Wokeworld this week offered up an embarrassment of riches as work continues apace on dismantling reason in favour of dumbing down and woke ideologies. I’ll leave the discussion of Australia’s own vegan vigilantes to Bill Muehlenberg here but you need two know this sample of stories from around the globe.

Trigger warning: reading these stories may leave you with a violent urge to bang your head against the nearest wall.

School sores

Britain

In Britain schools are removing “analogue” clocks from examination halls and replacing them with digital alternatives because teenagers are unable to tell the time. That’s right, teenagers sitting exams for GCSE and A-levels (school leavers, to Australian) to presumably test their intelligence, analytical and mathematical skills can’t even read the clock on the wall. They’re so dumbed down by their dependence on digital devices they’ve lost the important real-world mathematical skills that we exercise every time we use 12 numbers and the positions of the big hand and the little hand to understand the time.

But rather than declaring a crisis of education authorities have instead opted to make life easier for the students, and the proctors who have to keep telling kids the time, by swapping out the familiar round face of a clock for a digital box. Indeed Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) warns that having a traditional clock in the room could be the cause of unnecessary stress.

This is obviously a wonderful preparation for life at a modern British university with safe spaces and no triggering. They’ll be spared memories of the emotional trauma caused by struggling with those menacing big and little hands and, God forbid, patriarchal and imperialist Roman numerals.

Australia

Here at home the fun police have struck again and we have primary school triggering to worry about. It was reported this week that the battlers at Mosman Public School has now banned primary school children from handing out birthday party invitations at school. Parents:

Now have to send party invitations to their children’s classmates via email to avoid anyone not invited from getting upset or offended. They were also advised by the school via email to discourage their children from discussing planned festivities while at school.

Argentina

In Argentina, however, things have gone from just dumb and triggered to downright sick. As Argentinians prepared for the celebration of Easter a group of feminist teachers in La Matanza, Buenos Aires, handed out green sugarcoated treats resembling Easter eggs to children. And what’s the matter with that? Only that in a twisted parody the cute eggs bore the motto Aborto Ya! (Have an abortion already) as part of a wider effort they called Abort the little surprise.

This comes only weeks after a proud mother posted a photo of her pre-pubescent daughter crushing a baby doll with her foot at a pro-abortion rally in the same city.

There are no depths too low to be plumbed by these crazed ideologues who perversely insist on secularisation, as if their own beliefs don’t fit within a warped but clearly defined system of faith and worship.

POC marks

A recent casting call for an ensemble play in New York City had one commentator scratching his head. Details about the production were listed on the Backstage website, with some woke pearls of wisdom clearly standing out.

Rehearsal details included:

Please note we are working on organizing a short (three – four hour) anti-racism training for the creative team and ensemble in April – to help us address power dynamics and reduce harm within the creative process. This training will be open to all ensemble members and creative team members, but will be mandatory only for white ensemble/creatives.

Under Compensation was the following:

Pays a small stipend (minimum $150) for the spring workshop period. Due to the content of this particular project, resources are being allocated in favor of POC collaborators. This means that POC artists will receive a larger stipend than the white artists working on this project.

Racism is alive and well and living at a theatre in NYC.

Cyclist substitute

You always know that what follows will be woke when a news report begins with “Academics have suggested that… “.

Our very own news.com and other outlets around the world introduced us to a joint study by Monash University and Queensland University of Technology – Dehumanization of cyclists predicts self-reported aggressive behaviour toward them: A pilot study.

You can read more about this masterwork here. But for those wanting just the facts, the study of 442 people proposes a link between the dehumanisation of cyclists and acts of aggression towards them, based on participants’ responses to dehumanizing statements and ranking cyclists on a specially-constructed insect-to-human evolutionary scale.

Apparently 55 per cent of non-cycling respondents saw cyclists as less than human, but in an interesting twist that shows you should be careful about how tight that helmet is, 30 per cent of cyclist respondents described cyclists as less than human, too.

The big outcome of the study however is the call from Professor Narelle Haworth to use the term ‘people who ride bikes’, rather than ‘cyclist’, as a step towards getting rid of their dehumanization. You should keep that in mind the next time you’re blocked by a coterie of lycra-clad ‘people who ride bikes’ riding three abreast in front of you as they live out their Sunday morning Tour de France fantasies.

I think on a scale that ranks people from cockroach to human there are some professions that would fare far worse than cyclists. Politicians, car salespeople, lawyers and journalists must all be in need of a humanizing name reboot. Suggestions, anyone?

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