When satire is indistinguishable from reality

From Ken White we have a Leaked Northwestern University Email States Rules For Title IX Investigations which includes this among other things:

Classes on the American court system, civil rights and civil liberties, and criminal justice may continue so long as professors emphasize to their students that they are participating an an anthropological study of a profoundly sexist and cisgender-biased system and that no positive normative judgment is intended.

I’m in complete agreement with commenter AddictionMyth who said:

I understand that satire is protected by the First Amendment. But this was insufficiently parodic to avoid being confusing. At least, I didn’t laugh. Not once.

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22 thoughts on “When satire is indistinguishable from reality

  1. I want to start a list of words I want to ban from use in my presence. I’m going to start with anything that starts with “cis-” as a prefix. I will also add “normative,” “sexist,” “mysigonist” (and all its variants), “microaggression,” and any combination of “social justice.” All these hippie phrases being pushed out by the left and academia are giving me heartburn. What words would you add?

    • “Check your…” unless it be “check your Progressivism” or some variation thereof.

      • I will accept contextual variations, on a limited basis. 😉

    • Cis is actually an important term to keep around. It means someone who is not transsexual. This term is relatively new and while I originally thought it was a stupid made-up term to be politically correct it turns out to have precedent as the Latin antonym for trans. Trans is Latin for “across from” and cis is the opposite meaning “on this side of.” The terms are also used in chemistry as opposites. It’s important to have the term cis because there needs to be a non-pejorative way to distinguish between people who are and are not trans. If you contrast “trans” people and “normal” people it’s slightly insulting. While I will admit that being trans is not normal the problem arises in that some people associate “normal” with “good” and “abnormal” with “bad.” Even worse is contrasting a “trans” woman and a “real” woman. That is absolutely insulting. Thus the need for the term cis so you can contrast a “trans” person and a “cis” person.

      • I guess if you don’t like “cis” you could use “real” or “biological”.

        • Saying that a trans woman is not “real” is incredibly insulting. As for “biological”, a post-op trans woman is almost biologically identical to a cis woman who has had a hysterectomy, different chromosomes and has a prostate but that’s about it. I guess you could say “genetic” but that’s clunky and cis just works better. It’s elegant and is literally the opposite of trans in Latin.

  2. [Trigger alert: victim blaming, cultural bias, dose of reality] Perhaps the coddled little darlings at Northwestern would prefer studies or demonstrations of Sharia law on campus? Maybe a few honor killings, stonings, a beheading of an academic here or there, and some executions by flamethrower of some heretics?

    [trigger alert: certain to offend someone] Holy Crap – Are the libs so afraid of reality that they’ve crawled entirely back into the womb ?

  3. what means “cisgender-bias?”

    i like to keep up on jargon, but sometimes it develops so swiftly as to defy imagination. i guess language is insufficient to totally describe some thought “process.”

    this is what happens when we pamper and coddle idiots, i suppose.

    • “what means “cisgender-bias?”

      Probably better not to know, more clutter in the brain being of no good use.

      Maybe it means being attracted to the opposite sex. Oops! Saying “opposite sex” is probably now proof of sexist bigotry of some horrible, oppressive nature.

  4. Good gawd. Somewhere I have a lapel button that says “Nuke A Gay Whale For Christ”. I gotcher “positive normative judgment” right here. Sigh.

    • Back in the 1980s there was a large graffiti message painted along the major route through Moscow, Idaho;
      “Nuke the gay baby whales for Jesus!”

      It conflated many of the main stream media/political “issues of the day” back then; nukes, gays, babies, whales and Jesus. I thought it was sort of clever. It stayed there for years, until that building was torn down to make way for a hyper-space bypass.

  5. I read the damn article and believed the whole thing. It seemed completely realistic (but transtarded) to me. Only in the comments was there reason for doubt.

    • Please don’t use trans as a pejorative. You’re insulting a group of people with a serious medical condition that’s outside their control, the vast majority of which just want to live normal lives and be left alone.

      • Uh? “trans” is just a Latin root prefix meaning “the other side”. It is not more pejorative than “three hundred seventeen”.

        • ChrisTheEngineer wrote “transtarded”. Pretty sure that’s insulting and it’s what I was referring to.

          • It might possibly have been intended as an insult, yes. That does not make the first syllable into a pejorative — only the whole word. Just as the fact that “mother***” is an expletive doesn’t make “mother” into one.
            Now if you meant that “retarded” is a pejorative, that is not necessarily true. It is a technical term. It has also been grabbed by the PC nazis as a term to forbid, just as they have previously forbidden many other words (like “handicapped” or “indian”). All that this does is cause new euphemisms to be picked, which then in turn get attacked and replaced by yet another euphemism. Consider crippled -> handicapped -> disabled -> whatever the word now is. And of course, this forbidding is almost always done by white liberals to whom those terms don’t apply; the people actually described by these terms tend not to care. I had a good friend with a fairly nasty case of CP who quite enjoyed using the word “crippled” to describe himself, and had nothing but contempt for those who butcher the language for fear that he is too sensitive to deal with plain English.

          • Fine, if you want to be a grammar nazi about it. Trans is not a pejorative but OP is clearly combining it with another non-pejorative word (retarded) to use in a pejorative sense. Now if you’re going to argue that somehow calling something “transtarded” isn’t meant to be insulting then you’re full of shit.

            I’m not a fan of the degeneration of language due to political correctness either. But I will call out an obvious slur if I see it.

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