Kat and Phoebe discuss plotting a murder with ChatGPT and the latest in academic diversity dramas. Links: With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores Phoebe on the state of academic affairs: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-waterloo-attack-is-part-of-a-broader-trend-of-hatred-for-academia/
Any argument that someone has blood on their hands if they’re critical or skeptical of something reminds me of the post-9/11 argument that opposing the Patriot Act, DHS, or the Iraq War was tantamount to defending jihadist terrorism.
Doc Martin ran from 2004, and only just finished last year. There were only 10 seasons in 18 years and a total of 79 episodes, which is so very British! As they mainly did a season once every other year, if there's an end-of-season cliffhanger you had a very long wait! So a warning if you want to binge this series, you get the ravages of time very quickly as you go through the shows, the characters age very quickly! I absolutely love the show and have seen the whole lot, I know Phoebe will love it too.
I mean one thing he might have done was to object internally. Either contacting professors/administrators or, more plausibly, writing about it in the school paper. (Accessible to all, in theory, but also nobody cares.) But, the school paper wanted nothing to do with him, which is on the one hand understandable, but on the other, may explain how he came to share his grievance with the general public.
Thanks. Many who attempt discourse, disagreement or complaint via “normal” institution channels simply get ignored if “on the wrong side of morality” - such as parents interacting with schools or me interacting with my city-gov department. When channels are shut for opponents, dissidents are left with so
Just seen this in a comment piece in the Times (UK), and naturally thought of Phoebe (who may have seen this elsewhere).
Sexual harassment court case, via the best Victoria Wood song! Excerpt below:
“Chef was sexually harassed with song.”
In this story, illustrated with a picture of the late Victoria Wood pulling a funny face, a hotel manager in the Lake District was found to have sexually harassed his head chef “by suggestively singing the ‘Let’s do it’ refrain from a song by Victoria Wood”.
Now, this is the comical 1989 Ballad of Barry and Freda in which a wife exhorts her reluctant husband to “Be mighty/ Be flighty/ Come and melt the buttons on me flame-proof nightie!”; insists there be, “No cautions/ Just contortions/ Smear an avocado on me lower portions!”; and declares, “This folly/ Is jolly/ Bend me over backwards on me hostess trolley! Let’s do it, Let’s do it toniiiiiight!”
I mean, how, just how, has a judge concluded that one guy singing those words to another, in a kitchen, “amounted to unwanted sexual conduct”? How could anyone crooning, “She licked her lips, she felt sublime/ She switched off Gardener’s Question Time . . .” be doing it to make someone feel uncomfortable?
In other news, a middle-aged man in a beret is suing 20 bikini-clad “nurses”, who chased him round and round his local park to the tune of Yackety Sax in a way that made him feel “humiliated and sexually threatened”.
I'm imagining that Phoebe is picturing Tony Hales' artiste/Maude Lebowski groupie from The Big Lebowski. Completely in a bubble. Both of them cackling insanely over how audacious and "insider" they are carefully always being. Doing something audacious, and expecting people to either be confused by it, or delighted by it.
Thank you for the news. I cannot reach NYT article about U of Chicago- Whiteness Studies. I want to know more about why class was actually cancelled. Was it due to sense of personal threat? Or was the university threatened with a discrimination lawsuit?
I have an MPH from UCLA - early 1990’s. I have no information about students of 2023 intervening in the hiring process. I advise that all alumni not donate a dime until after UCLA recovers from wokeness. Politicized wokeness seems to always result in the robbing of due process from victims of woke witch trials. UCLA has demonstrated that it is not an ethical business partner to potential faculty. That students would mine a person’s past for perceived dirt - sets the standard for what could become “forever unemployed” for 2023 woke activists in the post-Equity era that will follow.
“Adversity score” makes the behavioral scientist in me come out:
(1) Category - Official Privilege:
Relatively easy to quantify. Because I am over 21 years of age, I have the privilege to purchase alcohol, tobacco and firearms. I have the privilege of driving and voting and of driving to go vote. At age 67, I will have the privilege of receiving Social Security. On employment forms for municipal, state and federal jobs; Sex = female and Race = Non-White, are officially preferenced or privileged.
