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Minnesota college forces faculty to attend racially segregated anti-racism trainings

“All faculty/staff will need to either attend the live session or watch the recorded session each month,” Carleton College’s website states.

Carleton College is a small but influential private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, with about 2,000 students and an endowment of close to $900 million. Tuition is $59,000 a year.

The mandatory trainings apparently are not sitting well with all employees.

According to a slide from the March 2021 affinity group meetings, the anti-racism trainers state that “We’ve been told that in some groups that after saying that there’s no racial problem at Carleton some people just refuse to participate.”

The trainers accuse such people of perpetuating racism.

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NGO rescue ship caught demanding €10.000 per migrant

According to the Ragusa public prosecutor's statement, the people smuggling NGO had violated the law by aiding illegal immigration and acted against the maritime navigation code. The rescue ship Mare Jonio allegedly demanded €10,000 from the Danish ship for each passenger taken from onboard their vessel. The Maersk tanker had earlier picked up 27 illegal migrants floating in a boat, and the Maersk tanker's owners would have been charged a total of €270,000 if they had agreed to these terms. Eventually, the sum of €125,000 was transferred by Maersk onto the NGO's bank account.

The African migrants have been kept in makeshift conditions on the tanker for 38 days due to the fact that Maltese authorities refused to allow the ship to dock in any of their ports. After agreeing to pay the roughly €4,630 per migrant, the tanker's temporary passengers were allowed to board the Italian ship. The NGO vessel then proceeded to the Sicilian port of Pozzallo, where all 27 migrants disembarked.

Although MSH has not denied that a large sum was received after the passenger transfer from the Maersk ship, the NGO has issued a statement complaining about the Italian prosecutor's bias, stating that "Ragusa’s public prosecutor has made public his personal crusade against NGOs many times... And, Mediterranea will not stop because of this sad and predictable attack. Mediterranea will continue to be at sea where the crimes of slaughter, torture, rape, and persecution are carried out."

The Danish shipping giant Maersk have also defended its actions, saying that "at no time before or during the operation was any financial compensation or support discussed or agreed. Months after the rescue operation, Maersk met with representatives from Mediterranena to thank them for their humanitarian assistance. Following this meeting, we decided to make a contribution to Mediterranea to cover some of the costs they endured as a result of the operation. This was done in the amount of €125,000 euros and with the full support of Maersk Tankers’ management."

This, however, is not what the Italian authorities' investigation has found so far. According to them, the migrant smuggling NGO was motivated by profit when picking up illegal African immigrants from the commercial ship. They also allege that Beppe Caccia, a board member of the NGO, called a Danish phone number four times between Sept. 8 and Sept. 10. Furthermore, the pro-migration organization's co-founder, Luca Casarini, was charged as far back as 2019 with promoting illegal migration.

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[Ayaan Hirsi Ali] Sweden’s migrant rape crisis

When carrying out research for my new book Prey, I was constantly frustrated by the lack of reliable data on almost every aspect of the problematic relationship between mass migration and sexual violence. Statistics were either a tangle of changing definitions of “sexual assault” or — in the case of a number of countries, including Sweden — they weren’t available at all.

That has now changed thanks to the work of the social scientists Ardavan Khoshnood, Henrik Ohlsson, Jan Sundquist and Kristina Sundquist. In a recent issue of the journal Forensic Sciences Research, they published a paper on “Swedish rape offenders”, in which they analyse the characteristics of individuals between 15-60 years old who were convicted of “rape+” against women in Sweden between 2000 and 2015. The term “rape+” here refers to both acts of rape and attempted rape, including aggravated cases.

The researchers found that, within that time-frame, a total of 3,039 offenders were convicted of rape+ against a woman in Sweden — nearly all of whom (99.7%) were men. According to the researchers, Swedish-born offenders with Swedish-born parents accounted for 40.8% of the offenders. But, strikingly, almost half of the offenders were born outside of Sweden (47.7%). Of those foreign-born offenders, 34.5% were from the Middle East/North Africa, with 19.1% hailing from the rest of Africa. As a percentage of all convicted perpetrators, therefore, 16.4% were foreign-born individuals from the Middle East/North Africa, and 9.1% were foreign-born individuals from Africa (excluding North Africa).

How far does this signify over-representation? On the basis of population records kept by the official agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), approximately 20% (19.7%) of the Swedish population are foreign-born individuals. Among those convicted of rape and perpetrated rape, the foreign-born account for 47.7% of those convicted — so they are over-represented by a factor of 2.4.

Moreover, if we piece various statistics together, we find there are 565,902 foreign-born people living in Sweden who were born in North Africa and the Middle East, representing 4.9% of Sweden’s population. Yet 16.4% of those convicted of rape and attempted rape are foreign-born individuals from North Africa and the Middle East: over-representation by a factor of 3.3. And that figure rises to 4.7 when you consider all foreign-born citizens from Africa (excluding North Africa.)

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Courts Use COVID to Take Kids from Parents

In April 2020, NBC ran a story about a doctor in Florida who was kept from her children on the pretense that her job posed a COVID risk to them. That same month, CNN ran a story about an E.R. doctor who similarly lost custody temporarily because a judge decided her job was no longer safe.

“The Court does not enter this Order lightly but given the pandemic in Florida and the recent increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases, the Court finds in order to insulate and protect the best interests and health of the minor child, this Order must be entered on a temporary basis,” the judge wrote in that court ruling.

This phenomenon, however, is hardly limited to healthcare professionals with immediate exposure to the virus. On the contrary—even though COVID-19 has been consistently shown to pose no substantial threat to children—in a number of recent cases around the U.S., judges have used marginally COVID-related reasons to justify denying a parent custody or even altering a pre-existing custody agreement.

The American Conservative interviewed Melanie Joseph and Dr. Micheline Epstein, both of whose custody cases have recently received media attention. Both told TAC that their situations provide windows into widespread judicial tyranny in the U.S.A.

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'Anti-racist journey' prompts UNR lecturer to apologize for teaching 'Jingle Bells,’ ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep'

Kate Pollard — a senior music lecturer at the University of Nevada-Reno — wrote about her “anti-racist journey” in music education for Nevada Today, the school’s news outlet.

Referring to her first days as a middle school teacher in the late 1990s, Pollard wrote that “I don’t think I even knew what these songs were about, and I am fairly certain that none of my middle school students asked about their historical context.” However, when she “learned what authenticity and appropriateness meant in the mid-2000s,” she began to dive into “culturally relevant pedagogy.”

Between that time period and the present day, Pollard has had “many conversations and read a lot of literature on anti-racist curriculums and appropriation.” She realized that “many of the songs I taught as a middle school educator and even as a college educator are not appropriate and even potentially harmful to certain peoples.”

Examples include “Jingle Bells,” “Shortnin’ Bread,” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” — all of which, according to Pollard, have links to “blackface minstrelsy.”

Pollard told Campus Reform that “Jingle Bells” is problematic because she read that “slave owners used to put bells on slaves to keep track of them, which the jingle bells are referencing.”

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Merchants of Revolution: California’s ethnic studies initiatives train children in Marxist theory—and opposition to the American system.

California public schools are embarking on a new experiment: education as social justice. Earlier this year, the state Department of Education approved an ethnic studies model curriculum, and individual school districts have begun to implement programs that advocate “decolonizing” the United States and “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.

This will likely come as a surprise to most California residents, who may be familiar with the movement’s euphemisms—“ethnic studies,” “educational equity,” “culturally responsive teaching”—but do not understand the philosophical and political premises of these programs. As the state and many school districts begin to implement the state ethnic studies curriculum, however, details are emerging.

I have obtained documents from one such program, the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s Ethnic Studies Initiative, that paint a disturbing picture of the ethnic studies curriculum and the activists leading the charge. According to the documents and to sources within the district, the Office of Education held a series of teacher-training sessions on how to deploy ethnic studies in the classroom. The leaders, including district staff, an advisor for the state Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, and a professor from San Jose State University, encouraged teachers to inject left-wing politics into the classroom and to hide controversial materials from parents.

According to slides and contemporaneous notes from the session, the Santa Clara Office of Education began the presentation with a “land acknowledgement,” claiming that Santa Clara County and the public school system “occupy the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, the sovereign nation and original people of the skies, land, and waters.” The premise of this ritual, which has become common in progressive organizations, is that the American government, founded by white settlers, is an illegitimate colonial power that should return the land to the Native American tribes.

Next, Jorge Pacheco, president of the California Latino School Boards Association and advisor for the state Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, presented the movement’s conceptual framework. Pacheco explained that the ethnic studies curriculum is based on the work of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, who invented the concept of the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” which holds that students must be educated to understand their oppression and develop the practical skills, or “praxis,” to challenge and eventually overthrow their oppressors. Pacheco acknowledged that the Marxist underpinnings to ethnic studies “scare people away” but insisted that teachers must be “grounded in the correct politics to educate students.”

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Stanford students told they better not agree with J.K. Rowling on trans issues

Students living in the Harry Potter-themed dorm were told in late March that J.K. Rowling’s views on transgenderism are unacceptable, according to a column in the Stanford Review.

The statement was made during the dorm’s first virtual house meeting, Stanford student Maxwell Meyer wrote.

The statement read: “We want to acknowledge that J.K. Rowling has made many transphobic, anti-Semitic, and racist statements over the past year. Her beliefs do not reflect our values as a house, and we want to make it clear that we do not tolerate comments like hers in this dorm. Our theme … is intended to make this space safe and fun for you this quarter.”

The College Fix reached out to Meyer, who declined comment.

Meyer argued in his column that the claims against Rowling are inaccurate, pointing out that she has been a longtime supporter of LGBT rights while also acknowledging biological sex. He also asserted that Rowling has made no racist or anti-Semitic statements.

Harry Potter-themed dorm? This is just daycare for (purported) adults. Defund and disestrablish.

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Why big business loves Black Lives Matter

There are many layers to this relationship. There is the immediate branding boost companies can gain from associating with BLM. According to an Edelman survey of 35 countries, 64 per cent of customers say they would reward firms for taking a stand on social issues. Brands like to win over consumers young so they can stay loyal for life – and many young people are uncritically supportive of BLM.

Woke politics has also been useful for firms hiding all kinds of unsavoury practices. Many firms will proclaim allegiance to BLM one day, while lobbying against curbs on forced labour the next, for instance. Indeed, whether you take the Marxist view, that all firms in a capitalist system exploit labour anyway, or the Adam Smith view, that sellers in a marketplace act out of self-interest rather than kindness, it is surely hard to take any company’s proclamations of righteousness too seriously.

