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"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Is Your Kid a Weirdo?

Posted on | November 21, 2015 | 146 Comments

 

America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people. Evidence indicates that the population of kooks and freaks is rapidly increasing, and there are simply not enough sane people to keep the weirdos under control. Especially among the under-30 demographic, the United States is struggling to cope with the proliferation of dangerous perverts, drug addicts, psychotics and Ivy League liberal arts majors:

A student at Columbia University is urging the school to inject more diversity into its required courses, claiming she suffered severe emotional trauma from reading too many books by and about white people.
Columbia students and faculty gathered Wednesday night for a panel discussion on “Race, Ethnicity, and University Life.” . . .
One of the panelists at the event was black Columbia student Nissy Aya. Aya was supposed to graduate in 2014, but instead is only on track to receive her degree in 2016. That, Aya says, demonstrates “how hard it has been for me to get through this institution” . . .
Aya attributed some of her academic troubles to the trauma of having to take Columbia’s current Core Curriculum, which requires students to take a series of six classes with a focus on the culture and history of Western, European civilization. . . .
“It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes,” she said. “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

If you can afford to attend Columbia University (annual tuition $51,008), you are not an oppressed victim of society. A student at an elite university who believes she is being “traumatized” by the curriculum is delusional — she is demented, deranged, mad, zany, wacky, off her rocker, and a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Everybody knows that Columbia attracts fruitcakes and dingbats. The alumni include Megan McCain and Barack Obama, after all. Unfortunately, this weirdo trend is not limited to the Ivy League elite. A poll finds that 40% of “Millennials” (ages 18-34) support prohibiting “statements that are offensive to minorities.” Everything written by “powerful, white men” (Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Hume, Locke, Madison, Burke, et al.) might eventually be banned as “hate speech,” in order to avoid “traumatizing” fragile neurotics like Nissy Aya.

Parents need to be aware that their children could be swept up in this pandemic insanity, which is highly contagious. Monitor your child’s psychological health by asking questions like, “Are you victimized by oppressive gender norms?” and, “Do you need a trigger warning before you read Shakespeare?” If a kid answers “yes” to questions like that — or if they dye their hair cerulean blue and start whining about “objectification” in video games — this indicates your child may be at risk of becoming a weirdo afflicted with Special Snowflake™ Syndrome.

Characteristically, these weirdos believe they are entitled to whatever they want, whether it is a Columbia diploma or better media “representation” of their sexual identity. The Special Snowflake™ is typically a privileged young person who identifies as a victim, either because of their race, their sexual orientation, or whatever mental illness (depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.) they self-diagnosed based on a list of symptoms they read on a  blog. Your kid may seem perfectly fine — an honor student with lots of friends, cheerfully involved in extracurricular activities — and then quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, she starts moping around, wearing bizarre clothes, and grumbling about how she’s oppressed by the patriarchy.

Consider the case of a teenage girl, the daughter of two successful lawyers, who became convinced she was a victim of society:

I’ve never felt quite like a woman, but I’ve never wanted to be a man, either. . . .
I discovered my mistake one day in junior school, when a few of the girls in my class were chatting about what boys they fancied. . . . Even back then, there was something odd about me, a strangeness . . .
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would be both interesting and true. So I mentioned that I often felt like I was a gay boy in a girl’s body. Just like everyone else, right?
I could tell from their faces that this was not right. It was very, very wrong. . . .
I often wished I was a lesbian. But I almost always fancied boys, and if you fancied boys, you had to behave like a girl. And behaving like a girl was the one subject, apart from sports, that I always failed. . . .
I was anorexic for large parts of my childhood and for many complex, painful, altogether common reasons, of which gender dysphoria was just one. I felt trapped by the femaleness of my body, by my growing breasts and curves. Not eating made my periods stop. It made my breasts disappear. On the downside, it also turned me into a manic, suicidal mess, forced me to drop out of school, and traumatized my entire family.
At 17, I wound up in the hospital, in an acute eating disorders ward, where I stayed for six months. . . .
I was bisexual, and I was very much hoping that one day when I wasn’t quite so weird and sad I’d be able to test the theory in practice. . . .
I got better. . . . I left the trauma of the hospital far behind me and tried to cover up my past with skirts and makeup. . . .
At 24, I wrote columns about abortion rights and sexual liberation, and books about how to live and love under capitalist patriarchy. In response, young women wrote to me on a regular basis telling me that my work helped inspire them to live more freely in their femaleness. They admired me because I was a “strong woman.” Would I be betraying those girls if I admitted that half the time, I didn’t feel like a woman at all? . . .
Only when we recognize that “manhood” and “womanhood” are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism, of misogyny, of the way we are all worked over by gender in the end. . . .
Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.

