Item The conceptual penis as social construct. (Don’t let the title fool you: this item does not go where you think.)
We’ve all had our digital mishaps: sharing a link from the wrong web browser tab in a professional email, or sending a text that autocorrect has made nonsensical.
Most such mishaps end with an embarrassed apology and a note to self to check twice before clicking “send.” Sheldon Pollack’s did not. The professor of law and political science at the University of Delaware has been formally reprimanded by Matthew Kinservik, vice provost for faculty affairs, for sending the wrong colleague a link to an Inside Higher Ed article with the word “penis” in it…
Here’s what happened. In May, Inside Higher Ed published a news story about an Alan Sokal-style hoax article that somehow made its way through the peer-review process and was published by Cogent Social Sciences. The bogus paper, called the “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” argued that the “conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.” You get the picture.
Chuckling, Pollack forwarded a link to the news story to a male colleague who is a good friend, as well as his own son, with the message “I always wondered why I felt emasculated on university campuses of late. This article explains why.” But instead of his friend, he says, his email program autofilled the contact for a female colleague with similar initials, with whom he had recently corresponded about a promotion and tenure issue…
Six months later, Pollack says, the female colleague formally complained…
All professors must already be very careful about what they say in class, [Pollack] said via email, “lest they offend a student or colleague. Now, the word ’emasculated’ is deemed hate speech and ‘gender-based bias.’ I want to hear how the vice provost explains that.”
We do, too, Pollack, but don’t count on reason, sanity, logic, or reality to come to your aid here. A feeling has been hurt, and there is nothing greater than feelings.
Item Marines Further Lower Infantry Officer Standards, This Time Involving…Hiking
[Earlier] we talked about recent changes to the U.S. Marines’ Infantry Officer Course (IOC) which must be passed by all prospective officers who would lead troops into battle. That change eliminated the punishing Combat Endurance Test (CET) as a required, “must pass” requirement to complete the course. While the Marines deny it, there was speculation that the move was designed to make it easier for female officers to pass. (Only one has managed to graduate the full IOC since all combat positions were opened to women under the Obama administration.)
[The article then quotes Free Beacon about another diminution in standards.]
The U.S. Marine Corps has relaxed hiking standards for prospective officers seeking to graduate from the service’s punishing Infantry Officer Course amid disquieting attrition rates.
Marines will still be required to participate in nine hikes as part of the course, but the shift has reduced the number of evaluated hikes from six to three, the Marine Corps Times reported on Wednesday. Marines are required to pass all three evaluated hikes to graduate, whereas previously they had to pass five of the six evaluated hikes…
[Back to original article.]
The Marines are still denying this is designed to make it easier for women to pass…
You’re tired of hearing me repeat this, but…Equality ALWAYS leads to a lowering of standards, absolutely always. First equality is sought, it is discovered it cannot be met, so the standards are lowered or eliminated, and then out trots an apologist who says, “The standards were not needed anyway.”
Item Patient blindsided by $17,850 urine test that insurer said was worth $100.
Elizabeth Moreno had back surgery in late 2015…A Houston lab tested her urine sample for a constellation of legal and illicit drugs, many of which, Moreno said, she had never heard of, let alone taken…
Urine testing for patients with chronic pain has grown explosively over the past decade as deaths from opioid abuse rose sharply. Pain doctors say drug testing helps them make sure patients are taking the drugs as prescribed and not mixing them with illegal substances.
Yet the testing boom costs billions of dollars annually and has raised concerns that some labs and doctors run urine tests needlessly — or charge exorbitant rates — to boost profits…
Some insurers have refused to pay…
Increasingly, if you want to stay healthy, financially and physically, stay away from the doctor.
Apparently, the PENIS not mightier than the sword.
Oops, typo. My bad…
Somehow, the first article seems an illustration of the lesser endurance exemplified in the second. Is this a self-parody by Pollock’s conceptual colleague?
Tried to watch “Tough Mudder” on CW Thursday but had a freaking transgender. Tried “911” on Friday but was an SJW piece of rot variation on the dentist that shot the lion (LEGALLY) in Africa so I watched a DVD of a 1950’s program that actually was entertaining.