But there is more to all this than cynicism and wokewashing. Many of the ideas about race being pushed by BLM – particularly the ubiquity of structural racism – are now part and parcel of corporate culture and the white-collar workplace. Race experts are invited to give workshops and training on diversity and inclusion. Employees are tested for their unconscious bias. An entire race industry worth billions has mushroomed. The most famous and sought-after race entrepreneurs, like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi, can earn vast sums of money in the corporate sector – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per hour. Those BLM protesters setting fire to police stations were not radical revolutionaries — they were more like the militant wing of the human-resources department.

Why has this happened? Clearly, these kinds of workshops are wasting precious work hours and don’t actually produce anything that can be sold. Perhaps what is most useful to the capitalists in these ‘anti-racist’ campaigns is their relentless attempts to re-racialise society. The Coca-Colas and the Nikes of the world are very keen on highlighting the racial differences between working people at every opportunity. According to leaked emails, insiders at Amazon-owned Whole Foods consider the ‘racial diversity’ of its workers in each branch an important metric in determining how likely they are to form unions.

Campaigns for ‘racial awareness’ seem almost perfectly designed to foreground apparent differences between their employees, to pit the ‘privileged’ against the ‘oppressed’ among the workforce, to downplay their common interests as workers. The potential for racism in the workplace – whether overt or in the form of microaggressions – has also given management much more authority to monitor workers’ interpersonal relationships, and even their private lives and political activities (particularly on social media). Race has always been relied on by elites to divide and manage people. But where they once drew on racist tropes, now they draw on ‘anti-racism’.

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California county teacher training: U.S. a ‘parasitic’ system due to ‘invasion’ of white men

As part of its “Ethnic Studies Initiative,” Santa Clara County, California’s Office of Education recently lectured its teachers that the United States is a “parasitic” system which has led to “domestic violence, drug overdoses, and other social problems.”

The county’s teacher workshops were in preparation for implementation of the state’s new ethnic studies curriculum.

California approved the 900-page curriculum last month. Its overview section states oppression will be studied via the intersection(s) of “patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, exploitative economic systems, ableism, ageism, anthropocentrism, xenophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, Islamophobia, and transphobia.”

According to a new report by Christopher Rufo at City Journal, presenters at the Santa Clara workshops “encouraged teachers to inject left-wing politics into the classroom and to hide controversial materials from parents.”

One of the presenters, Jorge Pacheco, was an advisor to the (ethnic studies) curriculum. He said the document is based on the work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist known for his “pedagogy of the oppressed.”

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GOP Army vet congressman seeks answers about ‘critical race theory’ at West Point

A Republican congressman and Army veteran is seeking answers from the U.S. Military Academy about “elements of critical race theory” being made part of instruction for cadets at West Point, including seminars on “systemic racism” and presentation slides discussing “White Power” and “Racist Dog Whistles.”

Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret and Afghanistan War veteran, sent a letter to West Point’s superintendent, Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, telling him, “Information has recently come to my attention from unsettled soldiers, cadets, and families that raises serious concerns about the U.S. Army’s introduction of elements of critical race theory into cadet instruction. While we should always eradicate extremism of all forms from our ranks and never tolerate racism, I am alarmed that this doctrine that focuses our future leaders on race in ways that will be detrimental to unit cohesion, destructive to morale, and strain the readiness of our armed forces.”

Waltz first noted the letter during an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News on Thursday.

“We had a brief phone call, he assured me they’re looking into it and assured me that I will promptly get a more formal response laying out what’s being taught and why in more detail,” Waltz told the Washington Examiner of his Thursday discussion with West Point’s leader, adding, “We’re going to continue to press and get to the bottom of it.”

Screenshots obtained by the Washington Examiner seem to back up the claim that these sorts of theories had been introduced at West Point. Events deemed to be “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” seminars included “Viewing: The Defamation Experience” and “Workshop: Understanding Systemic Racism” — and the message indicated that “you MUST attend at least one of these seminars.” A presentation by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point included slides discussing “White Power at West Point” and “Racist Dog Whistles at West Point.” And a slide depicting a lecture by Emory University professor Dr. Carol Anderson titled “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage” in February seemed to have been put on by Ike Hall (Eisenhower Hall Theatre) at West Point.

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[Glenn Greenwald] Big Corporations Now Deploying Woke Ideology the Way Intelligence Agencies Do: As a Disguise

The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE), hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.

It’s so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport to honor and cherish. Like the GCHQ, how menacing can an intelligence agency be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people they routinely spy on, repress and kill?

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Biden Re-Ignites the Waco Fire

Last week, President Joe Biden nominated David Chipman to be head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the premier federal firearms enforcement agency. Biden complemented that announcement with a call for a national red flag law to entitle police to preemptively confiscate firearms from citizens suspected of being a threat to themselves or others.

Chipman was a 25-year ATF agent and a key official at the 1994 federal trial of the Branch Davidians who survived the ATF and FBI assaults the prior year. Many federal agents posed for grisly “victory photos” in the rubble of the Branch Davidians’ Waco, Texas, home after it burned to the ground during an FBI assault. One photo allegedly shows Chipman proudly holding a rifle in front of the wreckage where scores of children died shortly before. The White House and Chipman’s current employer, the antigun Giffords organization, did not respond to repeated email requests to confirm or deny that Chipman is the federal agent in that photo; the Daily Mail and many online sites have tagged Chipman as the agent. In a Reddit public question and answer session in 2019, Chipman sought to spur support for an assault weapons ban by falsely claiming that the Davidians shot down two federal helicopters that were attacking their compound.

Biden’s nomination of Chipman has thrust Waco back in the national spotlight. Millions of Americans permanently lost faith in the federal government after ATF and FBI attacks concluded with more than 80 civilians dead. But few Americans are aware of Biden’s role, first in helping cover up the debacle and later, after ample damning evidence had surfaced, exonerating federal law enforcement and instead blaming Americans who distrusted Washington. Biden’s behavior on Waco is a bad portent for anyone who expects federal agencies to be leashed during his reign.

At the time of the federal assault at Waco, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had primary oversight jurisdiction over the conduct of federal law enforcement agencies. How did Biden react to an FBI tank and toxic gas assault that ended with shocking carnage? On the day after the fire, Biden “cautioned that lawmakers should wait until all the details become available before it begins second-guessing the Justice Department,” the New York Times reported. Biden declared, “We’ve got to wait to figure out what happened before we have hearings.” Delaying hearings until after the federal agencies that had blundered (or far worse) announced the “facts of the matter” would have horrified earlier generations of congressional leaders who courageously exposed federal lies and cover-ups, from Sen. William Fulbright’s investigation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s to Sen. Frank Church’s investigation of FBI and CIA rampages in the 1970s.

Biden conducted zero hearings on Waco while he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. After Republicans captured control of Congress in the 1994 elections, committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) held hearings in late 1995. Despite plenty of damning disclosures of federal misconduct at Waco in the prior two years, Biden was emphatic that the real problem was “a growing number of people across the country who are seizing on the incidents at Waco as well as at Ruby Ridge to suggest that law enforcement is our enemy.”

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[Freddie deBoer] Education Doesn't Work

If environment dictates everything, then school quality would be immensely consequential. If school quality is a real, stable, and meaningful property, and the environmentalists are right about educational outcomes, then switching schools should have a dramatic effect on how a student performs in the classroom. But what parents typically find is that their child slots into the distribution just about where they were at the old school. The research record provides a great deal of evidence in this direction too.

For example, winning a lottery to attend a supposedly better school in Chicago makes no difference on educational outcomes. In New York? Makes no difference. What determines college completion rates, high school quality? No, that makes no difference; what matters is “preentry ability.” How about private vs. public schools? Corrected for underlying demographic differences, it makes no difference. Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them makes no difference. The kids who just missed the cut score and the kids who just beat it have very similar underlying ability and so it should not surprise us in the least that they have very similar outcomes, despite going to very different schools. (The perception that these schools matter is based on exactly the same bad logic that Harvard benefits from.) Similarly, highly sought-after government schools in Kenya make no difference. Winning the lottery to choose your middle school in China? Makes no difference. All of this confirms anecdotal experiences. Did kids you know go from failures to whiz kids when they moved to a different state, a drastic change in environment? No, of course not. Because they’re the same kid.

Teacher quality perhaps exists but likely exerts far less influence than generally believed. There is no such entity as “school quality.” (I have addressed the charter school shell game at considerable length here.) There is the underlying ability of the students in a school that produces metrics that we then pretend say something of meaning about the school itself. That’s it. Zoning doesn’t make kids perform poorly by keeping them out of the best schools. Zoning creates the impression of the “best schools” by keeping out the kids destined to perform poorly.

Late last century France created an artificial cutoff date for conscription into the military. The result was a sudden influx of students into higher education; men who would have spent years in the military instead spent them going to school. But it not only made no difference in terms of wages or employment, it made almost no difference in the amount of people graduating from higher education. Conscription was screening out the marginal students from attending higher education. But removing the screen didn’t make those students any less marginal. If school matters most, going to more school (or whatever quality) should have a demonstrable impact on students. At a vast scale, in one of the wealthiest and most developed countries on earth, it did not. It simply made no difference.

Meanwhile constantly cited explanatory mechanisms, like class size, aren’t necessarily explanatory at all. Calls for smaller class sizes are ubiquitous because they are one of the few interventions endorsed by both neoliberal ed reformers and the teachers unions who are their enemies. But the quantitative effects of class size has been a research obsession for at least 40 years, and yet there is no real consensus on what exactly works, for what students, in what contexts. Claims of a small class size advantage routinely carry extensive lists of provisos, such as saying that it’s necessary for physical classroom space to not shrink along with number of students, the kind of requirement that makes implementing these efforts at scale a policy nightmare. Nor is there consistency between different studied groups; for example, at the university level class size effects vary wildly depending on who you’re looking at.

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'Ghost Student' scandal hits Baltimore city schools

A school already under investigation for grading irregularities is facing new accusations. Documents just obtained by Project Baltimore show, Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in west Baltimore appears to have had ghost students on the roll. Those are students you’re paying to educate, who aren’t attending school, and in some cases haven’t been for years.

Augusta Fells is a school in turmoil. In summer 2019, its principal and assistant principal were placed on administrative leave as City Schools launched an internal investigation into staff misconduct and grading irregularities.

Project Baltimore spoke with former Augusta Fells families. We obtained transcripts showing students at the school were failing classes, or not even showing up, and still being promoted to the next course level.

