“Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.” (Schiller) (or Asimov, for that matter :-)
Sometimes you ask yourself, if the world has completely insane.
Apparently some idiot SJWs(*) who (wrongly) think they are progressives have found a new target: Yoga
Case at hand: the Centre for Students with Disabilities at the University of Ottawa is operated by the Student Federation. The CSD has had a yoga program for students with and without disabilities for seven years now. Now someone complained about “cultural appropriation”. So they ordered the yoga program to shut down.
To quote the Toronto Sun:
Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of "cultural appropriation."
Jennifer Scharf, who has been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008, says she was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning.
Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that "while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students ... there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice," according to an email from the centre.
The centre is operated by the university's Student Federation, which first approached Scharf seven years ago about offering yoga instruction to students both with and without disabilities.
The centre goes on to say, "Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced," and which cultures those practices "are being taken from."
Un-fucking-believable.
To add insult to injury — the Yoga instructor suggested a new title (“Mindful Stretching”) for the program as a compromise. But because student leaders could not agree how to translate that to French they rejected the compromise .
And apparently, more than 700 readers of the Ottawa Sun now consider Yoga a racist practice — as the poll accompanying the article suggests. Ouch!
What to make of it? Well, were it just a general student service, I think the law of democratic consequences applies. Quite generally, if you vote braindead knuckleheads to run your student union, braindead knuckleheads is what you get — and deserve.
But this is about students with disabilities. And I am pretty sure this center runs on government and university grants. And that is where my tolerance for braindead knuckleheads ends very apruptly. The university should remove that center from student control and have it run by non-ideological adults instead of SJW cultists.
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* SJW: As it was asked in the comments: a Social Justice Warrior is the leftwing form of those people who consider themselves and their ideology so superior that they feel entitled to shove it down everyone else’s throat.
Rightwing forms of that species are called sometimes christian dominionists, or just generally authoritarian conservatives, depending on what particular form of rightwing ideology they champion.
Both have a penchant for censorship (as long as they call the shots), and generally favor enforcement over open debate and persuasion.
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Addendum: The new poll option is just too tempting. So let me add the Ottawa Sun’s question here:
