The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour

Those who keep going on about "pedophilia" are almost certainly unaware of all this, but still:

 

The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour

"Drag Queen Story Hour pitches itself as a family-friendly event to promote reading, tolerance, and inclusion. “In spaces like this,” the organization’s website reads, “kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.” But many parents, even if reluctant to say it publicly, have an instinctual distrust of adult men in women’s clothing dancing and exploring sexual themes with their children.

These concerns are justified. But to mount an effective opposition, one must first understand the sexual politics behind the glitter, sequins, and heels. This requires a working knowledge of an extensive history, from the origin of the first “queen of drag” in the late nineteenth century to the development of academic queer theory, which provides the intellectual foundation for the modern drag-for-kids movement.

The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life. The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy. It is now being transmitted, with official state support, in a number of public libraries and schools across the United States. By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.

Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.”...

“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” Rubin wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. . . . Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”

Rubin’s project—and, by extension, that of queer theory—was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. The key mechanism for achieving this turn was the thesis of social construction... traditional conceptions of sex, regarding it as a natural behavior that reflects an unchanging order, are pure mythology, designed to rationalize and justify systems of oppression. For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political.” Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image...

Once the ground is softened and the conventions are demystified, the sexual revolutionaries could do the work of rehabilitating the figures at the bottom of the hierarchy—“transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers.”

Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum—pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth,” Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically...

Such positions are hardly idiosyncratic within the discipline of queer theory. The father figure of the ideology, Foucault, whom Rubin relies upon for her philosophical grounding, was a notorious sadomasochist who once joined scores of other prominent intellectuals to sign a petition to legalize adult–child sexual relationships in France. Like Rubin, Foucault haunted the underground sex scene in the Western capitals and reveled in transgressive sexuality...

Rubin’s American compatriots made the same argument even more explicitly. Longtime Rubin collaborator Pat Califia, who would later become a transgender man, claimed that American society had turned pedophiles into “the new communists, the new niggers, the new witches.” For Califia, age-of-consent laws, religious sexual mores, and families who police the sexuality of their children represented a thousand-pound bulwark against sexual freedom. “You can’t liberate children and adolescents without disrupting the entire hierarchy of adult power and coercion and challenging the hegemony of antisex fundamentalist religious values,” she lamented. All of it—the family, the law, the religion, the culture—was a vector of oppression, and all of it had to go.

The second prerequisite for understanding Drag Queen Story Hour is to understand the historical development of the art of drag...

As writer Daniel Harris explained in the counterculture journal Salmagundi, traditional drag performances from William Dorsey Swann until the mid-1960s were sensual experiences, “an innocuous camp pastime,” but with the onset of the sexual revolution, they became forms of resistance and revolution. “After the 1960s,” Harris wrote, “ideology [tightened] its grip on the aesthetic of drag when gay men began to use their costumes to reevaluate the whole concept of normality and thus carry out a crucial part of the cross-dresser’s agenda: revenge.” Drag performers increasingly saw their vocation as political and started street organizations such as Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in order to join the wave of activism rising through their communities in New York, San Francisco, and other hubs.

Suddenly, drag was not a private performance but a statement of public rebellion. The queens began using costume and performance to mock the fashion, manners, and mores of Middle America. In time, the need to shock required the performers to push the limits. “Men now wear such sexually explicit outfits as ball gowns with prosthetic breasts sewn on to the outside of the dresses, black nighties with gigantic strap-on dildos, and transparent vinyl mini-skirts that reveal lacy panties with strategic rips and telltale stains suggestive of deflowerment,” Harris noted. “The less drag is meant to allure, the bawdier it becomes, with men openly massaging their breasts, squeezing the bulges of their g-strings, sticking out their asses and tongues like porn stars in heat, and lying spread-eagle on their backs on parade routes with their helium heels flung into the air and their virginal prom dresses thrown over their heads.”

The next critical turn occurred in 1990, with the publication of Gender Trouble, by the queer theorist Judith Butler. Gender Trouble was a bombshell: it elevated the discourse around queer sexuality from the blunt rhetoric of Gayle Rubin to a realm of highly abstract, and sometimes impenetrable, intellectualism. Butler’s essential contribution was twofold: first, she saturated queer theory with postmodernism; second, she provided a theory of social change, based on the concept of “performativity,” which offered a more sophisticated conceptual ground than simple carnal transgression. Gender Trouble’s basic argument is that Western society has created a regime of “compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism,” which has sought to enforce a singular, unitary notion of “sex” that crushes and obscures the true complexity and variation of biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and human desire. Butler argues that even the word “woman,” though it relates to a biological reality, is a social construction and cannot be defined with any stable meaning or categorization. There is nothing essential about “man,” “woman,” or “sex”: they are all created and re-created through historically contingent human culture; or, as Butler puts it, they are all defined through their performance, which can change, shift, and adapt across time and space.

Butler’s theory of social change is that once the premise is established that gender is malleable and used as an instrument of power, currently in favor of “heterosexual normativity,” then the work of social reconstruction can begin. And the drag queen embodies Butler’s theory of gender deconstruction...

By the 2000s, the performance of drag had absorbed all these elements—the social-justice origin story of William Dorsey Swann, the carnal shock-and-awe of Gayle Rubin, the ethereal postmodernism of Judith Butler—and brought them together onto the stage. The queer theorist Sarah Hankins, who performed extensive field research in drag bars in the Northeast, captured the spirit of this subculture and its ideology in a study for the academic journal Signs. Drawing on the work of Rubin and Butler, Hankins describes three genres of drag—straight-ahead, burlesque, and genderfuck—that range from stripteases and lap dances to simulations of necrophilia, bestiality, and race fetishism. Hankins describes the world of drag as a “sociosexual economy,” in which the members of “queerdom” can titillate, gratify, and reward one another with cash tips and money exchanges. “As an audience member, I have always experienced the tip exchange as payment for sexual gratification,” Hankins writes. “And I am aware that by holding up dollar bills, I can satisfy my arousal, at least partially: I can bring performers’ bodies close to mine and induce them to touch me or to let me touch them.” Or, as one of her research subjects, the drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova, puts it: “I’m literally out there peddling my pussy for dollar bills.”

The goal of drag, following the themes of Butler and Rubin, is to obliterate stable conceptions of gender through performativity and to rehabilitate the bottom of the sexual hierarchy through the elevation of the marginal...

The final turn in the story of drag is, in some ways, the most surprising. As the dark side of drag pushed transgression to the limits, another faction began moving from the margins to the mainstream. Some drag queens—most notably, the drag performer RuPaul—toned down the routines, pushed the ideology deep into the background, and presented drag as good old-fashioned, glamorous American fun. Television producers packaged this new form of drag as reality programming, softening the image of the drag queen and assimilating the genre into mass media and consumer culture.

This provided an opportunity. As the queer theorists’ vanguard intellectual project was running aground on incest and bestiality fantasies, the most enterprising among them took a different tack: using the commercialization of drag and the goodwill associated with the gay and lesbian rights movement as a means of transforming drag performances into “family-friendly” events that could transmit a simplified version of queer theory to children. The key figure in this transition was a “genderqueer” college professor and drag queen named Harris Kornstein—stage name Lil Miss Hot Mess—who hosted some of the original readings in public libraries and wrote the children’s book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish. Kornstein sits on the board of Drag Queen Story Hour, the nonprofit organization that was founded by Michelle Tea in 2015 to promote “family-friendly” drag performances and has since expanded to 40 local chapters that have organized hundreds of performances across the United States.

Kornstein also published the manifesto for the movement, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” with coauthor Harper Keenan, a female-to-male transgender queer theorist at the University of British Columbia. With citations to Foucault and Butler, the essay begins by applying queer theory’s basic premise of social constructivism and heteronormativity to the education system. “The professional vision of educators is often shaped to reproduce the state’s normative vision of its ideal citizenry. In effect, schooling functions as a way to straighten the child into a kind of captive alignment with the current parameters of that vision,” Kornstein and Keenan write. “To state it plainly, within the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production.”

To disrupt this dynamic, the authors propose a new teaching method, “drag pedagogy,” as a way of stimulating the “queer imagination,” teaching kids “how to live queerly,” and “bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.” As Kornstein and Keenan explain, this is an intellectual and political project that requires drag queens and activists to work toward undermining traditional notions of sexuality, replacing the biological family with the ideological family, and arousing transgressive sexual desires in young children. “Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education,” they write. “This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society.”