(2) Category- Unofficial Privilege:
Qualitative, subjective and sometimes speculative. Therefore difficult to quantify. First child is often privileged but only within family household. Non-stepchild is privileged in human household and especially so in animal kingdom.
(3) Category- Personal experience as adversarial. The adversarial weight that one attaches to any experience is not standardized across individuals.
As to "something in the water", we seem to be in a moment where ending "the myth" of "meritocracy" is an idea whose time has come.
There actually once was a reductio -ad -absurdum experiment to test the hypothesis that, if we could only take the scalpels and stethoscopes out of the hands of the elite, highly trained "oppressor" class and put them into the hands of the "disadvantaged", we would all be much better off.
In 1966 medical education in the PRC came to a halt. Experienced clinicians who had been responsible for teaching medical students in regional hospitals were sent to labor camps. The new medical students typically had a primarty or middle school education and a few months of "barefoot doctor" para-medical experience. Surgery was sometimes performed by truck mechanics because of their "practical" experience "working with their hands.". Political consciousness became the most important criterion for college admission, which was limited to children of the right class -workers and peasants. (If your parents were urban white collar types you could sometimes spend a few years working on a collective farm, then get "re-classified" as a peasant, then get into university). Most exams were abolished as tools of "capitalist-roader"gatekeeping.
A vivid dramatization of the result of this "breaking of the meritocracy" in medicine can be seen in the film "To Live" by Zhang Yimou, one of the greatest directors of modern China. I won't spoil the plot, but replacing the head of Ob-Gyn, a "class-enemy", with an untrained kid with the correct political background has the expected outcome.
" Ending the meritocracy" is an experiment that's already been performed, and, after Mao, the chinese decided they wanted no part of it.
I can’t believe you didn’t include a “spoiler” tag on this episode, now every time I read one of Kat’s books I’m going to wonder if there’s a murder in it.
Any argument that someone has blood on their hands if they’re critical or skeptical of something reminds me of the post-9/11 argument that opposing the Patriot Act, DHS, or the Iraq War was tantamount to defending jihadist terrorism.
Doc Martin ran from 2004, and only just finished last year. There were only 10 seasons in 18 years and a total of 79 episodes, which is so very British! As they mainly did a season once every other year, if there's an end-of-season cliffhanger you had a very long wait! So a warning if you want to binge this series, you get the ravages of time very quickly as you go through the shows, the characters age very quickly! I absolutely love the show and have seen the whole lot, I know Phoebe will love it too.
I forgot how early you two were on Robin DeAngelo.
Request of K & P: If you were the U of Chicago student displeased with Whiteness course; what would you do differently to minimize potential harm?
I mean one thing he might have done was to object internally. Either contacting professors/administrators or, more plausibly, writing about it in the school paper. (Accessible to all, in theory, but also nobody cares.) But, the school paper wanted nothing to do with him, which is on the one hand understandable, but on the other, may explain how he came to share his grievance with the general public.
Thanks. Many who attempt discourse, disagreement or complaint via “normal” institution channels simply get ignored if “on the wrong side of morality” - such as parents interacting with schools or me interacting with my city-gov department. When channels are shut for opponents, dissidents are left with so
Just seen this in a comment piece in the Times (UK), and naturally thought of Phoebe (who may have seen this elsewhere).
Sexual harassment court case, via the best Victoria Wood song! Excerpt below:
“Chef was sexually harassed with song.”
In this story, illustrated with a picture of the late Victoria Wood pulling a funny face, a hotel manager in the Lake District was found to have sexually harassed his head chef “by suggestively singing the ‘Let’s do it’ refrain from a song by Victoria Wood”.
Now, this is the comical 1989 Ballad of Barry and Freda in which a wife exhorts her reluctant husband to “Be mighty/ Be flighty/ Come and melt the buttons on me flame-proof nightie!”; insists there be, “No cautions/ Just contortions/ Smear an avocado on me lower portions!”; and declares, “This folly/ Is jolly/ Bend me over backwards on me hostess trolley! Let’s do it, Let’s do it toniiiiiight!”
