Tag: Stupid people

Foolishness

Men & Women, Two-Minute Hate

Under “Feminist Harpy” in the dictionary, you’ll find this picture:

Why? Because of this insane demand:

Mother demands her son’s school take Sleeping Beauty off the curriculum because the princess doesn’t give consent to be kissed and woken up by prince
Sarah Hall, from Northumberland Park, North Shields, claimed the fairytale promotes an ‘inappropriate sexual’ message to young children.
She argued the story is irresponsible because it teaches children it is acceptable to kiss women while they are asleep.
The mother of two said: ‘I think it’s a specific issue in the Sleeping Beauty story about sexual behaviour and consent.
‘It’s about saying is this still relevant, is it appropriate?’
Ms Hall is worried about what message the tale, which features a Prince waking up a Princess by kissing her, sends to impressionable youngsters.

Neither Prince Charming nor Sleeping Beauty were available for comment — because they’re fucking fictional characters.

Excessive Baggage

Culture

I very seldom look at anything regarding members of the Kardashian coven, but the other day this particular pic caught my eye:

…and my immediate thought was: good grief, she’s got a fat ass. If she and that Lopez woman are responsible for women today going for butt imp[lants, she has a lot to answer for.

Only later did I notice the horrendous dye job. I will grant that as a brunette, this woman has a reasonably-pretty face (if you’re into that look). But as a blonde, she somehow manages to make herself even more trashy than she normally appears.

No man should. Ugh.

Correction #982

Two-Minute Hate

Okay, I must admit this was a funny one:

The Pratt Tribune, a tri-weekly newspaper out of Pratt, Kansas, printed the headline, ‘Students get first hand job experience’, over the weekend

I don’t know why Americans are so afraid of hyphens, because the rule is really simple.

  1. If you’re making a compound adjective (i.e. using two adjectives, one to describe the second), hyphenate the two if they appear before the noun being enhanced, e.g. “a laughably-stupid editor” (that would be the idiot working for the Pratt Tribune). If you don’t hyphenate the two words, the first adjective* (laughably) is left dangling out there, and sometimes you won’t know whether it applies to the following adjective (stupid) or to the noun (man). Linking the two words with a hyphen makes it quite clear.
  2. If you’re using the compound adjective separately from the noun, i.e. after a verb — “The editor is laughably stupid” — then the hyphen is unnecessary because laughably can only be referring to stupid.

The headline above is what we used to call a howler because the word hand could equally apply to the noun job, but in fact it refers to the previous word first. The sentence should read, “Students get first-hand job experience” (or even “firsthand”, in this case) but even then, the editor should have spotted the likelihood of the howler caused by the proximate occurrence of hand before job, and written “Students get job experience at first hand” instead.

What’s even funnier is that the hapless editor probably has an English degree from a college or university. Draw your own conclusions, but he’s clearly not a well-read man. (See how that works?)

And finally: in the U.K., “prat”[sic] means “stupid person”, which seems appropriate in this case.

*I know, “laughably” is actually an adverb, which is what one normally uses to enhance an adjective, but let’s keep the instruction simple.

Unaffected

Bad News, Politics

A youngin asked me the other day what changes I’ve noticed in my personality as I’ve got older. The principle one, I told him, is that as I’ve got older, I’ve begin to care less and less about more and more. Here’s an example.

So apparently Facebook does ugly things to conservative Facebookers (or whatever they’re called).

I don’t care, because I don’t have a Facebook account, nor will I ever surrender that much control, to anybody. This is why I have a private blog: I can post anything I want, say anything I want, and as long as I don’t murder anybody, I’ll be fine*.

If my hosting service were to suspend my account, I’d go somewhere else (I’ve had several offers to host this site for almost no money), and if my blogging software were to be disabled, I’d just build my own blog from scratch — done it before, was too lazy to do it again this time. Anyone remember this?

…or this?

…or this?

Hand-built. And I can do it all again, if I have to. In the meantime, I’ll stick to this:

And I don’t care about traffic, or pageviews or any of that crap either. BobbyK once told me that this site has about 10 percent of the traffic of my older one, and I don’t actually care. I seek neither validation nor popularity. I do what I do, and people can agree with me, disagree with me, ignore me, or whatever. Hence: splendid isolation.

As I look back, my whole purpose in life has been to deny control of that life to others, and I’m too old to change that purpose now. So fuckem.

*I should point out that since the death of Senator Teddy The Traitor Kennedy, the odds of me being arrested for murder have fallen precipitously. Still, every time I see a chair, duct tape and a baseball bat in the same room, I get flashbacks.

