Tree Huggers Anonymous

It began with a hug. It ended in marriage.

Yes, indeed, a woman in Fort Myers, FL just married a tree. Apparently, hugging was not enough. She wanted to go all the way.

Not just any tree, a 100 year old Indian laurel ficus tree. No news about whether or not the new bride Karen Cooper consummated her marriage with the tree. Or whether the centenarian tree has a good supply of Viagra, for just such challenges.

Why did she do it?

Isn’t it obvious? The local authorities had wanted to cut down the tree. They were afraid that if the tree fell over—say, in a storm—the local town would be liable for any damages it caused to human organisms. So, Cooper, unconcerned about her potentially injured fellow citizens, decided to save the tree by marrying it.

One does not know why the husband tree would naturally be spared the chainsaw, but somethings escape our ken. Apparently, Cooper learned about this primitive bonding ritual from Mexican women who married trees in order to save them from deforestation.

How many men do you know who believed that marriage was their salvation, or that marriage was saving their lives?

The New York Post has the details:

The bride wore white and the groom wore bark.

A Florida woman had her heart set on saving a beloved, century-old tree in danger of being cut down — so she “married” it, according to local media.

Karen Cooper’s Saturday nuptials with the Indian laurel ficus tree rooted in Snell Family Park in Fort Myers included floral arrangements, a dog serving as ring-bearer, and a wedding cake decorated with an icing rendering of the tree next to the words “Higher Love,” reported the News-Press.

The wedding dress-clad Cooper and about 50 onlookers exchanged vows to protect the ficus, which was put on the city’s chopping block in December after a prospective buyer of a neighboring lot expressed concerns over his liabilities if the towering tree were to fall.

Of course, we have no information about how the tree consented to the marriage. Did it say: I do. Or did it drop a few leaves on the ceremony? Or does it bark?

Frankly, I find the act of marrying a tree without the tree having given explicit consent to be abusive…. Cooper has taken advantage of a poor, innocent tree…. At least, she cannot be accused of being a child sexual predator... the tree is a hundred years old... largely beyond the age of consent.

Now, if Cooper decides one day to marry a human male, will this make her a bigamist? I suspect that, all things considered, the risk of that happening is small. The moral of the story is that if you cannot find a man who is willing to marry you, go with a tree. Trees do not say No, but they also do not say Yes. It feels like abuse to me.

In this picture, the woman on the left is the blushing bride. The woman on the right seems to be the maid of honor. The tree is in the background.

 

Inner City Gun Violence

Blame the NRA. So goes the chant, rising from the fevered minds of legions of adolescents. We congratulate them on become the tools of the anti-gun movement, but we must recognize, and emphasize, that when you blame the NRA for shootings you are exonerating the shooters.

Somehow or other, we are more concerned with stigmatizing the NRA than in stigmatizing those who commit gun violence. This cannot be a deterrent to those who would shoot their neighbors.

In the case of Nikolas Cruz, as we and many others have mentioned, the attack on the NRA has also exonerated the government agencies and officials who failed the Parkland community-- from the FBI to the sheriff’s office to state welfare agents. Everyone knew about Cruz and no one did anything about him. Sounds like a good time to blame the NRA and to save Scott Israel’s career.

The newly-minted student activists want to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines… and yet, when it comes to gun violence in America, they are not really the problem.

Besides, why isn’t anyone talking about inner city gun violence? The city of Chicago, like Philadelphia and Baltimore has been a shooting gallery. These cities have stringent gun control laws, and yet, they are havens for homicidal maniacs. No one has anything to say about that. No one, except The Daily Caller… which comes to us from the Weasel Zippers blog, via Maggie’s Farm.

If we examine the facts, most everyday shootings are committed by people who use handguns, not rifles. The Daily Caller explains:

Meanwhile, if gun control advocates were actually serious about gun violence, they’d be talking about places like Chicago and they’d lobby for further regulation of or outright ban on the sale of handguns. Yes, the real numbers actually show rifles are among the safest firearms for an American to own. According to the FBI, Americans are roughly 20 times more likely to die at the end of a handgun.

Yet, handguns are definitively not part of the script the media follows when a mass shooting occurs in America. First, blue check marks start tweeting for gun control while the bodies are still warm. Second come the spin masters like Bloomberg’s anti-gun Everytown USA, which got basically the entire media to repeat a wildly false statistic that 18 school shootings had occurred in 2018. Third come the “thoughtful” and “powerful” opeds, lately from veterans quick to use their service as a lecturing device.