I mean, how, just how, has a judge concluded that one guy singing those words to another, in a kitchen, “amounted to unwanted sexual conduct”? How could anyone crooning, “She licked her lips, she felt sublime/ She switched off Gardener’s Question Time . . .” be doing it to make someone feel uncomfortable?
In other news, a middle-aged man in a beret is suing 20 bikini-clad “nurses”, who chased him round and round his local park to the tune of Yackety Sax in a way that made him feel “humiliated and sexually threatened”.
!!!
I'm imagining that Phoebe is picturing Tony Hales' artiste/Maude Lebowski groupie from The Big Lebowski. Completely in a bubble. Both of them cackling insanely over how audacious and "insider" they are carefully always being. Doing something audacious, and expecting people to either be confused by it, or delighted by it.
Sound engineer quibble: Phoebe is turned up to a volume of easily Kat x2 much of the time.
Thank you for the news. I cannot reach NYT article about U of Chicago- Whiteness Studies. I want to know more about why class was actually cancelled. Was it due to sense of personal threat? Or was the university threatened with a discrimination lawsuit?
I have an MPH from UCLA - early 1990’s. I have no information about students of 2023 intervening in the hiring process. I advise that all alumni not donate a dime until after UCLA recovers from wokeness. Politicized wokeness seems to always result in the robbing of due process from victims of woke witch trials. UCLA has demonstrated that it is not an ethical business partner to potential faculty. That students would mine a person’s past for perceived dirt - sets the standard for what could become “forever unemployed” for 2023 woke activists in the post-Equity era that will follow.
“Adversity score” makes the behavioral scientist in me come out:
(1) Category - Official Privilege:
Relatively easy to quantify. Because I am over 21 years of age, I have the privilege to purchase alcohol, tobacco and firearms. I have the privilege of driving and voting and of driving to go vote. At age 67, I will have the privilege of receiving Social Security. On employment forms for municipal, state and federal jobs; Sex = female and Race = Non-White, are officially preferenced or privileged.
(2) Category- Unofficial Privilege:
Qualitative, subjective and sometimes speculative. Therefore difficult to quantify. First child is often privileged but only within family household. Non-stepchild is privileged in human household and especially so in animal kingdom.
(3) Category- Personal experience as adversarial. The adversarial weight that one attaches to any experience is not standardized across individuals.
Kat should follow Chat-GPT novel-writing advice. Instead of “mid-summer murder”, how about “mid-summer trigger”? “Mid-summer mis-gendering”?
As to "something in the water", we seem to be in a moment where ending "the myth" of "meritocracy" is an idea whose time has come.
There actually once was a reductio -ad -absurdum experiment to test the hypothesis that, if we could only take the scalpels and stethoscopes out of the hands of the elite, highly trained "oppressor" class and put them into the hands of the "disadvantaged", we would all be much better off.
In 1966 medical education in the PRC came to a halt. Experienced clinicians who had been responsible for teaching medical students in regional hospitals were sent to labor camps. The new medical students typically had a primarty or middle school education and a few months of "barefoot doctor" para-medical experience. Surgery was sometimes performed by truck mechanics because of their "practical" experience "working with their hands.". Political consciousness became the most important criterion for college admission, which was limited to children of the right class -workers and peasants. (If your parents were urban white collar types you could sometimes spend a few years working on a collective farm, then get "re-classified" as a peasant, then get into university). Most exams were abolished as tools of "capitalist-roader"gatekeeping.
A vivid dramatization of the result of this "breaking of the meritocracy" in medicine can be seen in the film "To Live" by Zhang Yimou, one of the greatest directors of modern China. I won't spoil the plot, but replacing the head of Ob-Gyn, a "class-enemy", with an untrained kid with the correct political background has the expected outcome.
" Ending the meritocracy" is an experiment that's already been performed, and, after Mao, the chinese decided they wanted no part of it.
I can’t believe you didn’t include a “spoiler” tag on this episode, now every time I read one of Kat’s books I’m going to wonder if there’s a murder in it.