For the drag pedagogists, the traditional life path—growing up, getting married, working 40 hours a week, and raising a family—is an oppressive bourgeois norm that must be deconstructed and subverted. As the drag queens take the stage in their sexually suggestive costumes, Kornstein and Keenan argue, their task is to disrupt the “binary between womanhood and manhood,” seed the room with “gender-transgressive themes,” and break the “reproductive futurity” of the “nuclear family” and the “sexually monogamous marriage”—all of which are considered mechanisms of heterosexual, capitalist oppression. The books selected in many Drag Queen Story Hour performances—Cinderelliot, If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It, The Gender Wheel, Bye Bye, Binary, and They, She, He, Easy as ABC—promote this basic narrative. Though Drag Queen Story Hour events are often billed as “family-friendly,” Kornstein and Keenan explain that this is a form of code: “It may be that DQSH is ‘family friendly,’ in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is ‘family friendly’ in the sense of ‘family’ as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.” That is, the goal is not to reinforce the biological family but to facilitate the child’s transition into the ideological family.

After the norms of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family are called into question, the drag queen can begin replacing this system of values with “queer ways of knowing and being.” Kornstein and Keenan make no bones about it: the purpose of what they call drag pedagogy, or the “pedagogy of desire,” is about reformulating children’s relationship with sex, sexuality, and eroticism. They describe drag as a “site of queer pleasure” that promises to “turn rejection into desire” and “[transform] the labour of performance into the pleasure of participation,” and DQSH as offering a “queer relationality” between adult and child. They litter their paper with sexualized language and double entendres, blurring the lines between adult sexuality and childhood innocence. In fact, as the queer pedagogist Hannah Dyer has written, queer pedagogy and, by extension, drag pedagogy seek to expose the very concept of “childhood innocence” as an oppressive heteropatriarchal illusion. “Applying queer methods of analysis to studies of childhood can help to queer the rhetoric of innocence that constrains all children and help to refuse attempts to calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire,” Dyer writes.

The purpose, then, is to subvert the system of heteronormativity, which includes childhood innocence, and reengineer childhood sexuality from the ground up. And drag performances provide a visual, symbolic, and erotic method for achieving this. Kornstein and Keenan’s language of the discipline—“pleasure,” “desire,” “bodies,” “girls,” “boys,” “glitter,” “sequins,” “wigs,” and “heels”—gives it away.

Of course, the organizers of Drag Queen Story Hour understand that they must manage their public image to continue enjoying access to public libraries and public schools. They have learned how to speak in code to NGOs and to appease the anxieties of parents, while subtly promoting the ideology of queer theory to children. While many of Drag Queen Story Hour’s defenders claim that these programs are designed to foster LGBTQ “acceptance” and “inclusion,” Kornstein and Keenan explicitly dismiss those objectives as mere “marketing language” that provides cover for their real agenda... In other words, as a movement, Drag Queen Story Hour has learned the dance of operating a cash-flow-positive activist organization, winning government contracts, and securing access to audiences, while providing a plausible rhetorical defense against parents who might question the wisdom of adult men creating “site[s] of queer pleasure” with their children.

This gambit has been remarkably successful. Drag Queen Story Hour began with voluntary programs at public libraries, which are required by law to provide equal access to organizations regardless of political affiliation or ideology. But within a few years, those state-neutral events have turned into state-subsidized drag performances for children. The New York City Council and New York Public Library have provided taxpayer funding directly to the Drag Queen Story Hour nonprofit, sparking a trend of state-subsidized drag readings, dances, and performances across the country. Next, the New York City Public Schools, with more than $200,000 in funding from the municipal government, began hosting dozens of drag performances in elementary, middle, and high schools in all five boroughs. Other political figures seem to want to go even further. The attorney general of Michigan has called for a “drag queen for every school.” California state senator Scott Wiener has suggested in a tweet that he might propose legislation to offer “Drag Queen 101 as part of the K–12 curriculum” and mandate that students attend Drag Queen Story Time as a way to “satisfy the requirement.” Both might have said this tongue in cheek—but in any case, these things have a way of going from joke to reality at the speed of light.

Though the spread of sexually charged drag performances has an aura of inevitability, one should keep in mind that transgressive ideologies always contain the seeds of their own destruction.

As the movement behind drag shows for children has gained notoriety and expanded its reach, some drag performers have let the mask slip: in Minneapolis, a drag queen in heels and a pink miniskirt spread his legs open in front of children; in Portland, a large male transvestite allowed toddlers to climb on top of him, grab at his fake breasts, and press themselves against his body; and in England, a drag queen taught a group of preschoolers how to perform a sexually suggestive dance.

Scenes from drag events hosted across the United States in bars, clubs, and outdoor festivals have been even more shocking and disturbing: in Miami, a man with enormous fake breasts and dollar bills stuffed into his G-string grabs the hand of a preschool-aged girl and struts her in front of the crowd; in Washington, D.C., a drag queen wearing leather and chains teaches a young child how to dance for cash tips; in Dallas, hulking male figures with makeup smeared across their faces strip down to undergarments, simulate a female orgasm, and perform lap dances on members of a roaring audience of adults and children. Newspaper headlines have also announced abuses: “Tucson High School Counselor Behind Teen Drag Show Arrested for Relationship with Minor”; “Houston Public Library Admits Registered Child Sex Offender Read to Kids in Drag Queen Storytime”; “Drag Queen Charged with 25 Counts of Felony Child Sexual Abuse Material Possession”; “Second ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ Reader in Houston Exposed as Convicted Child Sex Offender”; “Drag Queen Story Hour Activist Arrested for Child Porn, Still Living with His Adopted Kids.”

Advocates of Drag Queen Story Hour might reply that these are outlier cases and that many of the child-oriented events feature drag queens reading books and talking about gender, not engaging in sexualized performances. But the spirit of drag is predicated on the transgressive sexual element and the ideology of queer theory, which cannot be erased by switching the context and softening the language. The philosophical and political project of queer theory has always been to dethrone traditional heterosexual culture and elevate what Rubin called the “sexual caste” at the bottom of the hierarchy: the transsexual, the transvestite, the fetishist, the sadomasochist, the prostitute, the porn star, and the pedophile. Drag Queen Story Hour can attempt to sanitize the routines and run criminal background checks on its performers, but the subculture of queer theory will always attract men who want to follow the ideology to its conclusions.

When parents, voters, and political leaders understand the true nature of Drag Queen Story Hour and the ideology that drives it, they will work quickly to restore the limits that have been temporarily—and recklessly—abandoned. They will draw a bright line between adult sexuality and childhood innocence, and send the perversions of “genderfuck,” “primitivism,” and “degeneracy” back to the margins, where they belong."

Links - 7th October 2023 (IQ)

Does Self-control Outdo IQ in Predicting Academic Performance? - "Duckworth and Seligman’s seminal work found that self-discipline (self-control) was more salient for academic achievement than intelligence. Very little replication work exists, including in different cultures; the current study addressed these gaps. Data were collected from 6th and 7th grade cohorts of early adolescents (N = 589; age: Mean = 12.34 years, and SD = 0.89; 58% female) over two years. The study tested whether self-control was a stronger predictor than intelligence in explaining academic performance two years later as well as in explaining developmental changes over the course of two years. Path analyses provided evidence that both self-control and intelligence longitudinally predicted teacher-reported academic competence as well as school-reported grades; however, intelligence was a significantly stronger predictor than self-control. In addition, only intelligence predicted developmental changes in each measure of academic performance over time, self-control did not."

What Science Says About Identifying High-Potential Employees - "in forecasting potential to excel in a bigger, more complex job at some point in the future, the question shifts to how likely an individual is to be able to learn and master the requisite knowledge and skill. The single-best predictor of this is IQ or cognitive ability. Learning ability includes a substantial cognitive component but also the motivation to pick up new knowledge and skills fast and flexibly."

