Some right-wing hysteria for a change.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has published 95 “elaborations” to help teachers relate elements of the Australian curriculum to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. I have no idea why those chose 95 or why they used “elaboration” when the alternative term “case study” or even just “example” may have been less provocative (it sounds like someone higher up is a bit full of it). In any case, this has some of the right or leaning right-wing in what seems a bit of an unnecessary lather.

Tim Blair sees it as the intrusion of racial politics into science classes. His article is eminently reasonable and contains many good arguments:

A test tube doesn’t care who holds it. A scientific theory doesn’t care who formulates it. The first atom to be split didn’t care if that act was carried out by a woman in Bangladesh or by 46-year-old New Zealander Ernest Rutherford, who accomplished this remarkable breakthrough in 1917.

…

we are clearly moving away from a clear-eyed, empirical attitude towards science at a time when student elsewhere around the world are stepping up their scientific awareness.

Tim also mentions equally frothy reactions from Kevin Donnelly and Warren Mundine, Elsewhere the Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist was provoking people who are simply incapable of not taking the bait (how much advertising for the Daily Telegraph is done by perpetually outraged people that HATE it?):

‘Science is science. It is based on empirical data and the scientific method and nothing else. Also, here’s a racist cartoon we drew to mock Indigenous science.’ pic.twitter.com/aH3uVOAgez

— Pearson In The Wind (@LukeLPearson) November 1, 2018

Wow, this must be a very serious new front in the culture wars! The indigenous lobby has hijacked the Australian curriculum!

Except that is not at all what the Authority published or proposed. All they have done is issue case studies related to indigenous cultures or histories that can be used to investigate aspects of the curriculum. It doesn’t mandate that teachers must pretend that indigenous science is something other than what it is, it just gives teachers other (optional) ways to illustrate scientific concepts.

For example, one part of the curriculum is:

Students learn how scientific
understanding, including models
and theories, is contestable and
is refined over time through a
process of review by the scientific
community (ACSHE157)

And teachers can choose to use as a case study:

Students can investigate how fire
research has evaluated the effects
of traditional Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples’ fire regimes
and how these findings have
influenced fire management
policy throughout Australia

I understand that this will be mishandled by many Australian teachers. The mostly well-meaning but equally incapable people who taught at my under-resourced school weren’t able to handle the curriculum before and they certainly won’t be able to handle it being even more complicated. And there’s no doubt that some of the more enthusiastic woke teachers of the new generation will take this as an invitation to further romanticise the magical indigenous peoples. But that is an entirely different discussion about some of the more serious problems in the Australian education system. All in all, this seems to be much ado about absolutely nothing.

Anyway, this is the culture wars, so I’m sure two camps will form and the hysteria will intensify.

This is an interesting article, but I’m sharing it specifically for this concluding comment:

To well-heeled Remainers who live away from cities – Sir Max lives in a country town in Berkshire, I believe – it may seem infra dig[*] to complain about changed communities, but it too often seems to be people who live in areas virtually untouched by mass immigration and multiculturalism who are the most evangelical about imposing it on others. See the Chipping Norton Remainer set.

Which is to an extent the case in Germany too.

* I had to look this up: according to Wiktionary it is a colloquialism meaning “beneath one’s dignity” (from Latin: infra dignitatem).

Maybe I’ve just become reactionary, because this sort of thing, although trivial, really does irritate me:

Lets get rid of the apostrophe

I do feel sorry for the author, he is ginger and his parents named him “Tiger” (or he chose that for himself, but he mostly doesn’t look transgender?). But even if his parents/nature cursed him, the article* still grates. His argument, which is almost buried in rationalisations, is that the apostrophe should be abolished because it can be abolished.

I’m not opposed to change, and I understand that language can and must change. I’m also not really a stickler for English grammar. I never learnt it and I frequently misuse and abuse it (look at anything I write). But I do appreciate that there is a framework of correctness which can be turned to when necessary, and I reject utterly the notion that language must be simplified to accommodate the illiterate. I hate the idea, for example, that someone would take the worst of my mongrel, semi-bogan English and form rules from it. I’m firmly of the view that language, like most things, needs to follow the best and the brightest.

The apostrophe is, anyway, one of the easiest things about English. There are only three reasons why someone would be unable to use apostrophes correctly (I don’t mean typos):

1. they are too stupid, not that there is anything wrong with that.
2. they don’t care to learn the rules.
3. they are to lazy to apply what they know.

