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

New thread posted: https://saidit.net/s/CultureWarRoundup/comments/8vyk/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_february_7/

Per user suggestion, until traffic on this sub picks up a bit, I'm going to create a single thread that may correlate to several weeks' worth of threads in the subreddit. We have this option because saidit's automoderator doesn't appear to have the "auto-post new threads" feature. There is no cutoff that will generate a new OT/LE thread, but practically-speaking, it will probably be somewhere in the 2-3 weeks/100 comments range to start. We have flexibility at the expense of a small amount of convenience.

That said, here is the cross-link to the current OT/LE on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/sgtzor/january_31_2022_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/

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

How the Left betrayed the Truckers: The convoy is despised by those who should support it

This sense of fear and dread at the machinations of the proles is hardly something unique to Canada. Indeed, even the United States saw a large increase of worker militancy and wildcat strikes over oppressive vaccine mandates. Like their compatriots in Canada, America’s various professional friends of the working class responded with horror and scorn. The well-known Marxist economist, Richard Wolff, was mobbed on Twitter for suggesting that workers striking over mandates were actually part of something called “class struggle”, rather than merely an expression of “fascism”.

Ottawa’s truckers are a symptom of the massive class divide that is opening up across the West. Marxists are sticking their heads in the sand about this generational moment, or papering it over with absurd topsy-turvy leaps. In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.

The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?

It’s easy to laugh at this sort of absurdity, but the lesson here is anything but a joke. The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. Nora Loreto may not be a person with calloused hands, and she may very well belong to Gord Magill’s “email jobs caste”. But for the longest time, the political rhetoric and worldview of the Left depended on the idea that the trucker and the activist were merely two sides of the same coin.

Without the activist and the “organiser”, the trucker would never be able to know how to organise himself and his fellows politically; without the trucker, the activist and the organiser would not have a cause for which to organise. Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.

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

Judge grants interim injunction against loud honking at Ottawa protest

Ontario Superior Court Justice Hugh McLean has granted a 10-day injunction to prevent truckers parked on city streets in downtown Ottawa from honking their horns incessantly.

McLean said Monday the injunction is temporary because he needs to hear more evidence, but that he has heard enough to make this ruling as a protest against COVID-19 pandemic measures continues to paralyze the national capital around Parliament Hill.

Paul Champ, a lawyer representing central Ottawa residents in a proposed multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit, had argued the loud and prolonged honking is causing irreparable harm.

Keith Wilson, representing three of the respondents in the case, had told McLean the ruling on the injunction would carry national importance.

McLean said he heard enough evidence that the continual blaring of horns was having an effect on residents that their right for "quiet, if we can use that term," trumped the honking truckers' right to protest.

Anarchotyrann, eh?

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

Hoax alert: Black Illinois student criminally charged for racist notes

Illinois law enforcement announced Friday that Kaliyeha Clark-Mabins, a black female college student, will be charged with three counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.

Kevin Schmoll, the chief of police for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, made the announcement on Friday. The College Fix had started asking questions about the investigation last week.

The notes said “DIE BITCH” and “BLACK PEOPLE DON’T BELONG” according to charging documents provided to The Fix by the Madison County State’s Attorney office.

“SIUE Police received [on January 23] a report of a hate crime involving the posting of hand-written notes on the door of a room in Woodland Residence Hall, along with an alleged anonymous text message thread from fall 2021 containing threatening and racially hostile content,” campus Director of Media Relations Megan Wieser said in an email to The Fix. Police responded to reports of disorderly conduct and suspicious activity, according to the crime blotter.

The investigation included not just the campus police, but the “Madison County State’s Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Secret Service,” the email said. The investigation cleared two white students falsely accused of involvement, Amanda Jerome and Jimmi Thull.

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Big Tech vs the working class: GoFundMe’s withholding of donations to the Canadian truckers is a foul, classist attack on democracy.

We need to talk about GoFundMe’s withholding of millions of dollars from the Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates. This is union-busting 21st-century style. This is a multimillion-dollar company using its corporate clout to starve working-class activists of funds. This is a signal from Silicon Valley, clear and loud, that it will wield its power to crush any form of political agitation from ‘the lower orders’ that pushes too hard against the political consensus. Anyone who thinks this clash between a profit-making fundraising website and drivers pissed off at being pushed around by Covid authoritarians is just another weird online spat needs to think again. This is far more than that. It is a scoping out of the battlelines over freedom and power that are likely to define the internet era.

GoFundMe’s deprivation of funds to the truckers protesting against Canada’s vaccine rules is, to my mind, one of the most egregious and anti-democratic acts yet carried out by the California-based elites who oversee the World Wide Web. These truckers, such essential workers, are revolting against Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s introduction of a new rule earlier this month stipulating that truckers who cross the Canada-US border will need to be vaccinated or else go into quarantine after every trip. This is a mad demand. It would severely undermine some truckers’ ability to earn a living. So truckers have risen up. They drove their vast rigs across Canada in what came to be known as the Freedom Convoy before stopping in the capital Ottawa where they have been blocking roads and causing fainting fits among middle-class liberals who cannot understand why these oiks won’t just carry on dropping off sacks of kale to the local Whole Foods and stop going on about their pesky rights.

There has been an outpouring of support for the truckers. Canadians and Americans tired of corona-authoritarianism are cheering the truckers for honking a huge collective horn at the elite consensus on Covid. Despite the best efforts of woke politicians and columnists to depict the truckers as QAnon on wheels, as a motorised version of Mussolini’s March on Rome, many people know that in truth they are decent working people who simply object to the state making their lives that bit harder. People also know that the woke set’s attempts to delegitimise the Freedom Convoy by flagging up ‘far-right’ comments made by a tiny handful of the truckers is a tactic as old as capitalism itself. Elite opponents of working-class organisation have always used smear and innuendo to try to nullify the throng. Seeing this smear campaign for what it is, lots of folk decided to give the truckers a few bucks. But GoFundMe had other ideas.

GoFundMe says the 10million Canadian dollars raised via its website, on a page titled ‘Freedom Convoy 2022’, will not be given to the truckers after all. It cited police reports about ‘violence’ in the convoy. What violence? Where? Thousands and thousands of people have joined the truckers’ protest and yet there have only been three arrests. One person was arrested for being in possession of a weapon, one for causing ‘mischief’, and one for making a threatening comment on social media. As far as mass protests go, this is a staggeringly low level of allegedly criminal behaviour. I once visited the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in London and witnessed at least three misdemeanours in the one hour I was there (public urination, threatening speech, and a disturbing of the peace by a man on smack who kept shouting ‘GET TAE FUCK’). For a mass, angry, revolting movement, Freedom Convoy is uncommonly peaceful. GoFundMe’s ‘violence’ blather is clearly a jumped-up pretext for its political decision to punish the truckers.

On Friday, GoFundMe issued a statement saying that Freedom Convoy was a peaceful movement when it first started but it has since ‘become an occupation’. And so, ‘no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organisers’. Instead, the $9million that remains in GoFundMe’s coffers will be distributed to ‘credible’ charities or refunded to the people who donated if they fill in a form. As if to make it super clear that this is all very political, Facebook has now removed a page promoting a Freedom Convoy in Washington, DC and deleted the personal account of the trucker who set it up. ‘It’s censorship at its finest’, he said, and he’s not wrong. This looks like a cut-and-dried case of the new capitalist oligarchies siding with the political establishment – in this case, Justin Trudeau – to shrink and silence the consensus-threatening cries of ordinary people.

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

GWU students demand firing of professor who wouldn’t let service pitbull into class

According to The Hatchet, Professor Marie Matta argued with student Liza Malinsky in class late last month about the dog’s (named Charlie) presence in class.

Malinsky, who describes herself as a “disabled Black woman with a history of trauma” and “crippling anxiety,” claims on her Instagram page that Matta “humiliated” her and acted illegally by “expos[ing] confidential information about [her] accommodations and disabilities in front of all of [her] peers.”

[...]

One of Malinsky cheerleading teammates, Carly Shaffer, started a Change.org petition on February 1 calling on Matta (left) to be fired for engaging in “racial and ableist injustices.”

[...]

In response to a Facebook comment which claimed Charlie isn’t actually a service dog and that she trained the dog herself, Malinsky said “all legal under [Americans with Disabilities Act] law.”

While it is true service animals do not have to be professionally trained, the ADA specifically notes “emotional support, therapy, comfort, or companion animals” do not qualify as service animals. There is an exception, however, for “psychiatric service animals” which serve to calm those with anxiety attacks.

"Emotional support pitbull" 📯📯

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

Kids Full of Life, Adults Obsessed with Death: The insanity of masking children—by the numbers

These are nationwide statistics. But, of course, there has been a huge difference in mask policies toward kids—and others—across the several states. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s children have lived freely, except in particular localities that have imposed their own mandates. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, by contrast, California’s kids have lived a masked existence, with partial exceptions in counties (such as Orange) where Newsom’s decrees have been only loosely enforced.