Top psychologist: IQ is the No. 1 predictor of work success - "Does a child’s high IQ set them up for career or financial success down the road? According to psychologist John Antonakis, the answer is essentially yes.  ″[IQ is] the single most important predictor of work success,” Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior at Switzerland’s University of Lausanne who focuses on leadership and management research, tells CNBC Make It. “It’s a very robust and very reliable predictor.”  In 2012, Vanderbilt University psychology researchers found that people with higher IQs tend to earn higher incomes, on average, than those with lower IQs. Past studies have also shown that high IQs are comparably reliable in predicting academic success, job performance, career potential and creativity.  Antonakis says high IQs are particularly notable predictors for success in highly complicated, skilled occupations like physicist, engineer or even neurosurgeon. But don’t worry, he adds: You can still be highly successful without being a Mensa member. These five other skills and traits factor into your career success and overall happiness, too:
Ability to be outgoing and friendly
Self-confidence
Being open to new experiences
Organizational abilities
Strong communication skills...
high-IQ leaders get better results than less intelligent leaders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2013 study found that Fortune 500 CEOs are typically overrepresented among the top 1%, in terms of cognitive abilities."

PhD students aren’t what they used to be either - "The value of a high school degree has collapsed since 1980...        It is a rather trivial consequence of the falling human capital levels of people with just completed high school... 'Figure 14 shows that as the number of slots for PhDs increases, the average IQ of the enrolling students falls. This indicates that there is heterogeneous quality of enrollees and expanding slots may draw in a marginal researcher less talented than the average researcher from the existing pool. Thus, even though policy can increase the supply of researchers, there is a trade-off between expanding the pool of PhDs and the average talent of PhDs in the economy.'"

Urban vs Rural Residence and IQ
Someone claimed that country differences in IQ were due to rural and urban populations. But the biggest rural-urban IQ difference reported in the literature is 13. Some studies even find no difference. So even if the country with the highest IQ had a 100% urban population and the one with the lowest IQ had a 100% rural population, the rural-urban difference would not explain this difference

National IQ is the Best Predictor of Economic Growth - "it has a very strong relationship with pretty much every national indicator for success... We find national IQ to be the most robust predictor of economic growth with the largest effect size, compared to +70 variables in the growth literature. And the cherry on top is that it is causally identified... Although our correlation is extremely strong, many plausible rival explanations also work well - natural resources, institutions, culture etc.. Let’s imagine we have 50 plausible explanatory variables to explain economic growth with. The maths of this implies that there are 2^50, or over one ‘quadrillion’, possible models you can test. Which should we test? With this massive ‘model uncertainty’, the early economic growth literature of the 90s was filled with papers with conflicting results, since economists could alter the methodology, time period and variables to find just those models which happened to support their theory by chance. This p-hacking was bad - a 1993 review of the literature on democracy and economic growth found that nearly half of the published studies suggested democracy improved economic growth and nearly another half said the opposite!... Across every single test, national IQ performed the best with on average the largest standardised coefficient and the largest posterior inclusion probability (PIP). Well except for GDP per capita in the starting year, which we forced into every model anyway... we think our estimates very accurately measure a causal effect of IQ on GDP. For one, national IQs can almost be perfectly predicted (r = .9) from polygenic scores (EDU3) designed to estimate educational attainment... More broadly, much of the past literature looking at this question provides good reason to think most of the causation goes from IQ to GDP. Diamond and oil-rich countries are no smarter than their neighbours. Using a reduced sample, national IQs measured before the growth period studied have the same effect size as when national IQs are measured during the growth period. We contribute to the literature using a classic, bread and butter tool of econometrics - Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation... Our instruments were cranial capacity (yes, average brain size in a country), ancestry-adjusted UV radiation, and 19th-century numeracy scores"
So much for "The only thing IQ tests prove is how good you are at taking IQ tests"

The truth about intelligence: Do IQ tests really work? | New Scientist - "Russell Warne has spent many hours scrutinising undergraduate psychology textbooks. As a professor of psychology at Utah Valley University, he wasn’t looking for insight, but for mistakes – and he found plenty. Some of the worst concerned IQ tests. “The most common inaccuracy I found, by far, was the claim that intelligence tests are biased against certain groups,” he says. Yet intelligence researchers are at pains to ensure that IQ tests are fair and not culturally biased. “Another, very common one was the idea that intelligence is difficult to measure.” No wonder IQ tests are often considered controversial and flaky. But that simply isn’t the case. “Despite the critiques, the intelligence test is one of the most reliable and solid behavioural tests ever invented,” says Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico... an individual’s performance on an IQ test can be influenced by external factors such as motivation. And you can “game” the test by practising sample questions beforehand – although the average gain from such tutoring is just four or five points... it is rare for recruiters to test IQ in isolation: candidates might be given a personality test too and a practical exercise to assess job-related skills. They usually also have to name several referees."

Association between intelligence quotient and obesity in England - "There was a negative association between IQ and obesity in the UK population"

Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries? - "For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies."
Weird. I thought IQ was a myth

The impact of low, average, and high IQ on economic growth and technological progress: Do all individuals contribute equally? - "We find that all social classes of IQ play a significant role in economic growth.
• 1 IQ indicates higher economic growth of 2.5–3.8% over the period of 1970–2010.
• 1 IQ of the intellectual class indicates .04% more patents within 2000–2009.
• Average ability and non-intellectual citizens don't contribute to new technologies."

FLynn-effect and economic growth: Do national increases in intelligence lead to increases in GDP? - "National historical changes in IQ were related to changes in GDP per capita.
IQ growth is positively correlated to economic growth."

Bruno Campello de Souza's answer to Is Nassim Taleb right that 'IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle'? - Quora - "I must warn that I am one of those that Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb considers to be pseudo scientific quacks that peddle erroneous ideas to suckers. In other words: I am a cognitive psychologist...
Dr. Taleb's article is wrong in so many fundamental ways that it is very hard to even begin to address it. I'll try to tackle most of them, in no particular order.
1. IQ is NOT a measure of "unintelligence", extreme or otherwise. It is a comparative measure of the ability to solve abstract linguistic and logical-mathematical problems. The results show how far each individual is from the average, both in terms of being above or below it...
3. The observation that IQ explains “only" 13% to 50% of the variance in some tasks merely reflects the fact that performance requires more than just intelligence. Yes, such things include Conscientiousness (which is related to impulse control or the ability to defer satisfaction, i.e., "patience"), but also values, personality, and the way in which all these things relate to sociocultural settings and even physical environment. Actually, one should suspect a "quack" when someone in human or social sciences claims that a single variable alone explains most of the variance of anything. Indeed, the most advanced multivariate statistics in use today were created by psychologists and social scientists in order to deal effectively with such complex problems in their field.
4. The criticism stated by Dr. Taleb involving "fat tails", "via negativa not via positiva" and being a "concave" measure is a series of non-issues and expresses profound ignorance on his behalf. A whole other lengthy thread might be initiated on this alone. The fact that many of the so-called "real-world" performance indexes do not usually show a Gaussian distribution (indeed, most often one finds a Pareto or similar distribution) does NOT imply that the association between a normally distributed IQ (or any Gaussian variable) either "doesn't exist" or "is uninformational". At worst, it just means that such associations are better assessed through nonparametric techniques. The same reasoning goes for nonlinear associations, which can be analyzed through nonlinear methods. It is ludicrous to suggest that a nonlinear association between IQ and the SAT is in any way indicative of the uselessness, inadequacy or fallacy of the first. One must also observe that non-Gaussian distributions can frequently be "Gaussianized" through simple mathematical transformations such as taking a natural logarithm or, with a bit more complexity, a Box-Cox transformation, among other methods. Nonlinear association can also be linearized through usually simple transformations. For example, the graph cited from Frey and Detterman (2004) can be easily turned into a strong linear association if one uses Ln IQ instead of "raw" IQ scores. And since when do nonlinear associations imply in pseudoscience?
5. Of course the correlation between IQ and performance gets smaller as one takes higher and higher ranges of IQ. It is a simple, straightforward, diminishing returns or saturation-effect. Indeed, if one takes a high enough range, the correlation would HAVE to be zero. If someone with a certain level of IQ can solve, say, "17+34=?" at a certain speed, a person with a higher IQ will tend to solve it faster, but, as one takes people with higher and higher IQs, the improvements in time would become more and more negligible, for everyone would be giving nearly instantaneous correct responses (I would expect that, in such a scenario, the physiology of eyesight and visual perception, as well as psycho-motor phenomena, would eventually be more relevant for the differences in response time than differences in IQ). Why is this to be considered any sort of argument against IQ's is beyond me. Its is the contrary that would make me scratch my head.
6. "It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation." To this I simply refer to the saying from Kurt Lewin: "There is Nothing More Practical Than A Good Theory". Abstract thinking, especially the aloof and detached type, is ESSENTIAL for STEM competences, and one is hard pressed to find skills that are more practical and real world-oriented (or that yield greater employability in the job market, for that matter)...
8. "Convexity", as used apparently by Dr. Taleb and his followers alone, is an ill-defined and confusing concept that has most certainly never been measured and tested against IQ scores to substantiate the claim that "IQ doesn't detect convexity".
9 .Dr. Taleb argues that the pattern-recognition element underlying IQ tests is not indicative of "true" intelligence, for "Not seeing patterns except when they are significant is a virtue in real life". Is he saying that one can and should discard a pattern due to its lack of significance BEFORE such a pattern is even perceived? How is that even logically possible?...
In short, it seems to me that Doctor Nassim Nicholas Taleb has no idea what he is talking about not only regarding IQ tests, but also pertaining to Statistics, Probability Theory and the Scientific Method...
The fact that racists and alike used IQ to pseudo-justify their stances is no more of an argument against IQ than pointing out that Hitler was a vegetarian is an argument against vegetarianism. It is simply an ad hominem fallacy and an appeal to emotion... The similarity between IQ test items and "real-world" tasks is not limited to "some" cases, but to many, including most of the better-payed and most valued activities (e.g., education, clerical work, analyst jobs, STEM occupations, etc.). This is a strength, not a weakness (the opposite might be a weakness).
There are numerous studies showing positive associations between IQ and various measure of socioeconomic success, including not only wealth, but also income, longevity, procreation, job performance, job advancement (promotions), college-level employment, attaining advanced degrees, having no criminal record, not requiring welfare, and so forth.
The existence of "noise" in the associations between IQ and socioeconomic outcomes is simply the reflection of the fact that, in human and social phenomena, the relationship between variables A and B is nearly always mediated or affected by their interactions with C, D, E, and more, so that if one only considers A and B, the impacts of the others will appear as "noise". The greater the number of other variables affecting the relationship, the larger the "noise" will be. Also, there will always be some "noise" in any measurement due to human errors, the observer effect, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, and the fundamental randomness of the Universe. This does not mean that it is useless to measure. Indeed, as George Edward Pelham Box famously said: "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."...
There ARE numerous standardized measures of "well-being" and even "sleep" that are widely used for various purposes, ranging from clinical interventions to the guiding of public policies. No one, except Dr. Taleb and, maybe, his acolytes, thinks that they are absurd in essence.
The Flynn effect DOES warn us "that IQ is somewhat environment dependent". This is not new. Even the staunchest defenders of a biological basis for IQ still acknowledge that at least some 20% of the variance comes from environmental factors of various types (nutrition, vaccination, breastfeeding, education, use of digital technologies, engagement in social activities, etc.)."