[...]

Now, Fox45 News has obtained a document, from October 2019, which contains the names of 21 seniors at Augusta Fells. Sources tell us the school compiled the list of students who, while enrolled on paper, were not physically attending class and some hadn’t for years. They’re known by educators as ghost students.

In Maryland, schools receive funding per student. The more students enrolled, the more money the school gets. City Schools receives nearly $16,000 per student, every year. So, the question is, did North Avenue get taxpayer money to educate 21 students who were on the rolls of Augusta Fells, but were not actually attending the school? That would come out to $331,653 of taxpayer money to educate students who weren’t there.

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

‘Tucker Must Go’: ADL Demands Tucker Carlson Be Fired For Discussing ‘Replacement Theory’

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Friday declared that Tucker Carlson “must go” for daring to calmly discuss how Democrats importing voters dilutes the voting power of current American citizens and is a form of disenfranchisement.

“‘Replacement theory’ is a white supremacist tenet that the white race is in danger by a rising tide of non-whites,” Greenblatt said on Twitter. “It is antisemitic, racist and toxic. It has informed the ideology of mass shooters in El Paso, Christchurch and Pittsburgh.”

[...]

In a guide on their website for pro-Israel activists, the ADL tells followers to say that the idea of “bi-nationalism” in Israel “is unworkable given current realities and historic animosities.”

“With historically high birth rates among the Palestinians, and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world, Jews would quickly be a minority within a bi-national state, thus likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections,” the ADL says. “In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically – and potentially physically – vulnerable.”

“It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory.”

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

Postmodernism makes you miserable

In today’s postmodern culture, problem-solving has never been easier. Rather than sift through the messy labyrinth of factors that influence our actions and interactions, many now favour one common explanation: power and privilege. Not only are complex issues like climate change, the severity of the Covid pandemic and even the fight for free speech now said to be the result of racism and tyrannical power structures, but so too are personal matters like our sexual preferences, music tastes and even diet choices. From complex political dilemmas and social iniquities to the mundanities of our everyday lives, most things, it has been decided, are the result of power, privilege and systemic oppression.

Privilege — that is, an advantage or right granted to select individuals or groups in society — certainly exists. It is a cruelty of life that some seemingly sail through on vessels of unearned privilege, while others have to contend with hell to live a reasonable life. And without doubt, some characteristics — like your class, religion, race, sexuality, etc — come with societal advantages or disadvantages, depending on where you live and the era in which you were born. All of this makes life bitterly unfair.

Leftists, traditionally, have tried to awaken those most advantaged in society to this unfairness, urging them to acknowledge those starting on the back foot — especially when this inequality is the result of discrimination.

But, then the ideological tectonics shifted. The terrain of the left now, rugged and volcanic with radical ideas of postmodernism and critical race theory, has transformed. Not only must the ‘privileged’ recognise their place in the social hierarchy and help pull up those at the bottom, but they must also accept a new version of reality. Racism, sexism and other prejudices not only persist, we’re told, but pervade everything. Together, our individual biases weave into invisible threads of power and privilege, now entwined into the very fabric of Western society. Racism is omnipresent: it infests our every thought, action and interaction, and is socialised so deeply within our psyche that everything we say or do is a symptom of it.

The problem with this worldview — that power and privilege pervade everything — is that it requires a huge sacrifice. Convincing yourself that everything around you is shaped by tyrannical power structures, and that every interaction you have is governed by an insidious oppressor-vs-oppressed dynamic, numbs you to the beauty and complexity of the world. It makes for a miserable existence.

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

[Rod Dreher] What Are They Preparing Us For?

Two young teenage girls in DC, both black, both minors, attempted to carjack a sedan belonging to an older man, a South Asian immigrant. In the ensuing crash, the old man was killed. The DC girls are going to be offered a plea deal. We did not see a raft of big thinkpieces in our media focusing on the Meaning Of It All — that is, what it meant for two black girls to assault an Asian man, resulting in his death.

I would say that is appropriate. As far as we know, race didn’t play a motivating role in this attack. Why racialize a killing without solid evidence that it had a racial angle?

Remember Noah Green, who killed a white Capitol police officer, and was himself killed, in a deranged attack on the US Capitol? He was a Black Muslim who, according to his family, was mentally ill. We did not see a raft of big thinkpieces in our media focusing on the Meaning Of It All — that is, what it meant for a black man to kill a white police officer in an attack on the US Capitol.

I would say this is appropriate. As far as we know, race didn’t play a motivating role in this attack. True, there might well have been anti-white animus in his joining up with the Nation of Islam, but it does seem that mental illness plausibly explains this. Why racialize a murder without solid evidence that it had a racial angle?

The other day, Philip Adams, a black former NFL cornerback, shot and killed five white people, including two children, and seriously injured another one, before committing suicide. We don’t know why, but it is possible that Adams might have suffered brain damage from his football career. One of the white victims, a doctor, might have been treating Adams, a report says. We have not seen a raft of big thinkpieces in our media focusing on the Meaning Of It All — that is, what it meant for a black man to massacre a white family.

I would say that this is appropriate. There is no reason at this point to think that racial animus played a role in this mass murder. Why racialize a mass murder without solid evidence that it had a racial angle?

[...]

This keeps happening with the media. Why? I mean, I know why: because newsrooms are filled with progressives who are drunk on left-wing race grievance ideology. To hell with professional standards or moral responsibility — they have a Narrative to propagate. I spoke this week to a foreign journalist working in the US, and he told me that he’s having to work harder than before to find out what’s happening in the US, because he can no longer trust what he reads in the American newspapers.

I can’t stop asking myself the question: Why are they teaching non-white people to fear and loathe whites? What are they preparing America for?

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

America’s elites want a racial apocalypse

The impending threat of violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere, offers manna from heaven for some but disaster for most. The racial-protest industry, perfected by the openly neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter, has raised a reported $90million, much of it from corporate largesse. What civil-rights activist Bob Woodson calls ‘race-grievance predators’ – like Ibrahim Kendi – are being bankrolled by oligarchs, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Thanks to the Floyd incident, diversity departments of corporations, universities and governments now have permission, indeed a mandate, to embrace open discrimination against whites and, when convenient, Asians as well. Companies like Coca-Cola now impose expensive racial ‘diversity training’ on their employees. Other businesses, like Uber Eats, have gifted free delivery for African-American-owned firms only, while Oakland has initiated a $500-a-month basic-income programme for poor people, funded by rich non-profits, but with the proviso that whites need not apply.

Racialism also holds short-term political benefits for Democratic politicians. Every Republican move now made – getting rid of the Senate filibuster or challenges to electoral laws – has morphed into a ‘return to Jim Crow’. A discussion of controls, whether at the voting booth or the border, is immediately labelled as racist. Anyone suggesting otherwise risks being sent into the digital gulag by the dominant oligarchy.

The experience of the past 50 years shows, consistently, that civil disorders reduce investment in core cities, and lead companies to invest elsewhere. South Los Angeles is worse off, relative to the rest of the region, than in 1965. Research reveals riots have had this effect in much of the US. After last summer, many downtowns, notably Minneapolis and Portland, have suffered enormous setbacks in terms of business activity.

Businesses generally are loath to invest in places where violence lurks, and law enforcement seems unequal to the task of controlling it. One friend, himself a minority, had a medical warehouse in central Minneapolis that was burned down in the riots. He says the company has plans to rebuild – in suburban Atlanta or in Florida. ‘We can’t afford to destroy the economy’, warns Jamil Ford, who, with his church, tried to protect businesses last spring. ‘These are all the ones who can drive things after the fires happen.’

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

Good news, everyone! We don't even have to bother repealing the 19th: Biden on gun control: “No amendment to the Constitution is absolute"

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A Medical Student Questioned Microaggressions. UVA Branded Him a Threat and Banished Him from Campus.

Meanwhile, the Academic Standards and Achievement Committee met to to discuss the concern card. This committee voted to send Bhattacharya a written reminder to "show mutual respect" to faculty members and "express yourself appropriately." The committee also suggested that he get counseling.

On November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes. Bhattacharya repeatedly asked university officials to clarify what exactly he was accused of, under whose authority his counseling had been mandated, and why his enrollment status was suddenly in doubt, according to the lawsuit. These queries only appear to have made UVA officials more determined to punish him: Bhattacharya's mounting frustration with these baseless accusations of unspecified wrongdoings was essentially treated as evidence that he was guilty. At his hearing, he was accused of being "extremely defensive" and ordered to change his "aggressive, threatening behavior."

He was ultimately suspended for "aggressive and inappropriate interactions in multiple situations." On December 30, UVA police ordered him to leave campus.

UVA's administration engaged in behavior that can be described as "gaslighting." Administrators asserted that Bhattacharya had behaved aggressively when he hadn't, and then cited his increasing confusion, frustration, and hostility toward the disciplinary process as evidence that he was aggressive. And all of this because Bhattacharya asked an entirely fair question about microaggressions, a fraught subject.

His lawsuit contends that UVA violated his First Amendment rights by retaliating against him for speaking his mind. UVA filed a motion to dismiss the case, but a district court judge ruled that the suit could proceed.

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

Black student identified as vandal in spate of racist graffiti at Albion College

A black male student at Albion College has been identified as the source of racist graffiti that recently rocked the Michigan institution.

“Albion police brought the 21-year-old Black male in for questioning on April 6, according to Chief Scott Kipp. The student admitted to creating most of the graffiti, and video evidence from Albion’s Campus Safety Department confirms the statements made by the student,” MLive reports.

Once the investigation is complete, the case will be forwarded to the Calhoun County Prosecutor’s Office for possible charges, Kipp told MLive.

According to images of some of the graffiti posted on Facebook and the campus student newspaper the Albion Pleiad, the vandal wrote on campus walls “Die n***** please” and “Call the swat #KKKTime.”

“Since March 28, Mitchell Towers has been vandalized with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti on at least four different occasions. One of the most violent messages came on Monday when the message, ‘White lives Matter Rally at 4/7/2021 Let’s Kill all N—— on this Campus’ was left,” the Pleiad reported.

I'm sure you're all as shocked by this as I am.

[–]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)

[Rod Dreher] ‘We Thought We Were Safe’

Here’s my story, which is tame in comparison to what many families are dealing with. We are a homeschooling Catholic family, living in a very rural area of Minnesota. I am an IT remote worker, so we are not idiots and are quite familiar with how our Big Tech-fueled society works. We know better than to give our kids cell phones or have unfiltered internet. Outside of a few other families from church (most of which are Catholic homeschooling families like us) our kids have not been interacting with kids in the public school system or elsewhere. Owing to this and our rural life, WE THOUGHT WE WERE SAFE.