Children’s lives have been radically different in these two states. As long as they haven’t ventured into Walt Disney World—which apparently thinks that required mask-wearing is compatible with being the most magical place on earth—kids in Florida have been free to live like kids. In California, however, unless they’ve been raised in a liberty-loving place like Huntington Beach and been home-schooled, children have been forced to live like minimum-security prisoners.

The result? From January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2022, 99.999 percent of kids in California didn’t die of Covid—either because they didn’t get it, or because they recovered from it. Over that same span of time, 99.999 percent of kids in Florida didn’t die of Covid. Both states’ numbers matched the national average. So, where would you rather be growing up?

Or take two adjacent states with very different attitudes toward the masking of the American kid. Under Governor Kate Brown, Oregon’s schoolchildren are required to be masked in schools, as well as when they enter other buildings apart from private residences. Directly across Oregon’s eastern border, meantime, under Governor Brad Little, Idaho has not had a mask mandate at any time during the pandemic, either in or out of schools.

From January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2022, Oregon had just two Covid-related deaths of kids (those under age 18); Idaho, with about half the population, had just one—giving kids in each state a Covid survival rate of 100.000 percent, or 99.9998 percent when taken out to the fourth decimal point. A huge difference in freedom produced no difference in fatality rates.

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

Students demand revocation of assistant professors’ honorary degree for his Christian beliefs

Over 300 students, faculty, and alumni from Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee have signed a petition calling on the Vice Chancellor of the school to renounce the honorary degree of conservative Christian writer Eric Metaxas.

The petition calls for the revocation of Metaxas honorary degree due to what it calls "anti-LGBTQ" and "anti-democratic" beliefs and statements. It references an article written by the assistant professor in which he said that the LGBTQ community Is “capturing the hearts and minds of young people” through literature.

In the article, Metaxas warns parents to shield children against such influences.

"Anyone who reads books for teens these days will tell you that portrayals of gay relationships and characters are rapidly increasing," reads the piece in question. "In fact, they’re increasing to the point where they’re all out of proportion to reality. If you know the statistics on rates of homosexuality in the real world, you know that it’s somewhere around 3 percent, maybe less. Not so in the world of Young Adult fiction; there, it’s far more pervasive."

The signatories of the petition content that Metaxas’ statements are contrary to the university's mission because of its commitment to diversity and inclusion.

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

[Matt Taibbi] The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized "Fact-Checking": The fact-checkers who flagged Paul Thacker's British Medical Journal article about a Pfizer subcontractor for Facebook admitted they police narrative, not fact

After going through both legal and peer review, but without contacting Ventavia — apparently, they feared an injunction — the BMJ published Thacker’s piece on November 2nd, 2021. The money passage read:

A regional director who was employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.

Beginning on November 10th, 2021, the editors began receiving complaints from readers, who said they were having difficulty sharing it. As editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbassi later wrote in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Facebook has yet to respond to queries about this piece. Meanwhile, the site that conducted Facebook’s “fact check,” Lead Stories, ran a piece dated November 10th whose URL used the term “hoax alert” (Lead Stories denies they called the BMJ piece a hoax). Moreover, they deployed a rhetorical device that such “checking” sites now use with regularity, repeatedly correcting assertions Thacker and the British Medical Journal never made. This began with the title: “The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”

The British Medical Journal never said Jackson’s story revealed “disqualifying flaws” in the vaccine. Nor did it claim the negative information “calls into question the results of the Pfizer clinical trial.” It also didn’t claim that the story is “serious enough to discredit data from the clinical trials.” The BMJ’s actual language said Jackson’s story could “raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight,” which is true.

The real issue with Thacker’s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.

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Teacher Made White Elementary School Children Apologize to Black Kids For Their Skin Color: Irate parents expose more CRT madness.

The sensational claim was made during a school board meeting by the mother of a child who attends AM Kulp Elementary School.

“I actually pulled my daughter out of AM Kulp because of the 5th grade teacher who lined those students up, from whitest to darkest,” she said.

“(The teacher) made them turn around and made the white ones apologize to the black ones – now do not tell me that did not happen in this district,” the mother added.

“You need to put an end to this. Kids do not see color and you are segregating them and you are separating them. This is not OK. Do something or get out of those damn chairs!” she concluded.

The mother’s complaint was bolstered by a further claim by another individual at the meeting who described how the same teacher forced children to take part in a ‘privilege walk’ multiple times.

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'Perfectionism,' having a 'sense of urgency' are examples of White supremacy, academics argue

The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis hosted an event that made headlines before it even began, called “Is Professionalism a Racist Construct?”

In the event, the presenters characterized various qualities of workplace environments such as “perfectionism,” “a sense of urgency,” “defensiveness,” “worship of the written word,” and “quantity over quality” as characteristics of White supremacy culture.

One presenter, Assistant Dean for Field Education Jewel Stafford connected these alleged characteristics of White supremacy culture to the idea that “even though we're working really hard, there's a narrative that we're not enough, that somehow who we are, what we do, it's just not enough.”

The host, Associate Dean for External Affairs Gary Parker, noted that “there were some media outlets that portrayed this talk in a less than flattering light.”

Another presenter, Assistant Dean of the Office of Community Partnerships Cynthia Williams, addressed this controversy in her speech, noting multiple times that she was “getting into good trouble” with her colleagues, and specifically addressed the “provocative” nature of the question, “Is professionalism racist?”

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[Christopher F. Rufo] Prison-Gang Politics: The Left’s racialist ideologies threaten to transform America into a prison yard.

California prison gangs operate on a model of collective, identity-based security. If a white inmate attacks a black inmate, or vice versa, their racial compatriots must fight to protect the group’s interests. The threat of race war, they believe, is the only way to secure peace. The prisoners maintain separate facilities, separate sleeping quarters, and separate trade networks. They communicate with the other races through “reps,” or emissaries, who deliver messages on behalf of gang leaders. An individual might not want to join the white supremacists or the Norteño drug-runners, but his survival depends on doing so. Courts have occasionally attempted to integrate prison facilities but have never succeeded. Prison wardens have accepted the racial reality and work in tacit cooperation with the gangs to maintain segregated intake, cell assignment, and amenities.

I spent three years directing a documentary about life in America’s three poorest cities, including Stockton, California, which has some of the highest crime and incarceration rates in the country. Stockton is a case study in America’s diverse racial future: it is approximately one-quarter white, one-quarter black, one-quarter Latino, and one-quarter Asian. In the city’s daily activities, the racial groups generally cooperate and go about their business together. There are widespread interracial friendships, marriages, and families. Even some of the city’s street gangs are multiracial. But in the jails and prisons that surround the city, the cultural divide is stark: inmates are subsumed into their racial group; enmity between the races is the assumed condition; racial violence, retaliation, and revenge always loom. There are no individuals, only identity-based expressions of power. This “prison politics” has been cemented into the system.

A few years after making the documentary, I began studying critical race theory and the racialist ideologies that are becoming entrenched in American schools. Though the comparison is provocative, frightening parallels exist between the racialist logic of the prison yard and the racialist pedagogy of many public schools. First, schools that have adopted critical race theory reject individualism and colorblindness; to achieve an authentic identity and gain collective power, individuals must identify first and foremost with their racial group. Second, as in the prison yard, some public schools have begun segregating teachers and students for training sessions, classroom exercises, field trips, and even playground activities. Third, many schools that have adopted critical race theory explicitly teach that children belong to categories of “oppressor” or “oppressed” based on a racial hierarchy, and then tell students that they must tear down society in order to “decolonize” the land, settle racial scores, and direct the spoils to their compatriots.

This development might not come as a total surprise. Critical race theory draws heavily from black nationalist ideology, such as that of the Black Panther Party, which came to fruition in California prisons in the 1960s. The new iteration of this ideology might have abandoned the militant rhetoric of the Panthers in favor of the therapeutic language of the school psychologist, but it nevertheless threatens to replicate the destructive features of prison-gang politics in the “outside world.” If American institutions succumb to this ideology, they can expect a brutal future: the suspension of individualism in favor of racial collectivism; a nihilistic, zero-sum vision of society; and endemic racial conflict as a baseline condition. It would reverse the racial progress that the United States has made over the centuries.

To avoid this fate, Americans of all racial backgrounds must work together to defeat this ideology, down to its roots. Despite the success of critical race theory in prestige institutions, American voters still prefer individualism, colorblindness, and equal protection under the law. Even voters in deep-blue California have rejected affirmative-action policies that would judge individuals according to race rather than merit. The challenge is to turn this public preference into public action. Critical race theory has spread through our institutions, despite strong public opposition. Americans must act to prevent the country from becoming the equivalent of a sprawling, open-air prison yard.

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The Thought Police are here: Criticise the trans lobby and you can expect the cops to come round to ‘check your thinking’.

Orwell tropes are overused. I’m guilty of it myself. And yet there are times when only a Nineteen Eighty-Four reference will do. The police questioning of Scottish charity worker Nicola Murray is one of those times. After Ms Murray issued a statement saying that her domestic-violence charity would no longer refer women to the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, because of ‘deeply concerning comments’ made by the trans woman who runs the centre, the police came knocking. ‘We need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind making your statement’, they told Murray. Police officers visiting a woman’s home and grilling her over her ‘thinking’? Yep, we need Orwell for this.