Frontiers | The Measurement of Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review of the Literature and Recommendations for Researchers and Practitioners - "Overall however, there are a number of fundamental problems with ability based measures. First, many personality and intelligence theorists question the very existence of ability EI, and suggest it is nothing more than intelligence. This claim is supported by high correlations between ability EI and IQ, although some have provided evidence to the contrary (e.g., MacCann et al., 2014). Additionally, the common measures of ability EI tend to have relatively poor psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity. Ability EI measures do not tend to strongly predict outcomes that they theoretically should predict (e.g., O'Boyle et al., 2011; Miao et al., 2017). Maul (2012) also outlines a comprehensive set of problems with the most widely used ability measure, the MSCEIT, related to consensus-based scoring, reliability, and underrepresentation of the EI construct. Also see Petrides (2011) for a comprehensive critique of ability measures."
So much for the claims about EQ being more important than IQ with respect to the outcomes IQ predicts

Using DNA to predict intelligence - "In 10 years, the ability to predict intelligence from DNA has gone from 0% to 10%.
Genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS) are transforming research on intelligence."

What do SAT and IQ tests measure? General intelligence predicts school and life success. - "The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way. (In a recent New York Times op-ed, the University of New Hampshire psychologist John D. Mayer aptly described the SAT’s validity as an “astonishing achievement.”) In a study published in Psychological Science, University of Minnesota researchers Paul Sackett, Nathan Kuncel, and their colleagues investigated the relationship between SAT scores and college grades in a very large sample: nearly 150,000 students from 110 colleges and universities. SAT scores predicted first-year college GPA about as well as high school grades did, and the best prediction was achieved by considering both factors. Botstein, Boylan, and Kolbert are either unaware of this directly relevant, easily accessible, and widely disseminated empirical evidence, or they have decided to ignore it and base their claims on intuition and anecdote—or perhaps on their beliefs about the way the world should be rather than the way it is. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year... Test scores also predicted whether the students graduated... A 2007 Science article summed up the evidence succinctly: “Standardized admissions tests have positive and useful relationships with subsequent student accomplishments.” SAT scores even predict success beyond the college years. For more than two decades, Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski, Camilla Benbow, and their colleagues have tracked the accomplishments of people who, as part of a youth talent search, scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by age 13. Remarkably, even within this group of gifted students, higher scorers were not only more likely to earn advanced degrees but also more likely to succeed outside of academia. For example, compared with people who “only” scored in the top 1 percent, those who scored in the top one-tenth of 1 percent—the extremely gifted—were more than twice as likely as adults to have an annual income in the top 5 percent of Americans. The second popular anti-SAT argument is that, if the test measures anything at all, it’s not cognitive skill but socioeconomic status. In other words, some kids do better than others on the SAT not because they’re smarter, but because their parents are rich. Boylan argued in her Times article that the SAT “favors the rich, who can afford preparatory crash courses” like those offered by Kaplan and the Princeton Review. Leon Botstein claimed in his Time article that “the only persistent statistical result from the SAT is the correlation between high income and high test scores.” And according to a Washington Post Wonkblog infographic (which is really more of a disinfographic) “your SAT score says more about your parents than about you.” It’s true that economic background correlates with SAT scores. Kids from well-off families tend to do better on the SAT. However, the correlation is far from perfect. In the University of Minnesota study of nearly 150,000 students, the correlation between socioeconomic status, or SES, and SAT was not trivial but not huge. (A perfect correlation has a value of 1; this one was .25.) What this means is that there are plenty of low-income students who get good scores on the SAT; there are even likely to be low-income students among those who achieve a perfect score on the SAT.  Thus, just as it was originally designed to do, the SAT in fact goes a long way toward leveling the playing field, giving students an opportunity to distinguish themselves regardless of their background. Scoring well on the SAT may in fact be the only such opportunity for students who graduate from public high schools that are regarded by college admissions offices as academically weak... The sort of admissions approach that Botstein advocates—adjusting high school GPA “to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates” and abandoning the SAT—would do the opposite of leveling the playing field. A given high school GPA would be adjusted down for a poor, public-school kid, and adjusted up for a rich, private-school kid.  Furthermore, contrary to what Boylan implies in her Times piece, “preparatory crash courses” don’t change SAT scores much. Research has consistently shown that prep courses have only a small effect on SAT scores—and a much smaller effect than test prep companies claim they do. For example, in one study of a random sample of more than 4,000 students, average improvement in overall score on the “old” SAT, which had a range from 400 to 1600, was no more than about 30 points. Finally, it is clear that SES is not what accounts for the fact that SAT scores predict success in college. In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES. If SAT scores were just a proxy for privilege, then putting SES into the mix should have removed, or at least dramatically decreased, the association between the SAT and college performance. But it didn’t. This is more evidence that Boylan overlooks or chooses to ignore. What this all means is that the SAT measures something—some stable characteristic of high school students other than their parents’ income—that translates into success in college. And what could that characteristic be? General intelligence. The content of the SAT is practically indistinguishable from that of standardized intelligence tests that social scientists use to study individual differences, and that psychologists and psychiatrists use to determine whether a person is intellectually disabled—and even whether a person should be spared execution in states that have the death penalty. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on IQ tests—so highly that the Harvard education scholar Howard Gardner, known for his theory of multiple intelligences, once called the SAT and other scholastic measures “thinly disguised” intelligence tests. One could of course argue that IQ is also meaningless—and many have... But this argument is wrong, too. Indeed, we know as well as anything we know in psychology that IQ predicts many different measures of success. Exhibit A is evidence from research on job performance by the University of Iowa industrial psychologist Frank Schmidt and his late colleague John Hunter. Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers.  IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity... IQ is of course not the only factor that contributes to differences in outcomes like academic achievement and job performance (and longevity)... factors like conscientiousness—not to mention social skill, creativity, interest, and motivation—do influence success, they cannot take the place of IQ."
So much for the myth that IQ tests just measure how good you are at taking IQ tests
Too bad the author didn't make the point that since IQ is quite heritable, IQ tests supposedly measure SES because smart parents have smart children

