With many pressing issues at-hand, Berlin-based Tageszeitung just published an op-ed announcing the coming crusade against families, childrens' (mental) health, and unapologetic hedonism and narcicism
At the risk of being offensive - for real - but in the early nineties mental institutions were closed down except for those an immediate danger to othersor themselves, and psychiatry switched from curing you to make you normal, to make you able to have as nornal a life as you can manage being th way you are. Some good, some bad in there. KBT works heaps better than Fraudian psychology. Things like the lunacy of the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis is finally over and done with. Schizophrenia cannot be cured, only mitigated and handled.
On the other hand we also got the Oprah Winfrey approach to ADHD and the rest of the alphabet-diagnoses: "YOU get a diagnosis, and YOU get a diagnosis and..." (insert couch-jumping Tom Cruise meme here).
The point: people such as this author would have, with institutional psychiatry and no internet, been forced to either combat their mental illness or succumb and be interred in a sanatorium. Having such people not only loose, but gainfully empolyed in media, ducation and entertainment has proven about as smart a move as letting economists/political scientists such as Friedman, Nozick, Fukuyama and Hayek be the end all-be all of economics and politics.
The woman is mentally ill. She is delusionary, paranoid, and borderline psychotic, that much is clear from the text.
The problem is, normal in a psychological and behaviourological context (or discourse* if you prefer) is a quantitatively determined and defined term. If 99% of all people drink a glass of salt water before supper, that's normal no matter any physical issues. Whether it's healthy or not is a separate issue from normal (Insert mask meme) and to function as a flock we must "do normal".
Trick is to move the Overton window back from where it's going, since not even the wokest of woke actually wants to replay a live version of 'The Doom That Came To Sarnath', if the reference works.
And the issue of natural... oh dear. You know, if more people read de Sade's 'The bedroom philosophers' they'd realise that the entirety of Foucault, Derrida and so on is 100% plagiarised from the works of de Sade. I mean, half of it is porn that is so absurd it becomes comedic rather than anything else, but the other half is a political and philosophical treatise and the root of later french decadent philosophy.
I almost fell of my chair laughing when I read your anti-Foucauldian comment--it's funny, because it's true.
My personal experience with quoting these auteurs back at those who espouse their ideas (while, of course, reading translations) ist this: after about 2-3 minutes, my interlocutors notice that their (often shallow) knowledge of their 'scriptures' is coupled with ignorance about context, hence they change subject (or walk away).
If, like me, you work in academia, you get a lot of these inanities from graduate students, in particular Ph.D. candidates. It's an abject lesson in rank-pulling (me, the professor), which I use to teach a valuable lesson: as soon as the Ph.D. student in question retreats argumentatively, I ask about their principles and why, upon hearing my argument, they changed their views (hilarity often ensues; in some cases, though, I received feedback later on by Ph.D. candidates who admit to changing their minds after hearing me).
Your comments about 'normality'--perhaps: 'normalisation'?--are also spot-on.
Academia, the cradle and grave of free thought. Oh yes, I've been such a student - not espousing those particular notions popular today, but rather being that slightly odd and generally contrarian one, the one with the working class back ground, 5-10 years older than the others who thus speaks with deans and professors as so on as fellow adults.
Difference is, I don't back down - if I'm wrong, factually so, prove it. If the issue lacks definite proof, game on, clobber me with the advantage of experience and age - but position I don't give a rotten lingon for. "It is men that honours titles, not titles that honours men", so to speak.
One funny episode I remember from sociology was when one of the prefects announced that they would switch the main first semester exam (accounting for 75% of your score) from written answers to multiple choice. You'd get to read a quote, or a term, and then be given 3-5 options, check the correct one. Passing grade was to be lowered to 65% correct answers (200 questions total). So me letting my inner Eulenspiegel out asks "But that means that one might pass by guessing correctly on some if the questions? That can't be a good way to test knowledge!" (Full well knowing the actual odds of getting 65% out of 200 are so low you stand a better chance of being hit by a meteorite) Upon which the prefect replies: "No, it's impossible to guess on the test. We have eliminated the probability for that."
Cue stunned silence in the auditorium - not all in the humanities suck at math.
And my big mouth runs ahead of me: "I'm sure your colleagues at the maths department would love to learn how?"
"Class dismissed".
My favourite professor in pol sci used to chide us for not reading the actual works, such as The Republic, only the cliff notes versions. "In my day if we were to read Sokrates, we read Sokrates and counted ourselves lucky we didn't have to learn greek to do it! Are you that much mor lazy and stupid than us, that you can't manage that!? How do you know the parts selected for you are the important ones?!"