Fast forward to September of last year, when the scales came off our eyes. In hindsight there had been previous hints (there always are) but they were really just bewildering blips in what we thought was the life of our normal healthy 13yo daughter.

Long story short, she was severely depressed, suicidal, cutting herself, and drinking from our liquor cabinet. All in secret. She had rejected every value our family holds dear (she considered our “forcing” her to come to church on Sundays as a form of hostage-taking). And the most central thing to her self-understanding was her LGBT identity, which she had assumed somewhere around age 10 or 11. She asserted herself as bisexual, and was playing around in the “non-binary” headspace (though thankfully with no apparent intent of transitioning). Her mind had been completely taken over by LGBT activists, and every bit of the lingo spilt forth out of her mouth.

After the initial shock, when we were in “how did this happen??!?” mode, we discovered that it all had come in through the influence of one person, her best friend (who was from one of those “safe” Catholic homeschooling families I mentioned). As it turns out, the family was living a double life, with the public image of being devout but with severe dysfunction at the heart of the home. In the dysfunction, the “best friend” had no supervision and unlimited internet. So, with all the sleepovers the girls had in that house over the years, Lord knows what they were doing.

And in our house, with internet protections, etc, we nevertheless considered the other girl “safe” and had allowed the girls to have lots of interaction via Google Hangouts without us looking over their shoulder. We thought they were just talking about their pet bunnies! Nope. The chats were filled with profanity, LGBT themes (her friend also “identified” as LGBT by age 10), attempts to “hook up” my daughter with random 16yo girlfriends on the internet and requests from my daughter to her friend for vile content such as screen recordings of the latest video from Corpse Husband (google if you dare) because with our internet restrictions she couldn’t get it herself, but she knew we weren’t watching their chats.

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

Ann Coulter on the Chauvin trial: Minneapolis vs. The Evidence

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American Exodus: Don’t wait for the oligarchy to let you in. Just walk away.

Today, the oligarchy that controls American society’s commanding heights leaves those who are neither its members nor its clients little choice but to marshal their forces for their own exodus. The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

What forces can and can’t this oligarchy bring to bear? We have a hint from Time magazine’s Feb. 4, 2021, valedictory of “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” by leaders of business, labor, and the media, in cooperation with the Democratic Party, that “got states to change voting systems and laws” for the 2020 presidential election in contravention of black-letter constitutional law. Rulings by judges in Michigan and Virginia that changes to those states’ absentee ballot laws were blatantly illegal matters not one whit.

Why not? Because the coalition of masters controls the levers of the state and the press. As Time reveals, they “helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” Because these elites realized that “engaging with toxic content only made it worse,” they decided on “removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.” Instead of answering facts and arguments with which they disagreed, they would ignore their substance and smear whoever voiced them.

The boldness and novelty of these as well as of unmentioned tactics delivered the desired electoral result, and power heretofore unimaginable: Americans in 2021 are being fired or “canceled” from society for whatever anyone connected with the oligarchy finds objectionable—even for asking for evidence of the oligarchy’s assertions. Yet Time tells us that because the process of defeating Donald Trump’s voters angered them further, these oligarchs worry that they gained only “a respite.” Hence the united oligarchy must seek, as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it, permanent “national political dominance.”

Though that dominance seems at hand, the general population’s compliance with it is not. That is because isolating and alienating anybody, let alone half the country, is the proverbial two-edged sword. Anytime you isolate and alienate someone else, you do the same to yourself. The boundaries that the oligarchs have drawn, are drawing, separate them from the American people’s vast majority, whose consciousness of powerlessness and defenselessness clarifies their choice between utter subjection and doing whatever it might take to exit a system that no longer seems to allow for the prospect of republican self-government.

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

ASU dean writes book alleging that grading students’ writing is 'white supremacy'

Asao Inoue — who teaches first-year writing courses and serves as associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion — wrote Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, in which he advocates for a system of grading that circumvents merit.

Inoue — whose “research focuses on antiracist and social justice theory” — explains that his book discusses “grading literacy performances more broadly” — namely, by judging “final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing.”

“While the qualities of student writing is still at the center of the classroom and feedback, it has no bearing on the course grade,” he explains. “Why take our judgments of quality out of the tabulation of course grades and progress in a course? Because all grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist when used uniformly.”

“Grading, because it requires a single, dominant standard, is a racist and White supremacist practice,” he adds.

Inoue describes his labor-based system as a tool to enact his “social justice agenda” in his “classroom’s antiracist writing assessment ecologies.”

'College degree as participation trophy' sounds like a great reason to defund higher ed. Fuck it, defund higher ed, defund secondary ed, defund Mister Ed.

[–]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)

[Freddie deBoer] Some Principles & Observations About Social Justice Politics

  1. Social justice politics, like most political schools, is right about some things and wrong about others. The problem is that social justice politics also militate against criticizing people who express them thanks to ideas like standpoint theory; embedded in this school of politics is the notion that no one outside the movement (and few people inside) have standing to say that the movement is unhealthy. In a very basic sense this means that social justice politics lack the typical correction systems of other ideologies. When criticism becomes forbidden it is impossible to recognize and address serious internal problems. This meta-problem permeates everything that follows.
  2. This prohibition against criticism is enforced with the same instrument that the members of this community use to enforce everything: absolute social destruction. There is no probation in the eyes of the social justice world. The only penalty is the death penalty, the attempt to commit permanent character assassination. I suppose that some will call this claim inflammatory, but it seems to me to be far easier to find examples of people being forever shunned in the social justice world than to find examples of people who were gently educated and allowed to perform penance. This brutality is self-replicating: the executioners know that they could become the condemned with the slightest slipup. The most reliable way to prevent that is to be the most aggressive prosecutor you can. So the cycle actively rewards a never-ending escalation of vindictive punishment. This makes the social justice world, it’s fair to say, a somewhat unpleasant space.
  3. The desire to find fault in everyone and everything damages your basic perception of the world and make it harder to express your moral purpose. There are times when people are targeted for social exclusion because of perceived violation of social justice norms where many people react not with objection but with confusion; the alleged violation is premised on academic theories so complex and inscrutable that it’s hard for ordinary people to sort them out. And it leaves practitioners of these politics often expending time and energy making critiques that simply aren’t a reflection of what they’re critiquing. I wrote a post recently that argues that historical evidence shows that censorship efforts can’t stop right-wing extremism. This was very, very explicitly an argument that those efforts don’t work, not that they are wrong on principle, which is a different conversation. At the beginning of the piece I said that liberals seem incapable of understanding the is-ought distinction, that there is a difference between saying “this is good” and “this is true.” The reaction to the post was mostly positive, but there were plenty of critics who… seemed incapable of understanding the is-ought distinction, summarizing it as “deBoer says it’s bad to censor Nazis.” But I had very directly and unambiguously not said that. I have to imagine these educated adults are capable of better reading than that. The problem is that their incentive within the social justice world is to condemn in the harshest and most simplistic way possible. So “censorship cannot prevent right-wing extremism” becomes “deBoer loves Nazis.” Eventually this kind of thing undermines your credibility in the broader public, but then again see the next item.
  4. Social justice politics has an inside-outside problem. When you refer to “Black bodies” to describe Black people, and wield that phrase as though it has talismanic power, it becomes a kind of insider jargon that is confusing to those outside of your discourse space, and this confusion is not incidental but by design. The advantage of insiderism is that human beings have an inherent desire to be insiders and the appeal of becoming one can attract converts. The disadvantage is that for insider status to mean anything the outsiders must vastly outnumber the insiders, which provides direct incentives to limit the numbers within your movement, an existential contradiction with the basic project of any politics.
  5. An obvious conclusion one must draw from social justice politics is that most people are inherently bigoted, perhaps irredeemably so. It’s hard to see how someone could not derive that from the basic ideology. It is now perfectly common for people within that world to say that all white people are racist, in the interpersonal sense - that is, that all white people harbor animus and fear towards people of color. And those who do not go that far still see all white people as parts of a structurally racist system which they personally benefit from and uphold via their passive behavior at the very least. Similarly all cisgender people are assumed to perpetuate transphobia, again at least through participation in normal transphobic society and usually through active prejudice, patriarchy conditions the thoughts and behavior of all men and many unenlightened women, etc. Simply taking the basic texts and values of this tradition at face value leads you inevitably to the conclusion that almost everyone you encounter in contemporary society is a bad person.

(Observations 6-10 follow)

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

Theology prof: 'Dear God, please help me to hate White people'

A seminary professor wrote a prayer in which she asks God to help her “hate White people.”

Chanequa Walker-Barnes is an associate professor of practical theology at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, which claims a Baptist identity. Her oration was published in A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal.

“Dear God, Please help me to hate White people,” opens the prayer. “Or at least to want to hate them. At least, I want to stop caring about them, individually and collectively.”

“I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist,” she continues.

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

[Jesse Singal] A Professor Pushed Back Against 'White Fragility' Training. The College Investigated Her for 9 Months.

The stated goal of such events is to allow people to talk about race and racism more openly, but the decision to have the races meet separately made Parrett uncomfortable. "Racial segregation of that kind seems like a throwback to the pre-1960s and not a good way to create any kind of cooperation or collaboration," she says. She wasn't the only one disturbed by the idea of a racially segregated anti-racism training. Her friend Phil Snider, another English professor at LWTech, said in an email to senior administrators that a "conference based on segregation by skin color does nothing to build a community of belonging."

Nonetheless, a June 18 all-college email noted that the school's president, Amy Morrison, had "made clear the expectation that all full-time employees attend Friday's Courageous Conversations" unless they had conflicting teaching responsibilities. Parrett decided to express her qualms about the training during the training itself.

What happened over the next nine months was both bizarre and oppressive. Because of a brief disruption that easily could have been brushed aside or handled with a warning not to do it again, LWTech went to war against a tenured faculty member, launching a cartoonishly over-the-top disciplinary process that included the hiring of a private investigator, dozens of interviews, and claims of widespread trauma.

[...]

I was leaked an audio copy of the full two-hour Courageous Conversations event. About an hour and 20 minutes in, Parrett said, "Hi, I would like to speak, if I may." The moderator replied, "Mm-hmm," indicating that she could go ahead. Parrett then explained that she had noticed something she was hoping to point out to the group and asked if she could have five minutes to read a statement she had prepared. The facilitator didn't respond to this (at least not audibly), and a beat later Parrett continued.

