Links - 14th March 2025 (1 - General Wokeness)

🙏🌧🌍 on X: "I embrace my White Guilt, and so should you, by Jarvis Dupont" / X - "At the tender age of 12, I watched a film which put it all into perspective: Ratatouille. I remember the impact this movie had on me as if it were yesterday. My mind was awash with confusion. How could a rat control a cook?! Even if it were possible, how is it doing it? It’s simply holding his hair! What method of ungodly witchcraft is being employed here?! Then it hit me. This film was an allegory of slavery. There was no actual rat, it was brilliantly symbolizing white man’s need to dominate. The fact that the ‘rat’ is hidden underneath the chef’s hat cleverly illustrates how white society in America turned a blind eye to the way black people were being exploited. The ‘rat’ is a metaphor for the detached way in which white power was used to oppress African slaves, the ‘food’ it cooks represents the benefits white Americans have enjoyed as a result of this inhumane hierarchical structure. I was gobsmacked that a children’s movie could encapsulate a complex multi-layered issue in such a devastatingly simplistic way. I needed to know more. I sought out other movies that would open my eyes further to societal injustice and the evils of whiteness (Shrek the Third, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Schindler’s List, and of course, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps). I gorged myself on anything that could stimulate my dormant inner wokeness into being. It wasn’t until I watched Harry Potter 1 through 5 that I finally learned to despise myself. I remember that first wave of White Guilt washing over me. It was like an epiphany. I bathed in it, swam in it. Immersed my disgustingly pallid complexion in it until I was spent. Looking back, I’m not ashamed to admit it was an almost erotic experience. From then on, I was transformed. I found myself telling people to ‘educate themselves’, and would begin conversations with ‘FYI’, or ‘Dear fellow white people…’. I was using the word ‘problematic’ at least three hundred times a day, and it was wonderfully cathartic. The first time I called Father a ‘bitch-ass white cracker skank’ was an incredibly liberating experience."

Nexus Mods Removes 'Marvel Rivals' Mod That Depicted Donald Trump As Captain America : r/KotakuInAction - "All I ever hear about Nexus Mods is how they remove shit. Nothing good ever comes out of that site. Someone must have an alternative website for mods by now surely"