But his best quote: "I can speak my mind freely, because I'm retired. Think about that, pups."
Hmm, reading esp. that last sentence, it's that way: all the retired professors who criticised the Covid lunacy from the start would suffice to prove that point.
My own case, however pathetic in comparison, shall be mentioned, too: as a historian, I won't touch the 'contemporary' stuff (WW1 to the present) I write about here professionally.
Lowering standards is but one angle of the attack you allude to. The other is irresponsibility, as in: does it matter, if I deliver any assignment late?
A few weeks ago, I had the distinct misfortune to listen to a 'university pedagogy' instructor who showed a b/w picture of an exam from, I dunno, the 1950s. She asked: 'what's the advantage of this kind of exam?' To which I replied: 'one cannot really cheat, as opposed to contemporary "take-home" exams.'
I think that my interlocutor expected a different answer, for she's very much in the 'feminist pedagogy' (as practiced by stuff over at Vanderbilt U) and 'un-grading' (by which is meant a university without grades). The latter will certainly ensure that 'university' will become like kindergarten.
The weirdest part about the ways and means of contemporary academia, at least to me, is this, though: historically, 'the university' came about by interested 'students' pooling their resources to pay competent people to teach ('professors'). Note that the former had both interest and skin in the game--and now compare to today's world: here in Scandinavia, attending universities is 'free' (which does away with the simple, if inescapable fact that there's no free lunch or graduate course), and this colleague of mine now wants to do away with grades (insert: ambition, capabilities, merit, or the like), which is how we used to measure competence for about a millennium. I suppose if one goes, the other may 'logically' follow, too…?
Personally, I don't mind the redistribution and the welfare state, but there's a distinction to be made between 'aiding those in need' (e.g., first-generation students) vs. handing out stuff to make one's constituency more dependent on whoever is giving away things for 'free'. I suppose that this is a topic for another posting, hence I shall stop here for the moment.
Professor emerita of spanish, Inger Enkvist, Lund university, is the one voice in the desrt here. She has for twenty years tried to shine the light on the sad fact that about 15% of students in Lund now has so poor a control of swedish that they cannot read the assigned literature. This of cours stems from the removing of all real standards from compulsory and secondary schools post-2000. And that 15% includes native swedes.
In compulsory and secondary, we have something called "development conversations" (I can hear Orwell laughing), meaning teacher/student conversation on grades and progress or lack thereof. Now, there is a demand that this be extended to university, so your prohpecy is sadly true, though I'd say not so much kindergarten but Lord of the Flies.
Results are now so bad that for the last two PISA rounds, the ministry and departments of education actually cheated, openly, and without consequence except a note from PISA sayin "Don't do that" more or less. All students diagnosed with alphabet-diagnoses were quietly excluded, which is allowed by PISA rules but must be noted as it changes the calcualtions. But schools participating were also instructed to make sure the students with the lowest scores were absent on the day of the test, resulting in a whopping 13% of students/pupils notparticipating. Some teachers noted this and reported it, and were told that they are racist sexist homophobic yadda yadda who knows nothing of teaching.
End result: 1) it was proven beyond doubt that the socialist democratic party not only will but can violate any law with impunity and without consequence, and 2) Sweden ranks lower than Mexico for ages 6-16 and 16-20.
But this is old hat for me. I noticed when the boy was at school that what he was taught in seventh grade (age 13-14 here), was what I and the wife was taught in second or third, depending on age. Speaking with a rmanian colleague, he could confirm this as a long-term phenomenon in swdish schools, stating in the seventies: he grew up in Ceaucescu's Romania and were doing 2nd degree equations age ten, something most swedish students never learn at all, it being taught in secondary school (prep for further studies) and then only for those "who actually needs to know advanced math"...
I have to say (rather than just 'like') that I always find your comments interesting and very worth reading. Somehow I imagined that only in the U.S. was our system of schooling declining so rapidly. Although here all the COVID closures have resulted in something of a parent's revolt, which may (hopefully) become even more widespread when we have general elections in November.
This is about the nicest thing to note, thanks a lot, Erika!
You know what the worst part of your comment is? Everyone thinks that Scandinavians are really good at educating its people, but look at these issues now: is it true?
As to the US midterms: let's hope there will be consequences for the crap the Biden gov't is doing--I mean, by now, his handling of Covid, Ukraine, etc. makes (even) Mr. Trump look like a paragon of governance virtue (and I cannot believe I just wrote these words…)
I have a dream... Some day, someone will invent some ballon-like device, maybe made of latex or something, that is compatible with penises and will solve all of Mrs. Zucker's problems - the PH incompatibility, the sexually transmissible diseases, the possibility of pregnancy, ...