The remarkable persistence of power and privilege - "For Australia, it turns out that if we look at the register of modern-day medical practitioners, we find the privileged names of the nineteenth century overrepresented by a factor of nearly three. In other words, if your ancestor was at the top of Australian society six generations ago, you are three times more likely than the average Australian to be a doctor today...   Strikingly, Clark finds persistence even in Sweden, one of the world’s most egalitarian societies. The 1600s and 1700s saw the creation of a set of “noble surnames,” which today have twice their expected share of doctors, five times their expected share of lawyers, and three times their share of members of the top 1 per cent of income earners. This degree of persistence of status across ten generations demonstrates the power of inherited privilege...   How do we break the pattern? Part of the answer must lie in a fair tax system, a targeted social welfare system, effective early childhood programs, and getting great teachers in front of disadvantaged classrooms. We need banks willing to take a chance on funding an outsider, and it doesn’t hurt to maintain a healthy Aussie scepticism about inherited privilege.  Yet Gregory Clark’s results also remind policy-makers that this is no easy nut to crack. Part of the transmission of social status occurs through genes. On top of this, people tend to marry those with similar levels of education; and researchers have also documented significant differences in parenting approaches among different social groups. Making the system a bit fairer is within our reach – but a complete transformation may prove elusive"
The most important thing you give your children is their genes

Full article: Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry - "In a very short time, it is likely that we will identify many of the genetic variants underlying individual differences in intelligence. We should be prepared for the possibility that these variants are not distributed identically among all geographic populations, and that this explains some of the phenotypic differences in measured intelligence among groups. However, some philosophers and scientists believe that we should refrain from conducting research that might demonstrate the (partly) genetic origin of group differences in IQ. Many scholars view academic interest in this topic as inherently morally suspect or even racist. The majority of philosophers and social scientists take it for granted that all population differences in intelligence are due to environmental factors. The present paper argues that the widespread practice of ignoring or rejecting research on intelligence differences can have unintended negative consequences. Social policies predicated on environmentalist theories of group differences may fail to achieve their aims. Large swaths of academic work in both the humanities and social sciences assume the truth of environmentalism and are vulnerable to being undermined. We have failed to work through the moral implications of group differences to prepare for the possibility that they will be shown to exist."
Simple. Liberals just need to pretend that there is no research showing that intelligence is a thing or that it is inherited, and tar anyone who disagrees as a white supremacist and get him fired

Do IQ Tests Actually Measure Intelligence? - "“(IQ tests) are culturally, linguistically and economically biased against minoritized students, in particular Black, first and foremost, and then Hispanic,” says Ford. “If these tests were not biased, we wouldn’t have different IQ scores along racial and ethnic lines — but we do. It’s an indication that there is something wrong with these tests, not with us.”"
Critical Race Theory strikes again! Straight out of Kendi's mouth:  'When I See Racial Disparities, I See Racism.'

Ethnic Studies in California (CRT)

California Is Cleansing Jews From History

"In the fall of 2016, California’s then Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a mandate to develop an ethnic studies program for high schools in California...

Elina Kaplan, a former high-tech manager who had just stepped down as senior VP of one of California’s largest affordable housing nonprofits, remembers agreeing wholeheartedly with the idea at the time. “The objective was to build bridges of understanding between people,” said Kaplan, an immigrant herself, who moved to California from the former Soviet Union with her family when she was 11...

When the first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) was released, Kaplan couldn’t believe what she was reading. In one sample lesson, she saw that a list of historic U.S. social movements – ones like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Criminal Justice Reform – also included the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS), described as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Kaplan wondered why a foreign movement, whose target was another country, would be mischaracterized as a domestic social movement, and she was shocked that in a curriculum that would be taught to millions of students, BDS’s primary goal – the elimination of Israel – was not mentioned. Kaplan also saw that the 1948 Israel War of Independence was only referred to as the “Nakba” – “catastrophe” in Arabic – and Arabic verses included in the sample lessons were insulting and provocative to Jews.

Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area mother of two grown children who describes herself as a lifelong Democrat, was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.

Kaplan began calling friends. “Have you read this?” she asked, urging them to plow through the 600-page document. The language was bewildering. “Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations. …” This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades.

The new curriculum, which will eventually be promulgated throughout the California school system of 6 million children, would “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism … and other forms of power and oppression,” according to the proposal. It would “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.”

Capitalism was classified as a form of “power and oppression,” and although “classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia” were also listed as forms of oppression, anti-Semitism was not. Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group.

It didn’t take long for Kaplan to realize that the education offered up by the ESMC had little in common with the program described at the time of the law’s passage. Instead, it was a crude pastiche of idiosyncratic neo-Marxism that advocated the end of capitalism and divided the world into a simple polarity of victims and oppressors. The victims, according to this schema, included four groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans...

As a refugee from the Soviet Union, she understood the challenge intimately. “The reason I’m doing this – full time and not sleeping” she said, is that “this curriculum is pervasive and all-inclusive. It creates a means of understanding the world that does not allow questioning. And it’s a view that actively invites anti-Zionism into the classroom. It requires it. This is the greatest threat facing American Jews today.”

Kaplan wasn’t the only one upset about the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Clarence Jones, former legal counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., in a letter he wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s Instructional Quality Commission, called the ESMC a “perversion of history” for providing material that refers to non-violent Black leaders as “passive” and “docile.” Jones, who is co-founder of the University of San Francisco Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, decried the “glorification” of violence and Black nationalism as “role models for the students,” and rejected the curriculum as “morally indecent and deeply offensive.”

The unassailably liberal LA Times editorial board weighed in, criticizing the offering as “an impenetrable mélange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements” that served as an “exercise in groupthink, designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform and open minds.” It warned it was “in bad need of an overhaul.”

A group of Asian Americans urged the state to develop a program that would “inspire ethnic pride in all students and inspire them to work together, rather than against one another,” while Hindu, Korean, Armenian, and Sikh groups complained of being left out as did several Jewish groups. The California Legislative Jewish caucus published a letter saying the ESMC “effectively erases the American Jewish experience.”

Several émigrés from the former Soviet Union found the curriculum so traumatizing they couldn’t read it through. Three hundred signed a letter to Gov. Newsom and other state agencies saying: “We escaped a Marxist-socialist system and its associated tyranny and oppression. Never could we have imagined that, decades later, the same ideology and concepts that we escaped, would show up in, of all places ... the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”

They wrote of their shock at seeing Marxist “code-words” in the text, such as urging students to fight for a “truer democracy,” which Marx used to refer to the abolition of private property. They also noted other terms that look innocuous or even enlightened to the uninitiated, such as “transformative resistance,” “radical healing,” “critical hope,” have specific meanings in critical race theory, which the ESMC explicitly directs teachers to use as the key theoretical framework for teaching ethnic studies.

Critical race theory in education, writes Daniel Solorzano, a scholar cited in the ESMC, “challenges the traditional claims of the educational system such as objectivity, meritocracy, color-blindness, race neutrality, and equal opportunity.” Critical race theorists argue that these traditional claims act as a camouflage for the self-interest, power, and privilege of dominant groups in U.S. society.

CRT is not just an educational pedagogy that seeks to overturn academics as we know it, but it is also a guide for activism “animated by the spirit of the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberationist movements.”

Ethnic studies is a California native...

There is a straight line from the 1968 strike to today’s ESMC, whose text explicitly acknowledges its debt to the Third World Liberation Front. In a speech a week before his firing, George Murray, who also served as the minister of education for the Black Panther Party, declared the U.S. Constitution was a “lie” and the American flag was a “piece of toilet paper” deserving to be flushed. He also attacked Jewish people as “exploiters of the Negroes in America and South Africa” and called for “victory to the Arab people” over Israel.