The New York Times printed an op-ed about the problem. The Daily Caller calls it out:

We get scary posts on the AR-15 like this one from a two-time Pulitzer recipient at The New York Times, which notes that “173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s, according to a New York Times analysis.” Of course, the article — which reads like a less dishonest version of a press release from Everytown — is missing the context on handguns. How else would they have fit in the swipe at the NRA, the quote from a military veteran for gun control, and all the terrifying language about the infantry’s use of AR-15s?

If we’re to restrict gun deaths to just mass shootings, according to Statista (which uses the FBI’s methodology), handguns are about twice as likely to be used as rifles. We saw the results of handguns on soft targets in the Ft. Hood and Charleston church shootings. Except that it’s much easier to conceal a handgun, there is virtually no difference between a semi-automatic handgun and a rifle when it comes to attacking a close-quarters, defenseless environment like a school or a church.

Keep in mind, the Daily Caller points out, 173 deaths over an eleven year period is roughly a quarter of the number of deaths by gunfire in Chicago in one year. IN ONE YEAR. Put that one in your pipe and smoke it:

The “173 deaths since 2007” number is also highly misleading out of context. Roughly four times that number died by gunfire in Chicago in a single year.

Still, not a word about Chicago gun violence from the media and gun control advocates in this recent cycle, while they loudly claim to be the white knights of gun violence.

Apparently, black lives do not matter quite as much.

Fat Nation

What with our cults to celebrity and our mindless political debates you sometimes wonder about the state of America’s moral character. If so, you would be right.

When pondering the problem you will ask yourself how well Americans are doing on the self-control and self-discipline scales. Do Americans restrain their appetites or do they express them openly and freely?

Classical ethics recommended that people temper their enthusiasm for food and even for sex. Such ethical systems also recommended against emotional incontinence. Favoring rational thought over emotional rants meant that we were supposed to think before we dug into that pile of succulent pig’s feet.

And yet, thanks apparently to our therapy culture, we now believe that appetitive restraint is repressive and that we should indulge our appetites… be they sexual or alimentary. Our culture suggests that you can never have too much sex, but this also seems to provoke the notion that you can never have too much food. One suspects that both are ways to self-medicate, and that people have too much sex and eat too much because our cultures consider such activities salutary. It promotes the notion that we, being wealthy beyond anyone’s imagination, should enjoy our wealth by eating ourselves to death. One understands that it’s seriously difficulty to fornicate yourself to death… though I suspect that, as we speak, people are trying to find a way.

Need we even mention that our psycho culture tells us that there’s a pill for every form of emotional distress, and that we moderns have arrived at an advanced state where we enjoy our right to feel good all the time, no matter what. From psychiatric drugs to illegal narcotics to everyday weed, we seem incapable of restraining our appetites for chemical substances that promise to relieve us of all feelings of psychic pain.

We think we have liberated ourselves from repression. In truth we have descended into cultural decadence. We have lost the capacity to discipline our appetites and thus we indulge them, without fear. When our external appearance exposes our overindulgence… that is, when we grow out of our clothes and start looking like ambulatory round mounds of adipose tissue, no one has the right even to look askance at us.

Most likely, our collective food addiction is going to cost the nation a ton of money in medical care, but, whereas we rise up in anger when anyone lights up a cigarette—because of the cost of caring for smokers— when we see someone who is fat we cannot say anything, because that would be fat shaming. And we all know that fat shaming, like slut shaming, is bad.

Actually, we shamed a lot of people out of smoking, so it can’t be all bad.

Down with fat shaming. Down with self-discipline. Down with temperance. Down with family dinners. Up with eating alone. The result: America is getting more obese.

The New York Times reports on American cultural decadence:

American adults continue to put on the pounds. New data shows that nearly 40 percent of them were obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase from a decade earlier, federal health officials reported Friday.

The prevalence of severe obesity in American adults is also rising, heightening their risks of developing heart disease, diabetes and various cancers. According to the latest data, published Friday in JAMA, 7.7 percent of American adults were severely obese in the same period.

The data — gathered in a large-scale federal survey that is considered the gold standard for health data — measured trends in obesity from 2015 and 2016 back to 2007 and 2008, when 5.7 percent of American adults were severely obese and 33.7 percent were obese. The survey counted people with a body mass index of 30 or more as obese, and those with a B.M.I. of 40 or more as severely obese.

Nearly 40% of Americans are now obese. Most of this occurred during the Obama administration, but don’t tell anyone. Think about it: at this rate the majority of Americans will soon be obese. What if they are organized around a voting block. They can elect candidates on a platform of: Free food.

