Let’s crack open the catalog at Kenyon College and read the course description of a ‘gender studies’ class. First, please fasten your head to your shoulders so it doesn’t spin right off. Is it possible that the professor intended to make the description incomprehensible? And that the students like it that way?
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28 replies on “College ‘Gender Studies’ Course Description Will Spin Your Head Right Off Your Shoulders”
After a long absence from Linked-In, I saw the option to add my pronouns. I then added to my “About” section:
“If you need me to tell you my pronouns, you need more help than I can give you. ‘In the beginning, God made them male and female, in His image’ [Gen 1:27]. ALL else is from Satan. If this is even remotely ‘controversial’ for you, then: A. You aren’t interested in me, B. Vice versa, and C. 2+2 eternally = 4, Mr. O’Brien.”
It always amazes me that some people with so little to share could take so many words to reveal how little they actually know.
Earl C. Kelley- We have not succeeded in answering all our problems—indeed we sometimes feel we have not completely answered any of them. The answers we have found have only served to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel that we are as confused as ever, but we think we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.
Training for those who want to be able to ‘baffle them with your bullshit because you know you have no brilliance to blind them with.
Shows how our University system has turned into Bullshit factories….(except for STEM…but Engineers are crazy…er not-normal).
For Scott: FYI cis is Latin for “on this side of,” trans being the Latin for “on the other side of” or “across.”
Used to be called psychobabble, but gobbledegook works just fine. If you haven’t seen the Post Modern Generator, you should. Just hit the refresh button to generate another essay replete with generated references.
look up the college course on “Butter Dance” if you really want to understand what you are talking about, perfectly.
sorry not sure it’s a course but it sure “collegey”…
Smoking everywhere was a social phenomenon that was popular before we learned that it would be possible to live forever if only we do everything right.
Perfect. Another way in which Progressivism is a religion.
Scott listening to the class description with his mouth hanging open. Priceless.
As was Steve feigning falling asleep😂
I wish I had heard this segment earlier. I’ve been attempting to write a ghost story. I write a chapter and then go back and take out nearly every other adverb. Then I break down complex sentences. Then I remove all of the “thens”. Then I remove flowery descriptions of mundane objects. Then I throw away the chapter and try again.
Doing all that you’ll be guaranteed a well-written book, if there are any words left – ha ha. I tend to over decorate my writing with too much flowery and unnecessary verbiage, too, and have to take the hedge clippers to it over and over again. Words for me are like kudzu.
I saw this somewhere else. It is actually an English class.
Noun: sophistry
*(“arete” = narrow and high, a sharp pinnacle not to be strayed from for fear of falling)
If that doesn’t sound very familiar it sure as hell should.
Among exposing logical fallacies and other invalid arguments the recognition and demonstrable illegitimacy of sophistic arguments used to be standard in high school and college curricula.
These things were taught to students so that they would recognize and not be duped by false arguments. In other words, this was a means of attaining The Truth. This is a way of thinking that allows The Truth to be conceived and applied.
That this is no longer being taught is a serious problem to humanity. It is a regression not a progression. All sides are damaged when this sort of instruction is abandoned because even The Good do no recognize error for the error it actually is.
Invalid arguments are the application of mental and verbal tricks to win an argument, not the pursuit of actual truth which should be the goal of every discussion. We are not immune from this on the Right, I see this sort of thing here on BWC all the time.
The abandonment of reason appeals greatly to the puerile and egocentric. It flatters itself with pride and that makes it very, very dangerous.
So why did our schools stop teaching people how to recognize and attain The Truth?
Because their positions and politics cannot withstand the onslaught of Truth, that’s why.
Which means that education in general is now a massive deception. It starts with things like Gender Studies but those areas are now well entrenched deceptions. The deceptions are now bleeding over to STEM and hard, well established scholastic areas. We’re seeing this with the nonsense claims like “Math is racist”, “Science is racist”, “Testing is racist”, etc.
Bill was serious, Scott and Steve were making light-hearted jokes about the topic because of the obvious idiocy of the catalog entry but … Bill’s right, this is serious as hell.
This is not only the political threat of Leftist neo-Communist Social Marxism. This is not only the downfall of the United States of America. This is the abandonment of all knowledge and wisdom accumulated by the human race in its entire history. This is Evil incarnate that will, if allowed to dominate human thinking, take us all back to stone axes and living in caves.
I very well understand that there are Communist drivers behind much of Leftist politics despite what a guy I often refer to as Bullwinkle might erroneously believe. Communism is a tool among many of the enemy, this goes much deeper than that. MUCH DEEPER THAN THAT.
If you do not recognize the depth of this insidiousness and see what is branch and what is root, you’re not going to beat this thing.
Let’s try a military analogy to make this more clear. If “communism” is represented by armor (tanks and such) and all you do is gird up to fight tanks, you’re not going to see the air and infantry attacking you until it’s too late. This abandonment of reason and adoption of logical fallacy and sophistry is the air wing of the enemy.
