"Now even Peter Pan has been given a trigger warning" by Laurie Wastell

 

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Now even Peter Pan has been given a trigger warning

Universities are treating students like the boy who wouldn't grow up.

In JM Barrie’s classic children’s novel, Peter Pan, Neverland is the place where no one ever grows up. Today, Barrie’s fictional Neverland has become a reality on UK campuses.

A freedom-of-information request by this weekend’s Scottish Mail on Sunday found that Peter Pan is among the latest books to be slapped with a trigger warning by university officials. According to Aberdeen University, the beloved children’s book could prove to be ‘emotionally challenging’ to some adult undergraduates.

Trigger warnings, which aim to warn undergraduates in advance about content they may find ‘distressing’ or ‘offensive’, have become increasingly common in universities in recent years. Although, when they first appeared, they were used to draw attention to more adult themes in course content – from rape and murder to suicide and racism.

The threshold for what can be deemed triggering seems to get lower by the day. Back in 2016, the law faculty at Oxford introduced trigger warnings to its lectures on sexual offences. Barely a year later, English literature undergraduates at Cambridge were given trigger warnings for Shakespeare plays for their ‘potentially distressing topics’. Last year, in an irony of ironies, students at the University of Northampton were warned of the potential thoughtcrimes they might encounter in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And now, we have reached a new low, where even children’s literature can be considered challenging and hurtful to students.

So, what exactly is supposed to be ‘triggering’ about Peter Pan? According to Aberdeen University, it isn’t the ticking crocodile or the villainous Captain Hook that is likely to give students the biggest fright, but the novel’s ‘odd perspectives on gender’. How terrifying.

It is not just Peter Pan, either. Other children’s books that have been slapped with trigger warnings at Aberdeen University include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. Stories about pirates, talking lions and fairies, in other words.

A statement by a university spokeswoman offers a poor defence. ‘Our content warnings reflect the fact that every student is different’, she explains, ‘[they] do not seek to tell them what they should or should not find challenging’. This is disingenuous, as this is exactly what trigger warnings do. They highlight specific themes or plot points that students might be challenged by.

More bizarre still, Aberdeen’s spokeswoman also claims that trigger warnings ‘enable us to explore controversial topics that could otherwise be difficult to address in an inclusive and supportive environment’. In reality, the exact opposite is true. By encouraging students to view literature as likely to cause emotional harm, trigger warnings only add to the stifling, censorious atmosphere on campuses.

In truth, the widespread practice of trigger warnings runs directly counter to the mission of a university. Higher education should seek to broaden young minds, to make wise, independent-minded adults out of inquiring young undergraduates. Instead, many universities today encourage students to be narrow-minded and censorious by going to great lengths to shield them from offence. The message is clear: no difficult ideas here, thank you very much – this is a university.

The desire to shield students from harm also undermines academic standards. Universities across the UK no longer require students to study books that might be ‘potentially distressing’. When a book is slapped with a trigger warning, it is often just a matter of time before it is removed from courses entirely.

If braver students do dare to read Peter Pan, they will find a tale with an important message. Peter wants to stay a child forever, playing with the Lost Boys and flying around without a care in the world. But the dreaded Captain Hook is always lurking – eventually, even Peter has to face his fears. He has to grow up.

Students need to grow up, too, for their sakes and ours. The world needs more fearless problem-solvers and brave intellectual explorers. But if our universities keep on treating students like children, they will stay in Neverland forever.

Laurie Wastell is an intern at spiked.

Source: spiked

"You’re Gonna Get Sick, Get Used to It" by Todd Hayen

 

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You’re Gonna Get Sick, Get Used to It

Todd Hayen

Zero Covid, zero disease, zero suffering, zero death. Unrealistic goals? You bet—although many countries (particularly China) have seemingly adopted a “Zero Covid” stance and have made a rather destructive effort to eliminate any occurrence of Covid-19 from their citizenry—boarding people up in their apartments, attacking people trying to escape, all those fun things fascists like to do.

This effort to maintain a “Zero Covid” environment is yet another piece of the agenda intended to brainwash and thus control the populace. The powers that be know that, but most of the people they are controlling do not.

The people might think “Zero Covid” sounds like a good idea, but it is fantasy, and typically you can’t count too much on fantasy in a nitty-gritty real world.

