top 100 commentsshow all 272

[–]rwkastenBring on the dancing horses[S,M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Twilight of the American Left

“The most vulgar, simplistic view of the Left — that dissolves all the supposed distinctions between centrists, liberals, leftists, socialists, communists into one homogenous Democratic blob — happens to be correct.” So writes Benedict Cryptofash, an anonymous Twitter user and self-described “anti-leftist” whose other theoretical contributions include “the Left and Right are fake and gay” and “only libtards care about policy”.

Despite appearences, Cryptofash — his pseudonym mocks the tendency of online leftists to accuse their critics of “cryptofascism” — is not your typical Right-wing internet troll. He’s a Marxist who regards “leftism” as the ideology of bourgeois supremacy, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the classical liberalism that Karl Marx spent his mature years attempting to demolish. “My critique focuses on the Left,” Cryptofash writes in one of his periodic straight tweets, “not because they are worse than the Right, but because they are better than the right at precluding proletarian class consciousness.”

[...]

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

Effectively incapable of governing outside the bounds set by the Democrats and Democrat-aligned media, corporations, NGOs and government bureaucracies, the GOP’s real function is to serve as a sort of ideological bogeyman. By positioning itself as the last line of defence against phantasmic threats of “fascism” and “white nationalism” coming from the Right, the ruling class is able to legitimise its own power and conceal the domination on which that power rests.

Leftists, in this telling — whether Ivy League professors or Antifa militants on the streets of Portland — are thus little more than the unwitting dupes of the ruling class. However much they profess to hate the Democratic Party, they are, in practice, its running-dog lackeys. They support the party electorally, harass and cancel its designated enemies and enforce pro-Democrat ideology in the media, academia and the workplace. Crucially, they also help maintain the permanent state of moral emergency that serves as a pretext for the expansion of ruling class power, whether in the form of the increasingly direct control that tech monopolies wield over political discourse or the pursuit of Covid policies that transfer wealth upward and subject workers to a dystopian regime of medical surveillance.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Is the Conventional Wisdom on Educational Spending All Wrong? I doubt it, but who knows

Do school expenditures determine student performance? Are our educational gaps resource gaps? I would have thought that I could confidently answer with a no and not be challenged, at this point. People have regressed spending by countries, states, and districts on outcome metrics for a long time, and they pretty much universally show that there is no relationship between spending and success as defined in traditional terms. Neither countries that spend more nor states that spend more consistently outperform their stingier counterparts. We haven’t been able to make real causal statements, but in education we almost never can, nor is it easy to do so at the scales we’re talking about here. Perhaps the most commonly-cited review comes from the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek1, who is a zealous advocate of teacher quality measures (and their nastier consequences) and who since the 1980s has been a loud voice saying that we can’t spend our way out of our problems. In the intervening decades this view has become the conventional wisdom. But lately, there’s been a growing sense that it’s wrong.

I doubt that anyone would object to the claim that the United States has been trying to spend its way out of educational inequality for decades. Though you sometimes hear, absurdly, that we are “defunding” education, we are spending as much as we ever have, in inflation-adjusted dollars, and that is significantly more than we spent for the great bulk of the history of public education. And this funding increase has been steered in dominant majorities towards “need,” which means poorer schools and disproportionately higher-minority schools2. It’s typical for left-leaning people to lament that poor districts are broadly underfunded relative to others, but it’s hard to justify this belief. Part of the perception problem is that people are operating in a local-spending dominant mindset, when that reality doesn’t really exist anymore.

The growth of state spending has been a quiet but major story in recent decades, in part due to the massive expenditures necessitated by NCLB and ESSA testing requirements. State funding sources are now at parity with local sources and while federal education spending is still far behind, that expense has grown to something like .5% of GDP. Discretionary fed money tends to be heavily concentrated in the worst-performing schools, and state expenditures also are often steered towards struggling schools and districts. Here’s Title I spending as a convenient indicator of the larger dynamic, again old data but the trend hasn’t changed.

We’re spending more, and we’re steering the money where people say they want it to go. It just hasn’t worked.

I really need to underline this point: lower educational expenditures per student can’t be the source of race and income gaps because Blacker and poorer schools receive more per-pupil funding than whiter and richer schools. Sosina and Weathers 2019: “On average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively.” Check the tables in the study for more. And this does not encompass the small but growing amount of private dollars that are finding their way into public schools through various grant programs and foundation spending, which likely almost all goes to struggling poor and high-minority schools. This finding flies so directly in the face of the progressive conversation that I find people just can’t hear it, but it actually makes perfect sense. Of course those schools have more funding; we’ve been throwing money at our achievement gaps for 40 years.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The point is control

So let’s not pretend I’m Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to “both sides” a clearcut moral issue. Let’s pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year… anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like “while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter.” This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now–a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute–would they still defame you in “whisper networks,” never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being?

It is undeniably clear that last year’s most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain’t reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who’s already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that’s what has happened.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Poland: Pro-family law upheld by regional councilmen despite EU threats

Lesser Poland region councilmen decided to uphold a law which opposes ideological LGBT indoctrination. Civic Platform politicians who were backed by European Commission threats designed to challenge the law were unable to halt the law from passing.

The issue concerns a document which the Lesser Poland councilmen passed in 2019, known as the “opposition to introducing LGBT ideology to municipal communities” bill. The international media and LGBT activists has described the bill as an anti-LGBT declaration or law, which has enabled left-wing groups to abuse this phrase in an attempt to define the document as homophobic. However, the law does not concern anyone’s sexual preferences and merely refers to neo-Marxist LGBT ideology.

[...]

On Thursday, Lesser Poland councilmen voted over a proposal to withdraw the bill, with 23 voting against the motion, which was enough to keep the law in place. EU pressure was present in the background, as the European Commission has been threatening the Lesser Poland region with suspending €2.5 billion in funds from the 2021-2027 financial framework with claims that the law allegedly violates European values.

[...]

The Lesser Poland school superintendent Barbara Nowak told portal wPolityce.pl that the regional parliament did not bow to blackmail.

“The rejection of the European Commission’s demands fills one with pride. It shows that Poles have honor. We were offered to trade our freedom and values. We were offered payment for giving up our convictions and the fact that the majority of the local parliament opposed such a motion absolutely fills me with pride due to the stance of our chosen representatives,” she said.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

State Bans on Critical Race Theory Won’t Work: Massive bureaucracies will evade them. The better solution is to break up huge school districts.

I knew we’d lost the day I met the superintendent of North Carolina’s schools in 2011. I was leading a nonprofit whose civics curriculum was a stark improvement over the mishmash that the state’s teachers were then using. The Legislature had recently passed the Founding Principles Act, which required North Carolina schools to teach concepts like property rights, due process and federalism. Unlike the textbooks then in use, our materials were loaded with facts and original documents, illuminating concepts that undergird the U.S. Constitution and its founding. We were offering exactly what the state’s new law required.

The superintendent and her team were polite and engaging, but we couldn’t understand much of what they said. They tossed around jargon like “inquiry models” and “cross-walked objectives,” and insisted that North Carolina schools already met the new law’s standards. My colleagues and I walked out of that meeting knowing that—law or no law—civics instruction in our state wouldn’t change a bit.

I recall this experience as state legislatures debate bans on teaching Critical Race Theory, a body of conjectures that is, according to its defenders, simultaneously sound and nonexistent. Even where allowed to stand by courts, these laws, like other efforts to rein in education bureaucrats, will be swallowed up in the spreadsheets and matrices into which state departments of public instruction lure and quietly strangle every curricular reform.

That’s not to say that state leaders have no options for warding off CRT, transgender mania, Howard Zinn -style grievance Marxism and other dogmas festering in schools of education. They have the authority to implement a solution that harnesses the common sense of everyday American parents. They can bust up large school districts.

Take Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia, ground zero for the CRT war. Loudoun County, once 522 square miles of horse pasture with scarcely enough two-legged residents to qualify as a bedroom community, saw its population explode by nearly 400% over the past 30 years. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of students in Loudoun’s public schools grew from 14,174 in 1990 to 83,606 in 2020—an increase of 490%. Nine school board members oversee curricular decisions and teacher training affecting tens of thousands of families in an area nearly half the size of Rhode Island (which, by comparison, serves its 144,000 students via 66 separate school districts).

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bank of Amerika: The financial giant teaches that the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work.”

Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.

One the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”

Over the next three days, Bank of America teaches employees about intersectionality, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. “Racism in America idolizes White physical features and White values as supreme over those of others,” the program asserts. As a result of being part of the “dominant culture,” whites are more likely to “have more limited imagination,” “experience fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame,” “contribute to racial tension, hatred, and violence in our homes, communities, and world,” and, subsequently, “react in broken ways as a result.” People of color, on the other hand, cannot be racist, because “racism is used to justify the position of the dominant group . . . and to uphold white supremacy and superiority.” Therefore, the discussion guide claims, “reverse racism and discrimination are not possible.”