The Demonic Left WANTS you to focus on Communism and the more intensely and solely you focus the better for their strategy. Communism is bad, very, very bad. It’s hardly the only bad just as tanks are hardly the only element in an effective military. If you’re an infantryman facing a tank, that tank is the worst thing in your world but only because you don’t see the bigger picture with a tank bearing down on you.
We are in a war, a serious no-shit war and like any war it’s a complex and involved thing. It’s not nearly so simple as many simpletons on the Right seem to think it is.
Like sophistry dating all the way back to ancient Greece, this war is nothing new. It is the war of Good vs. Evil and it’s been around for all of human history. It has fallen to every generation of Good to fight our counterpart generation of Evil and EVIL HAS EVOLVED IN THE PROCESS.
Evil is no longer a cloddish oaf like Iron Joe Stalin, Evil is SMART. We’re not going to beat Evil unless we’re smart too. Sadly too many Conservatives think they have the whole situation scoped out and they do not. They’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg and it’s the part they’re not seeing that’s going to sink the ship of humanity. Yet when you point out that the dangerous part of the iceberg is well below the surface, deep and hidden from view, they ignore the warnings because hey, they think they’re smart and they can see the tip of the iceberg right there in front of them.
Attacking the tip of the iceberg does not destroy the iceberg. Destroy the iceberg and you destroy the tip too.
Whew! Thanks for that , ACTS (TM). I tried to come up with a deliberately invalid argument to posit to you, but my brain shut off when I fell off the “arete.”
Lol, don’t feel bad, I hear there’s a lot of that going around this year 🙂
For the record, that’s the word whoever wrote the Wikipedia article chose, not one I would have used. I had to go look it up just to understand it in the context of the citation. I figured there might be at least one more person in the same boat so I included a definition for clarity …
Excellent. Spot on.
Thank you.
What the world needs now is more Turbo Encabulators to reduce sinusoidal repleneration! Oh the humanity.
I tried talking Mrs. Jackson into attempting modial disruption, but she replied with magneto reluctance. I then applied capacitive directence and poof! – son number 2 was born nine months later. Obviously we had sinusoidal repleneration to thank.
I wish you luck on that conversation. Modial disruption is a hard sell.
Most of the Left’s arguments are based on logical fallacies.
Often, their premises arise from composition fallacies. That occurs when a property of one part of a system is attributed to the entire system. That fallacy results in a Straw Man misrepresentation of the system and generates a false premise.
Meanwhile, the ad hoc fallacy often combines false premises in a way such that, if A and B can happen then C could occur which, if combined with D, can lead to E! However, there is no evidence that A, B, C or D are true. The ad hoc fallacy assumes they are all true to make the false conclusion that E is unavoidable.
This is the heart of nearly all of the Left’s arguments: Make false assertions. Assume the assertions are true and draw pre-determined conclusions.
I can’t say I’m enjoying this “Let the inmates run the asylum” culture.
And I have no idea what happens next, but I’m pretty sure that nobody from any side will like it
Bill’s line, “If I had more time I would have written less.” was absolutely brilliant!
I like the commentary here but I think you are all missing one crucial point (unless I missed it):
You stated that people puffing themselves up with obtuse language is an age old phenomenon and you are correct. And I think you also touched on the fact that teens and 20-somethings have been doing this and lecturing adult adults for eons and that is also correct.
What is different, these days, – the reason you are talking about it at all – is that the ADULTS pay attention to the teens and give them power. Adults, now, are confirming and reinforcing the airhead’s narrative.
In the past, adults, as a group, laughed at the kids and knew that after 20 or so more years there’s a chance the teen might see things differently. Naturally this infuriated the teens but eventually a lot of them saw the light. I was an ignorant teen and I was infuriated but then I grew up and gained experience in the world.
But now not only to the adults indulge the teens they encourage them in their airheaded thoughts. This might be partly due to cynical power grabbing: politicians see mindless teens as a source of votes, for example.
When I was a kid, if a kid misbehaved in school, there was no latitude – BOTH the school adults and the parental adults were on the same side and brooked no excuses.
Today it’s entirely different. When my daughter was in grade school I watched as GRADE SCHOOL kids deftly pitted the parents against the school officials and everything the kids said was given the same weight as the adults.
THAT is why we are talking about this today: Adults give mindless know-nothing teens equal weight in the discussion.
Not only that, adults are generating this stuff (the course description you wrote).
Lastly, it’s ok for teens and 20 somethings to be ignorant , mindless, naive and sway-able. That’s what being young means. It’s ok.
What is not ok is that the adult population, as a group, pays the slightest attention to them.
The course description translates to “BS your way to an easy A” to fulfill an undergrad gen-ed requirement.