Ms Murray’s crimethink was to feel uncomfortable with comments made by Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman who is CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). Last year, Wadhwa said some women who experience sexual abuse and rape are ‘bigoted people’ and they should expect to be ‘challenged’ on their bigotries if they turn up at the crisis centre looking for help. Sexual violence is ‘not [a] discerning crime’, said Wadhwa. It ‘happens to bigoted people as well’. And ‘if you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature [to the crisis centre], we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma… but please also expect to be challenged on your prejudices’. In short – if you’re a woman who doesn’t believe that someone born male can become a woman, and who doesn’t want to see blokes of any sort in a rape-crisis centre, then you’re a ‘bigot’ and your trauma therapy will come with a side order of woke lecturing.

Not surprisingly, many campaigners against sexual violence were horrifed by Wadhwa’s comments. In my view, the very idea of a rape-crisis centre being run by a biological male is pretty disturbing. But the fact that that biological male is also happy to brand some rape victims as ‘bigots’ who essentially need re-education is just despicable. Women turn up at rape-crisis centres for urgent assistance following a terrible exprience, not to be interrogated on how au fait they are with the latest beliefs and decrees of the cranky cult of genderfluidity.

Ms Murray runs Brodie’s Trust, a charity that provides help to women who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy through domestic violence or a forced termination. In September, in the wake of Wadhwa’s comments, she said Brodie’s Trust ‘cannot in all conscience send vulnerable women to [the ERCC]’. She made the perfectly reasonable point that it is not for sexual-violence charities to police vulnerable women’s thoughts. ‘We have no interest in our clients’ religion, sexuality [or] political views’, she said. And so she said she would no longer ‘signpost’ vulnerable women to a centre whose CEO was openly threatening to police and correct vulnerable women’s beliefs.

The police didn’t see it as reasonable, though. In November, detectives from Edinburgh knocked on Ms Murray’s door. They had in their possession screenshots of her tweets and a printout of the statement made by Brodie’s Trust. Get your head around that – actual police officers printed out a statement made by a charity and went around to the charity founder’s home to talk to her about it. This is banana republic stuff. The officers confirmed to Ms Murray that she hadn’t said anything ‘hateful’ – ‘there isn’t a crime here’. So why were they in her home waving around printouts of her comments, she asked? ‘Because we need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind your statement’, they said.

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Student suspended for privately discussing Christian beliefs sues school district

According to The Detroit News, Plainwell High School student David Stout claims the three-day suspension last fall was for talking about the topic “in a private text conversation and in a hallway.”

As noted in the complaint, one of Stout’s text read “the Bible teaches that homosexual conduct is a sin,” and that “everyone is a sinner due to freewill choices.” He also wrote he “would pray for (homosexuals) ‘to repent and follow Jesus.'”

The suit claims one of the school’s band directors, Austin Hunt, chided Stout for “not policing and reporting other students’ inappropriate jokes” — meaning he laughed at others’ (inappropriate) “racial and homophobic jokes” and “didn’t immediately stop them.”

Hunt (left) allegedly told Stout he had to cease discussing religion on social media, and that he and his bandmates were “stealing others’ happiness.”

Perhaps most alarmingly, in response to Stout telling Hunt that he was being “very one-sided” and was trying to “shame, intimidate, and silence conservatives and Christians,” Hunt said that was a “correct” assessment.

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[Michelle Malkin] Why Airbnb Banned Me (And My Hubby, Too!)

So here is the grim reality of life in Woke America 2022. In November, I spoke at a peaceful conference held by an organization that is deemed a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League. The title of my talk was “Race, Immigration, and Con. Inc: How I Came to See the Light.” It was a wide-ranging discussion of my three decades of reporting on the nation’s demographic and cultural deterioration—which I’ve chronicled firsthand on college campuses, at our borders, and in every crime-ridden, riot-prone, and mass migration-transformed metropolis from Los Angeles to Seattle and Portland, to Baltimore, Washington, D.C, New York, and Denver.

As I’ve done throughout my career, I lambasted both Swamp Democrats and establishment Republicans for selling us out. The speech delved into the K-20 metastasis of anti-white curriculum, the corporate media’s whitewashing of black-on-Asian attacks, and the long campaign to censor nationalist dissidents who put America first. A week after my talk, San Francisco-based Airbnb notified me that I was banned from using its services ever again and imperiously deleted my account. Poof!

“My name’s Cedar, and I’m with Airbnb’s Trust team,” the Nov. 24, 2021 e-mail began. “It has come to our attention that you were a keynote speaker for the 2021 American Renaissance Conference earlier this month in Tennessee. Airbnb’s community policies prohibit people who are members of or actively associate with known hate groups. Due to your promotion and participation in a known white nationalist and white supremacist conference, we have determined that we will remove your account from Airbnb. This is consistent with action we’ve taken to ban people associated with this conference in past years.”

Airbnb’s ideological witch hunts have claimed an unknown number of victims since 2016 as part of a woke company initiative to root out “bias” and expel anyone deemed an “extremist” with a “dangerous organization affiliation.” Press coverage of previous purges strongly suggests that the aforementioned character assassins of the SPLC are involved through use of their far left, anti-white, anti-Right “Hatewatch” list. Ever since I wrote my first book, Invasion, in 2002, the SPLC and ADL goons have sought to stifle my voice.

But this latest salvo crosses the line. It’s not enough that I—a “woman of color” (the Left’s own descriptive label, not mine) and mother of two multiracial children – was pronounced guilty of “hate” crimes and “promotion” of “white supremacist” ideas for delivering a speech whose full content Airbnb didn’t even bother to obtain from me. The Airbnb bullies also banned my equally non-violent, non-hateful husband – who did not attend the conference and who is not a public figure or activist.

Just make your own platform ISP university bank insurance company housesharing service!

[–]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)

Even in Idaho: Arcane and radical pedagogy has infiltrated schools across America's heartland.

Many aspects of Idaho’s education system suggest parents are correct that the sexualization of children cannot happen in Idaho. Our schools are not required to teach sex education, unlike many other states. School districts can offer sex education programs but only within the limits of Idaho Statute 33-1608, which says the primary responsibility of family life and sex education rests with a student’s home and church and that school should do nothing to upset those established standards. Schools are required to teach abstinence and provide factual, medically accurate and objective information.

But advocacy groups and other branches of government undermine the sound intent at the legislative level. Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) has been implementing the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (APP) program in K-12 schools across the state since 2017. APP claims to teach abstinence but really encourages kids to engage in sexual activity and toward adopting social constructivist views of sex and gender. The DHW claims to be operating the program in every school district, affecting more schools every year.

According to the APP curriculum standards, students are taught to be activists for transgenderism and other LGBTQ issues, promote safety for sexually active kids rather than absitence or marital sex, and differentiate between biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression by the end of eighth grade. The DHW never reports the names and numbers of schools where the APP program is implemented — a transparency problem that can hardly be accidental.

Advocacy groups actively work to promote sex education material and radical gender policies at the local level. Sometimes school districts adopt APP curriculum, sometimes they quietly allow alternative sex education advocacy groups into the schools to offer programs. There is no transparency on the operation of such programs, so it is impossible to know what any individual school district is doing. But we know that advocacy groups are very active in school districts because the interest groups themselves brag about it, even though school districts don’t inform the public about it.

The Committee for Children Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum Second Step is used in many school districts statewide including Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello-Chubbuck, and West Ada. Second Step encourages students to question their sexual orientation and gender, be activists for issues such as transgenderism, and use the website LoveIsRespect.org for sex advice. The website includes resources such as “Five tips for your first time,” refers places to get an abortion, and promotes sexual taboos like polyamory.

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

Georgetown student protester requests place on campus for people to cry about controversial tweets

At another juncture, a student demanded that the dean cover for the classes that the activists had missed as a result of the sit-in, suggesting that the move should be part of a “reparations” package for black students. She followed up by insisting that students be given a designated place on campus to cry. “Is there an office they can go to?” she asked. “I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry.”

“And this is not in the future,” she added. “This is today.”

The administrators took the law student’s query seriously. “It is really, really hard to walk out of class or a meeting in tears, and you should always have a place on campus where you can go,” Dean [Mitch] Bailin told her. “And if you’re finding that you’re not getting the person that you want to talk to or not getting the space that you need, reach out to me anytime — anytime — and we will find you space.”

Yet another student pressed the deans to send out an email attacking [Georgetown Black Law Student Association] critics.

“Something that’s important is to remind our classmates that are attacking us that they are only here because our ancestors were sold for them to be here,” she said. “And I think it’s a very important fact that is not talked about explicitly enough, because we are still being attacked. So I just would appreciate in whatever message that’s going out [to the student body], that our classmates are explicitly reminded: Do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity . . . That needs to be something that these people are reminded of, because they continue to attack us as if it is not on our backs that they are even here.”

