thus, Eliza Doolittle.

On the continent it helped to inspire a genre of vaguely pornographic literature about the sexual perversion rife in England, a fantasy that belied the fact that late Victorian London was not a nest of vice, relatively speaking. Most measures of squalor and child abuse had declined in the 19th century and a teenage girl by the end of the century was relatively safe, compared to a predecessor in almost any era; public moral outrage offered protection, even if it could be unforgiving for those same girls who transgressed.

Stead would become the most famous journalist of the era, so renowned that in 1912 he was invited to New York by the US President to attend a conference — and so booked a ticket on a famously unsinkable new liner. He was last seen helping women and children trying to get on to lifeboats, and, true to the chapel ethos of his parents, gave away his lifejacket. He was among the 1,500 who lost their lives on the Titanic.

Ed West, “Our Modern Babylon”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-11.

April 22, 2023

“I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could”

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

I’m also a libertarian, but I might not go quite as far as Freddie deBoer in the quote in the headline:

Julian Sanchez makes good sense here on recent bills in Florida designed to regulate and censor LGBTQ content in schools:

Yes, indeed. Kids will learn about LGBTQ issues sooner or later. It’s pointless to try and keep them from finding out about the existence of homosexuality, of gay love, of gay marriage, of trans people and gender nonconformity. They’re gonna find out. They have smartphones, usually much younger than they should. They’re curious and the world is always a click away. It’s foolish to try and prevent them from learning about this stuff. And, in fact, the more that you try to restrict what they learn, the more likely they are to explore this world in a way that openly defies your efforts. LGBTQ people, politics, art, and culture exist. You’re entitled to object to LGBTQ rights, in a free society, but you’re not entitled to (or able to) create a bubble in which others are kept hidden from knowledge of the existence of LGBTQ people. People love that I’m forever tweaking liberals about their attachment to various forms of unreality, to thinking that they can wish away facts of life that they’re uncomfortable with. But it’s the same deal here.

Look, I will acknowledge that some of the reporting on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has distorted and exaggerated what the bill calls for, and I also think there’s a lot of motivated dismissal about the nature of some of the content that’s being debated. For example, some people have gone to the ramparts to defend access to the book This Book is Gay, which explicitly advertises itself as a guide to sex, despite the fact that the author herself says it’s not for children. (Pictures of the book that are routinely circulated are typically dismissed as conservative fabrications, but you just have to look at the book to know that isn’t true.) Probably that particular example is a matter of some groups being lazy when putting together reading lists, but of course there are always going to be debates and edge cases.

Would I ban that book? Of course not. Personally, I’m completely libertarian about this stuff; I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could. But there’s a difference between holding that position and believing it’s credible to pretend that there’s literally nothing to debate there. It’s pointless to pretend that books in a public school classroom are going to remain untouched by these disagreements. The views of parents will inevitably be expressed through the democratic apparatus that presides over those schools. Of course people are going to debate this stuff. Vociferously.

Still, the objections are ultimately misguided for the reasons Sanchez says. Plenty of kids in extremely repressive conservative environments dreamed of a future as an openly gay person in a liberal city, before the internet. I’ve always had qualms about the “born this way” framing — if being gay was a choice, would society have any legitimate right to refuse people from making it? — but the simple reality is that gay people and trans people etc have always transcended restrictive social and religious environments in their interior life, even if it was too dangerous for them to express it. If a kid is gay, they’re gonna figure that out. You don’t have to speed along the process, but trying to artificially impede their progress won’t work. That’s an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement.

April 12, 2023

Miniature Railway (1959)

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Pathé
Published 13 Apr 2014

Romney, Kent.

L/S of a lovely looking train locomotive. A man stands next to it and one realises how small the train is. It is one third of an ordinary train size — says voiceover. However, this is not a toy but a regular public railway, smallest in the world. It is officially known as the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, it runs between Romney and Dungeness and its passengers are children. This tiny railway must conform to the same Ministry of Transport regulations as any other trains. M/S of a driver Mr Bill Hart, checking the train. C/U shot of a plaque reading “Winston Churchill”. This is the engine’s name. Several shots of Mr Hart checking the train. Mr Hart enters his cabin and starts shovelling coal into the boiler. C/U shot of the coal being thrown in and a little door closed. This train takes one third of the coal needed for a regular size train. The train starts moving.

L/S of the two men turning locomotive on turntable to place it on rails. M/S of a woman cleaning windows along the train. Children arrive and station master, Reg Marsh, directs them to their coaches. M/S of the group of girls entering the train. M/S of the station master Mr Marsh blowing a whistle as a sign that train leaves the station. M/S of an elderly man looking at a huge pocket watch on a chain, and afterwards, in direction of the train. He is Captain Howey, a man responsible for having the line built. C/U shot of the watch — Roman numerals. M/S of Mr Howey as he puts the watch in his pocket. C/U shot of Mr Howey’s face.

M/S of the little train moving. C/U shot of its little chimney with a smoke coming out. M/S of the Rose family from Sanderstead, Surrey with their dog Trixie enjoying the ride C/U shot of driver’s face with the smoke covering it up to the point it becomes invisible. Another little train passes it going in different direction. Several shots of the two little trains moving. A car stops to wait for the train to pass. L/S of the little train as it approaches the station.

Note: Another driver appearing in the film is Peter Catt. Combined print for this story is missing.
(more…)

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