"Over the past couple of weeks, a lot has happened," Parrett began. "Protests have occurred, riots have broken out, people have been killed. And across the United States, companies, organizations, and schools have proclaimed their support of a movement called 'Anti-racism'"—here Parrett was referring to the capital-A variety. Parrett went on to complain about the segregated setting of the training and what she saw as the generally closed-minded nature of the nation's post-Floyd discourse. "Democracy thrives on conversations, but what we are seeing happening right now in the United States is not a conversation," she read. "It is a coup. Everyday Americans of all colors, creeds, backgrounds, and beliefs are being held hostage. Zealots are telling us, 'You're either with us or against us, and if you're against us, you're an evil bigot.' They are telling us, 'You're either part of the solution, or you're part of the problem.' They are telling us that all people may be classified into two sides: us or them, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, people of color or white, righteous or bigoted, oppressed or privileged. I don't accept such false dichotomies, and I don't accept the ad hominem implications that come with it. Too often, words like 'privileged,' 'defensive,' and 'fragile' are just ways to dismiss what another person has to say. Too often, words like 'racist' are just a way to intimidate someone into silence." Parrett argued that people should work together to solve "real problems like wealth disparity, poverty, job insecurity, unemployment, the high cost of living, or the fracturing of the nuclear family, whatever form that family takes," but are waylaid by those who claim the "real problems" are "racism, sexism, transphobia…[and] hateful words."

[...]

Despite the minor uproar during the event, the initial response from LWTech's administration appeared positive. Suzanne Ames, LWTech's vice president of instruction, called Parrett after the training and asked her if she was OK. "It seemed supportive," says Parrett. "I thought that she was just trying to be nice." But five days later, on June 24, Parrett received an email from President Morrison with the subject line "The fall-out from your actions last Friday."

It began, "In the seven years I have served as president and twenty years in the community and technical college system, I have never before sent such a serious email to any faculty member, let alone one newly tenured." She wrote that as a result of Parrett's statements, "many of [your colleagues] spent hours trying to decompress with their respective supervisors." The only choice was an investigation: "Because of your egregious behavior which has led to substantial harm to hundreds of colleagues on campus, I have asked Dr. Ames, Dean Doug Emory, and [executive director of H.R.] Meena Park to meet with you in the next few days to have a serious conversation about how successful you can possibly be on campus in the future."

From there, LWTech's disciplinary apparatus—both formal and informal—ramped up quickly. Two days after Morrison's email, an administrator informed Parrett that she was being placed on paid administrative leave for the summer quarter because of "allegations of a serious offense." She would immediately lose access to her LWTech email and to Canvas, the college's online learning platform. The nature of the offense was not specified.

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

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[Freddie deBoer] Nitro Edition: None of This is New

I did not enjoy this essay by Timothy Egan. With unusual candor, Egan says flat out that he thinks suppression of the (admittedly kooky) views of arch-conservatices is necessary for his side to win. He waves to some vague sense in which technology has changed politics and the idea that we’re somehow in a uniquely pernicious moment in American history as justification for using a variety of legal and technocratic solutions to make what are fundamentally social and political problems go away. As usual the normative questions people want to debate (should we make those problems go away) are potentially made irrelevant by the empirical question they don’t (can these tactics actually make those problems go away). Personally I find Egan’s take to be both wrong (incorrect on the merits) and bad (poorly written and argued). Let me take you on a journey.

I used to believe that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Now that seems archaic.

The overall form of this essay is pretty standard: it’s an argument that digital technologies have changed/are changing/will change the world, so we must do whatever the author thinks we should do. “Before it was the same, but now it is different” is something essayists love to pepper in there because it’s almost tautologically true and because most readers will just sagely scratch their beards over it instead of thinking too deep.

For example, we might think about the strange perpetual newness of the internet in this genre. Before you could trust in the benevolence of more speech, now you can’t because, what - the internet? Because truth can’t survive in the digital age or whatever? Do people not get that widespread adoption of the internet is 25 years old? I still hear this stuff all the time. “The internet will totally remake education, there won’t be physical schools anymore, pass the blunt.” What do you mean, will? When the internet finally gets here? The internet has been doing what, exactly, for the prior quarter century? Warming up? Why would the internet suddenly become a font for misinformation now, rather than in 2012, say? We had Facebook then. We had YouTube then. We had Breitbart then. We had 4Chan then. We had a bizarre reactionary political movement made up of guys who own snowblower dealerships spreading lies on the internet about birth certificates and the secular left agenda. Why would misinformation be anymore prevalent now compared to in 2012? Republicans were too honest back then? No one has a remotely plausible material explanation for why today would be different - because “misinformation” is sophistry, a way to avoid having to actually make an argument.

The real reasons so many people believe that this is an inflection point in history are a) as human beings we are sure Now is unique/special/important because we live Now and we believe we are important so Now must be important; b) claiming a crisis inspires people to adopt a cause without pondering whether it makes any sense, such as when trying to solve thorny political questions with shortcuts; and c) a lot of people desperately need to believe that Trump was a totally unique figure in human affairs, rather than a garden variety demagogue, to flatter themselves that they lived under authoritarianism. (When these people tell their stories of enduring Trump to their grandchildren they’re going to be insufferable.) Regardless, the notion that speech is more dangerous than it ever was is a fiction. Speech was always dangerous. What people want is for it to always be dangerous for their enemies and never dangerous to them. Life doesn’t work that way.

Now is not new. How’s that for a general aphorism for life: now is not new. And the continuing prevalence of “the internet will change everything” narratives, in 2021, is so odd. We had the internet in school when I was in junior high. The internet has already occurred.

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Colorado Bill Will Legalize Crime In Schools

What are the intentions of this legislation?

“A school resource officer or other law enforcement officer shall not arrest a student of the school, or issue a summons, ticket, or other notice requiring the appearance of a student of the school in court or at a police station for investigation, for conduct that constitutes any of the following offenses allegedly committed on the school’s grounds, in a school vehicle, or at a school activity or sanctioned event.”

What are those offenses that a student cannot be disciplined or even arrested for as found in Section 6 of the bill?

  • Physically attacking staff or students
  • Disorderly conduct
  • Theft
  • Trespass or criminal trespass
  • Criminal mischief including vandalism
  • Harassment
  • Drugs and drug possession
  • Causing bodily injury that isn’t serious

Read the above again, out loud. Yes, it says exactly what you think it says. According to Leslie Herod, one of the supposed authors of the bill, this effort will end the school-to-prison pipeline and will ensure all disproportionate discrimination against blacks or hispanics will magically stop.

“We introduced Senate Bill 182 in the Colorado General Assembly this year because school discipline does not have to only result in a punitive outcome like tickets and arrests. We believe schools need strong mental health services, trauma-informed approaches, and discipline codes that reflect age-appropriate discipline. Evidence-based inclusionary approaches to discipline like restorative justice programs can help students process disciplinary incidents and develop the tools they need to help ensure that infractions don’t happen again as they did for us. Kids need to be kids, they need to make mistakes and have the room to learn from those mistakes without jeopardizing their entire future.”

Gosh. That sounds wonderful doesn’t it?? Discrimination will stop, as will any violence in schools. Teen gangs will keep all mischief and violence off school grounds, and once a student has had counseling, no more bullying or drugs! This will stop the epidemic!!

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[Freddie deBoer] On Essays and SATs: Some Students are Just More Prepared Than Others

Whoops! It turns out that, far from being a more “holistic” measure that rewards the well-rounded, college admissions essays correlate more strongly with family income than SATs do. (This is in part a function of the fact that, found to be .25 in the largest sample I am aware of, the correlation between SAT scores and family income is vastly overstated by liberals.) The inevitable result will simply to be to kick the can further; “we need even more holistic criteria than before!” But it might be more useful to have a hard conversation.

My piece on why holistic criteria actually hurts marginalized students has been lost to the inevitable linkrot of time, but the point’s not particularly hard to grasp. The book Measuring Success amounts to a book-length refutation of all of the progressive myths about the SAT, and anyway, there is absolutely no reason to believe that holistic admissions aren’t subject to capture by the moneyed. Since test prep doesn’t work, family money can’t fix low SAT or ACT scores, whereas money can absolutely get a privileged teen into a summer program building houses for low-income families in the Andes (intersectional as well as holistic!), fencing lessons (decent at rare sport > great at common sport, unless it’s football or basketball), and a writing workshop (obsessive about one interest rather than casual about several, in today’s admissions game).

And since holistic criteria are so vague, you can’t do a simple correlation to see the impact of SES, like you can with the SAT and ACT. We know there is some relationship between test scores and family income precisely because those tests are quantitatively transparent; we can never have that with the black box of holistic admissions. Cynics might suggest that affluent white liberals are such strong proponents of holistic admissions precisely because there is less transparency, as less transparency in the system inevitably benefits the moneyed. There is no system of reward for academic achievement that the wealthy can’t game, but the assumption that holistic criteria favors diverse candidates while hard numbers favor well-off students remains totally unproven. It’s just liberal theology.

But the bigger issue is this: at some point you have to consider the possibility that all of these things are correlating together because they are measuring some stable construct of “academic ability.” The correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and college essays only invalidates those essays if the SES differences are causing differences in perceived essay quality. If instead higher SES students actually write better essays, then the instrument is doing its job. (If you think “better essays” is too vague a target, well, that’s why people have tried to develop more objective criteria… like the SATs.) Could essays be subject to elite capture? Sure; I imagine a remarkable percentage of college essays are written by adults, paid or not. But we’re also aware that writing skills, like all academic abilities, correlate with other academic abilities. Despite the common notion of “math people” or “language people,” measures of verbal and quantitative reasoning ability tend to correlate more strongly than many assume. Smart kids tend to be smart in all areas, just like when you went to K-12 yourself. As long as college admissions are at least partially justified as selecting for the most prepared, they’ll favor high SES kids.

Why would richer students be better at writing essays than the norm, aside from various types of illegitimate manipulation? All kinds of things related to their learning environment, the type a dozen breathless dissertations are written about every year. You can say that those beneficial environmental factors are themselves the product of family wealth, and I wouldn’t disagree. But if we forbid considering factors that correlate with SES, we’ll eliminate literally every selection criteria. If the idealized point of college admissions is to select for predictive validity - the ability of these measures to predict which students will flourish in college - then measures that correlate with socioeconomic status will necessarily be prized in admissions, as SES is a significant direct predictor of performance in college. And even if you somehow come up with some way to avoid this universal association, you’d inevitably end up rewarding another unearned and arbitrarily distributed factor: the individual student’s intrinsic academic ability. (Read all about it in my book.)

