Unforgotten, Series Four

Excellent television.  I had to upgrade my VPN to watch.  This is not to be missed.

But I don't understand the need...

Spoiler after the jump....

How to Deal with the Woke

In a couple of New York Post essays, Glenn Reynolds provides us with a road map.

First:

To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are

If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.

Second:

How to beat the woke:  Never apologize, rally friends and punch back harder

University and corporate bosses give into the woke because it’s painless and easier than fighting them.  Make it painful and difficult instead, and they’ll change their ways.

Personally, I find the invertebrates who capitulate to the woke mob to be much worse, and more culpable, than the woke children themselves.  Peter Savodnik labels them gutless enablers.  We need to mock and ridicule the children and fire the groveling, cowardly bosses.

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The Substack Controversy

There are three political writers who I sometimes disagree with, but nonetheless enjoy reading.  All three would describe themselves as left of center.  I think what I enjoy most about these writers is that they are consistently honest.  And frankly, I just don't think that about many writers on the Left.

One other interesting note about these three:  Two are gay men and one is a bi woman.  Now I read and enjoy other gay writers who I mostly agree with.  For example, Douglas Murray and Bruce Bawer.  Murray is far and away my favorite political commentator today.

But here, I would like to call your attention to these three:

Glenn Greenwald

Andrew Sullivan

Bari Weiss

Why?  Well these three have each had run-ins with woke establishments seemingly controlled by a small minority of far-left children.  In the case of Greenwald, he left The Intercept, an outlet he founded.

So what did they do?

Well they fled to Substack.

You'd think that would be the end of it.  But no, the children continue to hound them.  They want Substack to deplatform writers they disagree with.  And short of that, they call for a boycott of Substack.  Of course they do.

I only point out that these writers are gay and bi to emphasize how ridiculous the children are.  These are not far-right extremists.  Rather they are center left and far from homophobic.  But the children demand lockstep adherence to their far-left wokeness.  Otherwise, banishment and cancellation.

Now I don't know much about Substack.  I certainly don't know whether the owners have backbones or whether they are invertebrates like Dean Baquet.

I for one hope they withstand the noise.  But either way, some good will come out of this.  Because they have proven their business model.  And others are copying it.  When the children chased Donald McNeil out of The New York Times, he re-emerged at Medium.

That is, today I can subscribe to individual writers I enjoy without having to support some larger institution that I find unworthy.  If Substack folds, surely someone like Ben Shapiro will happily step into the void.  In any case, as with book publishing, the gatekeepers are losing their hold over public content consumption.  We no longer have to rely on Dean Baquet and his woke newsroom kindergarten to read Bari Weiss.

No doubt there are writers on these platforms that I intensely disagree with.  But so what?  Speech is not violence no matter what the children believe.  Let everyone have their say; if we must, we can judge the winners by their readership and subscriber counts.  It is a rather old-fashioned and liberal viewpoint, but I believe that the most appropriate response to speech I disagree with, is more speech.

How is it that the Left lost its liberalism?

This morning I noticed yet another writer I like appear on Substack:

Mary Katharine Ham.

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Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Lost in Wokeness

What?  Your middle-schooler did not read Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi?

Neither did mine.  Isn't that sad?  At one time, this charming story was included in the canon of every well-educated childhood.

But it is just about everything our woke educators hate.  It was written, of course, by a dead, white, male.  An Englishman and a colonialist.  Not only is the story colonialist, but like much of Kipling's work, it is set in India.  And perhaps worst of all, it is an unapologetic tale of good versus evil.  And of good vanquishing evil.

No doubt, our teachers have replaced it with something more appropriate.  

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is now in the public domain.  So I include it here.

If you are interested, here is a sample of how the story was once taught.

Also, I have added a Lost in Wokeness section to the sidebar.  That should be fun.

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On Teachers and Our Education System

An Existential Threat to Our Society

When I was in college in the mid to late eighties, my buddies and I had a game we would play.  We would meet coeds, chat them up a bit, and then one of us would guess chemistry or accounting or whatever.  So we'd ask them, okay what is your major?  Needless to say, we were always wrong.

That is, we were always wrong...for the smart gals.  But we kept at it because we had so much fun with the dumb gals.  See, we had noticed a pattern.  After that, when we encountered Mitzy and started our chat, one of us would ask:  Are you an Education major or a X major?  I am going to withhold X; we'll come back to this.

Anyway, after a while, we quit asking it that way.  We'd just look at each other and one of us would ask:  So Mitzy, what's your major?  Invariably it was Education or X.  We'd look at each other knowingly and crack up.

I can only speak anecdotally on this.  This was one college, thirty-odd years ago.  But it is undeniable that at that time and in that place, the absolute worst students on campus were education majors.

When I look at what's going on in the education establishment today, I fear that it was not just our campus, and I doubt there's been much improvement over the years in the average education student.