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This post got 50,000 likes and it never even pointed out the actual issue with the calculations, it just took issue with framing and it expressed that Kareem is too inept to find sources. But what's new? Kareem debunking thread below
Kareem says this is a "textbook example of how to lie with statistics." It really isn't, but let's see what he bases this on. The first thing he says -- his "main criticism" -- is that the data isn't provided. But for Kareem, this is completely meaningless. We know this is meaningless, because even when all the data is presented, Kareem still doesn't do anything with it, understand it, open it, manipulate it, or anything. He says "where's the data?" and when he gets it, he just blocks you. Example:
Kareem doesn't even deal in simulating data to check if his EXTREMELY BAD statistical intuitions are correct. Remember this? If he had simulated it, he would've seen that the exact opposite of his claim was true! But in any case, here's the data for the present post: This should've taken Kareem about five seconds to find, so there goes his "main criticism".
Kareem's next criticism is that the post leaves "out relevant information like how many murders happen between people of the same race." But this is *irrelevant* information when the topic is interracial homicides. It's only relevant if you're changing the topic! He says that the post "makes it seem as if race is the main causal factor in murders", but that's only true if you have a reading comprehension problem. He then says "if you look at interracial murders in the context of all murders, they are almost always a tiny fraction." This is just not true! Something like a fifth of murders cannot be called a "tiny fraction" given the population sizes and segregation at play. Now, in the real world, homicide is increasingly interracial, and the Black-on-White number is large:
But Kareem's claim also isn't *relevant.* Just because you want to talk about all murders instead of interracial murders doesn't mean that people are dishonest for talking about something different than what you wish they were focusing on. This is a common ploy he does. His claim that @GadSaad's post assumes Blacks and Whites are equally likely to murder except for race is asinine. No one said that! There can be tons of differentiating factors at play, but the statistics remain, and the risk to Whites from Blacks remains higher than vice-versa. Kareem then makes the baseless claim that calling an interracial homicide an interracial homicide is an "essentially racist framing". This makes no sense, but, who cares? His claim that focusing on interracial murders is to condone intraracial murders is also not supportable.
Two things should be obvious. Kareem deals in non-sequiturs. Kareem doesn't have any real criticisms, he just doesn't like what @GadSaad is saying, and he wants to claim that looking at stats he doesn't approve of can't be neutral when what he's replying to shows it can be.
Now Kareem isn't smart, he's a fraud, he's been caught lying, implying untruths, and more. But what's funniest here is that there is a real statistical error and he missed it. The image @GadSaad posted says Blacks are 23x as likely to kill Whites as vice-versa, but it's wrong! You get to the 23x (really 23.1x) number by multiplying the ratios of Whites killed by Blacks to Blacks kill by Whites by the population percentage ratio, when that's not required. For population pairs, you just use the ratio of killed to killed. That number is 458/84 = 5.45x.
There's also a data issue that Kareem didn't notice: These numbers are very unlikely to be true! Open up EZASHR, which spans 1980 to 2020, and the yearly White-on-Black numbers are usually 400-500, and the Black-on-White numbers are usually 1,300-1,500. Alarm bells. This dataset starts in 2024, so we can't use overlapping years with EZASHR to see if it's correct in other years, but if we could, my bet is that they wouldn't line up. Homicide statistics don't tend to jump around enough to get to the source's numbers. As a final point of order, the Black-on-White number at the source is 472, not 458, and the White-on-Black number is 86, not 84. This is minor and probably just means Gad's image was a bit out of date. Not a big deal at all. My advice to Kareem is to focus less on making threads that illustrate he suffers from cognitive difficulties and to instead focus on earning his PhD that he's spent nearly 9 years on so far."
On Kareem Carr's woke statistical illiteracy

Meme - ᐱ ᑎ ᑐ ᒋ ᕮ ᒍ @Andr3jH: "hold on so
> a black woman called Indians smelly
> smells PhD said it's racist
> more black women ganged up on her
> she deleted the OP and is offering a groveling apology for commiting a "misogynoir"
great stuff reminiscent of the heydays of intersectional oppression Olympics"
Dr Ally Louks @DrAllyLouks: "Hi all. I’ve taken a bit of time away from social media to reflect, but I see the conversation is ongoing. What I think is important is that we all show each other respect online. If you’re defending me by being disrespectful or racist then I would rather you didn’t. "
Dr Ally Louks @DrAllyLouks: "It's especially disheartening to see women of colour weaponising racist stereotypes against other women to put them down. Solidarity is necessary to counteract "all* forms of racism."
"no body said anything about your genetics... just that yall stink"
Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "All hail our new H1B masters."
"indian genetics are the worst"
You're not allowed to criticise black women, because that's racist and sexist

Meme - Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion: "Reading a recent graphic novel, I'm once again struck by how Americans have just decided to call literally any massacre a "genocide""
"Two Guns is the site of a major Apache genocide in 1878, where 42 Apaches were suffocated in a cave"
This only applies to where you can blame white people, of course

Skeptic Research Center Team on X - "Over 1/3 of white women in America, and over 2/3s of black women, believe "white people invented slavery." 55% of Millennial liberals believe "white people invented slavery." These data are from our latest representative study of Americans, conducted in Fall of last year. More info here"
Weird. I thought the left was very keen on "Teaching accurate history"

