Category Archives: culture

The Play’s Not the Thing

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It’s all about the bear-baiters down front in the…pit.

A dispute over “viewing privileges” at a kindergarten play Wednesday in Menifee led to deputies being called to the scene and the cancellation of the play, according to police and school officials.

Because parental privilege in recording the little darlings is more important than the little darlings’ heart-felt efforts at putting on their play.  So the parents entertained themselves in a Shakespearean-esque bear pit arrangement down front by fighting among themselves instead of sitting back and enjoying the play.

Way to put the little tykes in their place, parents.  You showed them who’s important and who isn’t.

No Patriotism?

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The planning board for the upstate town of New Paltz has voted against saying the Pledge of Allegiance at its meetings after one of its members called it a “total waste of time.”

Because it’s such a waste to honor one’s country.

Board Member Amy Cohen wanted the board to recite the pledge at its bi-monthly meetings.

This is a government building, we have a flag here. Personally, coming in off the street to do our governance…I feel that it helps me kind of transition.

Vice Chair Lyle Nolan demurred.

It’s a pressure type of thing, because if you don’t stand, it looks like you’re against it and I don’t think we need that. We’re all adults. We’re all here to do a job[.]

Imagine that.  Government officials—all adults—feeling pressure over an expression of patriotism.

And this from Board Member Lagusta Yearwood:

…reciting an oath to the US flag “goes against the principles this country was founded on.”

Because patriotism has nothing at all to do with this country.

This has been another story in the annals of the Nanny State.

Precious Snowflakes

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A four-month investigation into a University of Kansas professor who used a racial slur in class has concluded the word was used in an educational context and not intended to be racist.

Assistant communication studies professor Andrea Quenette has been on paid leave since November, when a group of eight graduate students filed a discrimination complaint after she used the slur in response to a question in class.

Graduate students, no less.  Do they really let children into graduate school these days?

Quennette used whatever word it was—even Fox News shied away from saying what the word was as it reported the simple fact of its use in the article at the link (honky?  whitey? ??)—in the course of discussing events at another school in her—get this—communications class.

But the graduate school’s children—some of whom weren’t even present—spent their energies not on learning but on seeking out an excuse to feel offended.  They wrote in their…complaint…that

Dr Quenette’s deployment of racially violent rhetoric not only creates a non-inclusive environment in opposition to one of the University of Kansas’ core tenets, but actively destroys the very possibility of realizing those values and goals[.]

Apparently deploying actual education, arraying actual discussions of events, doesn’t produce safe spaces, but rather destroys the very possibility of realizing a serious education for these precious little ones.

Dissent Democrat Style

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The Democrats in the Federal government permit dissent: they dissent from anyone else’s right to dissent.  Here’s a case in point.

Attorney General Lynch told the Senate last week that her department had referred a request to prosecute climate dissent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Specifically, it was referred to the FBI’s criminal investigative division.

Yep.  President Barack Obama’s (D) Attorney General actually referred a case of disagreeing with the Left to the FBI for criminal investigation.  Or for a security review.

One of the Senators questioning Lynch at that hearing was Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI), of RICO the dissenters infamy.  While he wondered idly about using the FBI in a “civil” case of suing climate scientists for dissenting over global warming, he had nary a word about the criminal investigation, nor even Lynch’s decision to refer dissent for criminal investigation in the first place.

Tax Dollars

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Yours, and mine, at work. The paper from which the following excerpt was taken (h/t The Wall Street Journal) was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature. The feminist glaciology framework draws attention to those who dominate and frame the production of glaciological knowledge, the gendered discourses of science and knowledge, and the ways in which colonial, military, and geopolitical domination co-constitute glaciological knowledge. Even in a globalized age where the place of women and indigenous people has improved markedly in some parts of the world, masculinist discourses continue to dominate, in subtle and determinative ways. Feminist glaciology advocates for a shift of preoccupations in research, policy, and public perceptions from the physical and seemingly natural, to a broader consideration of “cryoscapes,” the human, and the insights and potentials of alternative ice narratives and folk glaciologies.

The critique and framework outlined here illuminate experiences and narratives that emerged historically but remain potent today. Public discourse on the cryosphere continues to privilege, quite explicitly, manly endeavours and adventures in the field, and those who conduct their science in the manner of masculinist glaciologists and other field scientists of decades and centuries past….

The call for a feminist glaciology is not limited to ice and glaciers, but is a larger intervention into global environmental change (and especially climate change) research and policy.

Those were your tax dollars, and mine. Yeesh.