Here Are Some Things Open Thread

The most frequently misused words in English.

The entries that helped me were adverse -- nope, you can't use it to mean "inclined against;" that's averse (no "d") -- and enormity. Enormity, I was surprised to learn, is not just about dimension, but moral badness: It would be wrong to say "the enormity of his success." You can only use it to mean enormous evil.

Who knew?

The Yazidi Slave Girls and Boko Haram Child Brides were very heartened to see American feminists taking a such a strong stand against the important issue of asking women to smile.

This idiot is trolling the world by starting a GoFundMe fundraiser to combat his daughter's future anticipated pay gap. Not for his son of course, though.

Evan Sayet's old essay on his conclusions after years of struggling to figure out why liberals made excuses for the 9/11 terrorists: because they've been taught there's no such thing as good or evil, or of one thing being better than another, so any proof of one thing being evil (or worse than something else) must be met with hysterical babblings about root causes or chickens coming home to roost.

By the way: All liberals think they themselves are better, and the things they themselves think are good, and that people who disagree with them are evil; but they apply this nothing-is-better-than-anything-else line of thinking to disputes having nothing to do with them (such as the dispute between murderous jihadists and Americans -- they don't really consider themselves American, you know).

Long essay (which I was trying to digest and excerpt before giving up) suggesting that Political Correctness/microagression culture taught in college is actually psychologically damaging students, warping their thinking, and making them mentally ill-- by a guy from FIRE and that Jonathan Haidt guy, at the Atlantic.

The idea is that just as cognitive therapy teaches people to not make a big deal out of trivialities (like teaching people who have a phobia about elevators to learn to not be afraid of elevators), microagression brain-programming is a malicious form of cognitive therapy teaching people the exact opposite -- to fear this, hate that, fly off the handle about this other thing, and generally carry on like a lunatic about things that sane people do not even think about.

And just as the good form of cognitive therapy can make a hysteric or neurotic a well-functioning individual, so can the insidious form of it turn a well-functioning individual into a hysteric or neurotic.

I think it's 100% right and I'm glad someone had the guts to say so.

Colleges and progressives generally are teaching young people how to be mentally ill.

posted by Ace at 07:26 PM

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