The “conceptual” world is stupid and useless. It’s electronic SOMA. Forget opioids—smash those SOMA generators and save the planet, assuming it’s worth the effort. Not sure at this point it is. I am starting to think God does indeed owe Sodom and Gamorrah (not the TV series Gamorrah, either) an apology. We’re still walking around. They were destroyed.
“…an apologist who says, “The standards were not needed anyway.”
Oh, it gets worse, much worse than that, Dr. Briggs.
Not only are the old standards “not needed,” the old standards are pronounced racist, sexist, and homophobic.
Then quotas are imposed. Then….
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/darwin-was-sexist-and-so-are-many-modern-scientists/
re No 3.
American medicine is a nest of cartels
http://politi.co/2zqkKKP
A year ago my wife had knee surgery. The insurance company picked the doctor & the hospital. After she was already unconscious two nurses came into the operating theater who were not in the insurance network. The procedure took 20 minutes & I got a notice that each nurse had billed $5,000. $5,000 for 20 minutes means $15,000 per hour.
I’ve got two degrees in Electrical Engineering, eleven patents, & for the first decade of the 21st century, 2/3 of the automobiles sold on the planet had my data converters in their anti lock brake systems & I bill @ 1/2 of 1 % of this.
If you charge $15,000 per hour, I want to see your Nobel prize.
Bob Mounger,
If you want pay for your genius, you chose the wrong profession.
Engineers are notoriously low paid. They just want to do the work and management, in it’s cynical wisdom, know they can always get you do do their bidding. Like the females who want to be air hostesses. Not well paid.
…
When medicine is totally privatised as it is in America it comes at a much higher cost precisely for the sort of reasons outlined by Briggs fairy tale and your true tale of extortion. However extortion is what that was, so the claims court is the way to go.
Even though our NHS needs rubbing out and starting again, minus the cheap, rubbish, Eastern European and Asian labour and many other evils, it is still a better system. In particular if we are supposed to take Briggs example as a true reflection of the state of the American approach then
no wonder he calls them quacks.
Aha! comment blocked again.
I wonder why?
Perhaps the Chesterton reader’s back.
Sheri,
The dentist is a low grade coward of a man. That’s what I think. Shoot a lion to save a life. Lion meat is inedible.
Their meat is toxically loaded with vitamin A. There is enough in a heart to kill a man. He is decadence and piggishness personified. The gun did the difficult bit, not the man.
God didn’t kill anyone in S and G. That is a fundamentalist position.
On Briggs comment on equality. The argument previously made:
The word ‘diversity’ was used previously which he says ‘kills’, which I say is vague, perhaps deliberately.
The word has been hijacked by the left and liberals and naturally, the reactionaries, from biology where it is always the secret of success for survival of species. Gene mixing spreading the risk, so to speak.
All positive all good. Sexual reproduction owes it’s success compared with Asexual reproduction for the same reason. It works on a macro and micro level.
It is not a word which has anything but political use in society. The principle, which seems to me to be utilitarian in nature, has been taken and used as a doctrine and a dogma. What a shame, perfectly decent word, taken and rendered toxic.
Quoters are the main tool of diversity. Along with a whole load of emotional argumentation which any intelligent man knows not to indulge. But it’s such fun. The pro diversity ideals use the same tactics as the religious cults. Guilt, shame, shunning, threats of all kinds overt and covert. The smell is just the same. Truth doesn’t require any of that.
When medicine is totally privatised as it is in America it comes at a much higher cost precisely for the sort of reasons outlined by Briggs fairy tale and your true tale of extortion. However extortion is what that was, so the claims court is the way to go.
Even though our NHS needs rubbing out and starting again, minus the cheap, rubbish, Eastern European and Asian labour and many other evils, it is still a better system. In particular if we are supposed to take Briggs example as a true reflection of the state of the American approach then
no wonder he calls them quacks.
I was in the Navy and they lowered standards a long time ago. After the tail hook scandal where many females were assaulted the DON decided the Navy culture needed to be changed, i.e. feminized, and it was. As is obvious by the number of collisions the sailors now drive like women.
Since the medical community kills somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 people per year, it has been said that as health care becomes more and more expensive and unattainable, people will live longer.