Hmmm, that sounds something like, say, totalitarian governments in perhaps China might force their population to do.
As to Ms. Zucker's problems, well, what shall I say: it might solve any number of them, although I remain wary if the root cause of her problems might be addressed, too.
Ms. (ok) Zucker does not have any problems. She is being paid for sleeping around and writing crazy stuff about it, so she sleeps around and writes crazy stuff about it. The problem are the people pushing the ideology. When the revolution comes, Ms. Zucker will be the first to be put against the wall (for having slept with cis white men at all, or whatever).
Nature is what prevents these people from becoming gods, so they fight or deny it. James Lindsay has said more than once that he finds more common ground with Christians (i.e., people he very much opposed years ago) than with woke ideologues. At least they agree that objective reality exists.
Yes, avoid hetero sex to reduce deaths during childbirth. (Presumably the adopting “non-hetero” couple outsources their reproduction to some risk-free vessel, such as a frozen yogurt machine or something.)
Hmmm, while I can clearly see your point, Brian, I'd propose doing so makes me (crime-) think that 'outsourcing' childbearing reeks of both (female) objectification and colonial-imperialistic othering.
In other words, it might make those who engage in such 'outsourcing' to think about which victimisation category to prefer: self-victimisation due to childbearing (or its refusal) vs. the 'bodily appropriation' of one 'other'.
I can already see the ultra-woke cringing at this 'reality', though, so the best way forward is equally obvious: 'just do it' (the outsourcing) and never think about it; if, while engaging in such behaviour, one can always spot the splinter in anyone's brother's (or sister's) eye and get agitated over on the guano reservation.
Bonus features incl. self-congratulatory virtue-signalling, huffing, and puffing by the likeminded twitterati class.
Ok, this really gets a bit problematic rather quickly.
Alright, what if - just spitballing - what if we just designated a certain "segment" of the population as not having full human rights? That way it can be totally gender/oriontation-equitable. Like there could be some type of non-gender/orientation quality that defines who is in this segment of the population. Nothing comes to mind but I'm sure we could figure something out. And so this "segment" just serves the rest of us, including in child-raising. Obviously there would be a lot of variety in quality so you would want to let people "bid" on which servants they get, maybe with the ebay app on their phone. This would solve a whole lot of equity problems; I don't know why no societies ever thought of doing something like this before.
At the risk of being offensive - for real - but in the early nineties mental institutions were closed down except for those an immediate danger to othersor themselves, and psychiatry switched from curing you to make you normal, to make you able to have as nornal a life as you can manage being th way you are. Some good, some bad in there. KBT works heaps better than Fraudian psychology. Things like the lunacy of the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis is finally over and done with. Schizophrenia cannot be cured, only mitigated and handled.
On the other hand we also got the Oprah Winfrey approach to ADHD and the rest of the alphabet-diagnoses: "YOU get a diagnosis, and YOU get a diagnosis and..." (insert couch-jumping Tom Cruise meme here).
The point: people such as this author would have, with institutional psychiatry and no internet, been forced to either combat their mental illness or succumb and be interred in a sanatorium. Having such people not only loose, but gainfully empolyed in media, ducation and entertainment has proven about as smart a move as letting economists/political scientists such as Friedman, Nozick, Fukuyama and Hayek be the end all-be all of economics and politics.
The woman is mentally ill. She is delusionary, paranoid, and borderline psychotic, that much is clear from the text.
The problem is, normal in a psychological and behaviourological context (or discourse* if you prefer) is a quantitatively determined and defined term. If 99% of all people drink a glass of salt water before supper, that's normal no matter any physical issues. Whether it's healthy or not is a separate issue from normal (Insert mask meme) and to function as a flock we must "do normal".
Trick is to move the Overton window back from where it's going, since not even the wokest of woke actually wants to replay a live version of 'The Doom That Came To Sarnath', if the reference works.
And the issue of natural... oh dear. You know, if more people read de Sade's 'The bedroom philosophers' they'd realise that the entirety of Foucault, Derrida and so on is 100% plagiarised from the works of de Sade. I mean, half of it is porn that is so absurd it becomes comedic rather than anything else, but the other half is a political and philosophical treatise and the root of later french decadent philosophy.
I almost fell of my chair laughing when I read your anti-Foucauldian comment--it's funny, because it's true.
My personal experience with quoting these auteurs back at those who espouse their ideas (while, of course, reading translations) ist this: after about 2-3 minutes, my interlocutors notice that their (often shallow) knowledge of their 'scriptures' is coupled with ignorance about context, hence they change subject (or walk away).