On days five and six, Bank of America encourages white employees to confront their “white privilege” and “white fragility,” in order to “discover where [they] are on the privilege spectrum” and “if [they] exhibit ‘white fragility’ traits.” As part of the program, Bank of America employees take a series of diagnostic tests, in which they assess their racial and sexual identities, check a series of boxes to identify their “white privilege,” and probe racist attitudes that could contribute to their “white fragility.”

In days seven through sixteen, Bank of America covers a laundry list of progressive concepts and policy priorities, including “microaggressions,” “racial trauma,” “the abolishment of the police,” “the school-to-prison pipeline,” and “environmental justice.” The training program claims that racist microaggressions can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder in black Americans and that “racism can be just as devastating as gunfire or sexual assault.” America’s economy is described as a “caste system” with “African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate.” The American policing system, according to the materials, was founded on “slave patrols whose task was to capture, control, and brutalized enslaved people”; this system is “woven into the DNA” of American society and, according to the activists in the training module, can be solved only through “the defunding and even the abolishment of the police.”

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Steve Sailer] Our Culture of Lying

To climb the career ladder in modern America, you are expected to lie: about race, about crime, about men in dresses.

And if you are in the U.S. deep state, you have to lie about our Afghan allies. For example, general Mark Milley, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and advocate of reading Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo to understand “white rage,” announced in Kabul in 2013:

This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.

Underlings figure out what the bosses don’t want to hear and then don’t tell them. Colonel Bob Crowley reported in the Afghan Papers:

Truth was rarely welcome…so bad news was often stifled. There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPs—because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome and the boss wouldn’t like it.

Lying isn’t just bad for the soul, it’s bad for effectiveness at dealing with reality. After 1991, we of course stopped winning wars. But now we can’t even avoid losing in spectacularly humiliating fashion.

If there’s anything we’ve learned about the deep state from this episode, it’s that it’s real…and it’s inept.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

After threat of lawsuit, Princeton seminary excused student from ‘whiteness is sin’ anti-racism training

The student, Timothy Keiderling, was able to negotiate a compromise that got him out of the anti-racism training, which teaches that being white is “something to repent for” and “whiteness is a form of structural sin,” Real Clear Investigations reported this week.

Keiderling complained the mandatory trainings did not allow for debate or disagreement, which stood in contrast to the private seminary’s promotional literature and student handbook pledging free speech — grounds for litigation.

Keiderling asked the seminary president for “an exemption from all upcoming trainings,” calling them “antithetical to PTS’s mission and vision” and saying they “will impinge upon our freedom of thought, and … present a profound threat to freedom of conscience.”

He added: “As fellow followers of Jesus, we have no business treating each other differently based on our race. Don’t we remember that in Christ, these distinctions have no place anymore? Or what else did the Apostle mean when he wrote that ‘in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free’? The problem of racial injustice cries to heaven. But dividing us from each other is not the way to right the wrongs.”

[...]

“[M]y point that the training to which I object violates representations of academic freedom made by PTS on which I relied in accepting admission, and which I believe represent legally enforceable terms of the contractual relationship between PTS and me,” Keiderling responded.

[–]Node 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

‘whiteness is sin’ anti-racism training

lol?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] There's No Alternative to Cultural Appropriation

It’s encouraging to see that a drive-by accusation of cultural appropriation was met with the mockery that it deserves. (I assure you that those 6,000+ quote tweets are not echoing the sentiment.) As I’ve said, as hegemonic as this particularly cruel strain of social justice politics has become, the worm has already begun to turn against it. While we’ll be signaling our social justice bona fides for the rest of our lives, the particularly aggressive and self-aggrandizing school of woke politics is bound to lose, as it’s profoundly unpleasant. It also asks us to do things that we cannot possible accomplish - like living without cultural appropriation. I think it’s really important to underscore this point. The point when rejecting the cultural appropriation discourse is not merely to say that we should be able to mix and match cultural products to produce something new and better, though of course we should. The bigger point is that there is no alternative. There is no such thing as cultural change that does not include cultural mixing and exchange.

The woke Völkisch movement is based on a completely impoverished notion of how human beings develop cultural products like food, literature, visual arts, and music. Principal among these misconceptions is that cultural production is chosen and conscious. When someone makes an accusation of cultural appropriation, they’re claiming that somebody else has made a deliberate choice to integrate a given cultural product into what they produce. “Aha,” says white artist, “let me steal from the cultures of the global south for my own enrichment!” But that’s nuts; it’s simply not how influence works. You go to an art gallery, you see things there that you find moving or challenging, you go home and paint a painting. I promise, some of what you just saw in that gallery will appear in your painting no matter how much you might try to stick to your “culture of origin,” whatever that could possibly mean. We are all the sum of everything we have done and seen and experienced. Can you really look at every aspect of your personality and ascribe each bit of it to some specific discrete event or influence, then trace them back to a given cultural frame of reference?

I’ll answer for you: no, you can’t. And this is as true of someone who lived on a Polynesian island 500 years ago and never left as it was of Paul Gauguin when he toured those islands 350 years later. Humans integrate, we borrow, we assimilate, we iterate. Gauguin was a genuinely bad person and a great artist. He painted scenes from those Polynesian islands and wore the influence of their art on his sleeve in doing so. But if he had gone back to France and insisted on trying to paint only “European subjects” in “European style,” itself an inherently vague and contradictory goal, he would still carry the islands in his brush. Because that’s how humans work. We are not a collection of discrete experience particles but a swirling mixture of influences we barely understand. And some agonizingly progressive art student who self-consciously rejects Gauguin for his crimes, who makes it their mission not to be influenced by them? They’re bound to fail. Once they’ve seen his art, that art is imprinted on their brain, and it will assert its influence despite every conscious intention.

Cultural exchange always goes both ways. Yes, jazz is a quintessentially Black American artform, though all of the greatest Black jazzmen have given great credit to the white musicians who participated in its production. But to call jazz Black does not and cannot mean that it’s entirely distinct from white art as well. Jazz drew from ragtime, also “coded” Black, but ragtime drew from marches, drawn in great measure from white men John Philip Sousa and (eep) Wagner. Of course, there’s also march music from Bangladesh, Japan, Colombia, Turkey, even the Caucasus, home of the literal Caucasians, who are not very white. It’s turtles all the way down: you can’t ever get to the pure origins, because there are no origins. There’s mitochondrial DNA in culture, pure essence of human creativity that has no bedrock beyond what’s shared in the human experience. Trying to shed the bad adulterants and get to the pure cultural product, crafted only by the legitimate owners of that product, was stupid and futile when Goebbels attempted it and it’s just as stupid and futile when some Evergreen College sophomore tries to do it on social media using a iPhone that draws parts from 43 countries and scientific influence from vastly more.

Gospel was a white artform before it was a Black one. Does that invalidate gospel as a part of the Black experience, make gospel “less Black”? It’s an absurd question. Yes, early rock and roll was deeply influenced by rhythm and blues and the Black artists who pioneered it. But it was also influenced by the skiffle movement among white artists in the United Kingdom - which in turn drew from Black jug bands, but also from white folk acts, who in turn were influenced by traditional European musical styles, which did not spring fully formed from the head of Odin but from a panoply of earlier predecessors that stretch back to the dawn of civilization. People these days are very defensive about Black cultural production, and I get it. But what does it cost Black people or Black culture to point out that they too have been influenced by artists of other racial and ethnic origins, that they no more created cultural products in a vacuum than did Elvis or the Beatles? Yes, celebrate Blind Lemon and Robert Johnson, and give Black artists the credit and financial support they were once denied by the industry. (That’s one we can safely put in the win column, it seems to me, though I know it’s forbidden to identify progress.) But there’s no need to cancel Elvis to do that. Like all racial progress, cultural progress is not zero sum. Which is good news because, again, if the sands of the Sahara thousands of years ago were insufficient to preclude cultural exchange, the inevitability of that exchange in 2021 is such a foregone conclusion that you better make peace with people of all kinds being influenced by the entirety of the human experience in ways we can’t predict or fully understand and certainly can’t prevent.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Lockdown Forever: Scotland’s Leftist Govt Want to Make Emergency Coronavirus Laws ‘Permanent’

The leftist governing party of the devolved Scottish parliament is calling for its emergency coronavirus powers to be made “permanent”, giving them the ability to shut schools, enforce mask-wearing, and impose lockdowns without time limit.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) — which, despite being in favour of superstate EU membership, exists to campaign for the North of Britain to break away from the United Kingdom — published on Tuesday an announcement for a 12-week public consultation on removing the expiry date of the leftist government’s ability to enforce wide-ranging lockdown measures, also apparently broadening them beyond the scope of dealing with the Chinese coronavirus.

“…the powers that have enabled this are temporary and will exist only for as long as the current Covid pandemic remains a public health threat. However, it seems likely that Covid will not be the last infectious disease or public health threat Scotland will face.

“As a result, and based on the experience of managing Covid, the Government considers that building public health resilience in the future requires action to ensure a permanent suite of powers that will allow Scottish Ministers to tackle any type of infectious disease or contamination that may pose a significant health threat,” the consultation paper said.

