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People and Bodies

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Clarissa

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A local library is introducing a new children’s book at the park:

“People and bodies” is a slip but it reveals a lot. This is a mentality that sees people and bodies as two separate categories.

Diversity, in this worldview, means different-looking bodies that house identical people. Of course, that’s impossible because a person and that person’s body are the same thing. Diversity policies keep failing as a result of this unrealistic belief.

This way of thinking also produces the idea of mismatched bodies with people inside them who are suffering because of the mismatch.

It creates the idea of addiction and depression being the result of a glitch in the body that is unconnected to the actions of people.

The utterly misguided belief that people and bodies are different things drives a lot of the ills we experience.

26 responses to “People and Bodies”

  1. PaulS Avatar
    PaulS

    It would make sense if some of the people are dead.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s exactly what Klara thought. “Are there going to be dead bodies in the picture, Mommy?” she asked. :-)))

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
  2. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    Same as with the equally ubiquitous parlance of “You do you!”, “Finding your real self”, “Being your authentic self” and similar dim-witted palaver in the mouth of people who have no notion of what they are saying.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Or my own sentimental favorite: “speak your own truth”. I can’t get over the private ownership of truths. :-))

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    2. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      “Let your freak flag fly”

      Yes, that way we can quickly identify you.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “a mentality that sees people and bodies as two separate categories”

    Saw this a couple of days ago which sums it up pretty well….

    https://twitter.com/MattIsGay8/status/1677235028533870593

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s very, very unhealthy on many levels to think that “you” and “your body” are different things. It’s extraordinary dysfunctional.

      But this idea exists at the conjunction of great profit for some and sweet helplessness for others. And that makes it successful.

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    2. paranoid Avatar
      paranoid

      To be clear, the booklet was the final project of a college art student and not something used at actual primary schools. https://www.thepublica.com/uk-primary-school-scrubs-logo-from-graphic-sex-education-website-directed-at-10-year-olds/

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “final project of a college art student”

        Maybe that’s why it says the quiet part out loud… some rando art student didn’t know how to create plausible deniability and just shoves the connection between diagnosis and endless medical procedures to center stage….

        This is a bit more subtle (and no less horrifying)… people are just identical potato things with slightly different coloring but their subjective thoughts about gender are moral absolutes that must be followed….

        https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1625339076533518338

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  4. ed Avatar
    ed

    Why are librarians so rabidly ultra “progressive.”? Is that moniker in any way justified?
    It kinda turns me off to the idea of having kids spend time with these people, much less learn anything from them.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      And the chosen book itself was so badly written. These are people with no literary sensibility. Why would you become a librarian if you hate the written word? It’s very weird.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        “Why would you become a librarian…”

        Because it’s a safe air-conditioned government job, and you don’t need the intellectual chops for a STEM degree or anything resembling creativity.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          …and I say that as someone who used to love libraries, and once worked in one. The librarians I grew up with were awesome. They have all retired, and the library is now staffed almost entirely by visibly dysfunctional creeps, and I no longer feel comfortable sending my kids to “just go ask the librarian” when they’re looking for something. I don’t want those people anywhere in touching distance of my kids.

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “Why would you become a librarian if you hate the written word?”

        To punish those who love the written word…. seems pretty clear.

        Liked by 1 person

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Same reason people who hate kids become teachers?

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          1. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            “people who hate kids become teachers”

            I think something different and worse is going on there…. I think a lot of the young wokey teachers had desperately sad childhoods (and have retro-projected their adult psycho-sexual neuroses onto their childhood selves).
            No they want to vicariously fix their own childhoods by projecting their adult psycho-neuroses onto their students which is….. yeah, no I wouldn’t want those freaks anywhere near children….

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              Seems plausible. I haven’t had any real contact with the school system in like thirty years, so I’m sure the scenery’s changed.