[–]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)

An Awakening Community: Repelled by progressive policies, Asian-American New Yorkers look to the other side of the aisle.

Three in four Asian New Yorkers are immigrants. They have long been considered reliable Democratic voters, but lately, many seem more animated by opposition to Democratic policies. The extent of the shift became clear in the New York City elections last year, when Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, as well as some candidates for city council, scored well in Asian-heavy districts. While Democrats try to figure out what this means, Republicans hope to capitalize this year—and beyond.

[...]

Asians constitute about 15 percent of New York City’s population—about half of these Chinese—but they weren’t known for being vocal on civic issues until 2015, when thousands protested against the indictment of Peter Liang, a rookie cop who, while on patrol, accidentally shot dead an unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, in a Brooklyn housing project. In the eyes of the protesters, Liang, a Chinese-American, was a scapegoat for public anger resulting from non-indictments of some white cops involved in killings of black people.

Asian voices have only grown louder since then. They fought against former mayor Bill de Blasio’s specialized high school reform proposal that, they worry, would reduce the chance of admission for Asian students; the borough-based jail project that would bring an expanded jail to Manhattan’s Chinatown; the state’s marijuana legalization; and bail reform and the defund-the-police movement, which cut against their public safety concerns.

With each protest movement came the emergence of community activists new to politics. Phil Wong is one. An immigrant from Hong Kong and a father of three, Wong participated in protests for the first time in 2018 against specialized high school reform. Now he’s a civic leader mobilizing Chinese parents to fight affirmative action and critical race theory. “The atmosphere at schools here is more and more like China’s cultural revolution that encourages students to cancel teachers and parents, all in the name of equality,” Wong says.

Yanling Zhang is another, a volunteer for Vickie Paladino, a Republican who won the city council seat in District 19. “When I heard Vickie talking at a party, I thought she represents the traditional American values that attracted me to the U.S.,” says Zhang, who came to the U.S. for graduate school more than 20 years ago and had not participated in politics until she joined Paladino’s campaign. “But now this country has changed. Personal freedom is eroded by overbearing governments, and the media ignores the voices of ordinary people.”

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

Nightclub event slammed for charging White, straight males six times more than ethnic minorities for entry

Pxssy Palace, the organizer behind an event held at the E1 nightclub in east London on Jan. 28, advertised tickets for the event with three different price categories, based on a club-goer’s skin color and sexual orientation.

Black homosexuals, trans people, and non-binary people of color were able to purchase a ticket for £16.80 (€20), however the ticket price was 50 percent more expensive for White trans or gay men and straight Black women.

If a club-goer had the audacity to identify as a White, straight male however, they were billed £112 — more than six times the regular price — to attend the event.

[...]

Incensed social media users slammed what they regarded as a “discriminatory” door policy, and called on the Metropolitan Police to investigate the practice.

Others suggested those eligible for the higher ticketing band simply self-identify as another gender or sexual orientation in order to avoid higher fees.

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

it's similar if they have a ladies night. Women get in free, get cheaper drinks etc. Most are ok with that cuz guys think it's great if a bar or club has a ton of women, and are willing to pay to get in. Should be illegal though if you stop to think.

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

Pregnant New Zealand journalist is forced to turn to the TALIBAN for help after she was left stranded in Afghanistan because of Jacinda Ardern's draconian Covid laws

Charlotte Bellis, a broadcast journalist, said she has repeatedly tried to return to New Zealand since she learned she was pregnant in September.

She has submitted 59 documents to New Zealand officials in Afghanistan in an attempt to secure an emergency return home, but her bid was turned down and led her to turn to the Taliban, one of the world's most oppressive regimes, for sympathy.

It's a particularly cruel twist of fate for the woman who was revered worldwide for her fearless questioning of the jihadist group's previous record on women's rights.

[...]

Writing in the New Zealand Herald on Saturday, Ms Bellis said it was 'brutally ironic' that while she had once questioned the Taliban about their treatment of women, she was now asking the same questions of her own government.

'When the Taliban offers you - a pregnant, unmarried woman - safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,' she wrote

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

you're from new zealand, why were you there in the first place. No sympathy.

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

[Freddie deBoer] Covid as Liberal 9/11:" Covid is not over, or have you forgotten?"

Forgive me if this others have made this comparison, but it’s remarkable how this moment echoes that one in the obsession with mutual surveillance and moral hygiene, all enforced with constant reference to a real crisis and imagined dangers. It’s not just the serial overreactions, the threatening intensity, the constant reference to dramatically worse events supposedly yet to come. It’s the feeling of mandatory panic, the insistence that anyone who does not allow the crisis to dominate their internal life is somehow guilty of causing it, the desire to blame a disaster on people who are thought to not take it seriously enough. This self-impressed doomsaying reminds me so much of the people who constantly said, after 9/11, that al Qaeda was all around us, that the big attack was yet to come, that sleeper cells planned to nuke shopping malls…. 9/11, too, produced a type of proud Cassandra, haughty and contemptuous, who simply lived to let the rest of us know that the rest of us just aren’t serious enough, who believed that the crisis meant that every single moment of our lives was now a character test, one that we failed if we did exist in a permanent state of anxiety and fear.

Ours is a discursive atmosphere in which (a year into the pandemic) a mainstream magazine published a piece where the author gradually became more and more convinced by a legitimately deranged prepper’s rantings about Covid as the end of days. (When said deranged prepper says “SARS-2-CoV-19 is to the human race what an asteroid was to the dinosaurs,” the author says that this prediction is likely half-right, then suggests it may be even closer than that.) People openly salivate over the prospect of another, more virulent strain. They do! Look on social media. The sheer white-knuckled excitement when they predict the next brutal wave…. These are ostensibly warnings but they sure sound like yearning to me. If 9/11 taught me anything it was that there is such a thing as a national mood, and that it can have serious consequences.

Covid-19, like 9/11, has functioned as all-encompassing excuses to justify the preferences of people who want those things anyway. After 9/11, the call went out that the country was soft and fat, that we were not sufficiently devoted to national defense, that we needed to be more aggressive in foreign affairs, and that the country had grown insufficiently nationalistic and militaristic, that we all needed to toughen up and salute the red, white, and blue. These were of course beliefs held by many conservatives long prior to 9/11, and they exploited the moment. The ritualistic expression of anger at those who wanted to live in a post-9/11 world was really the defense of a new regime. Now many on the left of the political spectrum are attempting to do something like the same, turn disaster into opportunity. Even if it’s merely the opportunity to do the only thing that gets them out of bed these days, the opportunity to judge others.

[...]

For those on the far left, I think, Covid has been particularly seductive. In the last several years I have watched as the nihilism and anger that have never been rare in the socialist left have metastasized, curdling into this terrible black pit in the heart of people who have ostensibly revolutionary politics but who believe that no positive change is possible. So many people I know, including many very good people, have given up; so many are resigned to the idea that the system cannot be reformed from inside. But they are also not so deluded as to think that armed revolution could possibly succeed. (As I am fond of reminding people, the state has satellites that can read your t-shirt from space.) So a lot of people who are ostensibly socialists and radicals have succumbed to this grinding nihilism, this black, lol-nothing-matters defeatism. And so they stock whatever’s left of their hopes in extreme events - in Charlottesville, which they insisted was the start of a new street war against fascism, all sense to the contrary; in January 6th, which they hoped might present them with the opportunity to resist a totalitarian government; in climate change, which they imagine will bring us a post-apocalyptic world of endless possibility, rather than the far more likely future of a hot and unpleasant and environmentally devastated world where the powers that be nevertheless still rule and where inequality only grows.

Then Covid came and, for a brief moment they convinced themselves that it was the big one at last, and everything was possible. Now they are forced to confront the fact that the system is more powerful even than a pandemic, and that no disaster is coming to save us from our miseries.

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

Research: another casualty of woke

Take UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the super-corporation that brings together the university research councils. It boasts 7,000 employees, a wage bill of nearly half-a-billion, and distributes some £8 billion of taxpayers’ money (roughly £120 for every man, woman and child in the UK) for research every year.

This month, UKRI produced a new draft equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. This is worth some close scrutiny.

[...]

There is an overt commitment to ‘treating people equitably to achieve equality in outcomes’ and to ‘reshaping the system’ so as to create ‘welcoming and equitable structures’. Other aims include making every employee ‘inclusive in all that they do’; ‘addressing under-representation’ on racial lines; producing a research system ‘by everyone, for everyone’ (whatever that means); and doing all this with a ‘representative and diverse workforce’ (ie, quotas by another name).

This new strategy applies not only to UKRI itself. If you want any money from it, you’d better toe the line, too. It wants UKRI-supported research to be ‘delivered in inclusive ways to create more equitable outcomes and benefits’, and wants to ‘use levers’ to ‘make change’ (work that out for yourself).

[...]

This is not only misguided but very worrying. For one thing, radical social activism of the kind discreetly promoted here is all very well with politicians and, let us add, with professors. It is not alright in a non-political organisation set up to distribute government largesse in an even-handed manner to those it thinks will use it most efficiently. We do not expect bodies of this kind to boast of their contacts with political ‘advocacy groups’ and ‘grassroots movements’, or to be ‘championing and focusing on systemic and structural change’.