Court Ruling allows Professor's Defamation Claim to proceed against colleague - "In 2018, amid rising tension on campus, Porter surveyed views on academic freedom and hostile work environments. This sparked a backlash. Berea College’s administration then began disciplinary proceedings against him. This led to Porter’s suspension and subsequent dismissal.  At the center of the legal battle is an email chain involving Sergent, who criticized the Student Government Association’s decision to award Porter for his contributions to students. In his emails, Sergent labeled Porter as ‘unethical’ and ‘academically dishonest,’ while also accusing him of manipulation and making disparaging remarks about female faculty members. These statements formed the basis of Porter’s defamation claim.  The court determined that some of Sergent’s remarks were indeed defamatory and should be considered for trial, finding error in the lower court’s conclusion that the statements were protected by a common-interest privilege. The judges highlighted the potential implications of Sergent’s comments on Porter’s professional reputation and pointed to evidence suggesting that Sergent’s objections may have been influenced by personal interests, given his connection to a party involved in the Title IX complaint.  This ruling sets the stage for a jury to determine whether Sergent’s statements were made with malice or ill intent, which could void the protections he claimed under the privilege. As the case moves forward, it raises significant questions about workplace dynamics, academic freedom, and the responsibilities of faculty in addressing potential misconduct within their institutions.  The case, Porter v. Sergent, has drawn attention not only for its legal implications but also for the broader issues of faculty governance and the protection of academic expression, as both professors and students navigate an evolving landscape of campus culture."
That proves the point about academic freedom and hostile work environments

Laurie Penny on X - "I challenge anyone who claims to be ‘#antiwoke’ to define- as specifically as possible- what they think ‘woke’ actually means. Go ahead. I’ll wait. If you can’t or won’t do it, I’m going to go ahead and assume you’re just a bigot. RT/tag people, please, I want actual answers!"
Gurwinder on X - "“Woke” is when you:
1. Reduce individuals to group identities
2. Reduce these group identities to “victims” and “oppressors”
3. Reduce any disagreement with these reductions to “oppression” or “bigotry”"
The left keep pretending that no one can define woke, when it is repeatedly defined for them.

Meme - "r/BlueskySocial
CubesFan
It's not left leaning
I see many people talking about Bluesky as a left leaning social media platform. It is not. This is just what a social media platform looks like when extremist right wingers aren't using bots forcing algorithms that push fear mongering and hate. The world has been pushed so far to the right, that even conservative moderates are labeled left leaning. Don't play the game. It's not left leaning. That's the framing of the right to help continually push things right. Bluesky is very moderate with both conservative (not extremist) thought and thought. Enjoy what it looks like in the center where people can talk"
RudeOnion @RudeOnion: "I do find it hilarious how they mass abandoned Twitter the second conservatives were no longer being banned en mass, only to turn around and shriek about it being massively right -leaning now. Leftists exile themselves from relatively central platforms because they can't handle even the slightest opposing viewpoint. Only to call that platform alt right. It really is a repeating cycle."

Meme - Carl @HistoryBoomer: "Every damn time...
Me: "Speech policing is bad."
Them: "So you want to say slurs, you bigot! C'mon, I know you do; you're desperate to spew those slurs. Spew it, baby, spew the slur, let it loose, that's all you want, you want the slurs!""
Carl @HistoryBoomer: "A quote from the *Financial Times* doesn't epitomize anything! It's a good newspaper, but its focus is those top banker types! The fact is, NOBODY liked the word hall monitors except the word hall monitors."
Mustache Bob @MustacheBob2: "We get it, you wanna use slurs because you're a bigot."
kdaw @kdaw196158: "The overwhelming desire of white people to be able to say the n word again is amazing"
Erin, on the side of caution @CalliopeAnim: "Carl here really wants to say racial slurs"
False Social @ToughRoom: "The fact is, you saying NOBODY is bullshit. Are you planning on calling Blacks n**gers next? Jews k*kes? You want no consequence for it? I I get it, you preach personal responsibility but want zero consequence for anything. The Trump way."
Kortath @0ph1on: "I've never had a single problem with not being able to say slurs. Maybe you should consider just trying not to be a massive sack of shit?"
Where did the NPCs get this line from? They hate free speech so much