Naming such powers that are due to expire on March 2022 as “prohibiting or limiting numbers at gatherings; introducing lockdown measures; and requiring that face coverings are worn”, the document said that the proposal would give Scottish ministers “the same powers to protect the people of Scotland from any incidence or spread of infection or contamination which presents or could present significant harm to human health in Scotland, not just Covid”.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The authoritarian takeover of Australia

New South Wales chief health officer Kerry Chant became world famous recently when a video of her went viral. In it, she said, in the patronising tone of a school matron:

‘It is human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly. Unfortunately, this is not the time to do that. So even if you run into your nextdoor neighbour, in the shopping centre, at Coles, Woolworths or Aldi or any other grocery shop, don’t start up a conversation.’

Some of us thought: who the bloody hell is this sheila? Not only had I never heard of her, I hadn’t listened to anything anyone like her had said since I’d been kicked out of high school. My robust upbringing among ratbags and larrikins in the Australian suburbs had instilled in me an instinctive and entirely rational distrust of anyone who, like her, placed an undue significance on obedience above personal freedom and responsibility. My life has been, and continues to be, all the better for it.

New South Wales residents were surprised to learn they had been paying Chant’s wages since she joined the public service in 1991. Like many of her fellow neo-authoritarians, she had spent her entire career cloistered away from the freely enterprising general population, biding her time until the opportunity arose to exercise the powers none of us knew she had.

Now she and her type are all around us, telling us what to do every minute of the day. She is emblematic of Australia’s new elite, from the cops who told me to ‘move on’ when I was enjoying the sunshine by myself at Bondi Beach recently, to prime minister Scott Morrison, who peppers his updates on the latest panicking policies with reminders that ‘we are all in this together’.

No, we’re not. The elite in government and the bureaucracy, some of whom have even been granted pay rises since these lockdowns began, are laughing all the way to the bank while the nation’s middle-class, small-business entrepreneurs – the cultural descendants of the emancipated landowners of the 19th century – are driven to despair and bankruptcy. These elitists might evoke the Australian traditions of ‘mateship’ and the ‘fair go’, but they advocate nothing of the kind. Instead, they impose rules that are only possible under their newly created ’emergency powers’, and which would have been comprehensively ridiculed and rejected in any state or federal parliament at any other time in our history.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Big Drag: From campy fringe to corporate cringe

I used to think the drag queen trend had burned itself out by 2019 with the proliferation of Drag Queen [Horror] Story Hour at local public libraries. The premise is right out of a nightmare—outlandishly corpulent men in face paint, wigs, and tacky dresses reading awful books to sparse crowds of similarly-sized single mothers and their terrorized, fatherless children.

Some drag lectors proudly display large beards, their hairy chests and flabby bingo-winged arms protruding from the tops of their corset gowns.

Even the mothers in attendance have to force smiles on their faces. On high alert for every microaggression, in bad moods after spending two hours getting their three-year-old boys to put on their sister’s dresses, those mothers are probably a tough crowd.

[...]

Mercifully, the pandemic put a shiv into the bloated, hairy gut of the DQ story hour.

Unfortunately, post-pandemic, these freaks in fright wigs are back with a fierce vengeance—and the backing of every corporation in America.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

‘Nature’ magazine has lost its way

It’s all the more concerning then, that in the last few years, Nature has handed over an increasing amount of editorial space to social justice activism. In February of 2019, Jordan Peterson remarked that a once-great publication was going “farther down the social constructionist rabbit hole”.

The latest example comes in the form of a piece titled “Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments”, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. No less than twenty-six authors are listed under the title, suggesting this was not some trivial undertaking. It includes charts, tables and even a glossary of key terms (with entries such as “racial microaggressions” and “white privilege”).

The authors begin by noting that, in their field of conservation biology, “institutional and structural racism continue to create barriers to inclusion for Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour”. They proceed to describe the nature of this “institutional and structural racism”, before outlining their proposed “anti-racist interventions”. These include prioritising recruitment of “BIPOC”, setting up protocols for “anonymous reporting of hate”, and discussing anti-racist values “on the first day of class”.

Needless to say, I’m not convinced by the authors’ proposals, nor indeed by their use of the nebulous term “structural racism”. To begin with, they lump together several quite separate issues, while claiming that each is a manifestation of the same general “oppression” faced by non-white people in conservation biology. For example, the overrepresentation of whites in PhD programs and the “marginalisation” of local communities by some modern researchers are surely distinct phenomena? And neither necessarily indicates “racism”.

The authors take the usual swipes at historical figures whose views were not in line with contemporary sensibilities, grumbling that “many species carry scientific and common names that commemorate eugenics proponents”. And they argue that even the writings of Charles Darwin “contained racist ideas”. (Earlier this year, Science published an editorial describing him as “an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices”.) As to what departments should do about “problematic” figures from the past, the authors note that “buildings and gathering places can be redesigned with equity in mind”.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Academic claims critical race theory allows her to make racist comments

Aysha Khanom was canned from her position at Leeds Beckett University after tweeting racist remarks to a mixed-race political pundit and a social media commenter back in February.

According to The Guardian, the Twitter account associated with the Race Trust, which Khanom founded, asked black conservative commentator Calvin Robinson if he felt any shame due to the fact that “most people” view him as a “house negro.”

Though Khanom claims she did not personally write the tweet, she accepted responsibility for it. However, Khanom later personally called a commenter to that tweet a “coconut.”

[...]

In “what is believed to be the first case of its kind,” Khanom is suing her former employer under the UK’s Equality Act, arguing that CRT and black radicalism are “protected beliefs.” In June, an employment appeals tribunal ruled that “gender-critical” opinions are protected under the act. (Remember: There is no First Amendment in the UK.)

Khanom told The Guardian “[The remarks] were offensive – they’re meant to be offensive because they’re antiracist terms. You’re highlighting a problem, so how can someone be racist by calling someone out for going against their own kind? It’s almost upholding white supremacy. It’s so contradictory it’s unreal, racists have taken these terms and defined them for us.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

UMich prof says math and science classes are racist

According to Ball, “Whiteness” plays an integral role in explaining the racial and ethnic disparities that exist in mathematics performance. She claimed that since White and Asian students are overrepresented in high-level mathematics, new pedagogy is required to increase access to underrepresented minority students.

“Mathematics, despite the way we represent it, is something that many cultures and communities have created and there are people, scholars in our country, and teachers who have exploited opportunities to broaden kids’ views of mathematics," Ball said in the podcast.

More broadly, Ball views racial injustice as an issue that permeates the educational system. Writing for the Detroit Free Press on March 21, Ball stated, “As districts emerge from the quarantine of the last year, the plans for a safe return to school must take a fuller view of the safety needed to dismantle anti-Blackness and white supremacy in our educational systems.”

Additionally, her official biography states that her research uses mathematics as a way to investigate how to build relationships with children and also how to “disrupt racism, marginalization, and inequity.”

Her past positions include dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, president of the American Educational Research Association, and member of the National Science Board.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Who Tells Them Things They Don't Want to Hear? Can the New York Times ever defy its affluent white subscriber base again? Sources speaking on condition of anonymity say it's unlikely

If you’re new around here, the basic scenario is that we’ve had a years-long moral panic in which elite white tastemakers adopted the political posture of radical Black academics out of purely competitive social impulses, trying on a ready-made political eschatology that blames the worlds ills on whiteness and men and yet somehow leaves space for an army of good white people and good men to cluck their tongue about it all. Concurrently, the most influential paper in the world emerged from decades of fiscal instability by going hard on digital subscriptions, paywalling more and more of its content and rattling its tin cup more loudly than ever before. The result has been boom times, attenuated only by the end of the immensely lucrative Trump years. (I believe Chris Hayes is covering Trump’s latest spray tan tonight.) The trouble is that this model leaves them even more dependent on a particular social and political caste, namely the educated white professional class that graduates from top 25 universities, moves to Echo Park or Andersonville or Austin, then sends Zane and Daschel to pre-K that costs more than their Audi. Oh and they, like, care about justice and stuff. Conservatives hate read the NYT and thus have traditionally brought in advertising revenue, but they don’t hate subscribe, and the end result is that a paper that was about a 6.5 on a ten-point Liberal Elite Scale when I was a kid has moved to a 9.5. And there’s nothing internal to the publication that can stop this leftward march.

This will invite reprisals for speaking out of turn, but all of the following comes from public knowledge, other people’s reporting, what former and current employees have said, and a little bit of gossip. The social and professional culture within The New York Times is notoriously toxic, the confluence of people with immense career ambitions and total shamelessness about using social justice rhetoric to attack their enemies; watercooler shit-talking and mean-girling has moved to Slack, where it’s somehow even worse than it was before; all of the younger staffers see their jobs as straightforwardly activist positions, and the role of the paper to advance a pro-Democrat social justice ideology rather than to report objectively or to present a range of viewpoints; executive editor Dean Baquet is afraid of his own employees; the Sulzbergers don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations with their fellow white liberal elites at the food co-op or whatever; and in general absolutely every internal incentive within the paper points towards uncritically advancing a Robin Diangelo-approved race and gender ideology, a class-never, deferential-to-woke-norms soggy social justice politics that says nothing remotely challenging to said staffer cliques or the Hermosa Beach soccer moms who now fund the paper. When Bari Weiss resigned the media Borg represented it as all about Weiss, but her story was really about the kind of perspective that can’t exist anymore at The New York Times. I’m sure the blob would deny this stuff, but again none of these are well-kept secrets. If Ben Smith was not paid by the New York Times he would have reported this out long ago.