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

Swiss man changes gender to retire and receive his pension a year earlier

New rules introduced on Jan. 1 enable any Swiss resident with the “intimate conviction” that they do not belong to the sex they are registered as in the civil status register can apply to change their gender, in addition to their first name, for just 75 Swiss francs (€72).

And it took just four days for the system to be taken advantage of with Swiss daily Luzerner Zeitung reporting that a man from Lucerne applied to change his gender so that he could receive his state pension at the Swiss retirement age for women of 64, a year earlier than men.

While there are regulations supposedly in place to prevent individuals from making “manifestly abusive” applications, there is in reality “no obligation” on the part of civil servants to “verify the intimate conviction of the persons concerned” and the sincerity of the applicant is presumed in accordance with the principle of good faith.

The policy has raised further questions about how individuals could abuse the system in future to their own benefit, with critics warning that men could use the loophole to avoid a mandatory summons for national service.

One social media user suggested there was nothing stopping a male from applying for a gender change at the age of 17 to avoid military conscription. “At 30, you go back and change your name to man and that’s it,” wrote one user, all for the cost of 150 Swiss francs.

No word on whether his car insurance premiums have also decreased.

[–]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)

[Glenn Greenwald] The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

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

UPDATE: Suspended professor who was forced to take diversity training sues university

A professor who was targeted and suspended after using censored language in a test question to make an example of employment discrimination just filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The controversy began in 2020 when Jason Kilborn, a law professor at UIC, posed a hypothetical question in an exam surrounding illegal discrimination in the workplace. The question referenced anti-black and anti-women slurs, but were not fully spelled out. Instead, they were simply displayed by their first letters, "n" and "b."

Despite keeping the words censored, a petition was launched against Kilborn condemning him for the contents in question. A short time after, UIC suspended Kilborn and announced he would be forced to take a five-week diversity training course in order to return to teaching.

Yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) announced their partnership with Kilborn in a First Amendment lawsuit against the school. In the announcement, they claim that the diversity training Kilborn was subjected to "uses the exact same redacted slur in the training materials."

[...]

The lawsuit details that when Kilborn was called into a dean's meeting following student complaints about the question, he voluntarily sent an apology letter to his upset students. But nonetheless, the professor was soon placed on "indefinite administrative leave" and was barred from stepping foot on campus and participating in remote school activities.

[...]

The following Monday, One of the students who had also met with Kilborn, met with the dean -- along with several other students -- and falsely claimed "that [Kilborn] had exclaimed that he 'was feeling homicidal or 'would become homicidal,'" the lawsuit states. This prompted the dean and other defendants to invoke UIC's Violence Prevention Plan to summon a BTAT (Behavioral Threat Assessment Team).

So class, what did we learn? Never apologize.

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

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

Progressives Against Transparency: The ACLU joins Democratic politicians in opposition to making school curricula available to parents.

As debates over school curricula have raged for the past year, progressives have openly expressed anti-democratic views about how the education system should operate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, progenitor of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, made her view clear during an NBC appearance. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” she said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in the subject area.” Meantime, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe arguably cost himself a second term in the governor’s mansion by admitting that he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

So it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the Democrats are resisting public school transparency. What’s more surprising is that the American Civil Liberties Union decided to join them in taking this position. The ACLU wrote on Twitter that the curriculum transparency bills are “are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools.”

[...]

When the ACLU was demanding transparency about issues like religious instruction or sex education, it didn’t need to choose between government accountability and progressive social revolution. But the modern ACLU worries that greater government transparency may prevent “teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools”—by which it really means learning and talking about race and gender in a way that the new progressives approve.

By opposing transparency, progressives, the ACLU among them, may have made a tactical mistake. Public schools are government institutions paid for by taxpayers; with few alternatives, most parents are compelled to send their children there. It’s hard to argue that curricula should be kept secret. Some states, like Ohio, already have laws that allow parents to request instruction materials, reading lists, and curricula. To argue that schools can’t teach kids certain material unless it’s kept secret is to concede that the material wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny.

[...]

The ACLU of old would never have argued for government secrecy, especially when it comes to public schools. America still needs the commitment to government transparency that the ACLU once exemplified. One might even say that we need it more than ever.

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

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

Biological Man, 26, Who Molested Girl To Be Housed With Females In Juvenile Detention After Identifying As Woman

Guess that thing that TRA's tell us "never happens" happened again:

Tubbs went into a female restroom at a Denny’s restaurant in 2014, grabbed a 10-year-old girl by the throat, locked her in a stall, and molested her until another person walked into the bathroom, reports say.

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

German Health Minister Admits 'Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated' Narrative Was A Load Of Crap, Blames 'Software' Error

The German government has admitted that the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" narrative they used to oppress purebloods was based off a "software" error which incorrectly told them 90% of new covid cases were among the unvaccinated.

In fact, in most cases "they didn't even know who was vaccinated and who was not," the National Pulse reports.

Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, the top health official in Germany whose position is equivalent to the CDC director in America, claimed last week that "it was a mistake" and "was not done on purpose in order to largely blame the unvaccinated for the pandemic."

[...]

When are CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci going to apologize for pushing the same lie?

We know from Humetrix's study for the Department of Defense's Project Salus which looked at Medicare data hidden from the general public that "fully vaccinated" Medicare patients made up an estimated 60% of hospitalizations in the week ending August 7th and were more than 71 percent of COVID-19 cases as of August 21.

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

[Freddie deBoer] Human Capital is Real, and Some People Are Smarter Than Other People: until we acknowledge that, there can be no coherent discussion of education

When I set out to write my book, I knew the idea of intrinsic or inherent academic talent, an innate predisposition to succeed or fail, would be controversial, and was prepared for that controversy. The repeated reassurances that the book rejected race science, which annoyed some readers so deeply, were in part an attempt to ward off deliberate misunderstandings of what I was saying. (That is, that individual talents can vary thanks to genetics without that implying that group differences are genetic.) What I was consistently surprised by, though, was the number of people who responded to my book by insisting that there is no such thing as a summative difference in intelligence or academic ability - that is, that not only are there no inherent predispositions towards being good or bad at school, no one even becomes better or worse, no one is smarter than another. There are no measurable differences in what we know or can do intellectually. Or, in some tellings, no one knows what smart is, it’s some sort of ineffable quality we can’t pin down, or the very idea of “smart” is a racist Western imperialist hegemonic heteronormative con.

I find this all unhelpful. Narrow down as specifically as you can and no one can persist in denying that there are differences in summative ability. Can anyone really claim that I can do calculus as well as a math professor who teaches it? Because I can’t do calculus at all! Of course people have different things they know she understand and can do intellectually. I’m not naturally talented at math. I don't like it but it's true. And easily quantifiable. If there were no such distinctions school would not exist.

But the will to obscure this fact is strong. In many fields, the academics at the top are busily abstracting and mystifying success, the better to insist that no one is bad at what you study. (My old field, writing studies, is filled with academics who believe there is no such thing as being better or worse at writing, which makes you wonder why anyone is paying their salaries.) Every day academics declare that grade are a capitalist plot, tests evil, and the very idea of assessment offensive. But there really are things that you can know and not know in life, and some of them, such as reading, are really important. And in fact we are very good indeed at creating instruments that measure whether you can read or write or do algebra. It’s just that their results are socially inconvenient.

If the concern is saying that there are attributes and abilities in life that matter that are not academic or connected to intelligence, and that they should be taken seriously and rewarded, the news is good, as this is perhaps the core argument of my book. If the concern is saying that being smart is an unhealthy obsession in our society and too essential to having material security, the news is good, as that is perhaps the other way to state the core argument of my book. But I don’t understand why we would pretend that academic or intellectual ability doesn’t exist, and act as though that attitude is a prerequisite to be a progressive person who desires equality of rights, dignity, and human value. As I never get tired of pointing out, traditional left thinkers like Marx never pretended that all of us are equal in our abilities. (“From each according to his abilities” implies the opposite!) What the left pushes for is equality of human value, including across - perhaps especially across - differences in talent. Equal value, equal dignity, and equal right to demand the minimum conditions needed for human flourishing.

We can lawyer about the concept of intrinsic ability as much as we want. (For the record, acknowledging that genes and environment both play important roles in education, and that there are complex interactions between them, does not imply that outcomes are therefore mutable.) We live in a world where some people can do things, intellectually, that are monetarily rewarded and socially valuable, and some people can’t. Our attempts to spread these abilities universally have been an abject failure. Because each of us has a nature, and while we’re all good at something, we’re not all good at the same things, and capitalism most certainly does not reward all gifts equally, and so much the worse for us. (Indeed, this is the very reason redistribution is necessary.) Yes, intelligence is multivariate and complex and exists in many dimensions. But so is love, and no one pretends that love therefore does not exist. We are already asking the impossible of our education system, expecting it to reward excellence and create equality at the same time. Let’s not burden it even further by pretending we don’t know some people are better and some at worse at school.