              But there were definitely teachers who hated kids then. Like, in every school and every grade. Not just a few. It is still not clear to me if they always hated kids, or if it was just burnout. But it did seem like absolutely everybody– kids, parents, and teachers alike– might have benefited from a publicly-funded program to take bad teachers out of the school system, and provide free re-training and job placement help, to get them out of the school system.

              I still vividly remember fourth grade dress rehearsal for the Christmas pageant. One of the other 4thG teachers (not ours, she was nice) stood at the back, yanking kids into line to process up the aisle to the risers. I was carefully following what the other kids were doing, anxious not to screw it up for everybody. She bruised my arm yoinking me into line anyway. That woman needed to be forcibly retired, and had no business working with children. But she was definitely too old to go back to college and get a different job with comparable pay, security, and benefits.

              So if the new gen teachers are pulled primarily from kids-with-miserable-childhoods… what changed? Is it a difference in recruiting? Difference in child-rearing? The current crop of bright young teachers would have been born in…. the 90s? Is this the internet’s fault?

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              1. cliff arroyo Avatar
                cliff arroyo

                “Is it a difference in recruiting? ”

                One thing that happened was the women’s movement…. at one time ‘schoolteacher’ was one of the few respectable jobs for women who didn’t necessarily want to be stay at home housewives….
                This probably meant a few got into the game that didn’t much like children (or who burned out) but it was more a serious job.
                Not so much now, after the dismantling of public education (begun in the mid 1960s and ramping up in the 1980s and after) which also included the demonization of teachers and schools in general.
                The pickings just aren’t what they used to be….
                Not the whole story but probably a non-trivial factor.

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              2. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                yeah, I can see that. Now that bright women can get into a whole bunch of other respectable jobs, and teaching is still crap pay… it’s a brain drain problem.

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              3. PaulS Avatar
                PaulS

                The best teachers will get poached by private schools, leaving few available for public schools.

                The same thing happens in healthcare, which is why countries like Canada restrict private healthcare to prevent doctors from leaving the public system.

                Liked by 1 person

  5. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    It really does sound like perhaps we are walking onto the scene of a mass-casualty event.

    Bodies… It’s the new iteration of gnosticism. We grew up with the previous version, common across multiple protestantisms, where your soul is who you really are, all the pure, innocent, love-and-light stuff, and anything to do with the body is sinful and dirty, and dying and going to heaven means finally being released from the cage of flesh to be your true pure self.

    But the main message here is that the intellect is the true self, and the body is a lower, meaner thing we happen to be temporarily attached to… so it doesn’t matter what you do with your body, and because it’s kind of gross anyway, perhaps it is even a sign of piety to debase and mutilate it. Look how little I value this body! I spit on it! It is not me– it’s just a faulty, degraded, unwelcome blob I’ve been saddled with. I am so much better than it because my thoughts are elevated and pure. My intellect is the real me, and my intellect loathes my body. Give me three donuts and a frappuchino to go.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s a really great insight.

      It’s especially funny to consider that these worshipers of the intellect tend to be… not that smart. All they know is a string of slogans they wave at you indiscriminately.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Just wait’ll they achieve their version of heaven: uploading their consciousness into “the cloud” (hahaha!). If you thought the image of heaven as a bunch of harpists frolicking in the fluffy clouds was dumb… wait’ll you experience the nirvana that is a million dumbasses buying their stairway to digital immortality.

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    2. Avi Avatar
      Avi

      Thank you Methylethyl for clarifying this. I always had the notion that this US-made craze might have its origin in a particular strain of Protestantism, Puritanism to give it its name.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        I’ve always wondered if it was really Puritans who brought it here, though. Those people raised livestock, lived in one-room cabins, had like 10 kids. They were realists, far more than the modern mythology gives them credit for. They could not possibly have been as weird about sex and bodily functions as your average 80s evangelical churchlady, who couldn’t even pronounce the word “sex”.

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    3. PaulS Avatar
      PaulS

      This idea is also commonly associated with Descartes, although philosophers have been arguing about it since Plato.
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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