Amazingly, awareness does not work. Actually, public awareness and advertising never works. We keep trying it, because we have faith that one day it will work. We are wrong.

Public health experts said that they were alarmed by the continuing rise in obesity among adults and by the fact that efforts to educate people about the health risks of a poor diet do not seem to be working.

“Most people know that being overweight or obese is unhealthy, and if you eat too much that contributes to being overweight,” said Dr. James Krieger, clinical professor of medicine at the University of Washington and executive director of Healthy Food America, an advocacy group. “But just telling people there’s a problem doesn’t solve it.”

What does solve the problem? Perhaps we might think of eating together. And of having stable homes where children and parents eat regular dinners together. It beats scarfing down fast food in front of the television set.

The experts never seem to consider that food consumption has always been a ritualized group activity. They think it’s all biochemistry. And they believe that we need but put more labels on food products… the better to warn people about sugar and fat content. 

Not so strangely, the food industry is pushing back against these unreasonable restraints. They see us entering a slippery slope where the government will take over supermarkets across the country and will only permit you to buy rabbit food—carrots and kale. 

Need I remind you that the Obama administration healthy food program caused zillions of schoolchildren to reject the healthy lunches imposed by the government, thus to feel as though they were starving... until class was over and they could race to the nearest McDonalds for a Big Mac. Did you ever think of the damage that one dumb program can do?

I need not tell you that the advanced research studies of American obesity never credit Michelle Obama's efforts to starve schoolchildren. After all, she had the right intentions. And, as America gets fatter, nothing matters more than intentions. Don't you think?

The Times continues:

While the latest survey data doesn’t explain why Americans continue to get heavier, nutritionists and other experts cite lifestyle, genetics, and, most importantly, a poor diet as factors. Fast food sales in the United States rose 22.7 percent from 2012 to 2017, according to Euromonitor, while packaged food sales rose 8.8 percent.

Increased fast food sales bespeak more eating alone. They bespeak more social anomie. 

It’s the ethics, stupid. Self-control and self-discipline are important virtues in most ethical systems. A willingness to moderate your appetites, something that occurs normally when you are eating with others, represents an important ethical virtue. Being enlightened thinkers we have placed the onus entirely on science. We imagine that we need but take over food production and lower fat content, and all will be well. The truth is, if we do not promote ethical values, values that are rational but that do not come to us from science, we will find ourselves leading the world in obesity. We believe that appetite control is bad for our mental health. We believe that we can never have too much sex. We now seem to believe that we can never eat too much either.

And yes, let’s bring back fat shaming. And let's overcome the tendency to eat alone. Otherwise, we will find ourselves facing the unenviable choice: obesity or smoking?

Overcoming Shame

This week our least favorite advice columnist Ask Polly outdoes herself. Apparently, she read the wrong book about shame and now thinks that she knows something about it. She does not.

She is not wrong to say that the letter writer’s issue is shame, but she gives the woman exactly the wrong advice. In Polly’s defense, most of our psycho professionals would give the same advice. Thus, she is conforming to the conventional stupidity, so you cannot fault her too much.

Without further ado, here is the letter. It is interesting because it gives us very little sense of what is wrong:

Having no childhood or college friends is a special kind of loneliness.

I just turned 30, and I’ve created a pretty incredible life for myself. I have a partner I love, a great job, and I’ve been making a lot of rewarding new friendships over the past few years. The problem is that I don’t have really close childhood friends. Or even college friends. I don’t have that bestfriend who’s been around for years or decades, and this bothers me more than I think it should.

The oldest friends I have pretty much all date back to the job I had after college. From childhood through college, I was going through a lot and struggling to find myself. I realize now that I had major anger and insecurity issues. I’ve been able to work most of them out since then, but in the process I grew apart from the people I was closest to when I was growing up. (This is largely because I was trying to be someone I’m not for many of those years. Coming into myself meant realizing we weren’t all that compatible.) In college I met a best friend who I truly thought was my platonic soul mate, but we fell out a few years ago. It wasn’t my choice to no longer be friends, but she sent signals that it was hers, so I respected that decision.

As happy as I am in life, I feel lonely without having an absolute best friend who remembers all the random people I’ve dated, who I pulled all nighters with in college, who I go on trips with every year. It’s not that I don’t have friends who date back that far — I do have some, but they’re not the BEST friends I feel like I’m supposed to have had for decades.