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“A Certain Madness Amok”

At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia. He will be there until at least April 12, when he’s scheduled for a court date. At that time, he may be ordered to remain behind bars for a period yet to be determined.

Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.

The long answer begins in the 2015–16 school year, when, as Hoogland recounted in a talk last October, his then fifth-grade daughter (he also has an older son) was getting into trouble at school and Hoogland and his estranged wife (whom he divorced in the spring of 2015) decided it might be good for her to see her school counselor. Since it’s forbidden by the British Columbia Supreme Court to make her name public, she’s referred to in legal documents as “A.B.” (Hoogland is “C.D.,” and the girl’s mother is “E.F.”)

Unknown to Hoogland, A.B. continued to see school counselors well into seventh grade, when one day she suddenly cut her hair very short. At the end of that school year, Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun “socially transitioning” to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who was encouraging her “to take testosterone.” To this end, Wong referred her to an endocrinologist at the Gender Clinic and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

It used to be understood that gender dysphoria is vanishingly rare, typically afflicts boys, and almost always begins to manifest when a child is extremely young. In recent years, however, there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body. This “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her important 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which I reviewed), is a fad rooted in a number of contemporary social factors.

Many have expressed concern about this trend. Yet transgender activists, eager to increase their visibility and clout, have embraced these girls as real cases of gender dysphoria and have pushed for them to be “transitioned,” pronto. Such transition usually starts with the administration of puberty blockers, continues with massive doses of testosterone, and concludes with “gender-affirmation surgery”—known to today’s self-identified trans teenagers, rather innocuously, as “top surgery” (mastectomy) and “bottom surgery” (metoidioplasty and phalloplasty, which transform the clitoris into something resembling a penis).

A decade ago, subjecting minors to these protocols would have been seen as malpractice and child abuse. But in the last few years, the practice has won widespread political, cultural, media, and judicial support. Never mind that puberty blockers, while presented as harmlessly allowing young teens a “pause,” so that they can ponder their options, can in fact be quite harmful and are almost always followed by hormone therapy; that testosterone, which can cause sterilization, osteoporosis, heart disease, and stunted growth, invariably results in such irreversible symptoms as sterility, facial hair, and a deeper voice; and that “gender-affirming surgery,” of course, destroys healthy body parts that can never be restored.

The argument by supporters of these treatments is that they bring peace and wholeness to anxious young people. Routinely, those urging quick medical action for gender-dysphoric teens point to the suicide rate among them, far higher than the base rate. But they omit to mention that this rate doesn’t decline after transitioning—and that treatment can actually cause depression. Trans-activist lawyers for A.B. claimed that she was an urgent case because she was suicidal, and that she’d attempted suicide once because of her gender dysphoria. In fact, her endocrinologist stated that she showed no sign of suicidality.

Hoogland, for his part, knew of only one suicide attempt: A.B. had ingested “a bottle of something,” and he and his ex-wife had rushed her to a hospital, where she told doctors that she’d made the attempt because she’d been romantically rejected by her gym teacher. According to Hoogland, A.B. told him at one point: “If you don’t let me take testosterone I’m going to kill myself.” When he replied, “No, you know you’re not,” she said, “I know, but they told me to say that.” Indeed, it’s well known that if you claim to be suicidal, it can help get your treatments approved and get you to the front of the surgical queue.

It’s also been established that most kids who say they’re the other sex will change their minds soon after puberty. This alone would be reason to withhold radical, irreversible treatments until patients reach adulthood. But most of the doctors and psychologists involved in trans therapies seem to be as blithely indifferent as the trans activists are to this statistic. With utterly unfounded confidence, they’re placing massive numbers of young girls on the female-to-male assembly line.

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[Rod Dreher] Elites Vs. America

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins Of Totalitarianism, writes of the elites in pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

With each passing day, I am struck by how committed American elites are to tearing this country apart for the sake of instituting their idea of social justice.

[...]

You heard about the man killed today while attacking the US Capitol, right? His name was Noah Green, a black man who was reportedly a member of the Nation of Islam, the black supremacist group. He murdered a Capitol police officer, whose two children no longer have a daddy. According to the Washington Post, Green’s family said he was mentally ill, and paranoid. Billy Evans, the dead cop, was white. I think the media have done the right thing in not jumping to conclusions about a racial motive here, or a political motive. We just don’t know.

But look, if Noah Green was a white man who was affiliated with a white hate group, do you think the news coverage would be as sober and as responsible? Of course it wouldn’t. We all know this. There is still not one shred of evidence to suggest that Robert Long, the suspected Atlanta mass shooter at the massage parlors, was motivated by anti-Asian hate. But we have been living through countless hours and reams of print coverage about his racist act. When it comes to anything at all to do with race, I do not trust the US news media.

They’ll be just fine without my trust. But I am sure that I’m not alone. And they have 100 percent done this to themselves.

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Feminism’s sexual inadequacy

There’s an Old Testament story that ought to be better known (who does God’s PR these days?). King David is in his palace, and a servant announces that he has a caller. It’s Nathan the prophet. Good old Nathan — committed to maximizing the life-chances of the poor, a real old-school man of the people, and often a bit spiky with it — a man to keep onside. Yes, yes, send him in. Nathan launches into a story about a humble farmer who has been conned by some smooth-talking landlord and has now lost his land and his last remaining lamb to this greedy sod. The king’s a bit disappointed that Nathan has brought such a tiny issue to his attention — he was hoping for a big juicy cause he could champion, so as to remind the people of his compassionate-conservative credentials. But as Nathan goes into more detail the king becomes genuinely indignant and demands to know who this ruthless landlord is so he can punish him. Oh, I’m talking about you, says Nathan. And he leaves.

The king had assumed that a discussion about morality would remain safely impersonal, that his own misdeeds would not intrude. (If you have forgotten, he had his mistress’s husband killed, by putting him in the front line of a hopeless battle.)

Today’s version of King David is the sort of highly-accomplished liberal who smoothly debates every political issue of the day. I call him (it’s usually a him) the News Bore — he is super-well-informed and probably works in some aspect of the media. He’s ready for whatever issue you throw at him — he will have a thoughtful moral position on it that echoes some of his favorite columnists. But don’t stray from the journalistic realm. Don’t mention his ex-wife, who’s having a hard time, or the fact that his children are selfish misfits. Don’t point out that he has no values beyond bourgeois success, business-class hedonism. That would be impolite.

We’re free to debate the morality of whatever we want in our culture, thank God. So why are our debates so timid, so constrained, so cropped? Unless we’re saying the same old things about the same old topics — race, gender, sexuality — we seem nervous of what might unfold.

By tying morality to topical political issues, we avoid discussing it in ways that might be problematic to us. So we discuss mental health and addiction in terms of pathology. Don’t point out, for example, that addicts tend to be very selfish. Don’t ask why our culture promotes hedonism and excludes voices that question it. If such a voice does, very occasionally, emerge — Jordan Peterson’s for example — critics are ready with buckets of scorn. There is a hunger to unmask such voices as the same old traditional reactionary enemies — this surely comes from a fear that they might be able to challenge us. Similarly, an online group recently emerged called NoFap, encouraging men to hold back on porn and masturbation: it has attracted widespread suspicion, because its mission risks dubious moving away from abstract impersonal discussion.

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A Tale of Two Cities: Fleeing Portland for Boise

Meanwhile, Dionne’s husband, Brad, a deputy of 11 years with the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, watched fellow police officers in neighboring Multnomah County stand toe-to-toe with protesters and rioters. Witnessing politicians and the public turn on police officers in Portland, he realized the seriousness of the situation. He made the difficult decision to quit his job with the sheriff’s department after watching the poor treatment of Portland police officers and seeing crime skyrocket. Brad said he felt it was important to move his family to a safer city. “Portland is filthy and unsafe even during the day,” he said. “Boise’s leaders believe in law and order, which keeps the city safe. Unlike Oregon, which recently legalized all drugs, marijuana is illegal and violence is intolerable in Boise.”

As Portland crime skyrockets, Boise crime has decreased 9 percent, according to Boise Police who credit, in part, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The department adds, “The overall decline over the last few decades is also related to BPD’s growing community policing efforts.” Boise PD’s 2020 annual report to the community reveals the department responded to 151,897 calls for service—that is 1,061 fewer than the previous year.

Homelessness has not proven as significant a problem in Boise as in Portland to this point. According to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the entire state of Idaho had an estimated 2,315 people experiencing homelessness as of January 2019. This number stands in sharp contrast to the 4,177 homeless in the city of Portland alone as reported in May 2019. However, as Treasure Valley attracts new residents from along the west coast, rates of homelessness increase, as well. An NPR article notes that “Like many western cities, Boise is in the midst of an extraordinary affordable housing shortage. It’s also one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, a source of tension in some corners.”

A potential silver lining to the threatening homeless problem is found in a burgeoning job market. In fact, Idaho took the No. 1 spot for its economic growth according to the 2021 U.S. News Best States rankings, also coming in strong for its business environment, growth, and employment. The article cites Bill Connors of the Boise Metro Chamber who stated, “Our state government is stable. It’s not doing wild shifts politically.… Yes, it’s conservative and business-friendly, but it’s stable.”

Boise’s elected officials would be wise to learn from Portland’s mistakes in dealing with the now-uncontrollable homeless problem, establishing solutions early on that will curtail sprawling camps that spill into residential neighborhoods and onto city streets.

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When did roads and railways become racist?

Improving roads and railways is pretty uncontroversial, right? Wrong.

President Joe Biden is under pressure not to place too much focus on infrastructure projects in his new economic plan, according to the Washington Post. The reason – you may or may not have guessed – is that it’s racist.

Apparently, ‘sources close to the White House’ believe that favouring physical infrastructure projects represents ‘a dated nostalgia for a kind of white, working-class male worker’.

Union leader Mary Kay Henry is on the case, telling the powers that be to keep their commitment to spending on the ‘care economy’. She has highlighted that a disproportionate number of low-wage service workers are women and / or ethnic minorities, saying ‘we’re up against a gender and racial bias that this work is not worth as much as the rubber, steel and auto work of the past century’.

This is an extraordinary revelation. Who’d have guessed that schools are for ethnic-minority women, and roads are for white men? Presumably, non-white people and women do not work in heavy industry, drive cars or use any steel or rubber products, and males don’t need schooling as children or looking after in old age.