Many of the 18 people chosen by the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Committee to create the ESMC hail from San Francisco State’s School of Ethnic Studies, and most are adherents of the radical critical ethnic studies movement who refer to themselves as scholar-activists...

Nevertheless, in 2020, Gov. Newsom signed into law AB 1460, which requires that every student in the Cal State system – the largest four-year public university system in the country, of which San Francisco State is a part – take a three-unit course in ethnic studies. The governor’s decision defied the recommendations of the university’s own chancellor, members of the university’s board of trustees, and the university’s academic senate, all of whom opposed the bill, objecting to the government’s unprecedented intrusion into the university’s curriculum...

Meanwhile, the city of Seattle has already created a proposed framework for implementing ethnic studies throughout its K-12 curriculum. Math teachers will ask the following questions: “identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “analyze the ways in which ancient mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture,” “how important is it to be right?” and “Who gets to say if an answer is right?” It appears educational leaders are all for this. The president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Robert Q. Berry III, told Education Week: “What they’re doing follows the line of work we hope we can move forward as we think about the history of math and who contributes to that, and also about deepening students’ connection with identity and agency.” This, despite the fact that students in the United States already perform poorly in math...

One of the selling points for ethnic studies is that it would help California’s students do better in school overall...

Almost every article touting the ESMC makes reference to a single paper that showed some improvement in at-risk students who took an ethnic studies class. Thomas Dee, professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, compared a group of ninth grade students in San Francisco high schools at risk of dropping out with a similar group who took a class offering “culturally relevant pedagogy.” He described the results as “highly encouraging” – the latter showing improved attendance, completing more courses, and earning improved grades. Basically, students earning Ds became C+ students after taking the classes...

But Dee cautioned that his study was small and its results not easily scalable. He explained that the teachers who offered the classes had spent “years developing them and getting them right” with the help of outside experts. “This kind of pedagogy requires teacher skills of a high order,” he said. He is not sure the ESMC, a huge statewide top-down project, is focused on providing the kind of sensitive, close teaching that produced the positive results...

In the current, third draft, released in December, some of the most offensive material was actually moved back in. For example, an historical resource was added with the following description of prewar Zionism: “the Jews have filled the air with their cries and lamentations in an effort to raise funds and American Jews, as is well known, are the richest in the world.”

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, which fights campus anti-Semitism, points out that all 13 founding members of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) are BDS activists. CESA, the national home base for critical studies, passed a resolution to boycott all Israeli academic institutions in 2014, and the group’s past four biennial meetings included multiple sessions demonizing Israel. “There are a couple thousand academic boycotters of Israel in the country,” she said, “and the largest percentage of them come from ethnic studies. Anti-Zionism is built into the theory and the discipline of ethnic studies, which demonizes Israel as an apartheid settler-colonialist Nazi state.”

But of even greater concern to Jews, she believes, is the singling out of Jewish students as enjoying racial privilege. “I don’t see any way that Jewish students can sit in an ethnic studies class and not feel they have a double target on their backs,” she said, fearing hatred and violence will ensue. First, because they’re Jewish, and considered white and part of the 1%, the purported villains of the teaching, and then through an assumed association with Israel. “There’s a state requirement that you have to sit through a class that says to Jewish students they have extraordinary racial privilege and yet forbids them from speaking because ‘this course is not about you?’ If you don’t accept it, you’re publicly shamed and ostracized – you can’t even speak up and say, ‘I’m not sure if I think that all white people are racists.’”...

The Jewish Journal points out that Jews are the only group in the curriculum for whom the term “privilege” is used. And this privilege is not earned by way of talent, or educational and professional attainment, but rather trickery. The ESMC, echoing Nazi propaganda about Jews as impostors and appropriators hiding in plain sight, points out that American Jews often change their names (“this practice of name-changing continues to the present day”) to change their rank in the social hierarchy.

The historical reality of repeated genocidal attacks on Jews because of their perceived or imagined privilege is not offered as counterpoint, because ethnic studies teachers assume the Holocaust is taught in world history class. But next year in San Mateo County, world history will be replaced by ethnic studies"

Weird. I thought only bigoted white racists were against ethnic studies, and that the evil Jews behind Cultural Marxism were exempting Jews from white hatred because of their nefarious plot to undermine Western society

Weird. I thought Critical Race Theory was something only taught in law school

ETHNIC STUDIES MODEL CURRICULUM

"Adopted by the California State Board of Education March 2021...

Teachers and administrators should begin with a careful, deliberate analysis of their own personal identities, backgrounds, knowledge base, and biases. They should familiarize themselves with current scholarly research around ethnic studies instruction, such as critically and culturally or community relevant and responsive pedagogies, critical race theory, and intersectionality, which are key theoretical frameworks and pedagogies that can be used in ethnic studies research and instruction...

Unit 2. Text Structures, Purpose, and Audience: Inventing Images, Representing Otherness...

Students will be introduced to the concept of critical race theory as they highlight and discuss the Morris reading in small groups (Wesley Morris, “Fast Forward: Why a Movie About Car Thieves is the Most Progressive Force in American Cinema”)...

One of the main focuses of ethnic studies is translating historical lessons and critical race theory into direct action for social justice. This section will address the instructional methods used to develop the content knowledge and skills necessary for student empowerment and social action on a school and community level. While direct instruction and modeling are used to introduce new concepts (such as defining intersectionality and tracing Native American history in Sacramento in unit 1 and defining critical race theory, stereotypes, and internalized and externalized oppression in unit 2), learning will also take place through small and large group discussion"

Liberals are still trying to pretend that critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools

Even after I quoted the official curriculum which had multiple mentions of critical race theory, this guy kept insisting that "ethnic studies is NOT CRT, I'm still waiting on a link showing them implementing CRT verbatim", and that I was "intentionally being disingenuous and dishonest in order to promote your narrative...which is kinda gross".

When you're so ideologically motivated that you're unable to read...

Raceplay / Showing off her "hair" / The last interesting thing about her

"Toni, 25
22 miles away

Looking for a Dominant White Man who knows his way around curves

Prefer Men comfortable using the N-word as it gets me going. (Not gonna apologize or explain myself. I know what I am)

I know my desires aren't politically correct. Life is short, and my passions run deep. I've learn to accept my truth, and for me that means losing myself to fantasy, human connection, and the whim of a master's libido."

"Girls post pictures like this and ask:
How do you like my hair? *exposing butt*"

"ellanabryan: "My body is the least interesting thing about me" *lots of photos of her body*"

Links - 6th October 2023

Meme - "GARFIELD! I MADE YOUR FAVORITE - LASAGNA!"
"JON. JON I WAS BORN IN 1978. NO CAT HAS EVER LIVED MORE THAN 40 YEARS. JON, I'M GONE. LONG GONE. YOU KNOW THIS."
"SOUNDS LIKE SOMEONE'S HAVING ANOTHER TERRRIBLE MONDAY"
*skeletal Garfield in blanket*

Fake Luxury Shoe Store Prank proves Luxury is just Perception - Payless - YouTube - "Payless, a low-cost shoe retailer, opened a fake luxury shoe store called "Palessi" and filled it with the brand's inexpensive footwear. Consumers paid up to $600 for shoes that retail for $20-$40. Does this experiment prove that designer brands are just perceived as being luxurious rather than actually being luxurious?"

Meme - "It's Kyle THICCENHOUSE. Would you or wouldn't you?"
"Dude it's 4am"
"uwu. will you dwop me acwoss state wines to hewp me "defend mysewf?" *stares seductively at the growing "rifle" in your pants* "You wanna "fire a load" sempai?""

Meme - "He gently slid her panties to one side... So the rest of her socks would fit in the drawer."

Meme - "When your grammar and spelling is so bad over such a long period of time it becomes part of your "culture". *black*"

Meme - Asian Eats: Johnny Nguyen: "A FRIEND SPENT 30 MINS LOOKING THROUGH THE TRASH FOR THIS PACKET TO PROVE TO HIS WIFE THAT THE CORNER WASN'T FROM A CONDOM WRAPPER *chicken flavor*"

‘Shut Up, Please’: Michelle Yeoh Ignores Exit Music In Iconic Acceptance Speech - "About halfway through her acceptance speech for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for her performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” exit music began to play.  “Shut up, please,” she snapped, with a laugh. “I can beat you up, OK?”"
Of course, if a white person had done this...