I also feel jealous because my friends who are getting married have maids of honor who they’ve been friends with since kindergarten. I worry I either won’t be important enough to make it into their bridal parties or that my bridal party will look weird with so many “recent” friends and not enough long-term ones. I generally feel like new friends really like me, but I’ll never compare to the friends who have been with them through it all. I keep telling myself not to expect to have a BEST friend ever again. Still, it’s hard to feel okay with having a bunch of great friends but no best friend who’s been there from the days I was learning how to use makeup, or who hopped around college bars with me years ago.

I’d really love some reassurance — or some tough love.

A Special Kind of Loneliness

To which Polly says that the woman is being crippled by her feelings of shame. In that, she is right. And yet, when she goes off on an extended rant against shame, she exposes the fact that there are different ways to overcome and avoid shame. Those who rant against shame are suggesting that we should all become shameless. It’s the wrong way. Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK felt no shame. Adults who tell people not to feel ashamed are encouraging children to sext images of their private parts to whomever.

As it happens, Polly has seized on one aspect of this woman’s problem, the way other people treat her. This woman feels like an outcast, a reject, a pariah. Perhaps other people have mistreated her in the past. We might imagine that since she has felt rejected in the past she feels unworthy of long term human friendships. She has lots of friends now, but she is afraid that people will discover that she did not have any friends from childhood and hold it against her.

She thinks it’s a problem. It may or may not be a problem. We really do not know enough about her to know what happened, why it happened, and where she comes from. She says nothing about family ties or about her birth community. We do not know whether her father was an embezzler or whether she grew up in a toxic cultural environment. The fact that she has not clung to her childhood friends might mean that they were useless and worthless… thus that she did well, in growing up, to toss them aside.

For all I know, she is suffering the results of social mobility. If she has discarded useless friends from her past she cannot as easily discard her family. Perhaps she fears the way her new friends will react upon meeting her family at her wedding. Again, for all we know, she might have good reason to feel that they will embarrass her. It's not as though it has never happened.

She could solve this by eloping to Las Vegas. If she excludes her family because they are peasants, she will have to explain the slight. Thus, it’s not an easy issue, but one trusts that Miss Manners will be able to show her how to finesse the issue.

One also suspects that the letter writer has landed in a culture that feels slightly alien to her. Perhaps the issue is not having friends who taught her how to put on makeup, but not having grown up practicing the social codes of her new community. If everyone around her obeys the rules naturally, she might be struggling awkwardly because it is all relatively new for her.

She fears that she will make a faux pas, exposing her familial or community roots, showing that she does not belong. Perhaps she is exaggerating, but since we know nothing about her past or her present cultural environment we cannot sensibly say.

Anyway, the solution lies in hard work to learn the new customs, to become a member of her new community. She should not take Polly's mindless advice and think that she has no reason to feel embarrassed. Her feelings of embarrassment are telling her something. If Polly refuses to listen, the letter writer should reject Polly's advice.

If she takes Polly’s mindless advice to heart, she will probably decide that she ought not to adopt the new customs, but should keep doing as she did when she was growing up. Then, she would consign herself to social oblivion. If people recognize that your new table manners are not natural to you, it means that you need to work harder on developing them… until they become second nature. Trust me, it can be done. 

I recall a text by George Friedman, from his Geopolitical Futures blog. In it he explained how, upon courting and marrying a woman from Australia, he was obliged to learn an entirely new set of table manners:

I married a woman born in Australia, of that class that emulated English culture. Loving her as I did, I did not understand the British obsession with table manners. For her, eating a bowl of soup was a work of art, a complex of motions difficult for me to master, and to me incomprehensible in purpose. From the beginning of our love, dinner became for me an exercise of obscure rules governing the movement of food to my mouth. It was a time when conversation was carefully hedged by taboos and obligations. Some things were not discussed at dinner.

The rules of high Australian society did not resemble those practiced in the Bronx, where Friedman grew up:

I grew up in the Bronx, a place of fragmented cultures, of immigrants under severe and deforming pressure. There were many cultures – few any longer authentic, all in some way at odds with each other. Meredith’s table was a place of restraint. Mine was a place of combat. The hidden message about food was to eat as much as you can as quickly as you can, because who could really know when you would eat again? The table was a place of intellectual and emotional combat, where grievances were revealed, ideas were challenged and the new world we were in was analyzed for its strangeness. The grammar of debate took precedence over digestion.

When bad manners are considered shameful, the solution is to learn good manners. Simple, easy and direct. But certainly not multiculturally correct. No wonder so many people have missed the point.