If you disagree with me, well, point me to some counterexamples. Since the Tom Cotton editorial, what pieces has the Times published that defy the woke politics shared by the vast majority of their staffers? No one remains on staff who regularly puts their thumb in their eye of the rest of the writers and editors there, who consistently violates the assumed politics of the NYT subscriber base - affluent and educated white liberal urbanites who stick BLM signs in their windows and make sure the $30k/year private schools (I’m sorry, independent schools) they send their kids to have a good social justice curriculum. People who wouldn’t fit in at the UC Berkeley recycling club aren’t welcome. They certainly frog marched James Bennet right out of there, didn’t they?

Yes, there are people who are not liberals on staff, but they’re a certain kind of not-liberals. I like and admire Ross Douthat very much, and I don’t think he pulls his punches or changes his views to suit the NYT crowd. But I think that his natural tendency is to be precisely the kind of conservative the Times wants, which is the kind that doesn’t activate the culture war resentments of their median reader or inflame the rest of the staff. Similarly, my readers recently informed me that Coaston is a libertarian, which is cool. I think Coaston is the real deal. But again, while I’m not questioning her honesty or the independence of her thinking, she is very much a NYT libertarian, one uniquely suited to flatter their audience. They aren’t looking to hand a contract to Reason’s Robbie Soave, are they? So who else? Michael Powell, I guess. Nellie Bowles, whose “book leave” looks pretty damn likely to become a “just leave”?

You can talk about Bari Weiss, you can talk about the Cotton brouhaha, you can discuss the inherent and ugly incentives of the subscription model for the paper. But the Donald McNeil firing is truly the bellwether. A reporter with 45 years of NYT experience on an absolutely essential beat said something clueless but utterly anodyne to some spoiled adolescents on a trip that 99% of people their age can’t access. Despite the fact that what he said would have been totally unremarkable even in liberal circles five years ago, the situation caught the staff’s attention and its ire and they vented that ire with the typical absurdist claim that McNeil had put them “in danger” in some incredibly vague way. (On Twitter, of course). So McNeil was duly dispatched, and the basic power dynamic of the modern day New York Times was laid bare: a handful of the paper’s untouchable celebrities can kick up the junior staff into a frenzy, and once that catches fire on Twitter, there is no one in the paper’s leadership who has the honesty and integrity to tell them no. No one. (The NYT’s self-exonerating reaction to McNeil’s defense is quietly hilarious.) The simple fact of the matter is that Baquet has not demonstrated anything like the public courage it would take to face down a Twitter storm prompted by Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., and there’s no reason to think that that’s going to change anytime soon. The media types would reject all of this, if anyone at a big-shot publication had the integrity to write a story about these open secrets. But I’m not lying.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Biden administration may consider 'vaccine passports' for interstate travel

The AP reports that "...while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment."

"That's not to say they won't be implemented in the future," the AP writes, "as public opinion continues to shift toward requiring vaccinations as a means to restore normalcy."

[...]

Georgetown Law took up the question of Americans' rights to travel freely within the United States under the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic. At the time, Americans in many parts of the country were asked to "lockdown" for two week and to "slow the spread" so that when Americans got sick and ended up in the hospital, they didn't all end up there at once, overwhelming the medical infrastructure.

Meryl Chertoff, Executive Director, SALPAL writes: "The right of Americans to travel interstate in the United States has never been substantially judicially questioned or limited. In 1941, the Court declared unconstitutional California's restriction upon the migration of the 'Okies'—whose travails are famously documented in 'The Grapes of Wrath.' Justice Douglas referred to 'the right of free movement' as 'a right of national citizenship,' and the rights of the migrants were upheld under the Commerce Clause."

"The Privileges and Immunities Clause protects the rights of US citizens," Chertoff goes on to say, "who are each also the citizens of a state, against discriminatory treatment under the law of a different state. In a 1985 case, the Court found that the Privileges and Immunities clause prohibited discrimination against a non-resident except where (i) there is a substantial reason for the difference in treatment; and (ii) the discrimination practiced against nonresidents bears a substantial relationship to the State's objective. In deciding whether the discrimination bears a close or substantial relationship to the State's objective, the Court has considered the availability of less restrictive means."

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The cruelty of Australia’s endless lockdown

How has lockdown become so acceptable in Australia, a country where the seven-day average for Covid-19 deaths sits at just two? The answer, I suspect, is because its impacts are not equally shared.

Lockdowns’ worst effects have not been felt by Australia’s elites, including the professional middle classes, who dominate the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the media and the academy. The same social classes also dominate politics, since today’s professionalised political parties are only weakly linked to their erstwhile social foundations. Consequently, their interests and worldviews have shaped the framing of the pandemic and responses to it.

[...]

In 1996, iconoclast American historian Christopher Lasch’s book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously in America — yet its resonance today is surely apparent in Australia. In the book, Lasch argues that elites in Western societies, including the professional middle classes, have abandoned their responsibilities towards their fellow-citizens and nations, orienting themselves towards cosmopolitan identities and agendas. Noblesse oblige, as limited as it was, was replaced by a sense of moral superiority, derived from the feeling that their elevated position in society was earned and meritorious.

If Lasch had been around today he would have readily recognised that the elites in our Covid-stricken societies — not just in Australia — are still in revolt. Faced with these devastating impacts on their fellow-citizens, many elites and middle-class professionals have preferred to look the other way, conflating their own interests with society’s.

They have become lockdown’s biggest cheerleaders and portray their own compliance with lockdown rules as an expression of individual moral superiority, conveniently forgetting that the privileges afforded by their income and lifestyle are not shared by all. They have dismissed resistance to lockdowns as extremism, although evidence from recent rallies in Australia suggests that a number of participants were not fringe-dwelling conspiracists, but ordinary people struggling with long lockdowns.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bloomington ‘all-ages’ Pride event features Satanist pornographer

The city’s August 14 Pride event will feature performances from several drag queens, including a “story hour and show” with Martina Marraccino. Children are the usual target audience of “drag queen story hours” and an advertisement for the event says “all ages” are welcome.

Marraccino’s public Facebook page, listed under the name “The Lady Martina,” includes several pictures of him stripping. On his personal page, Marraccino asked his friends last month to donate to The Satanic Temple for his birthday and followed that up with a “Hail Satan” post.

Becky Strohmeier, a concerned resident who runs the Bloomington Patriots group, discovered that Marraccino appears to perform under the name Adam Divine as well. A Twitter profile with that name consists of “nearly 100% gay pornography,” according to Strohmeier.

“It’s very clear by his physical appearance that they are the same,” Strohmeier told Alpha News, noting that Marraccino commented on a Bloomington Patriots post about his alleged sexual exploits and didn’t deny it was him.

“This is childish and I’m not bothered. Your children crave love and acceptance, you seem to only have room for hate. That’s sad for them, and for you. Jesus would be ashamed of you,” Marraccino said.

🤡🌎

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Texas determines sexual reassignment surgery for children is 'child abuse'

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services announced Wednesday that sexual reassignment surgery for children is "child abuse."

"Genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse," Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters said in a press release. "This surgical procedure physically alters a child's genitalia for nonmedical purposes potentially inflicting irreversible harm to children's bodies."

The release was issued in response to an Aug. 6 inquiry by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and said that sex reassignment surgery could cause a threat of harm from physical injury.

Masters's determination and its enforcement would be "effective immediately," Abbott said Thursday.

The Texas law prohibits female "genital mutilation" for girls younger than 18, but it says nothing about prohibiting male "genital mutilation" for someone of that age.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Anti-White Infrastructure Bill

Americans are enthusiastic about spending money on infrastructure -- bridges, roads, broadband and green technologies. But this racist bill locates and hands out jobs and contracts projects based on race, not merit. Minority businesses and neighborhoods hold the inside track. If you're white, you're low priority.

The bill includes grants to install solar or wind technologies and generate jobs in areas decimated by closing coal mines or coal-fired electric plans. Here's the catch: when contractors bid, the bill says minority-owned businesses will get chosen first. Bad news for white contractors and displaced coal miners, who are overwhelmingly white and need jobs. (Section 40209)

The same is true for the bill's proposals to improve traffic patterns in cities. Contractors and subcontractors get priority only if they're owned by minorities or women. White male business owners can take a hike. (Section 11509)

Americans should be outraged. But not surprised. After all, President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan Act, which passed in March, also put into place an ugly system of discrimination against whites. It offered debt relief to Black farmers but not white farmers. Another provision offered billions in aid to minority-owned and women-owned restaurants, but it told struggling restaurants owners who happened to be white men that they had to go to the back of the line.

