Heh. I think it’s safe to say it’s not quite achieving whatever non-creepy, non-car-crash aesthetic it was actually going for. I thought the whole thing was a public service to help keep kids from turning to Furry culture. I have to assume that the coming protests will be even more disturbing than the film itself.

Does anyone else...become deeply depressed when hearing intellectuals? I trace my bitterness to the day I realized that the adults in the real world were every bit as stupid and horrible as my monstrous schoolmates. For most of my life, I believed that after graduation I would be able to leave all the pettiness and stupidity behind. Finding out that grownups were just as stupid as adolescents (without the excuse of youth) was a hard pill to swallow. I've really never gotten over it. You can only imagine the feelings I get when I see the monsters proudly wearing their misanthropy. How dare they! Do they not realize that they have it all backwards?

When I am an old man I shall wear purple With a red hat that frightens all the wokelings, And I shall spend my pension on whisky and fishing tackle And a Carhartt jacket and say we've no money for unskilled peasants pouring across the border.

Teacher, may I mambo dogface to the banana patch?

Professors are smrt. Why anyone would think this is actually profound is a mystery (if it even happened), but it is nice to see that the commenters are not buying the BS. The commenters at Paul Caron's place, sure. The ABA Journal article he links has no comment section, just an e-mail to which one may send one's thoughts. I'm guessing that the chances of the word "codswallop" appearing in their next issue are inversely related to the number of e-mails filling up that poor sub-editor's inbox.

...this ‘reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land.’ Is there a recent survey showing how many Aborigines really believe this creation myth? I mean, I shudder to think that this could be a case where the severely educated Woke Whites reduce a minority group to a two-dimensional cartoon in order to protect them from something they've never worried about before. Heavens forfend!

It's a particularly pathetic attempt by humanities students (the 'A' stands for Arts) to co-opt the STEM acronym. Daniel's correct. While a single extracurricular club may not have an active Arts component, there are more and more districts implementing STEAM as a regular academic program, part of the primary curriculum. Ironically, in some of the districts I've worked with, the initiative is actually blowing up in the faces of those who are trying to shoehorn the arty students in with those who can do math. As it turns out, forcing STEM types to spend a few hours a week reading classical literature or learning to paint or play a musical instrument isn't that big a deal for them. For many, it's a waste of time, but they're attending high school in a public school district, so they already have lots of experience with pointless wastes of time. For others, it's a chance to stretch their legs a bit, and some find that they really enjoy music or painting or literature. (Hell, my degree is in Physics, and I can hold my own discussing literature with my lovely bride who graduated with honors in English Lit, and I enjoy noodling around on my guitar as a favored pastime.) In these cases, the STEAM curriculum actually does some positive good. On the other side of the coin, you have the arty students who are expected to spend a few hours a week learning something about S, T, E or M. You might find this hard to believe, but in real life, it's a lot easier for a budding scientist, engineer, or computer geek to write a paper about Shakespeare than it is for a budding interpretive basket weaver to learn the difference between a cosine and a tangent, or to work his way through a geometric proof. In one district, I heard the argument made that painting a picture of a sine wave should count as partial credit toward a kid's trigonometry requirement. Because our society really needs bridges designed and built by people who paint nice pictures of bridges. In the end, mathematics will separate the wheat from the chaff.

For the most part, we have better things to do, and better people to spend time with. It will just get worse, and then worse still, and then one day they'll attack the wrong person. Maybe they trap a car in one of their roving traffic barricades, and when the driver panics and tries to escape they drag her from the car and leave her bloodied on the street. But maybe it's a photogenic young mother whose toddler is screaming from the back seat the whole time, and the footage goes viral. Or maybe it's a City Councilman's favorite niece. Then I think the LARPers will be astonished at how quickly the backlash wipes them out. This, of course, is a best-case scenario. The more likely path is that they try to drag a veteran out of his car, and he shoots three of them dead on the spot. This is the outcome they're really after, since it will justify all their preemptive violence to this point, as well as the escalation of violence they've been working toward. I shudder to think about what that city will look like when the police are told that they can only intervene on behalf of Antifa, to prevent the townspeople from protecting themselves. At that point, open war between the citizens and the Mayor's private security forces is only a matter of time, and the ramifications of that kind of violence will likely finish the unraveling of the social fabric that we've seen fraying lo these many years. Which, of course, was the purpose all along.

