Category: Snowflakes

Pretty Much Illiterate

Education, Seen On Campus, Snowflakes

Then there’s this tale of woe (read it all for the full horror):

College students are increasingly unprepared for serious study, with some professors recently reporting they are illiterate, raising significant questions about the overall quality of American education.

“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”   Wilson described that she is trying new pedagogical methods to convey the same information.  “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson stated. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”

Yeah, I know all about that.  I think I’ve told the story of how Connie (as Global Director of Training at a Great Big Accounting Firm) had occasion to review some of her earlier training materials.  These, she discovered, were about 80% text and the rest graphics.  Only five years later, the ratio had been completely inverted:  80% graphics and the rest text.  (And just so we know who we’re talking about, the trainees all had Masters degrees in either Finance or Business.  Not yer typical Fem Studies or Art History grads, these.)  When she tried to arrest that development and include more text, all that happened was that the training became less effective:  less absorption and poorer retention.

So none of the above are at all surprising to me;  only the extent is somewhat shocking.

At some point, all learning, innovation and civilization itself is going to plateau (or worse, #Muslims) instead of increasing with each generation, as before.

Socrates had it nailed.

Welcome News

Entertainment, Wokism

When I heard that Woke Disney was going to remake one of my favorite-ever movies, I was immediately overcome by a Black Mood.  What foul atrocities, I asked myself, are they going to inflict upon this jewel?

Fear not, Kim:

Disney fans are breathing a sigh of relief after it was reported that a live-action remake of The Aristocats has been quietly cancelled.

Plans for the new movie, based on the 1970’s classic, were initially announced in 2022 with Questlove attached to the project.

But, speaking on the August 20 episode of Score: The Podcast, the director – real name Ahmir K. Thompson – claimed that the film has been shelved.

Addressing the project’s demise, Questlove told the podcast: ‘A new administration came in, and then I was like, “Okay, well, this is what I plan to do, and dadada, do the song and dance, and here’s some of the music examples and there’s some team I’m working with dadada.”

‘And then they had another administration shuffle, and it was like, “Okay well. All right.” And by the third time I was just like, “Maybe this isn’t meant for me, because there’s also, at least, like right now, there’s so many options I have in pickings.”‘

Questlove said that The Aristocats live-action make could be revived years down the line.

‘Maybe it’ll happen in the future,’ he added.

I bloody well hope not.

Of all the old Disney movies (The Aristocats was made in 1970), this one represented all the good things about the classic animated Disney movies:  funny, satirical, heartbreaking, full of suspense, lovely musical numbers (Maurice Chevalier!), with wonderful supporting characters (e.g. Madame’s ancient lawyer and the gaggle of elderly English geese) and the most villainous of villains, Edgar the butler.

It is an example of the perfect movie — and, it should be said, the last okayed by Walt and made under Roy Disney’s supervision before their respective deaths.  (Since then…)

There is no doubt that any “new” take on this classic would only be foul, wrong and at the end, a commercial failure.  And making it “live-action” (i.e. mostly CGI) would add to the cataclysm.

Some movies — especially the perfect ones — never have to be remade.  And The Aristocats most certainly belongs in that category.

Hell, I always thought (and still do) that Duchess was just about the perfect woman:  gorgeous, unwittingly sexy, loved her family… the list is endless.  And as voiced by Eva Gabor… rowrrr.

And one last thought:

Rollback

Resistance, Wokism

Right off, I have to admit that I don’t really have a dog in this particular fight.

I don’t follow the NFL, never watch any of their games, and could not possibly care less what or how this little cartel names their teams.

That said:  I am concerned about the reasons behind this name change.

“Ooooh, we can’t bear the thought that eeevil old White men named their football team using a disgusting racist slur!”  (This despite the fact that No Actual Indian Felt Insulted By The Name, Ever.)

So on that basis alone — just to stick it to the Perpetually Indignant — I support changing the name back to one which has a proud heritage and, lest we forget, was the first football team to win a Super Bowl behind a Black quarterback, at a time when few if any of the other teams even had a Black quarterback.

It’s really time we pushed back against this fucking wokism — including the re-erection of all those statues the Leftoids pulled down because raaayyyycissss or slaverrrryyyyy or some such nonsense.

And while we’re on the subject of renaming, let’s get all those institutions back to their original names which honored past heroes.  (Frankly, I’d support renaming the pitifully-woke VMI to the Robert E. Lee Military Institute, as long as they also kicked out all the G.I. Jane wannabes in so doing.  Fuck it, let’s also go back to our proud heritage of men-only military colleges.)

Of course, The Donald is behind many of these initiatives, because it’s all part of Making America Great Again, and I am all for it.

Screw the wokisti.

Censorship By Algorithm

Technology, Wokism

…or by A.I., the outcome is the same.

Seen SOTI:

Since when could we not say simple words like “racists” and “pedophiles”*?

Since “bad” words could be flagged by built-in website algorithms and cause the post and/or writer to be “flagged” or even “banned”, is when.

Which is why I don’t bowdlerize my writing here;  if I want to say “rapist” I’ll fucking well say “RAPIST”, and if I want to say “porn” I’ll say that too, and not “p*rn” or its pathetic ilk.

It’s too bad, because the above statement lends itself to being quite funny, provided that you don’t encounter the linguistic roadblock of having to hunt for the substitute letters for the asterisks.

*(For my Brit Readers, “paedophiles” which would emerge as “p**dophiles”, which is doubleplusunreadable.)