The injustice was obvious. White male farmers and restaurant owners sued, claiming the anti-white provisions are unconstitutional. So far, they're winning. In every case, federal judges have halted the race-based programs in the American Rescue Plan Act until the challengers have their day in court. Politico reported last week that Biden's Justice Department may fold without a fight on the Black farmer debt relief cases because the law is not on their side.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The trans takeover of schools

Trans’ is a magic word. It is impervious to science, common sense and even to concerns about the safeguarding of children. Thhe Scottish government has now released guidance entitled Supporting Transgender Pupils In Schools, which instructs teachers to affirm, unquestioningly, children’s trans or non-binary identities from the age of four.

Teachers are advised to use preferred pronouns, including ‘zie’ or ‘ey’ or ‘per’, at the behest of pupils. And they are told they need to treat any disclosure of a child’s transgender identity as confidential, withholding it even from the child’s family. The idea that children and adult authority figures should collude to keep secrets from parents is deeply troubling.

Tellingly, the 70-page document states that ‘social justice’ is ‘core to what it means to be a teacher in Scotland’. This bizarre and ideologically drenched guidance represents a fundamental shift in education. It seems that children are now expected to lead and instruct adults.

Of course, youngsters should be listened to by teachers. When a child says he or she feels uncomfortable then adults must take note. That some children have a profound discomfort with their body (a condition known as gender dysphoria) is undeniable. But it does not follow that the person suffering has been born into the wrong body. Symptoms such as gender dysphoria or bodily dissociation are common responses to trauma. Any disclosure of these feelings should not be ignored. It might even be an indication that a child has been abused.

Instead, this irresponsible guidance instructs teachers that ‘if a young person comes out to you, it’s also important not to deny their identity, or overly question their understanding of their gender identity’. This is wrong. Adults should not to be led, either by children or ideologues, to affirm a child’s identity – it is adults’ job to listen, to take responsibility and to apply the experience they have gained with age.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Intersectional AmEx: The firm teaches employees that capitalism is fundamentally racist, then asks them to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities.

According to documents that I have obtained from a whistleblower, AmEx executives created an internal “Anti-Racism Initiative” following the death of George Floyd last year. The initiative subjects employees to an extensive training program based on the core tenets of critical race theory, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “intersectionality”—a component of critical race theory that reduces individuals to a collection of racial, gender, and sexual identities, which determine whether an individual is an oppressor or one of the oppressed.

In a foundational session, an outside consulting firm called Paradigm trained AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity, [and] citizenship” onto an official company worksheet. After employees categorize their identities, they can determine whether they have “privilege” or whether they are a member of a “marginalized group” that is “underrepresented, stigmatized, or otherwise undervalued in society.” Thus, employees can judge their position on the intersectional hierarchy—presumably with straight white males in the oppressor position, and racial and sexual minorities in the oppressed position.

In a related lesson, American Express then instructs employees to change their behavior in the office based on their relative position on the racial and sexual hierarchy. The trainers provide a blue flowchart with specific rules for interacting with black, female, and LGBTQ employees: if a member of a subordinate group is present, employees should practice “intersectional allyship” and defer to them before speaking. In another handout, the instructions for white employees are even more explicit: “identify the privileges or advantages you have”; “don’t speak over members of the Black and African-American community”; “it’s not about your intent, it’s about the impact you have on your colleague.” Even common phrases are subjected to race-based regulation: white employees are told not to utter phrases such as “I don’t see color,” “we are all human beings,” and “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough,” which are categorized as “microaggressions” against their black colleagues.

As one of the company’s high-profile “anti-racism” events, American Express executives invited Professor Khalil Muhammad—great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam—to lecture on “race in corporate America.” Muhammad argued that the system of capitalism was founded on racism and that “racist logics and forms of domination” have shaped Western society from the Industrial Revolution to the present. “American Express has to do its own digging about how it sits in relationship to this history of racial capitalism,” said Muhammad. “You are complicit in giving privileges in one community against the other, under the pretext that we live in a meritocratic system where the market judges everyone the same.”

After establishing the company’s participation in racist oppression, Muhammad then encouraged AmEx executives to begin “the deep redistributive and reparative work” and to “lobby [the government] for the kinds of social policies that reflect your values.” Muhammad argues further that the company should reduce credit standards for black customers and sacrifice profits in the interest of race-based reparations. “If American Express cares about racial justice in the world, it can’t simply say the market’s going to define how we price certain customers who happen to come from low-income communities,” Muhammad said. “If you want to do good, then you’re going to have to set up products and [product] lines that don’t maximize profit.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Antonio García Martínez] Silicon Valley’s fake diversity problem

Once our lucky candidate is given the job, the measurement doesn’t stop. Every tech company has an involved performance review process, aligned with whatever management gospel they believe. Employees, having spent long hours both working in Zoom meetings and bonding in “offsites” — imagine a school trip combined with group therapy — are then asked to submit “360-degree feedback”. Similar to East Germans writing Stasi reports on their neighbours, employees rank all their colleagues according to whatever rubric is deemed most important.

The calculus is even harsher among Silicon Valley’s high-growth startups. Here, returns on techno-capital can be stratospheric, way beyond even other capitalism-soaked boom times of the past. A single well-timed investment can make good on a venture capitalist’s entire fund, and a few choice years at the right company can set up an engineer for life.

But herein lies the problem: if venture-capital-fuelled technology is one of the most brutal, though effective, amplifiers of human talent, then the outcomes will be spectacularly unequal. Which is why the diversity agenda — the thought that all groups must enjoy equal representation everywhere we choose to measure — reaches such a crusading fervour inside the tech industry. The economic peaks and valleys that must be pummelled smooth are Grand Canyon-esque in their proportions. But in the current American zeitgeist, that enormous discrepancy in outcome is instantly projected along a single obsessive dimension: race and ethnicity.

The diversity reports from large public tech companies — they’re all required to publish them nowadays — reflect this one-dimensional focus. Consider a table from Google’s 2021 US diversity report below. Asians constitute over 40% of all of Google; that’s a seven-times overrepresentation versus their population percentage. Whites form barely 50% of Google, which is less than their percentage of the population as a whole.

More amusing in Google’s report is the crude racial categorisation which perfectly captures the progressive agenda’s simplistic approach to “diversity”. Here you can toggle the region to any part of the globe, and all of humanity in its spectacular diversity reduces to essentially the same five buckets: Asian+, Black+, Latinx+, White+ and Native American+. In true American style, it takes all the world’s real-life cultural diversity, puts it through the meat grinder of American racial politics and pops out five flavours.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Professor specializing in black feminist ‘ghosts’ opposes prison tours because it makes inmates feel ‘embarrassed’

A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth criminology professor who once authored an academic paper on “Black Feminist Hauntology” said she believes students should not be allowed to take field trips to prisons as it might “harm” prisoners.

[...]

“Many of us took the stand that said no, that’s really harmful to prisoners, to be looked at like animals in a zoo kind of visit, that really hurts them,” Saleh-Hanna said at the June meeting. “So does educating students allow us to hurt prisoners in this way?”

[...]

Saleh-Hanna received her Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2007, where her doctoral research was on “Crime, Resistance and Song.”

[...]

But Saleh-Hanna’s most notable research product came in the form of a 2015 academic paper which studied “hauntology and the sociological study of ghosts, historic memory, abusive structural relationships and works inspired by Toni Morrison’s and Octavia Butler’s novels.”

“Hauntology,” writes Saleh-Hanna, “is a socio-philosophical study of ghosts through whom we can locate the abusive and morally bankrupt nature of structural race relations as they manifest through the violent race-making and land-grabbing conquests of colonialism.”

I believe in last week's thread someone made the claim that "years of education" was strongly correlated with intellegence and attractiveness., to which I reply: lmao

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Tumblr Transformed American Politics

The journalist Wesley Yang’s “successor ideology,” his term for “wokeness” (or neoliberalism, political correctness, social justice, et al.) follows a similar trail, and his Substack Year Zero sets out to chronicle the history and rise of our new cultural and political landscape, or as he once framed it, our “bourgeois moral revolution.”

In his inaugural post, Yang alludes to successor ideology being a culmination of aspects of several important historical movements and events, including the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the New Left, and the social movements these things spawned. Perhaps there is no single antagonist; instead, we were brought to our current moment by a number of factors, that, paradoxically, are contradictory.

Yang’s thesis seems more reasonable, as it appreciates just how complicated our current moral landscape is. The changes we’ve seen have been so vast and, in some cases, so radical that to pinpoint one cause (the university, feminism, the economy) seems like a fool’s errand.

Although it’s too early to tell with Yang’s work, as he’s still in the process of publishing it, others in the field of anti-woke criticism seem to miss an important element of the story. Just how did these theories spread so effectively? Yang and Lindsay are likely right—a complicated convergence of activism, policy, and economic changes led to a shift in our culture, the seeds of which were planted far before the Obama administration. But the narrative they’re piecing together seems to be missing one thing: the fact there was a clear and, importantly, documented “super-spreader” event.