Corporate Rollover: At Dictionary.com we take words very seriously. They are foundational to how individuals think about themselves, and they can influence the perceptions of others. When it comes to the language of identity, the words we use are especially important. Thus begins their introduction to their essay on why it's so important that they keep the Newspeak dictionary up to date. It's not often that you see the battle lines drawn out quite so obviously! I'm hopeful that JeffG will pick up the case now that PW has returned, as this is his bread and butter, and a big reason why I started reading his work in the first place.

Rooster is the embodiment of phrases like “Men don’t cry,” and “Rub some dirt on it.” This alpha dog rejects vulnerability by preaching about how sissified city dogs are. The character is disturbing in his unapologetic validation of behavior society as a whole is trying to eradicate. He equates courage with arrogance and other outdated perceptions of manliness. Two things pop out at this disinterested observer: 1) The assertion that "society as a whole" is trying to eradicate traditional masculinity. 2) The horror that an animated children's film is not enthusiastically working to assist in this popular effort. Last year, I was on a wilderness canoe trip when my brother had a seizure, flopped out of his canoe and nearly drowned. Rescuing my brother from the cold water, and getting his lungs clear, and going back to fetch my 70-year-old father and his capsized canoe before hypothermia got the better of him, and then jury-rigging a temporary camp with the equipment we hadn't lost, and then paddling off to civilization to find help -- let's just say that "being in touch with my feelings" wasn't anywhere near the top of the list of helpful traits and skills that came into play that afternoon. I'm virtually certain that this movie reviewer was tormented as a kid, and as such he will forever confuse traditional masculinity with the bullying he experienced. I just wish that he and his fellow travelers could put their vaunted powers of nuance and empathy to work just one single time and realize how deeply insulting it is to have one's masculinity constantly characterized as "toxic," something to be ashamed of, to be driven out of oneself, or to be atoned for. You'd think that somebody who has spent his life insisting that queerness is nothing to be ashamed of would be a little more circumspect about insisting that everything non-queer is. You'd also think that people who can't kill a spider on their own would be more circumspect about calling for the eradication of a hundred million men who are handy with axes and guns and power tools and machinery. But then, as our gracious host has observed so many times, self-awareness isn't usually a strong suit for people like this.

The firm I work for was recently gobbled up by a larger company, which meant that I had to sit through corporate propaganda sessions for a week. I think I got off to a good start with the new HR department, since I was the most enthusiastic participant in the corporate diversity workshop. For instance, when asked why diversity was so important, I offered up: "Because blacks and queers don't have the same brains as you and me!" When we spoke about how {ethnic} jokes were harmful, I said I found it easy to get around the problem by always telling Polish jokes 'cuz we Polacks have such a great sense of humor. The feather in my cap, and the moment when I think the HR ladies really took a shine to me, was when they said that my demonstrated behavior could be considered a microaggression toward some of the others in the room. Without hesitation, I offered my most sincere micro-apology to anybody I micro-offended. I think they were impressed by my sensitivity!

Yeah? Wait till he* gets a toothache. Poetic justice, if you ask me.

One cannot help but admire the tenacity of those who would publish 1,700 words of assertion about word definitions on somebody else's blog. Still, who among us hasn't complained of the hipsters who regularly break into the cars on our street, or the preppies who are always spray-painting vulgarities on our garages and garden walls, or the patricians encouraging their attack dogs to defecate on our doorsteps, or -- worst of all -- the yuppies who gather in front of our apartment buildings to harass and threaten us as we go about our daily business. If only those hipsters, preppies, yuppies and patricians could be as harmless as the quotidian chavs we brush past in the lobbies of our office buildings each morning!

...and from that point forward it's going to be on. I can't disagree, much as I'd like to. I fear that people on both sides of the issue are going to gain a new appreciation of the Gadsden flag that was all the rage not long ago. We rattle, and rattle, and rattle some more, helpfully and politely warning you to back off. If you fail to heed the warning and continue to harass and torment us, at some point you're going to get bitten. And good luck convincing the onlookers that it's anyone's fault but your own. The problem is that we've a fair number of vicious thugs on "our side," just waiting for the right moment to wade in and start kicking people's teeth in. Separating the righteous violence from the gratuitous is going to be -- what's the word? -- tricky. And probably pointless anyway. At this point, I'm just trying to lock up the pay-per-view rights for the inevitable clash between the neo-nazis and the Antifa cosplayers. Should make for compelling television!

Warming up soup when I don't want to dirty a bowl *and* a saucepan.

Don't know why this would be a struggle. It's pronounced "Doctor Dre." Simple!