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The Texas Neanderthals were right

In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamed Vanity Fair.

Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.

No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’

Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.

Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not.

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Foucault’s attitude to sex is alive and well in intersectional feminism

If inheritors of the post-Foucauldian ‘critical theory’ worldview see existing systems of power as inherently oppressive and evil, then dismantling them can only be good. It’s then incumbent on adherents of this worldview to be open-minded about the attendant dismantling of all norms associated with those systems of power.

A detailed programme for this ongoing project of dismantling was published recently by a ‘Women’s Rights Caucus’ of over 200 intersectional feminist groups, LGBT+ campaigns and trade unions around the world. As flagged by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, of particular note is a line about how the campaign should encourage governments to eliminate ‘laws limiting legal capacity of adolescents, […] to provide consent to sex or sexual and reproductive health services’.

When we recall that the WHO defines as ‘adolescent’ everyone in the 10-19 age bracket, it becomes clear that this inserts into an ostensibly ‘intersectional feminist’ policy declaration, as mainstream consensus feminist aims, the goal of abolishing the age of consent for everyone over the age of 10.

That this has been waved through by over 200 international NGOs and self-styled feminist campaigns speaks volumes about how widespread and entrenched the commitment is to de-stigmatising all those ‘bourgeois’ sexual norms whose existence so inconvenienced Foucault. So perhaps (despite his posthumous quasi-cancellation) Foucault had the last laugh after all: thanks in part to his analysis of sexuality, ‘sexual autonomy for 10-year-olds’ is now well within the international progressive Overton window.

None of this, though, is an argument for cancelling Foucauldian analysis, as if such a thing were even possible. Rather, it’s an argument for employing it. If Foucault was right, power is inescapable and we all exist within it. I’d wager the majority of us still think it wholly legitimate and proper to use state power to stop adults sexually abusing children. For this majority, then, it’s an argument for mobilising political, social and cultural power and working methodically to remove from positions of influence every single group that has signed this declaration.

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LGBTQ+ students sue Dept of Ed to defund their own Christian universities

Students at Christian universities identifying as homosexual and transgender are suing the Department of Education to end the religious exemption in Title IX, which would make some Christian universities ineligible to receive federal funding.

Thirty-three students are listed as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the United States Department of Education filed in the District of Oregon’s Eugene Division. The suit — written by Paul Southwick of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project — states that it is seeking to “put an end to the U.S. Department of Education’s complicity in the abuses and unsafe conditions thousands of LGBTQ+ students endure at hundreds of taxpayer-funded, religious colleges and universities.”

[...]

For instance, Mackenzie McCann — a former Liberty University student who identifies as “queer” and “non-binary” — said in the lawsuit that the school has a reputation for conservative beliefs. As the suit mentions, Liberty’s student conduct guide states that “sexual relations outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University.”

“Students at Liberty behave in homophobic and anti-queer ways because they know they can do so with relative impunity,” said McCann. “Liberty’s culture enables such conduct and makes students feel like Liberty is backing them.”

McCann left the school after one semester for her “emotional safety.”

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Cancelled, Irish style

Cancellation doesn’t exist, apparently. It is a self-pitying myth invented by petulant conservatives to cover up being on the wrong side of history. Yet “they had it coming” is also audible. It’s what the American journalist Rod Dreher calls the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” Let us therefore consider someone who was most definitely cancelled — and remains so in his native Ireland — and see what the case of Kevin Myers teaches us.

The gleeful controversialist’s memoirs are reviewed in this issue by Simon Kingston. His cancelling offence had been to write a column in the Sunday Times’s Irish edition which reproached female BBC journalists whose agents brokered them lower salaries than their male peers. But it clumsily extolled two Jewish personalities whose agents did a sharper-elbowed job. In short, Myers exhibited that distinctive species of antisemitism which is admiring of its supposed target.

[...]

When the opportunity came for O’Toole and Greenslade’s long, grudge-laden memories to act up, they seized it, as did Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE. Idiotically, and ultimately very expensively, RTE proclaimed Myers a Holocaust denier in addition to being the klutz he had apologised for being over BBC salaries.

Myers’s vindication in court was a long time coming, however. As the storm broke around him, the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland had fruitlessly defended him: the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar happily joined the hunt. Vainly the JRCI pleaded that, more than any other Irish journalist, Myers had put the Holocaust before often indifferent Irish eyes. It did him no good then, any more than his legal victory over RTE has done him since.

Who are his critics? The prim O’Toole evidently despises the Rabelaisian Myers. Over the affair of the women’s salaries, “Myers would still be in that pulpit if he had stuck with straight misogyny,” wrote O’Toole in 2017, though his tune changed when his friend Ian Buruma was evicted from the editor’s chair at the New York Review of Books in 2018 (for running a piece by a man accused of formidably graver #MeToo offences than Myers has ever been). “If all those who take wrong turnings are instantly thrown overboard, the whole ship will be sunk,” O’Toole now wailed.

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Newly unveiled Greta Thunberg statue rankles students, local community

Titled “Make a Difference” and commissioned in 2019 (the same year Winchester declared a “climate and ecological emergency”), the statue cost the school almost 24,000 pounds (just over $33,000) and is thought to be the first commemorating Thunberg, the Daily Mail reports.

The university says the statue symbolizes Winchester’s commitment to “sustainability and social justice.”

But the Winchester University and College Union called the statue a “vanity project” and said the funds used to pay for it could have been used elsewhere.

“To be clear our concerns are about the expenditure and transparency of decision making by the university, which have long been opaque, not the subject of the statue,” the College Union said in a statement.

The union said statue monies should have gone to “preventing redundancies and cuts” at the school.

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Teacher Bullies Student For Taking Colorblind Approach To Classroom Assignment

Video footage shows a Virginia public school teacher bullying a student for saying he takes a colorblind approach to observing people.

A school teacher in Virginia’s Loudoun County Public School district — one of the wealthiest districts in the nation — was caught on tape telling a student that it is important to see racial differences when observing people.

For a class assignment, the teacher posted a photo of two females, one with white skin and red hair and another with black skin and black hair. Students were asked to observe what they saw in the picture.

One unnamed student responded by saying he saw “just two people chillin’.” The teacher called the student “intentionally coy” for not categorizing the women by their race.

https://youtu.be/0bHrrZdFRPk

Teacher: Tell me what this seems to be a picture of.

Student: It’s just two people chillin’.

Teacher: Right, just two people. Nothing more to that picture?

Student: Nah, not really. Just two people chillin’.

Teacher: I don’t believe that you believe that. I don’t believe that you look at this as just two people.

Student: It truly is just two people though, is it not?

Teacher: I think you’re being intentionally coy about what this is a picture of.

Student: What am I being coy about? It’s two people standing back-to-back in a picture.

Teacher: Yeah, and that’s all you see? Just two people?

Student: I’m confused on what you would like me to speak on.

Teacher: I don’t think you are. I don’t know why you do this. I’m not trying to call you out, but you … you act as if there’s nothing noticeable about this apart from the fact that there’s two people.

Student: Well I’m confused. Are you trying to get me to say that there are two different races in this picture?

Teacher: Yes, I am asking you to say that.

Student: Well, at the end of the day, wouldn’t that just be feeding into the problem of looking at race instead of just acknowledging them as two normal people?

Teacher: No, it’s not. Because you can’t not look at, you can’t look at the people and not acknowledge that there are racial differences.

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Students at Catholic university complain about having to read the Bible in class

Honor students at a Catholic university recently complained during a townhall Zoom meeting about the incorporation of the Bible into the curricula.

Loyola University Chicago’s Honors BIPOC Coalition, which has asked the university to increase the diversity of the honors program curricula, held a discussion on Wednesday, March 24. A number of students criticized how much the Catholic university makes them read the Bible.

“I personally did not like reading the Bible whatsoever, in any capacity,” Himani Soni, a Loyola student, said during the online meeting.

“I absolutely hated it,” Soni said, even though she said the other texts that were read in the honors’ program classes related to the Bible.

“As someone that has not grown up in a Christian household, even though we’re told to read it as a text to reflect the historical value of the reading, and not just in a religious context, it’s extremely unfamiliar to me,” Soni said.

She then criticized the use of it and said that Christian students at the Catholic institution had an “unfair advantage” because they have had “years of experience talking about the concepts.”

“For me personally, I had such a hard time reading the Bible, and it was not an experience I would ever have again, considering how it was taught.”

“I had to put in maybe ten times more effort than peers had to to understand the basics of the text” to understand similes and metaphors and other symbols in the text. Other students had to “let her know” what things in the Bible meant.

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[Rod Dreher] Mohammed Anwar’s Mystery Murderers

Well, in Our Nation’s Capital™ the other day, two teen girls — a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old — allegedly tazed an Uber Eats driver in an attempt to steal his car, and ran off with it, crashing the thing and killing the driver, who was a South Asian immigrant, Mohammed Anwar.

You can read the entire account of the felony murder in the Washington Post and never learn a thing about the race of the alleged carjackers. But if you watch the video, you will see that they are black: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MajX6b5OSQU

Black teenagers allegedly kill South Asian man in carjacking. It would seem that if we were concerned about crimes against Asians, this would be a story. But as of this writing, there is nothing about it in The New York Times. I googled to see if any of the networks had covered it. NBC News had something three days ago, which did not mention the race of the alleged perpetrators. This is understandable, because at that point, no video existed. Well, now it does. The story has not been updated. The other two networks aren’t carrying it, at least not that I could find. USA Today finally reported the story this afternoon, but said nothing about the race of those arrested for the crime.

The New York Post reported on it, but did not mention the race of the alleged perpetrators (though it did embed a video). Nothing on NPR, as of this writing.

As a matter of news judgment, I can understand not including race in crime reporting if it does not appear to be connected to the crime. But our news media did not care that one bit of evidence in the Atlanta mass murder connects that crime to racial animus (an NPR show last week conducted a lengthy interview with a professor who said that yeah, the Atlanta police say there is no evidence of racial bias in that crime, but they probably don’t know what they’re talking about). That suspected killer was a white man, and therefore fit the narrative. There is as much evidence that the crime that these two black juveniles are charged with had an anti-Asian racial-bias element as there was that the Atlanta shootings were racially biased — but the media treat these stories with very different standards.