That was the strange and powerful union of fandom, social media, and journalism between the years 2013 and 2015.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Now even rape victims are being called bigots

The list of ‘anti-trans bigots’ grows longer by the day. We already know that this McCarthy-like list includes any woman who dares to speak up for women’s sex-based rights and who would prefer not to have blokes in her changing rooms and bathrooms, and any lesbian-rights activists who object to the idea that in order to be a good, woke person she must agree to feel sexually attracted to someone with a penis who fantasises that he is a gay woman. Those, and others, have for a long time been branded thoughtcriminals against transgenderism, deserving of No Platforming and ceaseless harassment online. Now, another group of people has been added to the list: rape victims.

Yes, now even women who have suffered from sexual violence are being looked upon as potential bigots. It is increasingly difficult to feel shocked by the claims of transgender activists. These, after all, are the kind of people who think violent male sexual offenders who identify as women should be housed in women’s prisons, and who responded to the Wi Spa controversy in LA – when a male-bodied person paraded around in the nude in the women and girls’ section – essentially by saying: ‘Well, maybe seven-year-old girls shouldn’t be looking at trans people’s genitals.’ And yet, even for this increasingly eccentric and misogynistic lobby group, this latest development feels especially disturbing.

The attachment of the word ‘bigot’ to some women who have suffered from rape or other forms of sexual violence was made by Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman who is CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis. That a born male is overseeing rape-crisis centres that were traditionally intended to be women-only spaces has already, and understandably, caused controversy. Now Wadhwa has further alarmed women’s rights activists by arguing that some women who get raped are ‘bigoted people’ with problematic views about trans issues. And so when they arrive at a rape-crisis centre, they may need to have their ‘prejudices’ challenged. Read that again: women seeking help following a sexual assault may need to be re-educated and cleansed of their allegedly backward beliefs.

It was For Women Scotland that spotted Wadhwa’s comments. They were made on the Guilty Feminist podcast. In a discussion about ‘trans inclusion’ in rape-crisis centres – let’s be honest about what this really means: men being allowed to access what were once women’s spaces – Wadhwa said that some ‘survivors’ of sexual violence are ‘misinformed’ about what a trans-inclusive rape-crisis centre looks like. And so they turn up feeling ‘fearful’ and – get this – with possibly ‘bigoted’ views. ‘[S]exual violence happens to bigoted people as well. And so, you know, it is not [a] discerning crime’, said Wadhwa. And if these ‘bigots’ arrive at an Edinburgh rape-crisis centre, they can apparently expect to be lectured about their views. ‘[If] you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma… but please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices.’

This should horrify everyone who supports women’s rights, and especially the right of women to access advice and assistance following a sexual assault. What is a ‘bigoted’ idea in the eyes of trans activists? It can include, as JK Rowling has discovered, arguing that biological sex is real. It can also include the belief that people who were born male should never be allowed into women-only spaces. It can include making a distinction between women and ‘trans women’, by believing, for example, that the former are real women and the latter are not. So is a rape victim a bigot if she arrives at a rape-crisis centre and asks to speak to a woman rather than a man? Is she a bigot if she would rather not be counselled by a male person in women’s clothing? Will that woman – distressed by her experience of sexual violence and understandably preferring not to speak to a man about it – be looked upon as a ‘bigot’? Will she have her ‘prejudices challenged’?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Media Bashes Unvaccinated Kirk Cousins; Cheers Unvaccinated Lamar Jackson

The sports media crucified Vikings QB Kirk Cousins for much of the week because Cousins has refused the COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, the same press welcomed Ravens QB Lamar Jackson back to practice Saturday with applause after testing positive for COVID a second time. Like Cousins, Jackson has refused the vaccine.

“Why did Kirk Cousins, who didn’t even test positive, get destroyed for multiple days over COVID and Lamar Jackson gets essentially ignored?” Clay Travis asked on Twitter.

The answer: because Kirk Cousins is white and Lamar Jackson is black.

The media’s logic is simple. If ESPN, the New York Times, or USA Today criticize Jackson’s personal decision to avoid the vaccine, the outlets risk someone claiming they are trying to dictate a black man’s health decisions. Just the thought of that response quashes the idea of publicly questioning Jackson’s decision.

By contrast, bashing a white man — whether he’s an athlete, politician, or actor — comes with virtually no downside. Media outlets know that Cousins, because of his skin and gender, is an easy target. It’s a two-for-one. Twitter users will retweet headlines that demand vaccine mandates and share stories that focus negatively on a white QB. Honestly, crushing Cousins is good for Twitter business right now.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Sooner or Later, Ability Rules: on a long enough timescale, there's nowhere to hide

Why have remediation costs exploded? Look at the graph above. There is no underlying trend in educational data that would suggest that this vast improvement is underwritten by actual student learning gains. We decided the high school graduation rate was a national scandal, we found that we could not actually bring students up to standards, so we cheated and graduated them anyway. Can’t actually meet standards? Hey, there’s “online credit recovery.” Need a model high school without model students? Here’s one where everybody gets As, regardless of ability. Can’t get students through even with all of these lowered standards and with all of these dirty tricks? Don’t have any standards at all.

When I worked at Brooklyn College there was this constant vexing problem across the CUNY system. Students who do two years at a CUNY community college are guaranteed admissions at a 4-year school, but these students often show up with their transcripts an absolute mess and completely lacking the necessary underlying ability to succeed. Their struggles gets foisted onto already-overworked senior college professors, and of course the community college professors who send them to the senior colleges blame the high schools. All of this contributes to a system where six out of ten undergraduates can’t pass their required math classes. Why can’t these college students do high school math? Well, when the cut score for your state standardized exam is so ludicrously low, what do you expect? Something like this is happening all over the country: unprepared students get into college under misguided access programs or simply through the financial desperation of the schools. Once their lack of ability is apparent, the choices are to either let them drop out and start their lives with student loan debt and no degree, or to simply abandon the idea of rigor and further devalue the meaning of a college education.

Why does that transfer policy persist at CUNY? One, the senior colleges need the enrollments to stay in business, and two, because leadership views it as an equity program and conditions that supposedly increase equity simply cannot be challenged within CUNY. It’s broken, everyone knows it’s broken, nothing changes.

Many people seem content to kick the can further down the road. Even a half-decade ago when I was in grad school there was a burgeoning movement to reject the notions of grading and assessment entirely. (They’re as old as education, but ah well.) Several of my peers said directly that they never gave bad grades, even to people who didn’t once show up or submit an assignment, because grades are the hand of the patriarchy or whatever. You can call that a fringe position, but of course grade inflation has been rampant in college for decades; students are consumers now and eventually consumers get what they want. Now, with a social justice pretext presenting itself, I think eventually most colleges are going to take the path of least resistance and just give almost everybody As and call it a day. Fewer dropouts = more tuition dollars, after all. At scale, we’re already seeing an admissions free-for-all at all but top-tier US colleges. Policy pressure in K-12 has been pushing more unqualified students into the college pipeline from below for decades; the colleges pluck more and more of them up from above to stay fiscally solvent. But the best-prepared students were already going, and now there’s no more low-hanging fruit, and the kids they’re recruiting simply are not prepared and don’t belong in college. So they’ll just abandon rigor.

The problem is, you can only fulfil that bipartisan dream of armies of poor Black kids climbing out of the inner cities to Stanford and on to Google and upper-middle class lives if those kids can actually get the job done, if they can actually engineer, if they can actually code. Many of the students we graduate from high school simply cannot do what’s necessary to have that kind of success. Who is going to show up at Google and tell them that they have to give a programming job to someone who can’t code, because their lack of skills is just another equally legitimate “way of knowing”?

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Pro paintballer under fire for saying COVID patient ‘needs a f–king treadmill’

A professional paintballer was kicked off her team Monday for making fun of a teenager infected with COVID-19 and saying he doesn’t need the vaccine but instead, “a f–king treadmill.”

Jessica Maiolo, 31, posted a since-deleted video on TikTok about the Miami teen, who spent 10 days in the hospital with the virus, and how his mother said she’d wished she’d gotten him the vaccine sooner so the serious illness could’ve been prevented.

“Ma’am your kid does not need a COVID shot,” Maiolo, standing in front of a television with the news report paused, said in the video.

“Your kid needs a f–king treadmill. That’s what he needs.”

Maiolo was excoriated on the social media platform for being a “vile human,” fat shaming a teenager and spreading vaccine misinformation.

[–]Node 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Don't associate with idiots at any level. In many areas, that means separation from society itself.

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2)

Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting, and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa I Due Figaro showed her influence in some stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.

Vaughn was committed to championing minority musicians—so much so that she endowed a scholarship for them at her alma mater, Brevard College in North Carolina. “In all my years of teaching,” she said at the time, “I often have wished that more minority members were encouraged to pursue a music profession.” Besides the classics, she produced socially conscious contemporary works, giving the first professional staging, for example, at the Fort Worth Opera Festival of a feminist opera about a seventeenth-century nun.