To paraphrase one of the commenters from the linked Twitter feed: "The demand for racism in this country far outstrips the supply." Little wonder then that we should see so much third-rate knockoff "racism" flooding the market.

Woke™ Science!™ I need a research grant to look into the Lauripennian Uncertainty Principle, whereby it is simultaneously true that 1) men and women have no significant differences, and B) men are terrible monsters responsible for all the woes endured by women. I'm almost certain that the research will require a new approach to the two-slit experiment. I'll just show myself out now.

the magical qualities of baking soda... Another St. Patrick's Day, another round of confusion as to why "soda bread" tastes nothing like Coca-Cola. That being said, I must admit that I've never seen an elephant in an Irish pub, so at least that theory is still whole.

I'm approaching fifty (no idea how that happened) and I don't remember a time when some kind of climate catastrophe wasn't imminent. We're of a similar age, and I don't remember any of my classmates giving much thought to the consequences of acid rain, or the lack of anyplace to dump garbage, or the new ice age looming on the horizon. It's not that we were young and stupid (though we were), nor that we never heard about these pending disasters (we heard plenty). Rather, it was that we had several thousand Soviet ICBM's pointed at our homes, and woke up each morning with the small but significant chance that life on Earth would be snuffed out at the touch of a button. Fortunately for all of us, and all who have come after, we had Sting. After Dream of the Blue Turtles was released, I knew we'd be okay, because of course the Russians love their children, too. Of course our lack of long-term planning had consequences. We're just lucky that the acid rain melted the mountains of garbage, and what remained was covered up by the ice and snow. Life finds a way!

I'm pretty sure that guy used to sit in the cubicle next to mine, back in the bad old days. Gods, am I happy to have graduated to an office with a door...

Now I'm sorely tempted to fabricate some signs in Official State Typography that read: "This land once belonged to [tribe], before it was taken away by badass white dudes with superior firepower. The land now belongs to us, and shall remain ours until such time as we are overcome by a stronger tribe." Maybe add a little "Sod off, swampy!" at the end. I'm still deciding.

I understand the need for standardized time zones so that a 12:30 conference call is possible between people in different cities, and that it might mean that official "noon" differs from my own solar noon by a half hour. What I don't understand is why official "noon" should be legislated to be 90 minutes too early, for no damn reason besides the thrill of gaslighting. P.S. I had the pleasure of visiting Greenwich a few years back. As the Empire was on Summer Time, I made sure to arrive at "noon" just so I could observe the confusion of tourists who could not figure out why their shadows didn't line up with the Meridian. (I was pleased to find myself in the company of a handful of other soulless jerks who were similarly moved to come laugh at the masses.) Greenwich is wonderful -- as a sailor, a scientist, and a drinker, I found that the town had everything I could need!

Some U. S. states are flirting w/the sensible idea of just staying on fast time year round. The term 'a.m.' literally means "before the sun reaches the southernmost part of its arc," which is to say, the point when the Sun is halfway through its daily transit of the sky. If Congress, or Her Majesty's Government, or the ISO, or even Baghdad Bob insist on setting noon to some other celestial marker, then I really must insist that they also ditch the 'a.m.' and 'p.m.' labels. Turns out that the gaslighting nonsense we've been observing of late is not new. Leave it to our overlords in the government to insist that five hours after the sun rises, and seven hours before the sun sets, is the definition of "midday."

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, I worked in an upscale kitchenware store in Philadelphia, and had the good fortune of meeting several of the PBS chefs when they came to our shop to do book signings. Martin Yan was a lovely man, though his trademark smile began to look a bit plastic by the end of the afternoon. Jeff Smith was suffering with a cold, and was owly and not much fun to work with as a result. Nathalie Dupree was really sweet to us all, virtually indistinguishable from her television persona. But the best of them all was Justin Wilson. He showed up in a cream-colored linen suit, looking for all the world like a parish judge. He charmed the socks off of everybody, posing for pictures and carrying on with the ladies like they were the center of the universe. He pinched more than a few bottoms while he was at it, and the old devil got away with it every time, with nothing more than a squeak and a half-hearted swat and a "why you!" directed at him, when a lesser man might have gotten walloped with a purse. Truly a prince among men. My mom has a shelf full of autographed cookbooks, most of them including really lovely inscriptions. Not the sort of thing you might think about when taking a job selling pots and pans and knives. (At the time, I was just happy to come home smelling like a coffee bean instead of a deep fryer.)