Bullying Wokesters at UIC John Marshall Law School Pretend that they Don’t Understand the Difference Between Using an Offensive Word and Merely Mentioning it.

Woke bullies have reached ever new levels of intolerance and decency.  John McWhorter explains in this tweet:

You need to read the above tweet carefully. Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the 250 students who signed a petition requiring many dramatic actions, including a demand that "Professor Kilborn should immediately step down as the chair of the academic affairs committee and from all other committee appointments he holds." What was Professor Kilborn's crime? As part of a law school exam, he used only the sanitized version of the offensive word, exactly this: "N*****". This is the reason he was attacked by a mob of hypersensitive students.  The following comment to McWhorter's tweet was thus spot on:

After Professor Kilborn was unfairly attacked by the students, he was left twisting in the wind by the University of Illinois - Chicago (UIC) administration, which issued the following statement:

The Law School recognizes the impact of this issue. Before winter break, Dean Dickerson apologized to the students who expressed hurt and distress over the examination question. The Law School acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the examination were deeply offensive. Faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students. Those with tenure and academic freedom should always remember their position of power in our system of legal education.

This pathetic defense of its own professor and other details regarding this incident can be found at Above the Law.  Here's an excerpt:

The petition is a call to action for “Insensitive and Racist Content” on the exam, and when I initially read the petition, my impression was that the professor had used the full slur on the exam. (And I bet a lot of other people that read — and potentially signed — the petition thought that too.) But that petition does not “summarize[]” the exam as it purports to do — it provides a direct quote. By that I mean the exam did not use the full n-word (or the b-word for that matter), opting instead for the euphemism. Which is… the exact sort of adaptation and awareness of potentially traumatic racial issues that folks have historically asked for when professors claim the right to drop the full n-word just because it’s an academic setting.

Will any lessons be learned from this incident?  We shall see . . .

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The Attention Deficit Approach to Deeply Appreciating Your World

I try a lot of things. I dabble in most of them and I do deeper dives into only some of them. My ex-wife once accused me of being ADD, and her frustration might have been a significant factor in our struggles to get along toward the end of our marriage. I didn't like being accused of "being me." If that message had been candy-coated, it might have gone down a lot better, I often think.

A couple years after the divorce, I read a book on ADD (I can't remember the title) that defined the condition as "having a low tolerance for boredom." That describes me well.  I haven't ever received a formal diagnosis of ADD, but I suspect I'm on that spectrum. I find this topic compelling because I want to understand myself better and learn some new strategies for functioning at a high level without unnecessarily (and often unintentionally) annoying others. Today I just ordered a new book on ADD called ADHD 2.0. I suspect I'll be reviewing it on this website in coming weeks.

The evidence (that I have a low tolerance for boredom) is ubiquitous. I have had a long successful career as an attorney. I am a proficient musician who actively composes music in my home studio. I write voraciously, both at this website and elsewhere. I have achieved a decent level of proficiency in photography (I especially enjoy the challenge of portrait photography). I am a co-host of a podcast for trial lawyers called "The Jury is Out." I am a dedicated parent of two wonderful daughters. My life has been an energized zig-zag and it is not slowing down. Not everyone is wired like this or wired to like this, however. My energy annoys some people who want to live slowly, mindfully, deliberately.  To be more accurate, ADD tendencies can be charming at a distance, but it's not easy for some people to share a household with someone with ADD tendencies. I'm not opposed to exploring different ways to interact with the world. For instance, I have tried meditation as an attempt to live more mindfully. I'm still trying to figure things out at the age of 64.

A friend once assured me to stop worrying about the labels. She said that I was "like Ben Franklin." That was such a tactful way of putting it! She recently posted a long quote by Kurt Vonnegut that I'd like to share.  This passage is the point of this post:

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

I love this passage. Life is short.  I love trying lots of things for the same reasons Vonnegut tried so many things. I consider myself a C or B rated player at almost every thing I work at, but proficiency has often not the main point for me. For instance, I've dug for dinosaur bones, but I never aspired to be a paleontologist.

I would add this: I do a lot of things simply because I like trying them.  But I also like try many new things because doing this allows me to better understand how difficult it is to do these things well. I'll never be Ansel Adams or Pat Metheny, but working at photography and music offers me a deep appreciation for the work of these people on the cutting edge.

I don't know quite how to end this post. I'll merely encourage you to go out and try lots of things and meet a lot of the awesome people with whom you share this planet. The world is a big playroom. It can also be a dangerous place, but mostly it is a vast joyful place where you can dabble and dabbling often leads to bigger things.  But if not, your dabbling will bring you vast appreciation for those who walk the high wire.

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My Cell Phone Tells me the Sky is Falling Down

The IRS is prosecuting me, my copy of MS Windows has a dangerous virus and the Social Security Administration cancelled my social security number. All of this happened over the past week. Amazing, the things you learn when you take your phone off of DND for a week. I needed to keep things "open" for awhile, but I'll be going back to DND soon, so I can focus on sending money to Nigeria so that I can get rich.

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Today’s Visit to the St. Louis Zoo

From a visit to the St. Louis Zoo today. The convoluted photo is THREE underwater hippos and dozens of cichlids. It was overcast and in the 40s, which made it a perfect day to see animals and avoid crowds. The zoo is always a good option for walking and photography - it's about five miles from my house and admission is free (it is supported with a dedicated tax).  Whenever I sleep, I'm sleeping within five miles of lions, tigers and bears and hippos and many other animals of which I don't know their names. When my daughters were small, we often went to the zoo. It is now clear that I wasn't going there solely for the benefit of my daughters . . .

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