A southern California high school teacher made a Tik Tok video. I assume, since she decided to first create it, then post it, that she thought it was a good idea to do so. Why?
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1431375675903053829
Had this not already gone viral, I would not have included the video. But that ship has sailed so there’s no purpose to keeping it under wraps. Instead, it raises some questions about virtue signaling to one’s echo chamber, pathological narcissism and the disinhibition of people, from the teacher who made the Tik Tok to the flaming nutjobs who now believe it’s their right, if not duty, to destroy her.
There is no question that she has the right to believe as she chooses and speak her mind, whether you (or I) agree or not. There is a very real question whether she has the right to use her position as a teacher to engage in the conduct she describes in her video, as her role in the classroom is to teach a subject, not impart her personal ideology to students compelled to go to school by law and parents who want their children to be educated. She’s an English teacher. The students in her class are entitled to be taught English, not ideology. Their parents may not be aware of what their teacher is doing to their children, and they should be.
What does her school administration think of what she had to say in this video? That’s unclear. They may well be fine with it or not. The students and their parents may be fine with it as well or not. Perhaps this is the teacher they want at that school. Or not. But now that this video has gone viral, and the reactions to it are unsurprisingly severe, they will be put to the test. If this is what they approve of, so be it. If not, then this teacher will bear the consequences of her deciding it was a great idea to post this Tik Tok.
But these are issues for her school, her students and their parents to decide. Not for randos on social media. If she was my kids’ teacher, I would have a problem. But she’s not. And much as I find her pride in putting this rather striking display on social media extremely disturbing, it is not my place to tell either her school district or her students what to do about it. They get to make their own decisions, just as she did in putting her video out in the ether to bask in the cutesy validation of giggly wokies.
When this shifted from disagreeing with, and criticizing, her views into doxxing her and attacking to cost her the teaching job and perhaps any future she might have, it crossed the line. When I (as well as others) pointed out that it crossed the line into cancel culture, there were three primary points of dispute.
- She’s a public school teacher and is objectively harming students.
- She’s paid by “our” tax dollars and so we have a right to seek her cancellation.
- She’s put it online and asked for it.
In response to the criticism that they’re engaging in the same “cancel culture” they abhor from the left, the reactions were typically hypocritical.
- We have to fight fire with fire.
- They started it and so we get to give it back to them.
- It’s different when it’s really bad like this.
The teacher was doxxed. The school was “notified.” And her principal replied.
What Principal Wagner ultimately does has yet to be seen, but this is his proper role as principal to address the classroom conduct of his teachers. But the crazies on social media aren’t the principal. They aren’t the students. They aren’t the parents of students. They’re no different than any other narcissistic rando who feels entitled to join a swarm of gnats to destroy someone they despise.
What’s hard to see here is the narcissism that pervades all of these decisions, these choices. It’s become so endemic that it’s like asking a fish to describe water. Everyone feels entitled to have their personal view manifest into a world view. This teacher did so in making and posting this infantile tripe. The crazies who want to destroy this teacher did so in believing their nonsensical excuses, no different than the lies perpetrated by their opposites to rationalize their effort to control others, to seek hegemony. It’s not that every narcissist believe their sensibilities should rule others, but that they fail to grasp that this is unadulterated narcissism.
You disagree with something? That’s fine. You’re allowed. But that doesn’t make your disagreement some sort of universal “truth” that dictates what should become of others, what other must think, feel or do. What could possibly make you believe that you are the universal arbiter of good and evil, of truth and falsity, or right and wrong? Yet, so many of you do, and do so without shame.
A prof yesterday responded to something by noting that humility is dead. Yes, a bit ironic given the role academics have played in fostering narcissism by telling every student they’re special, their opinion matters and pandering to their infantile demands from pronouns to big rocks. But his point was well taken, that we can have views, but so what? We all have our own thoughts and feelings. We decide what matters to us and how we think that should guide our own conduct.