The Wisdom of Child Marchers

Happily for those of us who live in New York, our local newspaper the Times has offered some much-needed perspective about yesterday’s children’s marches.

You are well aware that children across America protested yesterday in favor of gun control. Given that the current laws were not enforced or implemented in Parkland, FL these brilliant adolescents and pre-adolescents want to shift the blame from government officials to the NRA.

Now, the Times has offered an editorial coda to it all, a remark that provides some much-needed perspective. It recalls:

… a revolutionary string of rulings by the United States Supreme Court, all of which have found that young people are “constitutionally different” from adults — their brains are still developing, their impulse control is weaker and their ability to change over time is greater.

Yes, indeed... constitutionally weaker with underdeveloped brain structure. If the Times had not brought this to our attention we might have taken the child marchers more seriously.

To be fair, The Times being the Times, was not throwing shade on the child marchers. It was trying to spring spring convicted killers from jail. You see, the Times wants the government to parole juvenile offenders who received long prison sentences for homicide. By  juvenile, it meant, in the example offered, a seventeen-year-old.

Being young and innocent, child murderers are less guilty. So says the Times. But, does this also mean that child demonstrators are less wise and less intelligent than average adults?

The Times continued:

This means that they are less guilty than adults and that their punishment must be different, especially in the case of life sentences for those convicted of murder. The “imposition of a state’s most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children,” the court said in 2012. They must be given “a meaningful opportunity” to get out; actual life sentences should be reserved for those few who exhibit “irretrievable depravity.”

America's War on Female Sexual Pleasure

The American war on female sexual pleasure proceeds apace. Out Puritanical nation is up in arms over the possibility that adult women might be having too much sex. It has taken to harassing them, criminalizing their conduct and shaming them in public.

Take the case of Alexis Mashak of Bangor, Wisconsin. A married woman, aged 27, Mashak is a middle school physical education teacher. So far, so good. Here is a picture of her in better days:

 

Of course, you are going to be thinking that young Alexis seduced one of her middle school students—most of whom are barely pubescent. But, no, that was not her crime. Her crime involved a sexual encounter with a 17-year-old male who was not her student. According to Wisconsin law, 17 is under the age of consent. Thus it represents a violation of natural law. To be truthful, the age of consent varies from country to country. It is not a moral absolute.

Anyway, we read the sordid details of what this seductive adulteress inflicted on this poor 17-year-old in the Daily Mail. Where else?

A married middle school teacher from Wisconsin is facing several charges after being accused of having sex with a high school student.

Meadowview Middle School physical education teacher Alexis Mashak, 27, of Bangor admitted to having sexual contact with a 17-year-old Sparta High School male student between November 2017 and March of this year. 

Gird your loins… it gets worse:

According to the complaint, police began investigating earlier this week after CCTV footage from the Sparta Barney Family Community Center caught Mashak kissing the student a day earlier.

The student said he met Mashak through his girlfriend and that they both worked at the Sparta Boys & Girls Club.

The pair told police they had sexual contact in his vehicle, his house and the community center, and that they shared nude photographs, according to the complaint.

Mashak is charged with child enticement, sexual assault of a child by a person who works with children and two counts of exposing genitals.

What would we do without closed circuit television. Mashak is being indicted for exposing her genitals… twice. In a culture where large percentages of young people routinely sext each other—I disapprove—she faces jail time for doing what most of her peers do on a daily basis. Apparently, her dereliction is totally horrible because… she works with children. Basically she is being treated like a sexual predator.

One can only imagine the unimaginable harm that was inflicted on this poor high school boy. One can only hope and pray that he will one day be about to overcome the traumas that were inflicted on him.

For the record, here’s a picture of Mashak after she got caught. It's an interesting before and after comparison.

Was she ashamed of what she did or horrified at being caught. By the way, one suspects that her husband was none too happy to hear about this… assuming that he did not know already. With the millennial generation, never know.

The Red Guards Take Over Mount Holyoke College

Just when you thought that it can’t be that bad, it gets worse. Just when you thought that the university system has not completely abandoned its mission to teach, we find a major American college indulging in the most brain dead form of political correctness. 

Here, we are not talking about its indulging some tenured professorial crank, some radical dimwit who refuses to be categorized as either male or female who thinks that his or her or its goal in life is to advance the new campus cultural revolution. We are talking about policy, the policy laid down by a one venerable and venerated educational institution, Mount Holyoke College.