 

Yes, Laurie Penny became “genderqueer,” and is now one of the World’s Most Famous Victims of Heteropatriarchal Oppression.

Victimhood can be quite a lucrative racket for a privileged Special Snowflake™ like Laurie Penny (who graduated from Oxford University and recently completed a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard) but most weirdos cannot cash in so easily on their grandiose delusions of persecution. In fact, a kid who succumbs to this entitlement mentality could get arrested in Pocatello, Idaho:

An Idaho school was placed on lockdown after a student threatened to “kill all the girls” because none of them would send him nude photos.
A 15-year-old boy was charged with one count each of threatening violence at a school and telephone harassment in connection with the threats — which spread quickly across social media Wednesday morning and were then reported to officials at the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District.
Police immediately initiated a controlled access code at Highland High School as officers investigated the threat.
“Some kid who was having attention problems with specifically the cheerleaders, didn’t get nudes,” said student Isaac Gomez. . . .
A screenshot posted online by KIDK-TV appears to show a text message conversation between the teen and a friend who tries to talk the boy out of his violent plot, which he intended to carry out about 9:30 a.m. Friday.
“(I’m) serious I have a 12 gauge shotgun and a 9 mm pistol I will bring and start killing everyone,” one message said. “I also have hunting knives I can bring.” . . .
Additional messages between the teen and his friend suggested his motivation for wanting to kill girls at his school.
“This,” the friend texted, “Over freaking nudes? Dude.”
“Because no one will give any to me,” the teen complained. “Every one hates me. And I hate (one particular girl). And I will kill myself after.”

You see the pattern? Nissy Aya is “traumatized” because Columbia University requires her to read about white males. Laurie Penny is “traumatized” because of the gender that society “violently imposed” on her. And this 15-year-old boy in Pocatello, Idaho, was traumatized because the cheerleaders wouldn’t send him any freaking nudes.

Weirdos have always been dangerous, but now the weirdos are trying to take over society — in the Ivy League, at BuzzFeed, in Idaho — and there are not enough normal people to stop them.

These weirdos are not victims of society. They are the products of inadequate parenting, and our civilization is slowly being destroyed because of the petulant tantrums of whiny brats whose parents lacked the courage to tell their spoiled offspring that the world is not obligated to indulge your hurt feelings. When adults abdicate authority, children never learn to respect others or accept personal responsibility. And so the “broken people” are everywhere nowadays . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Can you guess the favorite presidential candidate of Generation Weirdo?




 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Comments

146 Responses to “Is Your Kid a Weirdo?”

  1. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 8:45 am

    Not so much rich himself as a free-loader who was able to mooch off some rich people.
    That’s no doubt what they like about him.

  2. megapotamus
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 9:39 am

    Unreality crept in long ago. We shall make something from nothing and give it to you, The People while we take a fraction of what you make from something and feather our nests. The benefit will redound to you. Well, to us a bit….

  3. Tom LeBleu
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 11:02 am

    I wanted one of those but could only afford the Atari 400 with its bubbly keyboard. Still allowed BASIC and assembler programming along with “Star Raiders”

    Related to this article, we are about to send our first to Hillsdale. I would think that institution would have vastly more applications from normal, bright kids who are uninterested in fighting against the loony indoctrination typical on most Ivy league and other elite campuses.

  4. DrGreatCham
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 11:12 am

    Speaking to this topic:

    http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hirsi-ali-slams-feminisms-trivial-bs/article/2556419#.VlFV6NuOfmx.twitter

  5. JosephBleau
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 11:31 am

    My kids aren’t weirdos, but I haven’t sent them off to college yet. I doubt it will turn them into weirdos, but I don’t relish the thought of the forced confessions of white male cis-het privileges they will go through. I still have a couple years to decide to tell the first one whether to just go along and get it over with so he can get on with his math, science and finance classes, or to tell them to F Off.

  6. bashg
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:02 pm

    So true. Good writing.

  7. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:30 pm

    She’s just clean and articulate. Or so says Joe Biden.