But that’s about us, not about how we dictate to others how they must behave in order to validate our thoughts and beliefs. We are only the rulers of our own domain, no one else’s. And to put an even sharper point on it, most of us haven’t done a particularly swell job of running our own lives, so what makes you believe you’re entitled to run anyone else’s?
It’s unlikely that the teacher posting this Tik Tok expected it to escape into the wild and bring a shitstorm down on her head. It’s likely she thought only her tribe would see it and shower her instead with laughs, validation and approval for being so brave and fierce in her woke goofiness. That’s because she’s a narcissist, just like those crazies who reacted to her Tik Tok. And yet so few can even see it anymore.
Since there must be a witty shorthand term for every condition, and since “narcissist” sounds so academic and detached to my unschooled ears may I suggest the following:
SCATS – self centered and terminally stupid.
Anyone who ever had the chore of cleaning up after domestic animals will understand the analogy instantly.
SCATS is good.
All her giggling suggests she fell prey to Tik Tokking while high. If she has trouble in her current district, there is some other that will rescue her for being “heroic.”
Next time someone says “it’s not cancel culture, it’s consequences culture!” this is another good example to maybe get them to understand* that calling it that doesn’t make it any less shitty.
*a person can dream
“It’s accountability,” shriek random scat assholes who want to destroy other people.
An observation: she might be a great English teacher but you wouldn’t know it from the tik Tok video.
To your point, I’ve got no skin in the game so it’s none of my business what, if anything, happens.
I do beg to differ that she didn’t know it was going to go viral. I believe that she wanted it to go viral.
I guess my issue with this is that teachers are supposed to teach. Period. Yeah, I know, that ship has sailed already in the American school system, but kids don’t really care who you sleep with. They care about learning.
The fact this “teacher” felt the need to do this means, at least to me, that she is so insecure in her own belief system that she is willing to indoctrinate children to get a sense of validation of her own importance.
1) Alright, let’s suppose teachers are just supposed to teach. What, then, are they supposed to teach?
2) Few people care more than teens about who’s sleeping with whom.
What’s the old adage?
Do stupid shit, stupid shit happens.
Knowing how you feel about “what aboutism”, still, this teacher would be first in line to harass or dox someone from the other side who didn’t toe her party line. So what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I’d say.
This is blind hatred, and a great illustration of SHG’s point that one tribe is as vicious as the other when it comes to putting in the boot. In fact, I move that Duchamp sign your comment and that it be hung in an art gallery.
Johnny Cash, “Reverend Mr. Black.”
“If ever I could have thought this man in black was soft and had any yellow up his back,
I gave that notion up the day a lumberjack came in and it wasn’t to pray.
“Yeah, he kicked open the meeting house door and he cussed everybody up and down the floor!
Then, when things got quiet in the place, he walked up and cusses in the preacher’s face!
He hit that Reverend like a kick of a mule and to my way of thinkin’ it took a real fool to turn the other face to that lumber jack,
but that’s what he did, The Reverend Mr. Black.
He stood like a rock, a man among men and he let that lumberjack hit him again,
and then with a voice as quiet as could be, he cut him down like a big oak tree…”
Conservatives have turned the other cheek long enough and are striking back, using the progressive’s tactics against them.
Don’t like it, don’t doxx, call supervisors, etc. or expect the tables to be turned.
The conservatives who aren’t conservative, and the progressives who aren’t progressive.
While no one cares what interests me, it interests me that each tribe says the other started it. Personally, my observations of “who started it” go back to Lee Atwater and his intentionally racist southern strategy and Newt Gingrich with instructions not to say the word “liberal” w/out attaching a pejorative of some sort to it. Others with a longer perspective will choose someone further back. But it’s dishonest and ignorant to pretend that conservatives are just now striking back after having turned their cheeks for generations.
The tribes can point at each other and dredge up every slight, real or imagined, to justify their current wrongful conduct. Indulging this debate is foolish and counterproductive. Much as it’s normal for third graders on the playground, at some point somebody needs to get their head out of their ass and become a fourth grader.