Once a beacon for educating women, Mount Holyoke's administrators have found a way to make complete fools of themselves and to devalue the college's degrees. Keep this in mind, whatever you think of the nonsense coming from the Mount Holyoke administration, the attendant publicity will stigmatize the degrees its students hope to receive.

In the name of supporting trans and non-binary students, the college has handed out some new classroom guidelines. Charlotte Hays leads us through the thicket of stupidity. She begins by quoting the new instructions:

Pass around an attendance sheet, asking students to write their names, their roster names (if different), and their pronouns.

Pass out index cards or first-day surveys, asking students to write their names, their roster names (if different), and their pronouns. Some professors also ask for other relevant information, like Year, Major, Languages, Anything I Should Know (Commuter, Student Athlete, Coming to See Me About Accommodations), Why Are You Taking This Course, and so on.

Don’t assume you can tell what pronouns someone uses based on their appearance.

When you begin the semester acknowledging that pronouns and names matter, students are more likely to feel comfortable in your class, and thus be able to focus on the material you’re teaching.

To each her own pronouns. Or is it, to each his or her own pronouns. Why not simplify the problem by making everyone equal: to each it’s own pronouns.

So, a teacher must remember the preferred pronouns of each student. Each student must remember which pronouns to use with every other student. Has it crossed anyone's mind that this is wildly wasteful... undermining social organization and putting us on the path to anarchy. 

It takes a complete fool to pretend that this exercise in mind control, this offense to the English language, will help the students to focus on the material being taught. Being afraid of using the wrong-- that is, the grammatically correct pronoun-- will not help anyone to focus on the material.

So, the night riders of the thought police believe that they are creating a congenial learning environment. They have not stopped at the classroom. They have extended their policing to everyday language—the better to practice mind control, or better, mind suppression.

The college continues:

• When discussing the student body, say ‘Mount Holyoke students’ rather than ‘Mount Holyoke women.’
• Avoid making statements like ‘We’re all women here...’, or referring to ‘...the two genders...’
• Invite your students to let you know if you misgender them so that you can avoid doing so in the future.
• Use gender neutral language whenever possible, but certainly in your syllabus and other general written communication.

In what used to be a distinguished women’s college, you are no longer allowed to identify as a woman. You must use gender-neutered language. The school will reduce all of its students to Its. Surely, this will solve the problem. And what will said teachers do when they assign material, be it literature or philosophy, that fails to follow the school’s indoctrination manual? How much time will teachers spend apologizing for Shakespeare, or will the bard be banned for using incorrect pronouns? And what about Jane Austen? Surely, she did not use neutered pronouns. Will they simply erase all literary and philosophical works from the syllabus, limiting themselves to the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. Though to be fair, their new versions will have been authored by Chairperson Mao or by Chair Mao. 

Just when you thought it can’t get worse, it did. The college administrators added a note about what is now called intersectionality. If this does not seem to be radical leftist claptrap, I don’t know what does. It would be amusing if it were not being imposed on students and faculty, without their being able to dissent. They can happily disrespect the flag, but they have no right to misuse pronouns. That is to follow the rules of English grammar. It doesn't take a triple digit IQ to see the madness here.

What is intersectionality? I am glad you asked? Mount Holyoke defines it as thus:

We are all located at the intersection of multiple identities. That is, there is no single African-American, female, cisgender, working class, or first-generation experience. Taking an intersectional approach to our classrooms means becoming aware of the multiple forms of oppression and privilege each individual faces and how they interact with one another. Two transgender students from different class or racial backgrounds are going to have different perspectives and life experiences, even though they have one identity in common. An intersectional approach attunes faculty and staff to the wide range of experiences in our student body, allowing them to better support students as they navigate their time at Mount Holyoke.

Hays points out that in the old days, having multiple identities meant having multiple personality disorder, as in The Three Faces of Eve or Sybil.

It used to be that we were all Americans. It used to be that we were all students at this or that college or university. Now, Mount Holyoke College has regressed to a reactionary past where people belong to multiple pagan cults, each with its own rules and its own customs and its own passwords. One suspects that Holyoke is not alone.

We draw the only correct conclusion. Don’t send you daughters to Mount Holyoke. Don’t contribute any money to Mount Holyoke. If your child is already a student at that accursed place, withdraw her immediately. If you are an executive recruiter, cross Mount Holyoke off your list.

As we and many others have often mentioned, this madness will not stop until the alumni and alumnae stand up and call a halt to it… with their money.

If all of America’s universities are doing the same, we are doomed.