Saturday Miscellany

First, once upon a time I wrote a post about plagiarism. The date was June 30, 2023.

The source was one Robert Weisberg, previously a professor at Cornell and the University of Illinois. He had been teaching a few decades ago when school administrators decided to open their doors to underqualified applicants. They called it affirmative action.

Weisberg discovered that underqualified students were prone to plagiarize. They could not do the work, so they stole from others. Professors were obliged to give the students good grades, lest they be denounced as racists. 

We saw a similar phenomenon in the case of former Harvard University President Claudine Gay. Now, the Free Beacon has reported that an administrator at Columbia University’s medical school plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation.

The chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer of Columbia University's medical school, Alade McKen, plagiarized extensively in his doctoral dissertation, lifting entire pages of material, without attribution, from sources that include Wikipedia, according to a complaint submitted to the university on Wednesday.

The allegations implicate approximately a fifth of McKen's 163-page dissertation, "'UBUNTU' I am because we are: A case study examining the experiences of an African-centered Rites of Passage program within a community-based organization," submitted to Iowa State University's School of Education in 2021. More than two of those pages are a near-verbatim facsimile of Wikipedia's entry on "Afrocentric education," which is not cited anywhere in the dissertation.

Second, Sergei Klainerman, writing in Tablet, explained how diversity initiatives dumbed down the academy and rendered American students incompetent.

As this logic has unfolded on the ground, entire departments—especially in the humanities and social sciences—have become populated by people selected less according to academic credentials and achievement than the thinly disguised quotas required by DEI. When the process of change was deemed too slow, new programs and departments were created with the obvious mission of filling quotas while advancing the ideology of DEI and creating future elite cadres, especially within university administrations. Once you have created enough woke tenured faculty, and subjected the nonwoke faculty to legions of woke administrators, it becomes close to impossible to reverse the trend.

Third, now that Abigail Shrier has torn back the curtain to expose all the bad therapy being practiced in this country, I bring you the experience of one Olivia Reingold, recounted in Twitter. She underwent too much bad therapy and recovered. It is not just cautionary; it shows the way out of therapy culture:

“Gentle parents”—please listen to this before you create another kid like me, whose life was nearly derailed by 15+ years of therapy. By the time I was four or five, it was clear I had emotional problems. I would sometimes sit at the foot of our stairs, hyperventilating over something as simple as the discomfort of a seam in my sock. When a homeless person stopped my mother and me on the streets of New York City to ask for some change to “buy a cup of soup,” I remember going back to our hotel room to weep, disturbed by the way strangers—including us—walked past him without helping. By kindergarten, I was in therapy. By fifth grade, I was on mood stabilizers—perhaps justifiably, since by then I'd developed suicidal ideation. Therapy did not create my emotional problems. Neither did culture—this was before the rise of social media. But what therapy did was convince me that my problems were immutable, and perhaps even genetically encoded in my DNA. By the time I was 16, I was anorexic. When I had to drop out of college as a sophomore, a doctor looked me in the eyes and told me my condition was “like cancer.” “If you don’t treat this, it will get worse,” she said. Over the next five years, while I was in and out of treatment centers, various doctors reminded me that eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness—warnings the medical system now issues about gender dysphoria (although they say that is an immutable issue of identity, not mental health). Therapy is how I became convinced that I came from a line of eating disordered women. I reflected upon my maternal line and swore that my mother, her mother, and her mother’s mother all were riddled with eating disorders. The truth is that my grandmother was sick with anorexia, but I believe it was simply a culturally sanctioned way to express her distress. At 20 years old, I was freshly out of treatment—and 100% insufferable. I saw harms everywhere. We even had a word for them in my support groups—"trigger warnings." I had a vendetta against Starbuck’s branding of its low calorie beverages as “skinny” lattes, believing it was a slight to the anorexics of the world. I blistered over in anger when I learned that my cousin, a bar owner, was considering offering “skinny girl margaritas” to customers, convinced he was aiding and abetting eating disorders. I felt personally offended by gyms that kept scales in their locker rooms. I told anyone I dated to avoid mention of all “numbers,” that I never wanted to hear how many miles they ran, what pant size they wore, how much they weighed, or how many calories they consumed—not ever. You know what made me better? Less validation. It was the fearless parenting style of my beloved aunt Melanie that made me better. I lived with Melanie in Atlanta for five years. When I told her I was contemplating throwing up a meal, she told me she’d like to have a word with my eating disorder: "Yeah," she'd say. "Can you tell it to shut the fuck up?" She told me that yes, it was going to be hard to keep meals down, but that you bet I could do it. She helped me develop confidence. Slowly, I cultivated an identity beyond being just sick. The most surprising thing was the realization that I was not as sick I had thought. Yes, I had anxiety about things like picking up the phone, but what do you know—after a few months of practice, I no longer fretted over the phone. Melanie thought me that I could sit through discomfort—and that in fact, discomfort was my medicine. I’ll say that again: discomfort was my medicine. Your kid might be going through something right now, but I want to posit that what they actually need is less validation and these two sentences: 1) yes it is hard 2) you bet you can do it, kiddo. Thank you to all the parents with the courage to buck the system. Thank you to the non-gentle parents. TLDR: how therapy broke me but some good old fashioned “rub some dirt in it” parenting from my beloved aunt healed me.