Not Science

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

An Initial Association Test (IAT) purports to signal whether the testee (I nearly wrote something else) displays an inherent bias against something or someone. It’s called “science” (mostly by the charlatans who dreamt it up) but it isn’t, as the redoubtable Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal:

There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge.
Any social-psychological instrument must pass two tests to be considered accurate: reliability and validity. A psychological instrument is reliable if the same test subject, taking the test at different times, achieves roughly the same score each time. But IAT bias scores have a lower rate of consistency than is deemed acceptable for use in the real world—a subject could be rated with a high degree of implicit bias on one taking of the IAT and a low or moderate degree the next time around. A recent estimate puts the reliability of the race IAT at half of what is considered usable. No evidence exists, in other words, that the IAT reliably measures anything stable in the test-taker.

And it gets better:

But the fiercest disputes concern the IAT’s validity. A psychological instrument is deemed “valid” if it actually measures what it claims to be measuring—in this case, implicit bias and, by extension, discriminatory behavior. If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behavior, as Greenwald and Banaji asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior” in IAT research—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums. Oceans of ink have been spilled debating the statistical strength of the correlation between IAT scores and lab-induced “discriminatory behavior” on the part of college students paid to take the test. The actual content of those “discriminatory behaviors” gets mentioned only in passing, if at all, and no one notes how remote those behaviors are from the discrimination that we should be worried about.

In other words, the stats don’t add up, and the subject of the test (racial bias) cannot be established beyond cooking the numbers and faulty projection.

Sound like global warming theory.

If you read the whole piece — it’s long, like all City Journal articles — what will strike you the most (as it did me) was not the bullshit of the IAT, but the degree to which the IAT has become embedded in government and the corporate world.

This is yet another reason why I could never find employment in today’s business world: not only would I refuse to take the test, but I’d also pour scorn on the whole process, loudly. Exit Kim, on Day One at Global MegaCorp, Inc. And I wouldn’t even get a chance to be fired for complimenting some harpy on her outfit, or for carrying my 1911 into the office.

But I digress.

Once again, as with global warming “science”, this whole IAT thing smacks of people having a theory (people are prejudiced / the Earth is over-heating because of SUVs), then creating the pseudo-science underpinning to support and prove the theory. So it’s complete bullshit, just like Glueball Wormening. (Of course, the appearance of “Harvard” in the credentials of one of the IAT’s developers should have been a warning to everyone.)

I should also remind everyone that Heather MacDonald is a statistician, not just a journalist. Hers is the scientific method; what those other two tools are doing is selling snake oil.

Turning Men Into Women

Seen On Campus, Two-Minute Hate

…and I don’t mean by surgery, either. Following on the heels of the aforementioned Girlyman TV Show comes this pile of bullshit, appearing no doubt on a campus near you:

The program bills itself as a class where men “learn how social constructs of masculinity harm them and the people around them, and work to construct healthier masculinities.” Or, as Hicks puts it, “It was eight weeks of guys discussing how they can address their actions with better self-awareness and less toxicity.
“We spoke of emotional labor, consent, violence, communication, empathy, and vulnerability,” he adds, noting that the last subject, in particular, was a struggle for him: “[I was] trained and conditioned to be tough growing up.”

Listen, Sunshine: you know why men are conditioned to be tough growing up? Because someone has to be. Otherwise, we might as well all be women — which is no doubt your whole purpose.

And by the way: masculinity is as much as “social construct” as is motherhood, you fucking charlatan.

Read the whole disgusting piece to experience the full horror, but if projectile vomiting occurs, followed by an uncontrollable urge to do something really stupid (like driving off into the distance at 120mph on a Kawasaki), don’t blame me.

FFS, what a revolting concept. Some more (oh, why not? I shouldn’t be the only one to suffer):

For the past 25 years, Mankowski has taught a course titled Psychology of Men and Masculinities, which, he says, “deconstruct[s] how masculinity is socialized as a performative mask rather than a biological imperative.” He argues that the concept of “toxic masculinity” has four main components: suppression of anything stereotypically feminine; suppression of emotions related to vulnerability, like fear, sadness, or helplessness; male domination over women and other men; and aggression.

Pro tip: anytime some tool uses the word “deconstruct” or “deconstruction” he’s a fucking Marxist. Because that’s what Commies do: it’s the desired result of “critical theory”, which doesn’t criticize, it destroys. Don’t even get me started on the term “performative mask”, as though masculinity can just be taken off at the end of a performance.

It’s not a mask, asshole; it’s the core of our being.

I need to get to Scotland, and soon, so I can engage in some Critical Killing Therapy, whereby I deconstruct a fucking female* deer’s heart into shreds with a 6.5x55mm hollowpoint bullet. Yeah, that’s doubtless a manifestation of “toxic masculinity” for pricks like Mankowski; the problem is that it’s normally dormant, but can easily be awakened by psychobabble like this bullshit.

*That’s not overt hostility towards the fairer sex, by the way: the cull is for does (i.e. Bambi’s mom), because that’s how you control the deer overpopulation problem (yes, it is a problem) in Scotland. Fucking things breed like inner-city welfare mothers. Here’s Mr. Free Market displaying some toxic masculinity after one successful day’s culling, a few years back:

I know what y’all are thinking, and it had better be “Mmmmm… venison burgers!”