Greg Lukianoff on X - "I think we should keep a list of arguments that just aren't going to work anymore. And the childish aspersion that anyone who argues for free speech just really wants to say racial slurs should get nothing more than a hard eye roll and permanent skepticism towards their future arguments.   It's not going to work anymore."
Left wingers hate free speech so much they must pretend it's only about racial slurs and no one needs it except for that

Meme - Dunvallo Molmutius 🇬🇧 @molmutius: "If you know anything about blood and the trouble the NHS has sourcing blood for ethnic minority patients, this tweet is darkly amusing. And that’s before even getting into Sickle Cell, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in different countries, etc."
Just Dave Now @justdave89now: "Important Monday morning message to the racists on here. Unfortunately this message won’t get far on here as the right wingers won’t dare repost it. Watch the comments you’ll see the racists…"
"DEAR RACIST, YOUR CHILD NEEDS A PINT OF BLOOD. CHOOSE THE WHITE ONE. *2 pints of identical-seeming blood*"

Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods - "he enjoys living in a Christian society. This betrays a certain level of cultural free-riding. The survival of society’s Christian undercurrent depends on others buying into the “nonsense” even if he doesn’t.   Still, though Dawkins has spoken of his “cultural Christianity” before, this feels like another staging-post on a journey towards the good Professor finally admitting that the New Atheism, of which he was such a shining light, was wrong in crucial respects. First, in its almost touching naivety that a post-Christian world would give way to a values-neutral space, rooted in reason. Second, in its semi-adolescent diagnosis of Christianity as a retardant upon cultural and intellectual progress... He also speaks of his concern at the rise of Islam in Christianity’s place; perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that some prominent atheists (though not he) focused excessively on Christianity, being an easy target compared to other religions.   One reason for Dawkins’ change of heart might be good old-fashioned scientific observation. It doesn’t take the brains of an evolutionary biologist to work out that New Atheism was mistaken in its diagnosis of what would follow religion’s decline. The rational world we were promised hasn’t materialised and a nastier, less reasonable one is supplanting what was there before.   Nowhere is this more obvious than in Scotland. By the New Atheist logic, it ought to be the most rational place in the UK since de-Christianisation has occurred there at a faster rate. Membership of the national Church of Scotland has fallen by 35 per cent in 10 years and the Scottish Churches Trust warns that 700 Christian places of worship will probably close in the next few years. A Scottish friend recently explained that every place where he’d come to faith – where he was christened, where his father was buried – had been shut or sold. This is not only a national tragedy, but a personal one.  New Atheism assumed that, as people abandoned Christianity they would embrace a sort of enlightened, secular position. The death of Christian Scotland shows this was wrong. Faith there has been replaced by derangement and the birthplace of the Scottish enlightenment – which rose out of Christian principles – now worships intolerant new gods.  The SNP’s draconian hate crime legislation is a totemic example. Merely stating facts of biology might earn you a visit from the Scottish police. But perhaps Christianity has shaped even this. It cannot be a coincidence that Scotland, home of John Knox, is now at the forefront of the denigration of women. The SNP’s new blasphemy laws are just the latest blast of that trumpet.   Not that things are much better south of the border, where we have de facto blasphemy laws under which a teacher can be forced into hiding for showing his class a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Certainly not the neutral secular space we were promised with the erosion of Christianity’s central role in society.   Yet increasingly, the thesis of Tom Holland’s book Dominion seems to be winning out, via a growing recognition that the ethics we hold as natural and universal are, in fact, anything but. Much of what atheists ascribed to vague concepts of “reason” emerged out of the faith which informed the West’s intellectual, moral, and, yes, scientific life – a cultural oxygen we breathe but never see."