The mob cares nothing for facts, though. On June 17, 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class on opera dramaturgy to high school students via Zoom. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out (very likely a plant), asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehár’s allegedly racist (in this case, allegedly anti-Asian) operetta Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles) several years earlier. Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising a warmed-over issue irrelevant to the current discussion.

The fuse was lit. A Manhattan School of Music student petition was immediately forthcoming. Vaughn must be fired because she is a “danger to the arts community,” it thundered. The petition resurrected a meme from the time of the Lehár production—that Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler character, thus proving her racism. A rule banning blacks from playing servant characters would put off-limits some of the most essential roles in the repertoire, including Leporello in Don Giovanni, and Figaro and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro (the latter of which Kathleen Battle knocked out of the park). For good measure, the petition threw in unspecified “reports” of “homophobic aggression and body shaming.” The petition quickly garnered 1,800 signatures. Phony Instagram accounts under Vaughn’s name suddenly appeared on the Web, containing fake inflammatory material.

Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defense. Vaughn was fired, and replaced by a black male.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Memo reveals UNC plan to sideline 'diversity of thought' ahead of Nikole Hannah-Jones appointment

Hussman Dean Susan King wrote the August 1, 2020 memo to university Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz. She stated, "There is a fundamental conflict between efforts to promote racial equity and understandings of structural racism, and efforts to promote diversity of thought. These two things cannot sit side by side without coming into conflict.”

King wrote the memo in anticipation of Nikole Hannah-Jones joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty and teaching a class based on the "1619 Project."

"Hannah-Jones will teach a large class open to all students that centers around the 1619 Project. The class will advance all our values around diversity and the media and also offer students- inside and outside Hussman-a much deeper understanding of systemic racism and the impact of slavery on America," King wrote.

Despite an apparent willingness to deprioritize diversity of thought, the plan contains pages of recommendations aimed at advancing racial diversity according to a particular understanding of race and racism.

At the time the memo was written, "it [was] possible for a Hussman student to graduate without taking a course focused on the question of diversity," according to the dean. King wrote, "Faculty believe that is a problem."

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

U. Oklahoma coaches claim they can discipline players for their politics

Two women’s volleyball coaches at the University of Oklahoma argue in a legal motion that they have the right to discipline players for their political beliefs.

Player Kylee McLaughlin sued coaches Lindsey and Kyle Walton along with the OU Board of Regents earlier this year, alleging “she had been excluded from the team […] over her politically conservative views.”

The OU Daily reported that McLaughlin, the OU team captain and first team All-Big 12 selection in 2018 and 2019, had made comments that “at least one” of her teammates considered “racist” following a team viewing of the Netflix documentary “13th.”

[...]

In a nutshell: At a public university they can force players into volleyball-irrelevant political discussions … and to preserve “team unity” all players must agree with them.

Incredibly, the Waltons also contend restricting McLaughlin’s First Amendment rights in political discussions (again, introduced by them) is akin to enforcing rules during an actual volleyball match: “As it relates to on court conduct, for example, students are not at liberty to question the decisions of the coach via a First Amendment claim.”

[–]Node 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Another example of a woman attempting to associate with her enemies. They recognise she is their enemy, but it seems she hasn't got the word yet. Although to be fair, playing the role of the martyr can be a valid strategy.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Teachers union advises members on defending critical race theory — like not using the term

One will immediately note Education Minnesota’s tactics from the document’s title — “Responding to racially motivated attacks on racial equity in schools.” It’s not CRT but “equity.” Criticisms are “racially motivated.”

A “key concept” of the document says teachers should stay away from using the actual words “critical race theory” because it has been “redefined” by conservatives as an “all-purpose racial dog whistle.”

This ties in to another key concept: “ascribe motivations to the opposition.”

“Unfortunately, a few billionaires and the promoters and talking heads they pay for have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics,” the document reads. “Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t come together to demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like smaller class sizes, degrees without debt and affordable health care for all.”

The (conservative) wealthy are blamed again in the union’s advice on how to respond to parents who might say the United States should be “colorblind” and that “race shouldn’t matter”: “We should live in a state where anything is possible for anyone to achieve. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but the promoters and their billionaire funders are manufacturing outrage to divide us along racial lines.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A Woke Education: At California’s top private school, diversity, equity, and inclusion is the new core curriculum.

Some schools deny that they teach critical race theory, but the College Preparatory School, California’s top-ranked independent high school, leaves no room for ambiguity. According to its seven-page curricular update, revised on June 25, the Oakland school added readings in critical race theory to its constitutional-law elective. “These new readings,” the update announces, “were designed to challenge the law’s propensity to categorize people in ways that silo marginalized groups and to get students to think about how legal advocacy might operate from a more intersectional framework.”

But teaching critical-race-theory texts in one class is a microscopic detail in College Prep’s massive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) push, which accelerated in June of last year. According to a March 22, 2021 letter from Monique DeVane, College Prep’s Head of School, “the School has increased equity and inclusion budget lines” by “approximately $450,000 from the 2019–20 to the 2021–22 school year.” The letter responds to a February list of demands from the school’s Black Student Union (BSU), which urged College Prep to expand on its earlier DEI commitments. DeVane assures students and parents that the school has taken steps that meet many of these demands, including a curriculum overhaul and a test-optional admissions policy.

Over the last year, the school placed race front and center in its curriculum. In its Racial Equity & Belonging: 2020–21 End of Year Update, published in June, the school promises an ongoing effort to “assess and adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support teaching and learning for equity and belonging.” The English department, for example, modified seven of its courses. In one, The Changeling, “a novel that explores the intersection of monstrosity and race/racism,” replaced Shakespeare’s Richard III. The history department now assigns readings from the 1619 Project in both its “Atlantic World” course and its “U.S. and the World” course. The latter includes a culminating project that explores “how certain histories (of marginalized groups, of transnational labor, etc.) provide a broader understanding of events in U.S. History.”

The revisions extend beyond the humanities. The school’s honors biology course began with a week-long orientation on bias and prejudice in the sciences and included units on “how the concept of the gene has been used to perpetuate racism and eugenics.” In the engineering and design course, “students learned that many professionals create products based on their own demographic, which tilts white.” Another science course, “Issues in Science,” made justice “the center of each discussion, with a change of emphasis to how scientific practice and tools manifest whatever biases and prejudices exist in human society.” The math department “took a close look at its curricula and whenever possible, changed the names on theorems from the white European versions.”

No corner of the curriculum appears untouched. The world languages department “continued to incorporate explicit conversations and content about social justice, colonialism, and inequity.” The French IV Seminar “focused on race and diversity in French cinema.” The Dance curriculum “continues to be rooted in a social justice perspective.” Drama Tech students “designed a show in the style of a non-theatrical artist focused exclusively on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists.”

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

MMA Fighter Reported to UK Police Over a Meme

An MMA fighter in the UK who was reported to police after posting joke memes that some claimed were transphobic responded by saying, “I don’t give a shit.”

Darren Till seemingly caused the most offence by posting a meme that depicted a transgender pregnancy.

“When you transgender and you think you pregnant,” said the text accompanying the meme, which showed an image of a baby scan revealing the ‘baby’ to be a turd.

“Have a wonderful week everyone #positivity,” Till wrote under the post.

For this and other “transphobic” memes, Till was reported to Merseyside Police, who subsequently told the Liverpool Echo that “enquiries are ongoing” into the egregious thought crime.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1)

Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.

Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.

The campaign against classical music is worth examining in some detail, for it reveals the logic that has been turned against nearly every aspect of Western culture over the last year. The crusade began within days of the death of George Floyd in late May 2020. Floyd died during an arrest in Minneapolis; cell-phone video captured Officer Derek Chauvin (since convicted of murder) keeping his knee on the prone Floyd’s neck and back for nearly eight minutes, while Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe.” Riots against police brutality broke out across the U.S.; institution after institution pledged to fight the structural racism that Floyd’s death supposedly represented.

The classical music profession deemed itself implicated in Floyd’s death. On June 1, 2020, the League of American Orchestras issued a statement confessing that, for decades, it had “tolerated and perpetuated systemic discrimination against Black people, discrimination mirrored in the practices of orchestras and throughout our country.” The League was “committed to dismantling” its “role in perpetuating the systems of inequity that continue to oppress Black people” and expected its member orchestras to respond in kind.

That response was immediate. The Hartford Symphony Orchestra apologized for its “history of inaction to effectively confront the racist systems and structures that have long oppressed and marginalized Black musicians, composers, and communities.” The Seattle Opera announced that it would “continue to prioritize” antiracism and “make amends” for causing harm. Opera Omaha sent a message to its “black community”: “We know that you are exhausted and recognize we will never fully understand the depth of your suffering. We know that part of your exhaustion comes from the heartbreak of our silence, inaction, and half-measures.” Every communication that the opera sends out now concludes with the tagline: “We will listen more than we speak, but will not be silent in the face of injustice.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Navy could return to using photos for promotions, personnel chief says

The Navy could include service photos in promotion packages again after data suggested minorities are less likely to be selected blindly in some situations by promotion review boards, the service’s chief of personnel said Tuesday.