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University assignment has students record themselves accusing someone of racism or homophobia

An assignment obtained by Campus Reform from a University of New Hampshire course shows an instructor directing students to locate someone that they can accuse of "racism," "ableist racist or homophobic use of language," or "micro-aggressions."

Students in the "Introduction to Language and Social Interaction" course were told to "Call in someone on their ableist racist or homophobic use of language, for micro aggressions (or an act of racism) towards a person of color, homophobia against LGBTQI+ or ableism against a disabled person."

The assignment for the course, specifies that students must also record the interaction "in order to get credit," while clarifying to get permission before doing so.

"Remember to say you know they mean well and are a good person," reads the assignment.

Students are instructed to give their target "an alternate way of expressing themselves that doesn't marginalise [sic] or oppress," and warned to "Research your proposed alternative to make certain its [sic] not oppressive itself!!" because "You will fail if you tell someone to say something racist or sexist or homophobic."

A work-study program for America's future замполиты.

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Georgetown’s severe COVID restrictions are nonsensical — and destroying my senior year

Georgetown’s restrictions are so nonsensical that they seem spiteful.

While all campus facilities are shut down, the university curiously left housing open so that students are not entitled to any refund for their missed time, as they were during the fully virtual 2020-21 school year. This refund is significant when tuition alone is $60,000 each year. Instead, students are left paying the full cost without any of the benefits of a campus. Apparently the virus spreads in classrooms but not dorm rooms.

In defense of maintaining the maximum tuition rate despite the shutdown, Georgetown Provost Robert Groves claimed “campus will be open and functional during this period.”

This assertion is laughable. The quality of a campus where the classrooms, student centers, gym and dining hall are shut down is obviously near zero, but by making a return to school “optional” the university can maximize profits at students expense.

The school also makes a tremendous amount of money from its historically good basketball program, so students are allowed to attend the games in droves but cannot sit in class. The university’s priorities are clear, and they are not public health or students’ interests.

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A House Aggrieved Cannot Stand: Our rulers stoke a civil conflict because they want to win it.

Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.

Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.

The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.

[...]

Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.

In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.

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What’s going on in Quebec? The French Canadian province has gone in an increasingly authoritarian direction

Never fully in but never fully out, Quebec has always had an awkward status in Canada. Fiercely protective of its French identity, it has long flirted with separating from its anglophone motherland but, a bit like Scotland, the support was never quite there. Also like Scotland, it has, throughout the pandemic, tried to flex its (limited) autonomy over health policy by consistently pushing for more restrictions than the national government.

The announcement of a ‘health tax’ in Quebec for the unvaccinated (at least C$100), followed by a decree that only vaccinated Quebecois could access the province’s liquor and cannabis stores, has drawn this point into sharper focus. These measures are just the latest examples of an increasingly authoritarian attitude towards Covid, but they are not the most severe; at the height of the pandemic in 2020, the Premier Francois Legault passed Bill 61, a highly controversial piece of legislation that sheltered the Government from oversight and limited parliamentary discussion on new projects to just one hour.

The illiberal strain in the Quebecer character is nothing new; in fact, Covid has merely brought it to the surface. During a period known as ‘The Great Darkness’ in the 1940s and 50s, the French-Canadian province was run by Maurice ‘The Chef’ DuPlessis, whose leadership was marked by repression, persecution and patronage. His name has since become a byword for authoritarianism, with one parliamentarian accusing Francois Legault last month of channelling his inner DuPlessis.

Where Justin Trudeau has gone to great lengths to frame Canada as a beacon of multiculturalism, Quebecers have been far more assertive over their local identity. In 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Quebec’s original language law, which banned the use of English on commercial signs, violated charter rights to freedom of expression. More controversially, it copied France with a laicity law of its own, banning public workers in positions of “authority” from wearing religious symbols in 2019.

Covid has accelerated these tendencies, most of which are popular with the Quebecer public. On a recent talk show, for example, a giddy presenter asks a panel of children whether they support mandatory vaccinations (a strange thing to ask children in and of itself). In unison, they reply “oui” before being asked about what “should be done” about the unvaccinated (again, a rather peculiar way to talk about 15% of the province’s population). One boy says that “we should call the police”, while another offers a rather more detailed proposal: “We should cut everything from them little by little until they submit and get vaccinated”. Cue thunderous applause and a prediction from the presenter that there is a “future politician in the making”.

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[Freddie deBoer] Shovel More Dirt on Pre-K

So I would ordinarily shy away from doing an old-school blog post that simply links to something else, but this feels like a study that calls out for an exception. I’ve just been reading a paper in the journal Developmental Psychology1, thanks to a friend’s library access. It’s a pre-K study that has many virtues, including

  1. Large n (2990 kids)
  2. Genuine random assignment
  3. Longitudinal design
  4. Confirms my priors

… and it says kids who were assigned to the pre-K condition actually did worse than kids who were not.

Pre-K advocates tend to fixate on non-academic indicators as a way to justify pre-K programs. But attendance was mildly worse for the pre-K group:

Attendance rates in sixth grade (proportion of instructional days without a recorded absence) were high for both TN-VPK participants and nonparticipants. Nonetheless, the difference between groups was statistically significant with a slightly higher rate for nonparticipants (97.5% vs. 97.1%, p = .013 for the ITT analysis with observed values). Supplemental Table S11 provides model details for each year (see also Supplemental Figure S3). Sixth grade was the first academic year with a significant attendance difference between conditions, although there were marginally significant effects in kindergarten and first grade.

[...]

There are always exceptions and there are examples touted as proof that pre-K works. But the drift from the initial positive studies to more pessimistic later studies seems clear, from where I’m sitting, and the most compelling and parsimonious explanation is that we’ve gotten better at doing this research over time, with better study designs and higher data quality. The results are what they are. But liberals are forever looking for magic bullets in education, and a lot of them got very professionally, politically, and emotionally invested in pre-K, and it’s just really hard to get them to confront all the bad news.

(Figures in original not preserved.)

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A Covid Origin Conspiracy? Newly released emails make more plausible the contention that Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins presided over the suppression of the lab-leak theory for political reasons.

A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells. Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family. The furin cleavage site in the Covid virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family—a group called Sarbecoviruses—possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?

A member of the Andersen group, Garry of Tulane University, remarks in the latest emails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’s genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”

Another member of the Andersen group, Farzan of Scripps Research, apparently felt much the same way. “He is bothered by the furin cleavage site and has a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely),” the House committee’s letter says of his remarks. Farzan noted that viruses can acquire elements like furin cleavage sites when grown in cultures of human cells, so “instead of directed engineering . . . acquisition of the furin site would be highly compatible with the continued passage of virus in tissue culture.” Both routes— direct insertion of the cleavage site or tissue culture—would mean that the virus came from a lab.

The conferees were clearly aware of the possibility that the virus had originated in the Wuhan lab. “So I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together,” Farzan wrote, “whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature—accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40,” meaning he thought lab origin considerably more likely than not.

You might think that the senior administrators present at the conference would have rushed to investigate the startling inference that their expert advisers had drawn. But just one day after the teleconference at which his experts explained why they thought the virus seemed manipulated, Collins complained about the damage such an idea might cause. “The voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony,” he wrote on February 2, 2020, according to the new emails.

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Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Affirmative Action at Harvard and U.N.C.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are lawful, putting the fate of affirmative action in higher education at risk.

The court has repeatedly upheld similar programs, most recently in 2016. But recent changes in the court’s membership have made it more conservative, and the challenged programs are almost certain to meet skepticism.

The case against Harvard accused it of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.

[...]

In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs made more familiar arguments, saying the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.

Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal entrepreneur who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court.

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To witness the Covid divide, walk from Brooklyn to Queens: Attitudes are no longer about red states or blue states — it's all down to class

In the US, the divide over Covid-19 restrictions is often cast as a matter of red versus blue states. Republican states like Florida have banned vaccine passports and school mask mandates, and have heavily restricted the ability of employers to mandate vaccination for their employees. In blue states, and especially in deep-blue cities like New York and Washington, D.C., mask mandates are the norm and patrons are required to show proof of vaccination to enter a bar, eat indoors at a restaurant, or go to a movie theatre or gym.

Or at least, that’s what the law says. In practice, in vast swathes of America’s blue cities, these rules are entirely theoretical. I live in New York, and stringent Covid restrictions are almost exclusively the preserve of affluent (and predominantly white) neighbourhoods — most parts of Manhattan, plus the expensive, heavily gentrified areas of Brooklyn.

In Prospect Heights, where the median sale price of a home is $950,000 and the vaccination rate is 92.68% mask mandates are strictly enforced in all indoor settings. Most residents have voluntarily upgraded to N95s, and many of them have resumed masking outdoors. Businesses check vaccine cards and photo I.D.s as a matter of course. When I saw Licorice Pizza at a swanky local movie theatre, I was informed that the concession stand had been closed so that patrons wouldn’t be tempted to remove their masks to eat popcorn or take sips of water.