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[Glenn Greenwald] Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves

What makes all of this extra grotesque is that, as The Washington Post reported, most of those charged with various crimes in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot, including many whose charges stem just from their presence inside the Capitol, not the use of any violence, are people with serious financial difficulties: not surprising for a country in the middle of a major economic and joblessness crisis, where neoliberalism and global trade deals have destroyed entire industries and communities for decades:

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories. . . . The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

This USA Today article is thus yet another example of journalists at major media outlets abusing their platforms to attack and expose anything other than the real power centers which compose the ruling class and govern the U.S.: the CIA, the FBI, security state agencies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley oligarchs. To the extent these journalists pay attention to those entities at all — and they barely ever do — it is to venerate them and mindlessly disseminate their messaging like stenographers, not investigate them. Investigating people who actually wield real power is hard.

Instead, the primary target of the Trump-era media has become private citizens and people who wield no power, yet who these media outlets believe must have their lives ruined because they have adopted the wrong political ideology. So many corporate journalists now use their huge megaphones to humiliate and wreck the lives of ordinary private citizens who they judge to have bad political opinions (meaning: opinions that deviate from establishment liberalism orthodoxies which these media outlets exist to enforce).

We have seen this over and over. CNN confronted an old woman on the front lawn of her Florida home for the crime of having used her little Facebook page to promote a pro-Trump event they claimed was engineered by Russians. The same network threatened to expose the identity of another private citizen who created an anti-CNN meme unless he begged and promised not to do it again. HuffPost doxed the real-life name of an anonymous critic of Islam (whose spouted views I find repellent) and ruined her business.

Just last week, The Daily Beast decided to expose the identity of a private citizen at Spring Break in Miami and detail his marital and legal problems because a video of him went viral due to his being dressed as the Joker and uttering “COVID truther” phrases. The same outlet congratulated itself for unearthing and exposing the real name of an African-American Facebook user whose crime was posting videos mocking Nancy Pelosi.

My principal critique of the contemporary media posture — and my governing view of the real purpose of journalism — is summarized by this: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1371956483596881923

But increasingly, the largest corporate media platforms are used to punish ideological dissent and thought crimes by powerless, private citizens. They do not criticize or investigate real power centers, but serve them. And what makes it worse — so, so much worse — is that, as they assault, dox and harass private citizens, these journalistic bullies depict themselves as the real marginalized people, as those who are so fragile, voiceless, powerless, and vulnerable that criticizing them is tantamount to bullying, harassment, and violence.

I wonder if GG has a groyper account.

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The tyranny of diversity training

Our economy may be in deep trouble following the pandemic, but one area which is already enjoying a roaring 20s is the diversity industry, which has significantly increased its presence in many companies since the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. All around, in hushed tones, people in a variety of careers, from academia to medicine to finance, grumble about the increasing encroachments on their workplace by newly empowered D.E.I teams. And the grumbling is always private; no one wants to go on record.

For some it’s a mere time-wasting exercise, with occasional Zoom conferences adding to the day’s workload. For others it goes much further, with HR-led diversity teams now even deciding who can be hired for what role. But almost everywhere there has been a significant ramping-up since last June.

The usual pattern is that a well-meaning manager, bombarded with images of BLM and racial justice from every corner of social media, will suggest that the organisation needs to alleviate concern about racism. The company or department, aware that racism is seen as the number one social evil and that anti-racist courses might also act as insurance against any discrimination lawsuit, will hire a professional anti-racist activist from outside.

It is rarely initiated by human resources, but HR embrace it because it gives them a role as priests of the new faith. There is also a whole outside industry that benefits too.

A middle manager at a medical professional body told me how, following the summer protests in the US, “it was [considered] a matter of urgency that we ran a series of mandatory diversity and inclusion training sessions for our staff”. There hadn’t been any problem at the company, which was pretty diverse and had good morale.

The sessions were run by professional diversity consultants, and were “quite different from previous E&D training I had attended at past jobs. Whilst those ones tended to focus more on how to avoid breaking the law, these sessions felt a lot more like an induction into their ideology.” They said that equality meant “treating people differently and acknowledging their race” and afterwards participants were told to research “ally behaviour” and “to educate ourselves about the British Empire”.

As with many of these courses, some very questionable claims were made: “We were told that high levels of diversity were in all cases a great thing and can only lead to good outcomes,” when numerous studies point to the opposite. They were told the gender pay gap was in large part caused by people using the word “girl” instead of “woman”, a claim that fails to take into account the overwhelming influence of child-rearing on the gender pay gap.

There was a talk about unconscious bias testing, even though it’s been shown to be largely bogus, and as with so many of these sessions, almost all the examples and talking points came from the US, “and there didn’t seem to be any kind of recognition from the trainers that these are two very different countries with very different histories”.

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Trans Reddit User Posted Hundreds of Pornographic Drawings of Child Characters Under 10, Mods Banned Anyone Who Criticized Them

Mods please note this isn't [REDACTED], it's another so-far unrelated pedo troon moderator.

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Philadelphia library workers upset diversity training didn’t scapegoat white people

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, diversity consultant Brandi Baldwin, who is black and got her doctorate from nearby Temple University, also informed participants to avoid “white privilege,” noting the concept is “one of the other myths out there.”

Such terminology, Baldwin said, “didn’t account for the fact that people of color, too, could cause harm.” She asked attendees to consider: “Are all the inequities you experience at the hands of white people?”

The presentation, courtesy of the group DiverseForce, “didn’t sit right” for the employees whom The Inquirer says “have been fighting for racial justice” at the library for some time. Things “came to a head” at the library last summer following George Floyd’s death, with the library director resigning and speakers cancelling appearances.

Library community organizer Fred Ginyard said the only reason the Free Library even had the diversity training was in the interests of combatting white supremacy and systemic racism. “I don’t understand how you can address the issue if you can’t even name it,” he said.

“Black folk, we are seriously suffering from PTSD from that [expletive] training, even thinking about it now, I just wanna cry,” said Andrea Lemoins, a Free Library community organizer and a cofounder of the Concerned Black Workers of the Free Library, which has led recent racial justice organizing efforts. “To say that white privilege doesn’t exist? That is a whole level of anti-Blackness and internalized racism for her that I just cannot fathom.”

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Since race-based university admissions worked so well the next step is race-based hospital admissions.

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The New York Times: Bad times at the Grey Lady

You don’t have to look hard to find other examples of ideologically driven double standards at play at the Times. Last summer, the paper was at the centre of the national conversation after it ran an opinion article by the Republican Senator Tom Cotton. “Send in the military” ran the headline of a column in which Cotton called for a more robust response to the violence that followed the death of George Floyd.

An eruption of internal complaints followed: reporters and editors claimed that the article “put black New York Times staffers in danger”. A few days later, the section’s editor was fired. (The paper recently posted a job advertisement for a job on the comment desk. The ideal candidate, it read, would need “a sense of humour and a spine of steel”.)

Cotton’s article is still on the Times website, though neutered by a lengthy editorial note which states that “the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published”. The note implies factual mistakes in the piece — and yet no corrections have been made.

A few months later, the same section of the paper (under new management) published an egregious piece of Chinese Communist Party apologia. “Hong Kong is China, like it or not” ran the headline of an article by a pro-Beijing member of Hong Kong’s legislative council. Too busy play-acting a fight between fascism and democracy in America, the paper’s staff didn’t seem to mind much about it providing cover for a genuinely dictatorial regime.

Meanwhile, more ideologically convenient work is widely feted, no matter its shortcomings. Two years ago, the Times launched the 1619 Project, a paper-wide effort to, in their own words, “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative”.

Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for spearheading the initiative. (Last year she embraced the suggestion that the summer’s violent disorder be named the “1619 Riots”.) Even if one agrees with the argument being advanced by the Times, the important thing is that it was advancing any kind of argument at all. Only the faintest pretence of sober neutrality remains. “All the news that’s fit to print” is still the paper’s motto, but it is has less and less to do with the work done in its newsroom.

In a sign of the Times’s influence, school syllabuses are being rewritten to fit the 1619 version of US history, even though experts from across the political spectrum have taken issue with the project’s core claims.

A group of some of the most highly regarded historians in America, including Gordon Wood and James McPherson, dispute as “incorrect” the idea that America’s founders declared independence from Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue” and say the project’s mistakes “suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology”. A historian recruited to fact-check the project claims her reservations were simply ignored. The Times gives every impression of being as proud of the 1619 project as it was before any complaints were lodged — no matter the seriousness of the charge or the credibility of the source.

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The death of the American city

All of which meant America’s urban districts were ripe for civil unrest when George Floyd died last May, and these festering conditions exploded into the worst national rioting in decades. Parts of many cities went up in flames, the damage of which was obscured by mainstream media’s mantra of “mostly peaceful protests”. The constant rioting and demonstrations in Portland, once seen as a paragon of new urbanist-led revival, has all but destroyed its downtown, which is now largely bereft of pedestrians.

Remarkably, despite the dramatic rise in homicides, the city seems likely to continue its programme of de-funding the police. In many cities — Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, New York — “progressive” district attorneys have worked assiduously to restrain law enforcement. In California, where it is no longer considered a felony to steal anything worth less than $1,000, there has been a surge in property crime, including a huge rise in car thefts. San Francisco, for example, has seen the drug store Walgreens close ten outlets since 2019, citing elevated levels of theft and weak law enforcement. Meanwhile New York’s bodegas, small markets in ethnic neighbourhoods, experienced a 222% increase in burglaries last year.

The repercussions of this extend well beyond the criminal and judicial spheres. As cities slowly fall to pieces, they are increasingly becoming no-go zones for investors and business, except for those who see opportunity investing in suddenly distressed properties; barely ten per cent of US companies are interested in investing in large urban areas. A friend who runs a biomedical company had his warehouse burned down in the post-Floyd Minneapolis riots. When I asked him whether he would rebuild, he said yes — but in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, or Atlanta.

Yet a number of progressives insist that the current urban exodus of wealthy residents is not a cause for concern, as it allows a more fair society to be “reborn”. Such a naïve approach forgets that there is one problem with expelling the rich: in New York, for example, the “one per cent” pay 43% of the city’s income taxes. The same is also true in California, where the top 1% of the population pays half of all income taxes. Even London now depends almost entirely on the wealthy to keep its economy afloat.

But today’s activist Left does not seem to be concerned with economics — or, for that matter, much of the real world. In New York, activists have helped put an end to proposals for new jobs from Amazon, as well as a recent “Industry City” proposal in Brooklyn. In Seattle, the doggedly radical city council is working overtime to also push out Amazon — the company that has driven much of the region’s economic growth — to the surrounding suburbs and other regions.