Meme - "VIXENS GENTLEMENS CLUB
RARE POKEMON IN VIP ROOM
ASSCLAPATUS"

The duck said not today - YouTube

Meme - "When the priest calls you in for a "confession" but you molest him first"
"The future is now, old man."

Do monkeys use sex toys? Evidence of stone tool‐assisted masturbation in free‐ranging long‐tailed macaques - "Recent reports on tool use in nonforaging contexts have led researchers to reconsider the proximate drivers of instrumental object manipulation. In this study, we explore the physiological and behavioral correlates of two stone-directed and seemingly playful actions, the repetitive tapping and rubbing of stones onto the genital and inguinal area, respectively, that may have been co-opted into self-directed tool-assisted masturbation in long-tailed macaques (i.e., “Sex Toy” hypothesis). We predicted that genital and inguinal stone-tapping and rubbing would be more closely temporally associated with physiological responses (e.g., estrus in females, penile erection in males) and behavior patterns (e.g., sexual mounts and other mating interactions) that are sexually motivated than other stone-directed play. We also predicted that the stones selected to perform genital and inguinal stone-tapping and rubbing actions would be less variable in number, size, and texture than the stones typically used during other stone-directed playful actions. Overall, our data partly supported the “Sex Toy” hypothesis indicating that stone-directed tapping and rubbing onto the genital and inguinal area are sexually motivated behaviors. Our research suggests that instrumental behaviors of questionably adaptive value may be maintained over evolutionary time through pleasurable/self-rewarding mechanisms, such as those underlying playful and sexual activities."
These Bali monkeys have found a way to use stones as sex toys, scientists discover - "Even females were observed doing the same type of pebble-rubbing (although not as frequently as the males).  And despite the lack of visible arousal signs (aka erections), it was discerned that the motives were also sexual. Funnily enough, the female macaques were noted as preferring pebbles with rougher or sharper/more angular shapes, and we can only guess the reasons...   Different species of monkeys have, in the past, been sighted using things such as bottles and even fruits to satisfy themselves solo."

Love, Awkward and LGBTQIA+: I'm coming out, I want the world to know - FML - "Today, my boyfriend of almost a year told me he thinks he might be gay. I took off my shirt, sexily climbed over him, and began to kiss him passionately. "What do you think now?" I said seductively. His response? "Now I'm sure I'm gay." FML"

Meme - "Quand le fromage sur le Big Mac ne fond pas *grosse femme*"

Meme - "If God is omnipotent, why does he allow evil?"
"Evil exists because we have free will"
"Is there evil in heaven?"
"Of course there's no evil in heaven"
"Is there free will in heaven?"
"Yes. No. Wait. Well..."

Meme - "Lorsque tu ne dure pas mais qu'elle comprend *Le Roi Lion quand Nala blottit Simba*"

Meme - *Outer and Inner head*
Garfield Sofield Sailor Field Pikafield Hofiëld
Garnic Sonic Sailor Nic Pikanic Honic
Garmoon Somoon Sailor Moon Pikamoon Homoon
Garkachu Sokachu Sailor Chu Pikachu Hochu
Garmer Somer Sailor Mer Pikamer Homer"

Meme - "Sorry but we can't accept cash because our employees can't do math
Sincerely,"

Meme - "Mom, gotta talk to u about somethin"
"Oh lord, what's up"
"I think you should pay my bills because i didn't ask to be here"
"Don't take this the wrong way , your father and I love you but we didn‘t choose you. You know how many sperm cells were released ? You fought to win. You chose us. So maybe you should pay ours instead ..."
"Thats fckd up yo"

John Poulos' First Date Tweet Fact-Checked By the Internet - "Twitter users were stunned by a Community Note recently added to a seven-month-old tweet about a man’s first date.  The tweet in question was a response to someone asking, “What was your craziest first date?”  “Invited a Colombian woman on vacation without meeting her first – now we’re getting married,” the man replied in December.  Under the seemingly benign tweet, however, is a new footnote that left many Twitter users stunned.  “The user who posted this tweet is now charged with murdering the woman in question,” reads the note."
Of course, she adds in Andrew Tate character assasination

‘Invasion of privacy’: Women say they found a hidden camera in bathroom of B.C. Airbnb - "A group of women is warning others to check their rental homes after they said they found a hidden camera in the bathroom of their Airbnb.  Vancouver resident Jamie Gladman booked a place on the Sunshine Coast in March for her 30th birthday and she needed a place that could accommodate a large group... Kennedy Calwell, who made a TikTok video of the incident, said they discovered a hidden camera in the bathroom, facing the shower.  “One of our friends, Becca, she had just watched a video, I think, the day before, kind of talking about hidden cameras and how small they are and how they can be found anywhere, like in a showerhead, in an outlet,” Calwell said...       One of their friends took a shower in one of the bathrooms and when she got out, Gladman said she could see a racial slur in the condensation on the mirror... Gladman and Calwell also had some advice — trust your gut.  “We did get a weird vibe from the Airbnb,” Calwell said. “We did have a bad gut feeling about it. So I guess listen to your gut.”"
No hidden cameras found in B.C. Airbnb rental after viral TikTok, RCMP confirm - "Authorities have confirmed a series of "hidden cameras" guests thought they had discovered in an Airbnb rental on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast were actually just electrical outlets."

Meme - "It's okay to be native *black text on red background*
It's okay to be Asian. *black text on yellow background*
It's okay to be Latino. *black text on brown background*
*black background*
It's okay to be white. *black text on white background*"

Meme - "CONFESSION TIME/ FETISH
So I've been going to the gym for around 8 years now and I have achieved a physique that tends to attract a lot of women. Thing is, I strictly date women who weighs more or less 250 pounds. Fatties in general. I try to make the relationship last around 2 months before she feels comfortable enough to start working out with me. Don't get me wrong, I genuinely spend time with them, buy them nice things, make them feel loved- but my sole intention is to get them to come to the gym with me. This could go on for months, up until the point where she actually loses weight and starts to attract other guys. I have helped some women lose so much weight that they ended up cheating on me, with their now boosted confidence. Which is really what I'm hoping would happen 100% of the time. My goal is for them to get attractive and leave me, so that I can move on to the next fattie and make her lose weight. Am I out here doing God's work or am I going to Hell? Genuinely curious."

Meme - "Did THE MONSTER HAVE ANY Good Loot?"
"STUPID RANDOM ENCOUNTERS, LET'S FINISH THE QUEST"
"Naw, Just a Potion OF CURE DISEASE."
"MOMMY, WHEN IS DADDY COMING HOME? TIMMY IS GETTING WORSE"

Meme - "Tu peux mettre ta bite au fond de ma gorge stp ?"
"Bonjour. Je suis sa femme, on tente de recoller les morceaux. Aurélie cessez de vouloir briser une famille. Oubliez le, il ne me quittera pas enceinte. Faites vous une raison."
"Bonne grossesse. Du coup, il peut ou pas ?"

'Only old people listen to Jay Chou': Gen Z comments on Mandopop star stirs discussion - ""Darn it… I was playing Jay Chou's songs in my shop. My coworker born in 2003 told me, 'Only old people listen to Jay.'  "So I asked her what kind of music she listens to, and she said she has been listening to NewJeans and BTS. Has Jay expired?" They ended the post with a crying emoji... One user said: "Is he as popular as Fong Fei-fei?"  "Thankfully I only listen to Teresa Teng," another commented. The late Teresa is dubbed the Eternal Queen of Asian Pop and was active from 1966 to 1995. The late Fei-fei, aka Queen of Hats, was active from 1971 to 2010."

Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied Divorce Becomes Meme - "After news earlier this summer about Natalie Portman and her husband Benjamin Millepied working on their marriage after his alleged infidelity, the couple has separated. They join a growing roster of high-profile celeb divorces and separations this summer.  “The dude cheated on Natalie Portman, which just goes to show that being French is a condition you can hold off for while but never cure,” said one viral tweet."