Martin Varsavsky on X - "For the woke Trump is a Nazi, Elon is a Nazi, Rubio is a Nazi, Hegseth is a Nazi, the only ones who are not Nazis are Hamas who have 94 Jewish hostages and have it as their mission to kill all Jews."

leekern on X - "I live in Israel.  20% of the citizens are muslim.   When there’s a terror attack committed by a muslim - it’s not covered up that it’s a muslim - and it doesn’t lead to the breakdown of civil society.   So why do British politicians and the media feel they have to lie when a Muslim commits an act of Islamic terrorism in Britain or engages in a racist crime?  Do they think the British public are contemptible and disgusting and idiots and racists and that there will be a complete breakdown of the social contract that exists between people?"
Another reason the left hate Israel - they don't whitewash Islamist terrorism

Pope Francis to Trump: Reject 'hate, discrimination or exclusion'
𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎ on X - "The Pope met with Abolhassan Navab, an Iranian regime cleric who oversees the persecution of converts to Christianity. You can't make this up."

End Wokeness on X - "Filmed this morning by a veteran at the VA Center in Lyons NJ. There are more Pride LGBTQ+ flags than AMERICAN flags. VA needs to ban this nationwide."
When the real regime you pledge allegiance too is obvious

Richard Hanania on X - "You know all those times the feds would investigate or sue police departments because they pulled over too many black people or whatever, hence "racism"? Yeah, Trump has stopped that. NYT:
The Justice Department has ordered an immediate halt to all new civil rights cases or investigations — and signaled that it might back out of Biden-era agreements with police departments that engaged in discrimination or violence, according to two internal memos sent to staff on Wednesday...  The first of two short memos sent by Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff at the department, ordered a “litigation freeze” at the department’s Civil Rights Division to decide whether Trump appointees want “to initiate any new cases,” according to a screenshot of the document viewed by The New York Times...  Perhaps more significant, a second memo ordered a similar freeze on department activity involving so-called consent decrees — agreements hashed out with local governments intended to address flawed police practices, or bias based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disabilities.
Cops will be able to actually fight crime now instead of worrying about getting the right racial balance in prisons."

Meme - "ME IN 2012: THERE'S NO WAR ON CHRISTIANITY, WE JUST WANT CHRISTIANS TO BE MORE TOLERANT
ME NOW: THERE IS A WAR ON CHRISTIANITY AND I'M LEADING IT"

Meme - Cernovich @Cernovich: "Mehdi Hasan worked for Qatari state media, went to UK moved to the US for a show on MSNBC (foreign influence operation), and stayed here.  Funny how he doesn't want to live outside of Western nations, while demanding we become more like those places he won't live."
Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan: "Ackman and Musk can't stop tweeting foreign, non-British, far-right, racist conspiracy accounts about Britain, a country they know nothing about - and then making sweeping nonsensical statements about Britain ("there is no free speech", the King should dissolve parliament!)."
Bill Ackman @BillAckman: "There is no free speech in Britain. Shocking."

If you dress in patriotic clothing on Australia Day, can venues legally restrict your entry? - "A central issue in this scenario is whether being “Australian” qualifies as a race ethnic origin. In other words, is the first element above proved? These words are not defined in the Act, but case law suggests that terms such as “race” and “ethnic origin” for the purposes of the RDA are broad terms requiring a shared distinctive social identity — like “shared customs, beliefs or traditions” — recognised both internally and by the wider community, supported by a longstanding shared history.  While courts have affirmed that Aboriginal people are a recognised ethnic group under the RDA’s racial hatred provisions, broad national identities, such as being “Australian”, might fail to meet these criteria because they encompass diverse and distinct social identities. Therefore, banning Australia-themed clothing would likely not constitute unlawful racial discrimination unless it covertly targets a specific ethnic group. That said, some jurisdictions — such as under section 3 of the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth)— define “discrimination” as including “any distinction, exclusion or preference made on the basis of … political opinion”. Importantly, the protection against political opinion or activity does not apply in South Australia and New South Wales... Given the above, if you plan to show your colours this Australia Day, it might be safest to do so in private homes or public settings — otherwise you might run the risk of being ousted, which is just not cricket."
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
This is a covert admission that diversity and multiculturalism reduce social cohesion