  8. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:32 pm

    Or Valerie Jarrett. Or Loretta Lynch. Or Michelle Obama. Or Condi Rice. Or Mia Love.

  9. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:35 pm

    Spoken like somebody who doesn’t have a mantle covered in participation trophies…

  10. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:39 pm

    Nothing wrong with vocational school, or a few years in the military (if they are psychologically and emotionally suited for it).

    I knew plenty of people in the service who tried college earlier and muffed it, then enlisted. After one or two hitches, they went back to school and sailed through thanks to the maturity, self discipline and purpose they had found.

  11. Jeanette Victoria
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:56 pm

    I built a lot of stuff by Heathkit to bad they aren’t around anymore

  12. TheOldMan
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 1:01 pm

    Using the black marker line as a guide helped you get your deck close to the correct order. Then you could do local card number checking.

  13. Hillary: ‘All Sexual Abuse Accusers Deserve To Be Believed’; Bill Victim Agrees | Regular Right Guy
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 1:17 pm

    […] Is Your Kid a Weirdo? […]

  14. Mogumbo Gono
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 1:20 pm

    I’m so old I remember when pay phones had ratcheting dials…

  15. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 3:51 pm

    Yep!

  16. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 3:53 pm

    Yeah. Engels supported him. Engels was rich and privileged.

  17. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 3:57 pm

    If you wanna be white, just commit a crime. You’ll be there instantly.

  18. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:01 pm

    Star Raiders was the most important thing on the Atari 400.

  19. Daniel Freeman
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:03 pm

    Of course not. They’re in a box somewhere, if they haven’t been thrown out yet. I neither know nor care.

  20. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:05 pm

    Univac 1500? You are older than dirt!
    Seriously, I never saw a PDP 11 with a card reader. I used both 11/34 and an 11/70 with RSTS-e. The only people I saw with Univac 1500s was the Navy. They put them on ships as that was the only system that would stand up to ship board use at the time (early 70s).

  21. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:06 pm

    Marx never worked an honest day in his life … which is another thing these people like about him, since they also don’t want to do an honest day’s work.

  22. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

    Bill Godbout used to play with people’s minds in the early 80s when he hooked a graphics screen to his “boat anchor” system and run IBM software on it. People accused him of having it hooked to a VAX to run the demos he used to show at various shows and conferences.

    Sadly, his company is gone. Went from Godbout Electronics to Compupro to Viasyn, then death. He did some really good stuff.

  23. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:09 pm

    I don’t see the Woz as making such a statement.

  24. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:10 pm

    110 baud current loop. I used teletypes quite a bit in the early 70s.

  25. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:10 pm

    My code-decks had marker lines in many colors. If I recall correctly, I’d mark important subroutines, or major modifications, with different colors.
    But I used punched numbers and a card sorter to resort dropped decks.

  26. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:11 pm

    They are, but they don’t make kits anymore.

  27. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:12 pm

    Oh yes! Of course, if your deck is contained in 3 shoe boxes, you’ll be screwed no matter what. I’ve seen programs that big.

  28. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:13 pm

    That didn’t work for me. The place I started still had card sorter available. Tenn Tech didn’t.

  29. Daniel Freeman
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:14 pm

    Definitely not the former. I would recommend the latter, but with a vengeance.

    That is to say, he should be aggressive about refusing to make a false confession. He should be willing to threaten to sue everyone in sight, and willing to follow through on it, for both unequal treatment based on race and sex leading to an uncomfortable environment, and also disrespect of his religion (which prohibits bearing false witness, including against yourself).

    But he would have to be ready to hold frame, never back down, make them blink first, hit back twice as hard and make the rubble bounce. Otherwise he should just find a school that doesn’t do crypto-Marxist struggle sessions.

  30. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:32 pm

    The Navy called the 1500 the AN/UYK-5 (pronounced “Yuck 5”). We had a 1500 at Supply Corps School, but my first ship had the AYK-7 running a program to simulate the 5.

    At UCSD we had PDP-10s and 11s. It may have been the 10s that took the punch cards. I also recall people (not me) using the teletype interface.

    As a minor DEC related bit of trivia, one of the Atari 16-bit magazines in the ’80s was Analog. It got named because the office was down the street from Digital, so the staff thought it was an apt joke. Eventually they got tired of people explaining to them that the Ataris were digital computers, so they retroactively put periods in between the letters and said it stood for “Atari Newsletter And Lots Of Games.”