If, like me, you work in academia, you get a lot of these inanities from graduate students, in particular Ph.D. candidates. It's an abject lesson in rank-pulling (me, the professor), which I use to teach a valuable lesson: as soon as the Ph.D. student in question retreats argumentatively, I ask about their principles and why, upon hearing my argument, they changed their views (hilarity often ensues; in some cases, though, I received feedback later on by Ph.D. candidates who admit to changing their minds after hearing me).
Your comments about 'normality'--perhaps: 'normalisation'?--are also spot-on.
Academia, the cradle and grave of free thought. Oh yes, I've been such a student - not espousing those particular notions popular today, but rather being that slightly odd and generally contrarian one, the one with the working class back ground, 5-10 years older than the others who thus speaks with deans and professors as so on as fellow adults.
Difference is, I don't back down - if I'm wrong, factually so, prove it. If the issue lacks definite proof, game on, clobber me with the advantage of experience and age - but position I don't give a rotten lingon for. "It is men that honours titles, not titles that honours men", so to speak.
One funny episode I remember from sociology was when one of the prefects announced that they would switch the main first semester exam (accounting for 75% of your score) from written answers to multiple choice. You'd get to read a quote, or a term, and then be given 3-5 options, check the correct one. Passing grade was to be lowered to 65% correct answers (200 questions total). So me letting my inner Eulenspiegel out asks "But that means that one might pass by guessing correctly on some if the questions? That can't be a good way to test knowledge!" (Full well knowing the actual odds of getting 65% out of 200 are so low you stand a better chance of being hit by a meteorite) Upon which the prefect replies: "No, it's impossible to guess on the test. We have eliminated the probability for that."
Cue stunned silence in the auditorium - not all in the humanities suck at math.
And my big mouth runs ahead of me: "I'm sure your colleagues at the maths department would love to learn how?"
"Class dismissed".
My favourite professor in pol sci used to chide us for not reading the actual works, such as The Republic, only the cliff notes versions. "In my day if we were to read Sokrates, we read Sokrates and counted ourselves lucky we didn't have to learn greek to do it! Are you that much mor lazy and stupid than us, that you can't manage that!? How do you know the parts selected for you are the important ones?!"
But his best quote: "I can speak my mind freely, because I'm retired. Think about that, pups."
Hmm, reading esp. that last sentence, it's that way: all the retired professors who criticised the Covid lunacy from the start would suffice to prove that point.
My own case, however pathetic in comparison, shall be mentioned, too: as a historian, I won't touch the 'contemporary' stuff (WW1 to the present) I write about here professionally.
Lowering standards is but one angle of the attack you allude to. The other is irresponsibility, as in: does it matter, if I deliver any assignment late?
A few weeks ago, I had the distinct misfortune to listen to a 'university pedagogy' instructor who showed a b/w picture of an exam from, I dunno, the 1950s. She asked: 'what's the advantage of this kind of exam?' To which I replied: 'one cannot really cheat, as opposed to contemporary "take-home" exams.'
I think that my interlocutor expected a different answer, for she's very much in the 'feminist pedagogy' (as practiced by stuff over at Vanderbilt U) and 'un-grading' (by which is meant a university without grades). The latter will certainly ensure that 'university' will become like kindergarten.
The weirdest part about the ways and means of contemporary academia, at least to me, is this, though: historically, 'the university' came about by interested 'students' pooling their resources to pay competent people to teach ('professors'). Note that the former had both interest and skin in the game--and now compare to today's world: here in Scandinavia, attending universities is 'free' (which does away with the simple, if inescapable fact that there's no free lunch or graduate course), and this colleague of mine now wants to do away with grades (insert: ambition, capabilities, merit, or the like), which is how we used to measure competence for about a millennium. I suppose if one goes, the other may 'logically' follow, too…?
Personally, I don't mind the redistribution and the welfare state, but there's a distinction to be made between 'aiding those in need' (e.g., first-generation students) vs. handing out stuff to make one's constituency more dependent on whoever is giving away things for 'free'. I suppose that this is a topic for another posting, hence I shall stop here for the moment.
Professor emerita of spanish, Inger Enkvist, Lund university, is the one voice in the desrt here. She has for twenty years tried to shine the light on the sad fact that about 15% of students in Lund now has so poor a control of swedish that they cannot read the assigned literature. This of cours stems from the removing of all real standards from compulsory and secondary schools post-2000. And that 15% includes native swedes.
In compulsory and secondary, we have something called "development conversations" (I can hear Orwell laughing), meaning teacher/student conversation on grades and progress or lack thereof. Now, there is a demand that this be extended to university, so your prohpecy is sadly true, though I'd say not so much kindergarten but Lord of the Flies.