Meme - "I'm only interested in concensus." "The individual scientist does not matter." - Neil deGrasse Tyson
"I'd like to retract my thesis, all of my peers agree the world is in fact flat" - GALILEO GALILEI
Albert Who? Even Einstein had major critics - "Today, Albert Einstein‘s theories of general and special relativity constitute the bedrock of physics. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, and gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects. We accept these fundamental tenets because they have stood up to more than a century of experiment. But when Einstein proffered these notions in 1905 and 1915, the reception wasn’t nearly as warm as you might expect.  After all, Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation had stood firm for more than 200 years, and the upstart Einstein sought to supersede it! Moreover, many physicists and astronomers were still beholden to the idea of luminiferous aether, an invisible and infinite material that they thought allowed light to propagate through space. Dislodging these scientific mainstays would not be easy."

Meme - "Scientific explanation why men like motorbikes *female reproductive system*"

Meme - "When you convert *Two Muslim men embracing*
When you leave *Man being executed by sword*

Veterinary Training Guide Hilariously Warns 'Don't Fight a Cat' - "Twitter users were highly amused by a viral post on Sunday with a snippet of veterinary tech advice when treating cats, which ultimately recommends "not fighting" the animal... "The cat is faster and has sharper teeth and nails than you do," the advice reads. "It has 'no code of ethics' or considerations for its own future."  Above all, it emphasized: "In a fair fight it will win."  In cases dealing with highly aggressive cats, the text encourages three things: "Don't fight a cat. Use your brain. Use drugs.""

Protesters hoped to 'overwhelm' RCMP wildfire blockade in B.C. Shuswap region: police - "Videos posted to social media show about 20 protesters at a blockade of police cars in an evacuation zone near the lakeside community of Sorrento.  The protesters tell officers they do not believe politicians have the right to prevent them from using the road, and that it is illegal for the RCMP to block it.  The group, which organized itself on Facebook, had hoped to rally enough support to push through the blockade to enter the evacuation zone, saying they planned to support those who have chosen to remain inside to protect their property."
When people burn to death, this will be the police's fault

Meme - Robin: "JUMPING GEE WILLIKERS BATMAN! YOU'RE KILLING HIM!"
Batman: "DON'T WoRRY ROBIN! THAT'S ONE LINE I'LL NEVER CROSS!"
"DUE To YOUR INJURIES, YOU WILL REQUIRE LIFE LONG MEDICAL CARE. IT'S A GOOD THING You HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE"
"AS YOU CAN SEE MR. WAYNE, OUR HOSPITALS AND HEALTH INSURANCE ARE MAKING RECORD PROFITS"

Chou Samuel - "Reads headline "Person from ABC country moves to XYZ country for work, quality of life improves" Open article. Always the same. Top 1% or even 0.1% of salarymen. Never 99% or the median of employees, never entrepreneurs starting out. Well... To the top 0.1% of skilled professionals, the world is your work-life balance oyster. For everyone else, the way to overcome this is to become almost scholarly on the small and large economics, and what can and cannot be done/ feasible in the home country."

Meme - "Forget birthstones. Whats your birth siege engine?
JANUARY Siege tower
FEBRUARY Battering ram
MARCH Mangonel
APRIL Ballista
MAY Sambuca
JUNE Catapult
JULY Artillery cannon
AUGUST Siege hook
SEPTEMBER Greek fire
OCTOBER Trebuchet
NOVEMBER Springald
DECEMBER Onager"

Meme - "Cell: 8897603002 8106765920
ChaiGPT (Genuinely Pure Tea)
Enhanced with Al (Adrak & ilaichi)"

Meme = "If I was a famous author I would publish a book with ten different endings which all went to print with varying degrees of rarity, but not tell the fans about it so that I could watch their confusion as they disagree over how the story ended. Then when they figured it out I would 'come clean', telling them that I had released eleven alternate endings and watch them panic again as they all try to find the last ending."
"are you satan"

Meme - "Heddlu Gogledd Cymru
North Wales Police
CUSTOMER NOTICE
Please be prepared to show proof of age
WE DO NOT SELL EGGS OR FLOUR TO ANYONE WHO IS UNDER THE AGE OF 18
Cracking down on anti-social behaviour
making North Wales the safest place in the UK"

Meme - "How would you execute an Argentinasaurus for counter-revolutionary activity?
A *Guillotine at base of neck*
B *Guillotine just below head*"

Needless battle caused by uncommon language - "His men were outnumbered eight to one, stranded on every side by human waves of Chinese Communist infantry attackers at the height of the Korean war.  But when the British brigadier reported the position to his American superior in the United Nations joint command, he did so with classic and -as it turned out - lethal British understatement.  "Things are a bit sticky, sir," Brig Tom Brodie of the Gloucestershire Regiment told General Robert H Soule, intending to convey that they were in extreme difficulty.  But Gen Soule understood this to mean "We're having a bit of rough and tumble but we're holding the line". Oh good, the general decided, no need to reinforce or withdraw them, not yet anyway.  The upshot was one of the most famous, heroic and - according to a BBC2 documentary on April 20 - unnecessary last stands in military history: the ordeal of 600 men of the "Glorious Gloucesters" at the Imjin river almost exactly 50 years ago.  With no extra support promised, the colonel in charge of the Gloucesters fell back to a hill overlooking the river, where they made their stand. For four days, mostly without sleep, they held off 30,000 Chinese troops trying to surge across the river, killing 10,000 of them with Bren gun fire. When they tried to withdraw, they were too late. More than 500 of them were captured and spent years in Chinese camps. Fifty-nine were killed or missing. Only 39 escaped. Two soldiers were awarded Victoria crosses for bravery... a US officer - unlike Brig Brodie - would have known how to make Gen Soule understand, by using the phrase "Sir, there is all hell breaking loose here".  Sir Anthony said: "The two nations spoke military [language] in a slightly different way. It's certainly a good example of the old saying about Britain and the US as two nations divided by a common language.""

Man dies after having sex using epoxy adhesive instead of a condom - "Police say a man may have died after using a high-powered epoxy resin to seal his private parts during intercourse to ensure protection from pregnancy.  A local police investigator reportedly said that 25-year-old Salman Mirza decided to use the epoxy instead of a condom and it may have complicated his health condition."

What It Means When Couples Constantly Post About Each Other On Social Media - "Our online posting habits are directly tied to what social scientists call “relationship visibility” ― the extent to which we make our relationships part of our public personas. Having very high “relationship visibility” and over-posting about a partner may be a mask for relationship insecurity, according to a study recently published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin."

Vinay Prasad MD MPH on X - "Melflufen is another good e.g. of FDA failing to do its job This drug never needed to be approved, and had to be withdrawn nearly immediately. Only the company profited FDA is essentially captured by industry at this point We wrote this @Timothee_MD"
Why doesn't this Science Denier Trust the Science?

Meme - Eowyn: 'The men are saying we will not live out the night'
Aragorn: *He's right. He's fucked But I can't just tell him that*
Aragorn: 'This is a good sword' *It's shit*
Aragorn: 'There is always hope'

Meme - "Oc (south koreans add 1 year to their current age)
You're dating a sexy asian girl, 18yo
She's south korean"

Changes in American Adults’ Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1972–2012 - "In the nationally representative General Social Survey, U.S. Adults (N = 33,380) in 2000–2012 (vs. the 1970s and 1980s) had more sexual partners, were more likely to have had sex with a casual date or pickup or an acquaintance, and were more accepting of most non-marital sex (premarital sex, teen sex, and same-sex sexual activity, but not extramarital sex). The percentage who believed premarital sex among adults was “not wrong at all” was 29 % in the early 1970s, 42 % in the 1980s and 1990s, 49 % in the 2000s, and 58 % between 2010 and 2012. Mixed effects (hierarchical linear modeling) analyses separating time period, generation/birth cohort, and age showed that the trend toward greater sexual permissiveness was primarily due to generation. Acceptance of non-marital sex rose steadily between the G.I. generation (born 1901–1924) and Boomers (born 1946–1964), dipped slightly among early Generation X’ers (born 1965–1981), and then rose so that Millennials (also known as Gen Y or Generation Me, born 1982–1999) were the most accepting of non-marital sex. Number of sexual partners increased steadily between the G.I.s and 1960s-born GenX’ers and then dipped among Millennials to return to Boomer levels. The largest changes appeared among White men, with few changes among Black Americans. The results were discussed in the context of growing cultural individualism and rejection of traditional social rules in the U.S."
Some people got upset when I suggested that a higher body count was why asking about body count was more frequent nowadays

Meme - "The younger generation will never know relaxing meditation like this."
"Defragmenting Drive C
Defragmenting file system... 18% Complete"