Which means that it is not the apostrophe specifically that stupid and lazy people struggle with. They struggle with apostrophes because stupid and lazy people will always struggle with something. Reforming apostrophes won’t change that, it will just move them on to something else to struggle with. This is the sort of quest that can never end. Even if we degenerate to pointing and grunting, there will still be morons who cannot point and grunt.

Why does the ABC publish this sort of crap and why did someone (presumably) get paid for it?

* The literary in-group always call these things “pieces”. Did you see the piece I wrote for Wankers Quarterly? / A lovely piece by Aggie, she always writes so beautifully. / A little piece I put together in the wake of the social media outrage of last Monday. / Here’s a nice piece that takes a deep-dive into the salient issues:

the ABC commissioned roslyn petelin to respond (?) to the piece i wrote yesterday https://t.co/XPr34DEtv5

— Tiger Webb (@tfswebb) October 31, 2018

I previously mocked the twitterati for their reaction to the former Australian Minister for Education and Training exercising the lightest of oversight in vetoing some of the worst research proposals put to him by the Australian Research Council.

Not to be outdone, the author of a proposal (Double Crossings: post-Orientalist arts at the Strait of Gibraltar, LOL) that was specifically mentioned by the former Minister has now unloaded a dummy spit of his own (Fairfax of course, they won’t say no to such top-shelf content!). I’m not sure if the title is his or if the Fairfax sub-editor is responsible:

I kicked a winning goal only to have the minister disallow it

Oh, honey!

In any case, the article only seems to give the Minister more credibility. We now know that as well as putting together a research proposal that seems a waste of money on the face of it, the author himself is also definitely a spoilt, smug, crybaby. Not only can he not imagine that his work would not be adored by everyone else (not sure if the typo is his or Fairfax’s):

It’s ironic to see academic endevours double crossed by a minister for education who dismissed them on the basis of a nine-word title.

He also writes an entire “article” that whinges at some detail about he was entitled to his money, without – not even once – talking about the value of his work or why the Australian public should fund his hobby. I was not really a fan of Simon Birmingham, but I have to give him some credit for seeing through this entitled wanker and his attempt to fleece the public.

Today in transgender propaganda, a reminder that a young boy that hugs his dad emphatically is a lovely girl trapped in a sissy boy’s body (and presumably should proceed to the end goal of transgenderism: chemical and surgical castration and mutilation). The creators of the show should be praised, because this is actually a fairly realistic depiction of proponents of this madness: unnecessary and arbitrary regulation  of “male” and “female” behaviours, a very young child made up (WTF?), parents with not even half a brain between them, and overall a nonsense belief system that is clearly ridiculous to anyone who is not in the cult.

I have been thinking about it for a long time, and these days I am pretty sure: it is time to drop the T from LGBT. This is an awful, abusive religion that is ruining lives, and has nothing at all to do with gays, lesbians, or bisexual people.

A new journey begins for Maxine.
The finale of #Butterfly Tonight 9pm @ITV pic.twitter.com/Btbgyj5WJT

— ITV (@ITV) October 28, 2018

This and other variations on this theme have been doing the rounds on social media:

I don’t know where this comedian gets her numbers, but I couldn’t find a reputable source that’s publishing numbers like this in real-time. It might be better to wait until the complete picture is published (perhaps next year), but if your intention is to be hysterical and foment something, then why bother taking a rational approach?

In the meantime, the suggestion is that women are the victims of an out-of-control killing spree, and that no-one cares. The implication that no-one cares is obviously ridiculous. Most people do care about murder, especially in context. And Australian people as a rule are specifically very touchy about men who are violent to women. Though there are cultures and sub-cultures that tolerate or encourage violence against women (the comedian probably doesn’t know or care about that), in most pockets of Australia, even many of the roughest, men who beat or kill women are considered degenerate.

In any case, women are much less likely to be murdered in Australia than men are:

The majority (70%) of victims of Murder were male (141 victims). Less than a third of Murder victims in 2017 were female (30% or 61 victims), this was the lowest number recorded since the beginning of the time series in 2010.

78,051 women died in 2017. Which means that murder was the cause of about 0.08% of deaths.

Of course this is unacceptable, but is the hysterical reaction really fitting? Diabetes, for example, caused the deaths of 2,256 women, or roughly 37x the number of murders. If we can trust Diabetes Australia:

Type 2 diabetes is associated with modifiable lifestyle risk factors.

…

[and] represents 85–90 per cent of all cases of diabetes

At 85%, preventable diabetes kills roughly 31x as many women as murder does. Where is the meme for that?