Now, I’m not knocking fantasy. Sometimes it is just what we need to get through the day. But this isn’t our own personal fantasy, this is fantasy put upon us by an authority that has a nefarious agenda. It is a slight of hand card trick, it is an intentional deception—a deception premeditated to cause harm to some (most) and benefit others (a few).

What is the card trick regarding “Zero Covid?” Well, it is once again an effort to convince us that being human is a problem. Isn’t all that is going on in the world right now have the same intention?—the “Woke Culture,” the “Cancel Culture,” the “transgender/identity” issue? Need I list more examples?

It seems that whatever “power that be entity” that likes to dabble in human cognitive dissonance has been assigned the task of doing whatever possible to make humans confused, and thus dissatisfied, with their human-ness.

Should people born a certain biological (human) sex really be encouraged to mess with their humanness and alter it to “look like” a different sex? Sure, psychologically people can “feel” all sorts of “identities” and even act out on them, but why destroy the physical “human” part of ourselves as a result? Why be encouraged to insert microchips in our brains to make us smarter or more efficient than what nature intended us to be?

As a result of all of this fluidity to “alter” our nature, we become more and more comfortable with this idea that there is something wrong with how we came out of the box. We find our inability to live forever, or ward off all disease, or remove all physical danger from our lives, to be a defect—a manufacturer’s error. And then we go bonkers to compensate for our human problem.

I shouldn’t say we “become comfortable” with the idea of innate imperfection, because it is anything but comfortable, in fact, it is downright crazy making. Of course this doesn’t apply to all of us, but those that it does apply to are among us.

Where did this insane desire to alter our normal human “is-ness” come from? Well, we certainly have seen it from day one. Humans obviously have not evolved from their origin into creatures that integrate with the natural environment the way all other creatures have done. This is an age-old question, and nearly everything “human” has become part of that all-important question, from all the “good things” such as art, music, and other creativity from the heart, to all the bad things such as weaponry, pollution, and genetic engineering.

I find it difficult not to include any advancement in technology with the “bad things.” Any of the things we could say are “good” have only been effective in providing convenience, avoidance of hard work, and the extension of life, which are not necessarily noble accomplishments.

If hard pressed I would say hygiene, and the mitigation of suffering can definitely be included in the “good human advancements,” but advancements in hygiene, such as clean water, waste disposal, etc. is only needed after humans moved from a natural environment to a man-made one…any other suggestions?

Needless to say this argument can get complicated and dicey, possibly moving into the other argument, which suggests that we should never have moved out of caves—which obviously is not plausible nor necessarily desireable. Is there a way to be human without entering into the obsession to be “better than human?” Probably not, and possibly we have just reached the level of technology where becoming “better than human” moves us most definitely into a phase of transhuman ascendance.

But there is another element to factor in here—is our advancement a natural movement, or is it a coerced movement? Are we, as a whole, being manipulated into advancing too fast, or in a particular trajectory that will eventually destroy us? Maybe a little bit of both is at work here.

Obviously in cave days some overlord with the intention of destroying the masses with fire did not trigger the quest for fire—that desire more than likely came naturally. But can you say the same for the invention of the atomic bomb? Was it really for the good of mankind as a whole to destroy Imperial Japan, or was the incentive for creating such a horrific form of destruction have less humanitarian underpinnings?

We have reached a point in human development where it has been made clear that the development of the mRNA vaccine to treat another human engineered invention, the SARSCoV2 “virus,” does not have a humanitarian intention.

This all has clearly happened for the benefit of a few at the expense of many. And part of what has made this possible—the ease in implementation of these bioweapons in the complying bodies of those masses—is to convince people their “god given right” is to live forever and not face nature’s natural challenges.

If we follow the “rules of nature” and take care of ourselves naturally—eat healthy foods (which also is nearly impossible due to the pressures from above to do otherwise), exercise, fill the mind with less toxic thoughts, have meaning and purpose in our lives, didn’t pollute our environment, and never became possessed to consume everything in sight—then in my humble opinion very few diseases and “challenges of nature” would always be powerful enough to make us suffer intolerably, or to, as an end result, kill us—unless we have lived long enough or nature decided it was time to cull our species.