Fourth, from the EndWokeness account on Twitter:

27 posts from Biden about George Floyd. 

0 posts from Biden about Laken Riley. 

Did her life matter, @JoeBiden?

Fifth, from the Bud Light death watch:

The world’s largest brewer may have lost as much as $1.4 billion in sales because of the backlash to its brief partnership with a transgender influencer to promote Bud Light beer.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) reported record revenues for 2023 Thursday but said its “full growth potential was constrained” by its US business, where sales were hurt by a boycott of Bud Light over a sponsored Instagram post with Dylan Mulvaney.

Sixth, now that the new Argentinian Prime Minister has generated  budget surplus, what is left to cry about in Argentina.

Well, here is a candidate, from the Daily Mail:

A man woke up to find he had been given a vasectomy by mistake after going into hospital for a gall bladder operation in Argentina.

Medics are thought to have made the gaffe after delaying Jorge Base's surgery by 24 hours from last Tuesday until last Wednesday, which is the day of the week gall bladder ops are never performed at the medical centre.

'Doctors have already explained to me the possibilities of reversing the error are minimal.

'I feel so angry and helpless. I can't understand how they made such a mistake when it had gallbladder written all over my medical records.

The 41-year-old told Argentinian TV channel El Doce: 'I have three grown-up boys… but I was dreaming of having a girl.

Seventh, speaking of slander and defamation, this time against the one group that you can malign without consequence.

This, from Tom Schaller, co-author with Paul Waldman of a book that denounces rural white people as bigots who do not hold the same beliefs as enlightened coastal thinkers:

“We lay out the fourfold interconnected threat that white rural voters pose to the country. First of all, they are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay demographic in the country. Second, they’re the most conspiracist group: QAnon support and subscribers, election denialism, Covid denialism and scientific skepticism, Obama birtherism. Third: anti-democratic sentiments. They don’t believe in an independent press, free speech, they’re most likely to say the president should be able to act unilaterally. . . . they’re also the most strongly white nationalist and white Christian nationalist. And fourth: they’re most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.

Naturally, the people who are being slandered also built the country. They fought the nation’s wars and they feed the world. Hearing their reputations maligned they are naturally upset. Yet, idiots like Schaller and Waldman do not recognize that slandering people and defaming them produces a reaction. 

No one should imagine that you can defame people with impunity and not have to pay a price. The same applies to the constant barrage of defamatory comments directed toward certain peoples around the world. Treat people like trash and they are likely to respond. Attack their pride in achievement and they are likely to react badly.

The people who talk this way, who cavalierly attack others and who diminish their achievements are simpleminded bigots. 

Trash talk is a bad idea. No matter who is doing it. 

Keep in mind, as I have noted these past days, the attacks on white Christians in America sound like the attacks against Israel, for being a criminal conspiracy, for being a colonialist conspiracy, for practicing apartheid and other forms of bigotry. 

We should mention that denouncing white rural Christians for having too much rage implies that they are not rational beings, not very bright, but are emotional basket cases.

Eighth, the state of Florida has removed all diversity officers from its university system. Three cheers for Florida:

"To comply with the Florida Board of Governor's regulation 9.016 on prohibited expenditures, the University of Florida has closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors," reads a statement from Provost J. Scott Angle.

Ninth, finally some advice for young women, from Claire Lehmann, proprietress of the Quillette site:

My advice to young women is that when it comes to sex, your gut is infinitely more wise than your conscious mind, and if you feel bad about a sexual situation it is body telling you that it doesn't want to risk being fertilised by a loser.

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