By comparison, my own neighbourhood, Ridgewood, Queens (median sale price: $646,000, vaccination rate: 78.44%), feels as if it’s a different country. Indoor mask compliance is closer to 50%, and entirely voluntary — I’ve never witnessed an employee ask a patron to mask up or shoo a maskless customer out of an establishment. The vaccine pass is, similarly, almost totally unenforced, except in the hip establishments that cater to young creatives, most of them concentrated in the western portion of the neighbourhood bordering Brooklyn. My gym, on the Hispanic-and-white-ethnic east side, is entirely maskless, and takes a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward vaccination. When I expressed my gratitude to one of the gym’s employees for the mask-optional policy, she replied, in heavily Polish-accented English, that we were all adults and could make our own decisions.

Pandemic restrictions may be a partisan divide, but they are also, increasingly, a class divide. Even within one of America’s deepest-blue cities, strict adherence to Covid precautions has become a symbolic gesture among affluent, vaccinated white people — in other words, those least at risk from the virus. But among the people who are, objectively speaking, more at risk — minorities, members of the working class — the attitude seems to be: it’s time to get on with life.

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The culture war is a class war in disguise: By attacking marriage, family and education, progressive elites are kicking away the ladder from the working class.

Take the question of marriage. The idea that marriage is a positive value, and an important grounding unit for families, society and the nation more broadly, is decidedly outré on the left, where marriage is viewed as an outdated institution. Liberal outlets are chock full of essays asking ‘What does marriage ask us to give up?’ and ‘Why marriage requires amnesia’. Divorce, meanwhile, is talked of as a form of ‘home improvement’. In 2020 Black Lives Matter had to scrub a page of its website that was a bit too honest. ‘We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children’, the page read.

But the debate about the value of marriage isn’t just a cultural one or a religious one. It’s also one with huge economic ramifications – because married people earn considerably more than those who aren’t married, by as much as 30 per cent. Married men on average make $80,000 a year, compared to just $50,000 for their non-married counterparts. And the same is true across racial groups. While the racial earnings gap persists across the board, married black men out-earn single white men and single white women. The median income for married heads of black households is over $90,000 – compared to just $38,000 for their unmarried counterparts. The poverty rate for black Americans in 2020 was nearly 20 per cent – but for black married couples, it was just six per cent.

Moreover, it is now uncontroversial that children raised by two parents do better than children raised in any other family structure. A state’s share of married parents is the best predictor of upward mobility for poor kids – better even than race or college education.

Of course, it’s difficult to say whether the link between marriage and higher earnings is causation or correlation. Some economists have argued that people with greater earning potential compete better in the marriage market, while others have argued that married people climb the job ladder faster. Others have argued that married men work harder. Still others believe that married people can take bigger risks in looking for better work while relying on their partner’s income in the meantime, or that the qualities that make people good workers are the same qualities that make them good husbands. On the other side of the equation, many poor and working-class people feel they just can’t afford to get married.

Whatever its cause, the economic incentive to get and stay married is something the upper crusts know well. The class divide in America is as much a marriage divide as it is an educational one. College-educated, affluent Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be married, while working-class and poor families are living increasingly precarious lives, both economically and in terms of their family relationships. For instance, just 11 per cent of babies born to college-educated women are born out of wedlock, as opposed to over 50 per cent of babies born to women who never went to college, and 64 per cent of women who are poor. Just 26 per cent of poor families and 39 per cent of working-class families are married – compared to 56 per cent of middle- and upper-class ones.

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I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright.

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. My students weren’t allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren’t. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can’t be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can’t concentrate and they aren’t doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home.

One of my favorite projects that I assign each year is to my 10th grade students, who do in-depth research on any culture of their choosing. It culminates in a day of presentations. I encourage them to bring in music, props, food—whatever they need to immerse their classmates in their specific culture. A lot of my students give presentations on their own heritage. A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was one of the best days that I can remember. She was proud to share her story—she had struggled with homesickness—and her classmates got a lesson in empathy. Now, my students simply prepare a slideshow and email it to me individually.

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren’t even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that’s forbidden. Younger children are expected to follow the “mask off, voices off” rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other’s houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical.

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

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University language guide says 'grandfather,' 'housekeeping,' 'spirit animal' are 'problematic' words

A University of Washington language guide is calling everyday words used by Americans "problematic."

The University of Washington Information Technology department released an "inclusive language guide" that lists a number of "problematic words" that are "racist," "sexist," "ageist," or "homophobic."

According to the guide, words such as "grandfather," "housekeeping," "minority," "ninja," and "lame" are considered "problematic words."

[...]

"Housekeeping," is another "problematic" word that the guide recommends should be avoided by others working in the information technology industry because it can "feel gendered."

Phrases with "man" such as "manpower," "man hours," or "man-in-the-middle" is considered "not inclusive" and "thus sexist."

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Wokery beyond parody as university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell's 1984 as it contains 'explicit material' which some students may find 'offensive and upsetting'

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

[...]

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.

‘Too many of us – and nowhere is it more evident than our universities – have freely given up our rights to instead conform to a homogenised society governed by a liberal elite “protecting” us from ideas that they believe are too extreme for our sensibilities.’

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"To Begin the Process of Decanonization"

It’s always fun to check up on what’s going on in academia. Here’s an announcement that showed up in the Bard College library newsletter (Bard tuition, $57,498 a year):

In keeping with campus-wide initiatives to ensure that Bard is a place of inclusion, equity, and diversity, the Stevenson Library is conducting a diversity audit of the entire print collection in an effort to begin the process of decanonizing the stacks. Three students, who are funded through the Office of Inclusive Excellence, have begun the process which we expect will take at least a year to complete. The students will be evaluating each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.

So, to paraphrase this library announcement: three Bard students, chosen and paid for by the Office of Inclusive Excellence, are tasked with reviewing every book in the Bard library to evaluate how well it adheres to their moral standards. Facing outrage from library-fans, Bard quickly retracted and rewrote this announcement and clarified that the audit was more high-level analysis of each book and author.

Still I like to imagine these students marching through the stacks, pulling every spine, reading every page to examine for “representations of race, gender, religion, and ability.” Does Charles Dickens dehumanize someone with a limp somewhere? I bet he does. There’s some nasty ableism in Beowulf. Was Aristotle a feminist? This could take a while. Also, I think I kind of want to be on this committee.

[...]

There’s of course a whole new intellectual underpinning for all of this. Here’s the librarian Sofia Leung, who offers trainings and workshops on critical race theory in libraries:

“Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks,” she writes, asking her readers to pause and think about that in her essay, Whiteness as Collections. Or watch her talk with the University of Michigan on the “‘Ordinary’ Existence of White Supremacy in Libraries.”

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[Glenn Greenwald] Congress's 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power as it Investigates Citizens With No Judicial Limits

In its ongoing attempt to investigate and gather information about private U.S. citizens, the Congressional 1/6 Committee is claiming virtually absolute powers that not even the FBI or other law enforcement agencies enjoy. Indeed, lawyers for the committee have been explicitly arguing that nothing proscribes or limits their authority to obtain data regarding whichever citizens they target and, even more radically, that the checks imposed on the FBI (such as the requirement to obtain judicial authorization for secret subpoenas) do not apply to the committee.

As we have previously reported and as civil liberties groups have warned, there are serious constitutional doubts about the existence of the committee itself. Under the Constitution and McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases interpreting it, the power to investigate crimes lies with the executive branch, supervised by the judiciary, and not with Congress. Congress does have the power to conduct investigations, but that power is limited to two narrow categories: 1) when doing so is designed to assist in its law-making duties (e.g., directing executives of oil companies to testify when considering new environmental laws) and 2) in order to exert oversight over the executive branch.

What Congress is barred from doing, as two McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases ruled, is exactly what the 1/6 committee is now doing: conducting a separate, parallel criminal investigation in order to uncover political crimes committed by private citizens. Such powers are dangerous precisely because Congress’s investigative powers are not subject to the same safeguards as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. And just as was true of the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that prompted those Supreme Court rulings, the 1/6 committee is not confining its invasive investigative activities to executive branch officials or even citizens who engaged in violence or other illegality on January 6, but instead is investigating anyone and everyone who exercised their Constitutional rights to express views about and organize protests over their belief that the 2020 presidential election contained fraud. Indeed, the committee's initial targets appear to be taken from the list of those who applied for protest permits in Washington: a perfectly legal, indeed constitutionally protected, act.

This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.

Indeed, the committee has been purposely attempting to prevent citizens who are the targets of their investigative orders to have any opportunity to contest the legality of this behavior in court. As we reported in October, the committee sent dozens if not hundreds of subpoenas to telecom companies demanding a wide range of email and other internet records, and — without any legal basis — requested that those companies not only turn over those documents but refrain from notifying their own customers of the request. If the companies were unwilling to comply with this "request,” then the committee requested that they either contact the committee directly or just disregard the request — in other words, the last thing they wanted was to enable one of their targets to learn that they were being investigated because that would enable them to seek a judicial ruling about the legality of the committee's actions.