Results are now so bad that for the last two PISA rounds, the ministry and departments of education actually cheated, openly, and without consequence except a note from PISA sayin "Don't do that" more or less. All students diagnosed with alphabet-diagnoses were quietly excluded, which is allowed by PISA rules but must be noted as it changes the calcualtions. But schools participating were also instructed to make sure the students with the lowest scores were absent on the day of the test, resulting in a whopping 13% of students/pupils notparticipating. Some teachers noted this and reported it, and were told that they are racist sexist homophobic yadda yadda who knows nothing of teaching.
End result: 1) it was proven beyond doubt that the socialist democratic party not only will but can violate any law with impunity and without consequence, and 2) Sweden ranks lower than Mexico for ages 6-16 and 16-20.
But this is old hat for me. I noticed when the boy was at school that what he was taught in seventh grade (age 13-14 here), was what I and the wife was taught in second or third, depending on age. Speaking with a rmanian colleague, he could confirm this as a long-term phenomenon in swdish schools, stating in the seventies: he grew up in Ceaucescu's Romania and were doing 2nd degree equations age ten, something most swedish students never learn at all, it being taught in secondary school (prep for further studies) and then only for those "who actually needs to know advanced math"...
Untergang des Abendlandes indeed.
I have to say (rather than just 'like') that I always find your comments interesting and very worth reading. Somehow I imagined that only in the U.S. was our system of schooling declining so rapidly. Although here all the COVID closures have resulted in something of a parent's revolt, which may (hopefully) become even more widespread when we have general elections in November.
This is about the nicest thing to note, thanks a lot, Erika!
You know what the worst part of your comment is? Everyone thinks that Scandinavians are really good at educating its people, but look at these issues now: is it true?
As to the US midterms: let's hope there will be consequences for the crap the Biden gov't is doing--I mean, by now, his handling of Covid, Ukraine, etc. makes (even) Mr. Trump look like a paragon of governance virtue (and I cannot believe I just wrote these words…)
I have a dream... Some day, someone will invent some ballon-like device, maybe made of latex or something, that is compatible with penises and will solve all of Mrs. Zucker's problems - the PH incompatibility, the sexually transmissible diseases, the possibility of pregnancy, ...
Hmmm, that sounds something like, say, totalitarian governments in perhaps China might force their population to do.
As to Ms. Zucker's problems, well, what shall I say: it might solve any number of them, although I remain wary if the root cause of her problems might be addressed, too.
Ms. (ok) Zucker does not have any problems. She is being paid for sleeping around and writing crazy stuff about it, so she sleeps around and writes crazy stuff about it. The problem are the people pushing the ideology. When the revolution comes, Ms. Zucker will be the first to be put against the wall (for having slept with cis white men at all, or whatever).
Nature is what prevents these people from becoming gods, so they fight or deny it. James Lindsay has said more than once that he finds more common ground with Christians (i.e., people he very much opposed years ago) than with woke ideologues. At least they agree that objective reality exists.
Yes, avoid hetero sex to reduce deaths during childbirth. (Presumably the adopting “non-hetero” couple outsources their reproduction to some risk-free vessel, such as a frozen yogurt machine or something.)
Hmmm, while I can clearly see your point, Brian, I'd propose doing so makes me (crime-) think that 'outsourcing' childbearing reeks of both (female) objectification and colonial-imperialistic othering.
In other words, it might make those who engage in such 'outsourcing' to think about which victimisation category to prefer: self-victimisation due to childbearing (or its refusal) vs. the 'bodily appropriation' of one 'other'.
I can already see the ultra-woke cringing at this 'reality', though, so the best way forward is equally obvious: 'just do it' (the outsourcing) and never think about it; if, while engaging in such behaviour, one can always spot the splinter in anyone's brother's (or sister's) eye and get agitated over on the guano reservation.
Bonus features incl. self-congratulatory virtue-signalling, huffing, and puffing by the likeminded twitterati class.
Mission accomplished, I daresay ^_^
Ok, this really gets a bit problematic rather quickly.
Alright, what if - just spitballing - what if we just designated a certain "segment" of the population as not having full human rights? That way it can be totally gender/oriontation-equitable. Like there could be some type of non-gender/orientation quality that defines who is in this segment of the population. Nothing comes to mind but I'm sure we could figure something out. And so this "segment" just serves the rest of us, including in child-raising. Obviously there would be a lot of variety in quality so you would want to let people "bid" on which servants they get, maybe with the ebay app on their phone. This would solve a whole lot of equity problems; I don't know why no societies ever thought of doing something like this before.
I herewith move to nominate Ms. Zucker for this year's Darwin Award, then.