  31. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:39 pm

    I was thinking about having “I Am Special!” tattooed on my forehead.

    Haven’t yet because I’m torn between having it done backwards so I can read it in the mirror or forwards so everybody else knows it.

  32. Steve Skubinna
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 4:41 pm

    SJWs are all cowards. That’s why they form mobs so readily. Even still, one person with guts can always face down a cowardly mob.

  33. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 5:57 pm

    Stay the H3!l out of the military. It’s worse than crypto-marxist struggle sessions. It has become so PC that enduring it will be one long vexation, and they have the law behind them to force you to comply. The military is not worth it any longer. He will deeply regret his time in the current PC/SJW military. And the SJW on steroids.

  34. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 5:59 pm

    Feminism is now the true war on women. Feminism is a totally lost cause and should be abandoned. There is no redemption for it.

  35. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 6:02 pm

    Well, dihydrogen monoxide is dangerous stuff.

  36. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 6:06 pm

    We used to have to enter a jump instruction, then the upper byte, then the lower byte of the address to jump to with an Mits Altauir 8800 or and Imsai 8080 to boot the system. The early S-100 days were a wonderful time to live through.

  37. Quartermaster
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 6:12 pm

    The Univac we had on Sylvania when I went aboard at the end of 1973 was labeled Univac 1500. NAVMACLANT, where my wife was originally assigned, also had one and it was labeled the same. I never heard it referred to as you refer to it.

    I once saw a PDP-8 displayed as a relic. Never saw a PDP-10, but saw the PDPs I listed. The computer science department had the 34 at Tenn Tech, but later got a baby VAX, as did the Physics department. When I left Tech in ’92, the computer center had 3 VAXen. They went from being resource impoverished in ’83, to having an embarrassment of riches in ’92.

    I hated seeing DEC go under. I really hated hearing the HP bought them.

  38. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 7:31 pm

    I think the operators used a deck of punched cards to boot this relic Univac — it had a card reader, a card puncher, a line printer, four tape drives, and a tiny, tiny bit of memory — on which ran *all* the city’s business, both city government and utility billings and collections and payroll for both.

    There was a newer Univac with harddrives and an IMS system sending info to terminals in the Utility office. But it was just for show — every evening, tapes were created on the old system and used to modify the data in the databases on the newer system.

  39. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 7:35 pm

    I maintained a couple of programs that were at least three feet long.

  40. Dave
    November 24th, 2015 @ 12:08 am

    Your use of “weird” as a pejorative is a micro aggression to me. Please stop.

  41. Dave
    November 24th, 2015 @ 12:08 am

    Damn. Wrong ID. I usually post as Weirddave. Ruined the joke.

  42. RobertM
    November 24th, 2015 @ 3:25 am

    Heck, I remember when a computer was a piece of paper and a pencil!

    So THERE!

  43. Gunga
    November 24th, 2015 @ 9:36 am

    I vividly remember the sight of a Chinese student sitting in a sea of punchcards weeping after spending the night in the computer lab…only to have the wind instantly destroy what was clearly weeks of work. The word “inconsolable” is insufficient to describe his state and to say that it sent a chill down my spine is like saying that the Titanic had some trouble on its maiden voyage. Rule 7 – rubber bands are not optional.

  44. Max Blancke
    November 24th, 2015 @ 12:06 pm

    Here is my contribution. I have a son in college, working on a degree in Emergency Medicine, with plans to go into the Military as a surgeon. He hates communism, as he learned all he needs to know about it from his Grandfather, who spent two years in a Chinese prison camp. He stays as far as he can from the politics at school, but thinks the leftists are a bunch of deluded morons. He holds black belts in Karate and Kendo, which he studied in Japan. His senior project ( at a public high school in the south ) was designing a silent trigger and bolt mechanism for use with suppressed rifles, made with the addition of teflon and composite materials.
    He is my kid, and I am proud of him. I probably don’t deserve as much credit as I like to take for how he is turning out. But it is important to know that there are a bunch of kids like him. He is in one of the schools that has been in the news for the silly protests. He does not know any of those people, and has not personally seen the protests. All the good kids go far out of their way to avoid that crap. It is a tiny percentage of students that are making all the noise and fuss. The vast majority are there to work hard to obtain the knowledge of science, engineering, or medicine that will enable them to contribute in a positive way to the world.

  45. Daniel Freeman
    November 25th, 2015 @ 7:09 pm

    It has literally killed people!

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