We all die. We all suffer. We seem to have mostly come to a conclusion that we can skirt the natural systems and rely on technology to erase all of life’s dangers and dispel with nature’s wisdom.

People have been brainwashed to believe that only man-made medication and medical intervention can cure us. Most people give no credit to the human immune system and its miraculous ability to confront nearly any pathogen and give it a run for its money. Of course part of the agenda is to create an environment so toxic and contrary to the natural way of things that we are indeed faced with more formidable pathogens for our immune systems to deal with. Again, it is a complicated issue.

But the Covid hoax, to be successful, had to be released on people who believed a limited belief: humans are not capable of withstanding a natural phenomenon (a virus). This is what the people were told, which was always an illusion, yet still created as a fantasy bogeyman, and that the only way to face it and dispel it was to rely on man-made preventions (masks, social distancing and lockdowns) and cures (bogus vaccines).

Couple this with our insane insistence that we continue moving toward transhumanism (which at this time is still primarily a fantasy) and are above pain, suffering, illness, and particularly death, and you have the formula for madness.

If we are human, and not machines, or dependent on the assistance of machines (nano or macro), then we are going to get sick. Plain and simple. It is nature’s way of doing things and has been since humans crawled out of the primordial muck. Get used to it.

Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here

Source: OffGuardian

"Safetyism is a menace to family life" by Laurie Wastell

 

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Safetyism is a menace to family life

Laurie Wastell

A mother in Texas was arrested for letting her eight-year-old walk home alone.

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A mother in Texas has narrowly escaped a spell in prison. Her crime? One of her children was seen walking home alone. Seriously.

Lenore Skenazy, journalist and founder of Free-Range Kids, broke the news of this case in Reason magazine last month. In October 2021, on the way home from karate one afternoon, Heather Wallace’s oldest son, eight-year-old Aiden, was ‘driving his two brothers crazy in the car’. So Wallace stopped the car and asked Aiden to walk the rest of the way alone. The journey was only half a mile in a quiet suburban neighbourhood in Texas, one which Aiden had walked many times before. In other words, this was an ordinary day for a parent with three young boys.

But after a neighbour called the police, reporting – shock horror – a boy walking outside alone, Wallace ended up being arrested for child endangerment. She was handcuffed and then thrown in a jail cell.

In Texas, the minimum penalty for child endangerment is two years in jail – the maximum is 20. Unwilling to risk a trial, Wallace took a plea bargain. She was spared prison, on the condition that she complete a ‘pre-trial diversion programme’. This consisted of 65 hours of community service, random drug tests, as well as having to write an essay demonstrating her remorse.

Ironically, because she was unable to afford a babysitter, Wallace was often forced to leave her children alone in order to complete the community-service programme.

As a result of her brush with the law, Wallace had to resign from her job as a paediatric sleep consultant. Because of the charges, she can never work with children again.

Wallace’s shocking case is by no means an isolated one. In the US today, ordinary parenting is all too often being treated as criminal behaviour. Skenazy has documented a litany of similar cases in recent years. Mothers have been criminalised in the US for allowing a 14-year-old to babysit her younger siblings, leaving toddlers in a car while picking up a cake and leaving a 14-year-old at home alone.

In some cases, parents can be found not guilty of child endangerment by the courts, only to find themselves on a registry of child abusers, affecting their future employment.

What is driving the criminalisation of parents is a pervasive attitude of safetyism, combined with overzealous law enforcement and stringent child-abuse legislation. This means that even the tiniest parenting misstep – or even, in many cases, totally unobjectionable behaviour – ends up being treated as evidence of criminal neglect and abuse.

The authorities’ eagerness to paint parents as brazenly neglectful betrays a dismal view of ordinary families. None of these mothers was actually neglecting her children. All of them were just juggling the everyday struggles of raising kids, and allowing them to do things on their own – such as walking a short distance home – that would have been seen as normal just a few decades ago.

What’s clear, beyond doubt, is that the heavy-handed treatment of parents is not fuelled by concern about children. It is the logical outcome of a worldview that treats parental authority as secondary to expert credentials, in which stringent laws override common sense, and in which parents are treated with permanent suspicion.

We must stop criminalising parents. We must reject safetyism. And we must reject the view that the state knows best when it comes to raising children.

Laurie Wastell is an intern at spiked.

Source: spiked