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Ahead of trial, Finnish MP facing jail after tweeting Bible verse says case a test of religious freedom

According to ADF International, a Christian legal group that is supporting her, Räsänen could be given a two-year prison sentence for the tweet, after the Finnish Prosecutor General filed criminal charges against her on April 29, 2020.

The MP could also face additional jail time if convicted of two other alleged offenses relating to her comments in a 2004 pamphlet and on a 2018 television program, the group said.

[...]

The 62-year-old MP, who was chairwoman of the Christian Democrats party from 2004 to 2015, is an active member of the Finnish Lutheran Church. But she questioned her church’s sponsorship of an LGBT pride event in 2019.

On June 17, 2019, she asked in a Twitter post how the sponsorship was compatible with the Bible, linking to a photograph of a biblical passage, Romans 1:24-27, on Instagram. She also posted the text and image on Facebook.

[...]

Juhana Pohjola, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, was also charged for publishing Räsänen’s 2004 pamphlet “Male and Female He Created Them.”

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Penn professor faces termination for comments about Asian immigrants

The investigation is related to comments Wax (pictured) made in December on a podcast with Brown University Professor Glenn Loury (pictured). The topic for the show was “Contesting American Identity.” She posted follow-up comments on his Substack that also drew criticism.

Ted Ruger, the dean of Penn law school, released a statement saying Wax has “repeatedly made derogatory public statements about the characteristics, attitudes, and abilities of a majority of those who study, teach, and work [at Penn].”

[...]

“Taking her public behavior, prior complaints, and more recent complaints together, I have decided it is my responsibility as Dean to initiate the University procedure governing sanctions taken against a faculty member,” Ruger said. He previously said Wax had made comments using the “vernacular of white nationalism and white supremacy.”

Wax spoke with Professor Loury on his podcast “The Glenn Show” in late December saying the “influx of Asian elites” is “problematic.”

The Penn professor said many Asian immigrants are “more conformist to whatever the dominant ethos [is]” such as “wokeness.” She said a better policy is one that focuses on the “heartland population” of white and black citizens who are “the descendants of people that built this country.”

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Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.

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Public Health’s Truth Problem: Throughout the pandemic, medical and scientific institutions have disseminated dubious advice, flawed studies, and even outright falsehoods.

Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility. No doubt, officials and organizations promulgating them had a range of motivations—including honorable ones, such as wanting to encourage salutary choices. Yet the subsequent loss of institutional trust may result in harm that far outweighs any short-term policy objectives.

Consider some messages the field has promoted to the public over the last two years and their shaky relationship with the truth.

Any mask is better than no mask. Last week, CDC director Rochelle Walensky asserted that “any mask is better than no mask.” This statement was factually incorrect when she said it. The only published cluster randomized trial of community cloth masking during Covid-19—performed in rural Bangladesh—found that surgical masks reduced the spread of Covid-19 among villages assigned to wear them, while cloth masks were no better than no masks at all regarding the primary endpoint of blood-test-confirmed Covid-19. In an umbrella review of masking that I coauthored, we found no good evidence to support cloth masking. Two days after Walensky’s statement, the CDC conceded that cloth masking was inferior to other masks. Notably, however, this is still misleading because cloth masking is not just less effective—it is entirely ineffective.

You should wear an N95 mask. Now the CDC has endorsed the use of N95 or equivalent masks in community settings, which it presents as the superior choice. Here, too, the evidence is misleading. First, a masking policy involves more than just the filtration properties of the material; it should consider both filtration and human behavior. Will people wear the mask appropriately? Will there be gaps around the nose? Will they cheat to scratch or drink? Will it cause discomfort and lead to discontinuation? Will they feel invulnerable and seek out higher risk settings? Simply put, the CDC does not know that advising the public to wear N95 is good policy. It could have run a cluster randomized trial, as was done for cloth and surgical masks in Bangladesh; it did not. In fact, the agency has run no randomized trials of masking this entire pandemic.

The virus changes, but our policies remain the same. Masking—even if it works—is not a permanent solution. It cannot work when you stop doing it. Recently, in a striking admission, Anthony Fauci confirmed not only that the virus will not be eliminated, but also that it will eventually infect us all. Even vaccination is not enough to entirely halt omicron breakthroughs. Thus, even if N95 masking delays the time to infection, we will eventually be infected. The question becomes: Is it worth it? We aren’t getting any younger, and at some point we will have to trust our immune systems (helped by vaccination) to fight off the virus. Is it worth it for a young person to delay exposure with an inconvenient and intrusive mask?

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We need more kink-shaming

If someone had told you a few years ago that in the future USA Today would publish an article expressing sympathy for paedophiles, you’d have thought them mad. This most middle-market of newspapers, landing on the doorsteps of decent folk up and down the Land of the Free every morning, shedding a tear of empathy for paedoes? Get real. Not going to happen. Ever. Well, welcome to 2022 folks, where wokeness has dragged us so far down the putrid well of moral relativism that now even family newspapers are wondering out loud if perhaps we have been a tad harsh on people who find children sexually attractive.

I wish I was making this up. But it’s there in black-and-white for all to see. ‘What the public keeps getting wrong about paedophilia’, said the USA Today headline. Stupid public! The article opens as follows: ‘Paedophilia is viewed as among the most horrifying social ills. But…’ But! That’s probably when the reporter should have stopped writing. It’s at that moment they should have shut down their Mac and ventured out for a long walk to ponder how their career brought them to a situation where they’re saying ‘But’ to the long-held belief that paedos are sickos. ‘But’, the piece says, ‘scientists who study the sexual disorder say it is also among the most misunderstood’. Apparently, boffins have discovered that you can be born a paedophile, just like you can be born gay. ‘Paedophilia is likely determined in the womb’, we’re told. How long before paedos start marching behind the banner ‘Born this way’? ‘Don’t hate me, I can’t help lusting after toddlers, I was born like this.’

So that’s one of the things the ignorant public gets wrong about paedophiles, apparently. You prejudiced idiots think paedos are perverts who create and indulge their perverted fantasies through illicit associations and the sharing of warped ideas and images, when in truth they were born with this predilection for kids, much as they were born with blue eyes or fair hair. ‘The evidence suggests it is inborn. It’s neurological’, one expert tells USA Today. And if it’s inborn, if it can’t be helped, then we shouldn’t be too tough on paedos, right? Yes, brace yourselves, USA Today hints at this very point. Perhaps it is time we started ‘destigmatising paedophilia’, it suggests.

There is ‘controversy over “destigmatising paedophilia”’, USA Today says – no shit! – but perhaps it’s time we had that conversation. It tells readers there is ‘growing support in the field’ for the proposal that paedophilia should be destigmatised and that paedos should now be referred to as ‘minor-attracted people’. Apparently this would encourage more paedophiles to seek help and therapy. At the moment they’re too ashamed to say, ‘I’m a paedophile, I need help’, so maybe we should allow them to say: ‘I’m a minor-attracted person. I was born like this. I would like some assistance to make sure I never act on my inborn sexual impulses.’

I’m going to put my neck on the line here and say that if you’re a paedophile, if you sexually desire children, then you should feel ashamed. You should be consumed by shame, in fact. There should be a stigma attached to paedophilia! I can’t believe it is necessary to write that sentence. A stigma is a mark of disgrace. And adults who fantasise about sex with children are a disgrace. They are a disgrace to themselves, to their families, and to society. The very notion of ‘destigmatising paedophilia’ speaks to the relativistic rot we now find ourselves in, where our willingness to make moral judgements has been so throttled by decades of anything-goes, everything-is-valid bullshit that we can’t even bring ourselves to say: ‘Paedophilia is bad. Paedophiles are not good people.’

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Defy the nonsense of indigenous land acknowledgments

How do you make the progressives on campus so “horrified” that they spring into action to defend their sacred ideology? Make an indigenous land acknowledgment that doesn’t match their view of history and watch them lose their minds. Let me describe how that happened to me.

[...]

As the university says on its web page, explaining its suggested version:

"This language template is spoken by UW leadership during events to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land. We recognize that this is a difficult, painful and long history, and we thank the original caretakers of this land."

This is a blatantly political statement. My office and classroom are on occupied land? Then why don’t we give it back to the rightful owners? And if we’re not going to give it back, then why bother acknowledging them? Activists often say that making such an acknowledgment is a way to counter the erasure from our collective memory of the awful treatment Native Americans have suffered at the hands of European settlers.

[...]

There’s just one problem. What if you don’t agree with them? After all, if we are making an “acknowledgment,” wouldn’t you want us to say what we really believe? They can’t possibly be asking us to affirm something that we believe is false, can they? I decided to test this by crafting my own version of the land acknowledgment:

"I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington."

I don’t claim that this represents ultimate truth, but it is an alternative viewpoint that I value based on John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. I included this on my course syllabus for the winter quarter, and the reaction has been extreme. Allen School officials declared this to be “offensive” and said that they were “horrified” and promised to have it removed immediately. Our director said that it creates “a toxic environment” in my course. I have written elsewhere about how the school censored my syllabus, apologized to my students, and created an alternate section of the course so that offended students could be taught by a different instructor.