Injecting Anti-Racism Activism Into the Adoption Process Won’t Help Black Children - "a vice-president at Bethany Christian Services, the largest Christian adoption agency in the country, had told a reporter that allowing white families to adopt black children from the foster care system “can cause a lot of harm to children of color”; consequently, Bethany now favors “overhauling” the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, the US statute prohibiting child-welfare agencies that receive federal funding from denying foster or adoptive placements on the basis of race. Bethany proclaimed that it would be embarking on a “long journey toward becoming an anti-racist organization”—a journey that would require Bethany to consider race “as part of the best-interest determination for child placement.”... American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Naomi Schaefer Riley, focused substantially on a 2021 Bethany report titled, What the Pandemic Taught Us: Innovative Practice Report. “As the Bethany report points out, Black children are removed from their homes at a higher rate than white children,” Riley writes. “What the report doesn’t point out, though, is that Black children are also abused and neglected at twice the rate of white children, and they are more than twice as likely to die as a result of maltreatment than white children. The way to fix these disparities is neither to leave children in abusive or neglectful homes nor to insist that they remain in the foster care until an adult with a matching hue comes along.”... Bethany comes across as more intent on publicly displaying its anti-racism bona fides than making a compelling evidence-based case for race-conscious child-welfare reforms. Even to the extent that Bethany is arguing specific propositions, moreover, these arguments are couched in the gauzy language of “equity” and “systemic racism.” After wading through the anti-racism rhetoric, one is left with the sense that Bethany felt it need only proclaim its anti-racist impulses to justify racializing child placement decisions, without genuinely probing the benefits or potential drawbacks in regard to children of color in the child-welfare system... Bethany’s move to embrace an explicitly race-conscious approach to child-placement policy betrays a larger philosophical trend related to the rise of such doctrines as Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. While the dominant liberal vision of race in America once emphasized the ideal of color-blindness, the opposite view is now ascendant among progressives: Race—and the assumed existence of racism, in particular—must be centred in all areas of public policy... Cheri Williams, Bethany’s Senior VP of Domestic Programs, says that a colorblind approach “can cause a lot of harm to children of color.” But where is the empirical support for this statement? Since MEPA’s passage a generation ago, foster-care adoptions in the United States have more than doubled, and the average time to place children in an adoptive home out of foster care has been reduced by about a year. As a Mathematica report from 2020 indicated, the years between 2005 and 2019 yielded a 40 percent reduction in the number of black children in foster care—a trend that went hand in hand with a substantial increase in transracial adoption. The authors of the study also concluded that, despite persistent racial disparities, the “racial and ethnic disparities in permanency and adoption [have become] less pronounced over time, and transracial adoptions for Black children grew.”... Circling back to the world of data, a 2020 analysis of the available literature concluded that “Black children adopted into white families suffer no more developmental or adjustment problems than black adoptees in Black families.” A representative study examined by the authors found no negative impact on “adjustment, self-esteem, academic achievement, peer relationships, parental and adult relationships” for Black children adopted into white families. Contrary to what the Bethany report might have one believe, empirical studies suggest that adoptive parents’ race likewise tends to have little deleterious impact on an adopted child’s school performance, behavior, and familial relationships... I once asked the interracial couple that I mentioned above if there is some identifiable set of cultural norms or traditions I should be encouraging in my home. Their response was dismissive. They told me that the (mostly black) working- and middle-class families in their neighborhood don’t go about their day-to-day lives thinking about race. More and more, that’s the job of diversity consultants—and the sort of well-meaning white-collar professionals who funded and authored such documents as Bethany’s Innovative Practice Report."