Diversity among leadership dropped after photos were removed last year from Navy promotion packages, Vice Adm. John Nowell said during a panel discussion on diversity and inclusion at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.

“I think we should consider reinstating photos in selection boards,” he said. “We look at, for instance, the one-star board over the last five years, and we can show you where, as you look at diversity, it went down with photos removed.”

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper directed all services in July 2020 to eliminate photos from promotion and selection boards to support diversity in the ranks. But Nowell said adding them back could do more to build a more diverse leadership force.

“It's a meritocracy, we're only going to pick the best of the best, but we're very clear with our language to boards that we want them to consider diversity across all areas,” he said. “Therefore ... I think having a clear picture just makes it easier.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why Private Schools Have Gone Woke: Meet the National Association of Independent Schools, which enforces diversity, equity, and inclusion standards as a requirement for accreditation

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Lebanese Canary in the Identity Coal Mine

In reality, the port blast was a symptom of a deeper and more serious malady: the prominence of identity politics in Lebanese society. Lebanese society is built upon identity politics, reflected in a government and constitution with explicit diversity mandates. The obsession with identity politics has crippled Lebanon since its inception, with the explosion that destroyed the port just the latest in a long list of tragedies its citizens have experienced.

Lebanon’s dysfunction should serve as a cautionarytale for the United States. American politics are increasingly defined by identity and the quest for diversity. For example, in December 2020 none other than President-elect Joe Biden promised that he would deliver “the single most diverse Cabinet based on race, color, based on gender, that’s ever existed in the United States of America.”

The obsession with identity is found at all levels of government. One notable instance is the controversy surrounding the vacancy of Kamala Harris’s Senate seat in California. Representative Karen Bass stated: “Certainly, there will be a void if she [Kamala Harris] is not replaced with an African-American woman.” The Latino Community Foundation took the same tact: “Our [Latino] voice remains missing from the highest levels of our government… It is up to states like California to do their part to ensure that we are building more diverse and inclusive institutions reflective of our society.”

The statements of President Biden, Rep. Bass, and the Latino Community Foundation represent a growing belief that politicians and the U.S. government must be a mirror image of American society. It presumes that a government which “accurately reflects” the various racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities of its constituents will govern more effectively and produce greater stability. According to President Biden, “Building a diverse team will lead to better outcomes and more effective solutions to address the urgent crises facing our nation.”

Lebanon shows us that a fixation on identity politics and diversity leads to dysfunction and policy paralysis. On paper, Lebanon should be a success. It has an educated population, and a venerable history as a center for trade, banking, and financial services.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Professor suggests it should be a federal hate crime to criticize Fauci and other government-funded scientists

Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, is arguing that federal hate-crime protections may need to be extended to Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists “targeted by far-right extremism.”

In his July 28 paper “Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States,” Hotez writes that a “band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists.”

With that, the professor contends in his paper that Congress “should look at expanded protection mechanisms for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States,” citing a bill that has been introduced named the Scientific Integrity Act of 2021.

It would protect government-funded scientists “from political interference, but this needs to be extended for scientists at private research universities and institutes. Still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections,” Hotez wrote.

Hotez has become something of a media darling on CNN and other left-leaning news and radio outlets amid the pandemic. His Tweeter feed includes retweets calling the professor a “national hero” and likening him to Dr. Leonard McCoy of “Star Trek.”

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

University’s anti-racism workshop teaches deans to ‘accept white inferiority’

The University of Kentucky hosted an anti-racism workshop that apparently aimed to teach deans and other top faculty to accept their “white inferiority” and work to enhance diversity, equity and inclusion goals in their departments.

The university paid $5,000 to the Center for Healing Racial Trauma for the workshop, according to invoices recently obtained through a public records act request by Young America’s Foundation.

Titled “Cultivating an Anti-Racist Mindset for Academic Administrators,” the workshop was hosted last winter by the center, which offers trainings designed to heal people of racism and teach them to be anti-racist, among other services.

The center is run by University of Kentucky psychology Professor Candice Hargons, according to its website. Hargons did not respond to a request for comment from The College Fix.

The session involved deans and other top faculty writing out their “chosen metric for anti-racism,” to whom they have chosen to be accountable, and the steps they have taken thus far to address it. The details of the sessions were reported on by YAF, which obtained copies of hand-written cards by participants on how they will be anti-racist.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why Is Your College Tuition So Expensive? It’s Funding Piles Of ‘Diversity’ Bureaucrats

We discovered that, overall, the number of DEI-dedicated staff is dramatically out of proportion to other programs serving higher education goals. For example, the typical university devotes 4.2 times as many staff to promoting DEI initiatives than they do to helping disabled students get reasonable accommodations — and the latter is required by law. On average, DEI staff outnumbered history professors by 40 percent. Overall, there are 3.4 people working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.

Some universities had strikingly large numbers of people with DEI responsibilities in their job titles. At the University of Michigan, for example, 163 people have formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has more than 13 times as many people devoted to promoting DEI as providing services to people with disabilities. Georgia Tech has 3.2 times as many DEI staff as it does history professors. The University of Virginia boasts 6.5 DEI staff for every 100 professors.

We should note that our methodology for counting DEI staff was extremely conservative. We counted only those positions with formal responsibility for promoting DEI. We excluded faculty and staff in academic departments, like African-American and gender studies, even though they clearly promote DEI goals in addition to engaging in traditional teaching and research.

We also did not count the many administrators who tout DEI messages but do not have DEI in their job titles. Finally, we excluded staff with responsibility for ensuring compliance with Title IX and other legal anti-discrimination requirements.

Basically, we only counted those positions that universities wanted to create, not positions they had to fill. Even with these limits, the average university listed more than 45 people as having DEI responsibilities.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

EU Releases Urgent Memo Highlighting The Dangers of “Right Wing” Memes

The report opens very promisingly, by warning that the free exchange of humor will undermine “open societies.”

Humour has become a central weapon of extremist movements to subvert open societies and to lower the threshold towards violence Especially within the context of a recent wave of far-right terrorist attacks, we witness “playful” ways in communicating racist ideologies. As far-right extremists strategically merge with online cultures, their approach changes fundamentally. This trend has been especially facilitated by the so-called alt-right and has spread globally. This predominantly online movement set new standards to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action.

The paper then proceeds to explain that in the past, online humor was good, because it helped to “combat extremist ideologies,” though the authors note this comedy may be of dubious effectiveness:

Humour in the context of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) has largely been discussed as a means to combat extremist ideologies. Various counter-narrative campaigns have deployed humour to question the authority of extremist groups and ridicule their ambitions. Even though it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of such campaigns, research has shown that such endeavours are appropriate to spin democratic alternatives for affected youths.

At many times, the paper actually does a good job of explaining precisely why satire, ridicule, memes, and mockery are politically potent. But the authors themselves are such rigid ideologues that they cannot see the genuine humor at the root of right-wing comedy, and instead can only conceive of “supposed” satire and efforts to manipulate others.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

German Greens demand gender-neutral writing in schools

The Green Minister for Education in the German state of Baden-Württemberg is pushing for the use of gender-neutral language in schools. According to her, the schools should agree with the students on the way of writing generic masculines, for example, expressions such as “teachers” or “pupils”, which can refer to both males and females.

However, the co-ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) criticize the plan for violating the coalition agreement. A wave of resentment has also come from philologists who speak of “language rape.”

Green Minister Theresa Schopper said she wanted to stick to an educational plan for the use of gender-neutral language in schools, which her ministry developed five years ago under the leadership of the Social Democrats. “It would be good if the teachers agreed with the students on gender-balanced words,” the minister said.

One possibility is to use asterisks or underscores to write generic masculine words, such as in the cases of “police officer” (“Polizistin”) or “colleague” (“Kollegin”).

The state Association of Philologists spoke out about her proposal. Chairman Ralf Scholl called it “rape of the language”. The CDU, in turn, accuses Schopper of violating the agreement between the two ruling parties and rejects the introduction of “arbitrariness” in expression and writing in schools.

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The Nanny State Meets the Marquis de Sade: Using social justice totems to worship state power—all in the name of ‘public health’—is the acme of pandemic-era journalism

[–]mo-ming-qi-miao 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Cancelled by Childline: Ex-barrister lost his job as a volunteer counsellor with the charity after raising fears over the way children confused about their gender are rushed into changing sex

Former barrister James Esses said he was concerned many youngsters were confused about gender identity and, wrongly, were automatically categorised as transgender or fast-tracked into making life-altering decisions such as undergoing major surgery.

But after sharing his concerns on social media, Mr Esses, 29, claims he became a victim of a belief that young children know their own minds about gender.

First, he was told to leave a five-year degree course because of his 'social media activity'.

Ten days later, Childline told him he could no longer be a volunteer counsellor.

'I just wanted an open and honest debate about a hugely important topic – I'm not sure what is wrong with that,' Mr Esses told The Mail on Sunday.