davidthompson

Work Those Hips

Attention, puny humans. The dancefloor is mine: 

Get Them While They’re Soft And Yielding (3)

If you missed it in the comments, here’s a little creepiness from schools in British Columbia: 

When [parent] Kansas Field Allen heard about the posters, she was shocked. She asked her son to take photos of them so she could post about it on social media and get feedback from her peers. “I’d say 95 per cent of the people are in favour of having the posters taken down, and that’s from all races,” Field Allen said.

The posters in question, which appear across the school district, include this one:

Elsewhere (265)

Matthew Blackwell on empathy, asymmetries and “woke” hostility: 

[Jonathan] Haidt and his colleagues… sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (i.e., progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse… Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives... and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

For further illustration, see this and this. Or poke through just about anything here tagged “academia.”

S A Dance on the horrors and hokum of grad school humanities: 

I had never read Althusser’s Reading Capital and I had never read Marx’s Capital, which, perhaps, guaranteed my floundering in grad school given the pervasiveness of Marxist thought in the humanities… I went to graduate school because I found studying literature exhilarating and fulfilling. In my undergraduate honours thesis I analysed the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick. I wanted to do more of that: studying and understanding the great works of literature. Instead I was asked to understand how “The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;’ the reverse of the ideological recognition is the misrecognition of the performative dimension.”

And Gad Saad on “toxic masculinity”: 

Think of the male archetype in romance novels, which is a literary form almost exclusively read by women. He is a tall prince and a neurosurgeon. He is a risk-taker who wrestles alligators and subdues them on his six-pack abs, and yet is sensitive enough to be tamed by the love of a good woman. This archetype is universally found in romance novels read by women in Egypt, Japan, and Bolivia… Most of the traits and behaviours that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate. This is not a manifestation of “antiquated stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the existence of gravity.

See also this short clip of Jordan Peterson discussing women’s preferences in pornography. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Friday Ephemera

I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here. || Chickens, roosters and eye-catching cocks. || An unexpected detail. || At last, an endoscopic camera accessory for your phone. || The big freeze of ‘63. || How to make a kitchen knife out of pasta. || Russians paint a cargo plane. (h/t, Tony) || Parenting of note. || Penguin droppings seen from space. || Today’s word is irony. || Anamorphic sneakers. || An archive of scanned Heavy Metal magazines. || Snow thread. (h/t, Julia) || Luggage of note. || How to cast a 15-ton mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope. || I don’t think those are jellyfish. || Comment seems unnecessary. || “The universe begins in 5… 4… 3… 2…” || Oh, don’t look like that, it’s the reduced sugar brand. || And finally, an elasticated demonstration of the Doppler effect.

A Forehead’s Empty Without Them

From the pages of Cosmopolitan, I bring you fashion news:

The halo brow, the brainchild of 16-year-old Hannah Lyne, took inspiration from one of this year’s brow trends on Instagram. “I was having a conversation with a friend trying to come up with a new idea for a look, and all of a sudden it came to me that I should connect my brow tails,” Hannah said in an interview with PopSugar. “This look was influenced by fishtail brows; seeing the way my brow flicked upwards inspired the idea of just carrying the brow on until it met in the middle.”

They’re “strangely beautiful,” it says here. 

Via dicentra. 

Zombie Movie

Jordan Peterson tries to speak at Grant Hall, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Monday, March 5: 

Elsewhere (264)

Further to the first item here, biologist Heather Heying on the Mao-ling urge to shut down thought: 

When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest. It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Via TomJ in the comments, Helen Pluckrose on the same: 

The problem [for the protestors] was that both of the people [invited to speak] had penises, those penises were white and, as far as anyone knows, responsive to those of the opposite gender. They were hegemonic penises and this was problematic… Resolution of the hegemonic penis “problem” was first attempted via the invitation of not one but, ultimately, all five members of the tenured and tenure-track Women’s Studies faculty at PSU… They all declined to attend, one insisting it was inconceivable that the discussion could be had in good faith given the participation of [James] Damore and [Peter] Boghossian.

Again, the word projection comes to mind.

Kirsten Grind and Douglas MacMillan on “diversity” in practice at Google, and attempts to hide it from public scrutiny: 

YouTube last year stopped hiring white and [East] Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee. The lawsuit, filed by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years, alleges… YouTube recruiters were instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.

Short version here. 

And Chris Rossi on the creep of “social justice” and wasting class time with voodoo: 

Friday Ephemeraren’t

Yes, another chance to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. But on the upside, you’re getting quite good at it. I’ll set the ball rolling with a chap who does this better than you do; an archive of poltergeist clattering and other “occult” recordings; a “desk companion” of note; two ladies, some silver paper and a dash of Dunning-Kruger; and a heartwarming illustration of overdue consequences. 

Oh, and via Damian, this.