Hayden on X - "Can someone far smarter than me explain to me why the name of a mountain in Alaska is even remotely on the top 10,000 issues facing this country? Who is this for?"
Alaric The Barbarian on X - "The Left will go on a 50-year campaign of renaming anything named after a white man but the moment one thing is changed back it’s “uhh why do you care dude? kinda weird”"
Pushing the left wing agenda is the default. If anyone pushes back, not just are they bad people for being bigots but they are wasting time and effort fighting the natural order of things and should do more important things

Meme - Fidel Cashflo @barnett_stan99: "What flag is this and why is their obesity rate so high? *pride flags* I keep seeing fat women use it. What country are they from ?"

Colin Wright on X - "🚨BREAKING: A brand new study in a peer-reviewed @SpringerNature  journal—"Queering Babies"—sexualizes infants and exposes the ideological rot in academia.  The paper, which argues that surrogate babies are “queer creatures by default” and that perhaps all babies are inherently queer, stretches the boundaries of logic, coherence, and decency.  The author claims his paper "explores how encounters with [surrogate babies] disrupt or confirm normative expectations about the ‘babyness’ of babies, the ‘parentness’ of parents, and the interactions between these two."  He does this through a "autoethnographic account in dialogue with a collection of personal narratives from same-sex and different-sex parents to address the performative and relational aspects of this queerness."  The paper isn't merely absurd, it is also disturbing—it explicitly engages in the sexualization of infants.   The author recounts his daughter’s instinctual search for a breast during early skin-to-skin contact with him as “somewhat animalistic and perverse.” He describes a newborn’s attraction to breastfeeding as evoking "feelings of alienation and connotations of the sexual."  He then extends this strange sexualization by framing the connection between parent and child as inherently “gendered and sexual.” He writes: “The umbilical cord of 𝗍̶𝗋̶𝖺̶𝗎̶𝗆̶𝖺̶ shared fate, going back to the primal desire to 𝗅̶𝖺̶𝖼̶𝗍̶𝖺̶𝗍̶𝖾̶ connect and stay connected. And the future of connection—or this connected future—is always gendered and sexual.”  The author’s framing of queerness in infants also adds to the disturbing subtext of sexualization. Queerness, as he defines it earlier in the paper, inherently carries connotations of “sexualized strangeness.” To ascribe this quality to infants—who are incapable of sexual agency—is both inappropriate and disturbing. By defining queerness in this way, Boross is conflating its sexual meanings with infant behavior, dangerously blurring boundaries that should remain clear and unambiguous.  See the post below for a link to my full report."

Oxford and Cambridge to move away from 'traditional' exams to boost results of minorities - "The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap.  However, the plans have been criticised for potentially “dumbing down” university courses for students.  The approach was unveiled under proposals, known as Access and Participation Plans, which universities must release each year as per their registration conditions to show how they are helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  Under the proposals, the University of Oxford’s APP states it will “use a more diverse and inclusive range of assessments”, which would help to “improve the likelihood” of students from “lower socio-economic backgrounds” achieving better grades.  According to the University of Cambridge’s plan, “assessment practices” may be to blame for “awarding gaps” and it hoped to “improve outcomes” for Black-British and British-Bangladeshi students.  The document also references research by its own academics which describes traditional exams as “threats to self-worth”.  The Office for Students has now backed the plans, which are also being looked at by other Russell Group institutions.  It comes as universities face pressure to close the gap between the number of firsts and 2:1 degrees given to white, middle-class students compared with other groups... Sir John Hayes, a former education minister, said the changes were “deeply insulting to students from minority backgrounds” and warned they would “undermine the integrity of the assessment process.”  Other universities looking at making changes to exams include King’s College London, which plans to keep some traditional exams but also to make courses “fairer” and to “diversify assessment”."
Sam Ashworth-Hayes on X - "Can we also just reflect on the insanity of doing this at precisely the point when ChatGPT and other AI tools have made traditional closed book exams by far the most reliable assessment method"