University Education Departments are typically ranked as the least rigorous programs on campus.  They attract the least intelligent and least ambitious students.  And if you plan to work in some K-12 education leviathan, you expect a secure, comfortable job, for life.  So education attracts the least serious, most conformist, and the most risk-averse students.  Then the education programs offer these same underperforming students master's degrees and even PhDs.

Couple a lack of academic rigor with a master's degree and what do you get?  Undeserved smugness and complacency.  And I can think of no other profession that takes itself so seriously.  Teachers develop an exaggerated sense of self-worth.

For Christ's sake, in this country high school math is almost always taught by someone without a degree in, you know, math.  Why?  Ask any teacher.  They will smugly inform you that the pedagogy of math is more important than, well, math.  This is the thinking that leads to new initiatives like Common Core.  Since pedagogy is more important than the actual subject, the university Education Departments are forever churning out new pedagogical concepts and tools.  Like Common Core, much of this is quite inane.

Let me ask, does anyone really believe that today's Common Core students have higher math skills and competency than say your grandparent's generation?  The idea is absurd.  Here's another question:  Could it be that the people teaching math were not smart enough or disciplined enough to actually bother to get a degree in math?

So when I read serious journalism on education in this country, I am never surprised at how bad things are.  The US education system is populated with sciolistic people with subpar educations.  Of course they are going to be susceptible to the latest bien pensant orthodoxy.  They don't have the intellectual rigor and fortitude to resist it.  And in any case, the idea that these people should be leading a moral crusade, however misguided, is laughable.

Is it any wonder how US educators have reacted to Covid?  Their response has been nothing short of shameful.  The average grocery clerk has demonstrated more integrity.  In fact, to even compare teachers with grocery clerks today, does an incredible disservice to the clerks.  Look, this is not an outrageous statement.  Can anyone seriously take issue with it?

Okay, so what is X?  Well the X majors are not failing our children and society.  They may not be the smartest or most ambitious people, but they are in a profession that really does not require the smartest or most ambitious people.  So I am not going to deprecate them here.

I have no such compunction about teachers.  They have a vital role in our society and they are unworthy of it.  The Schools of Education are failing their students.  And in turn their students graduate and go on to fail ours.

It should be a national scandal.

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Ides of March (2021 Version)

The Ides of March is upon us.

Again.

Our government overlords betters elites are still carping about masks and social distancing.  That is bad enough, but even worse is how our fellow citizens, supposedly free Americans, are so willing to accept totalitarian measures.  And have been willing to accept these measures for a year now.

It has gotten to the point where I have stopped blaming the politicians.  It is not Joe Biden's fault for being Joe Biden and doing what Joe Biden does.  Here in North Carolina, it is not Roy Cooper's fault for being Roy Cooper and doing what Roy Cooper does.  I guess I would feel differently if these and other politicians were doing something other than what they said they were going to do, or abandoned their respective platforms.  But that is not the case.

No, it is time to admit where the actual fault lies.  The fault belongs to the people who voted for these idiots.  Yes, my neighbors, and friends, and family.  And yours.

Last week I had a conversation with a friend of mine about what is likely to happen in the coming months in Minneapolis.  And I told him that it is extremely difficult for me to muster sympathy for the people, the citizens, of Minneapolis, or Portland, or Seattle, when they continually vote for the idiots running these cities.  They have the government that they voted for.  Not once, not twice, many times.

As I have written before, because of our founding and our foundational documents, the United States has been late to this party.  And we can quibble about when exactly the change happened.  But it is unmistakable that today the United States has joined the rest of the world in that we have the government(s) that we deserve.

Clearly.

It reminds me of a piece I wrote back in 2019 complaining about my local city government.  Typical fare; you can read it here.  But I would encourage you to read the comments – one from a friend of mine and my response.  Here's the point:  She's a voter.  She voted for Joe Biden and she voted for Roy Cooper.  Of course she did.

So who is actually to blame for our mess?  She is.  And all of her co-religionists of the government faithful.

During the Covid crisis we have seen the largest transfer of wealth from small business to big business in the history of our country.  And that is perfectly okay with many people.  Don't fall for the old canard that big business is Republican or even conservative.  Big business has been drifting left since the sixties.  And today, they've fully arrived.  Big business loves big government.

We are going to get another big dose of this as the various eviction and foreclosure moratoriums come to an end.  It will not be pretty.  And again, more wealth will move to fewer hands.  This is a direct result of the lockdowns and the closing of our economy for a year.

If we want better government and better leaders, we simply have to demand better.  And vote better.  Otherwise, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

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The Masked and the Maskless

The Politics of Masking

One’s attitude on mask wearing is directly related to one’s attitude on government.  Let me summarize the two basic positions.  If you believe that government and the individuals running it are a force for good and can be trusted, then you will be more willing to believe what they say and follow their guidance.  If you believe that government is a necessary evil, must be constantly monitored, and certainly not trusted, then you will be less willing to believe what they say and follow their guidance.

In the United States today, this is a clear Left/Right divide.

The people on the Left are fearful of Covid because the government, with the help of the media, has told us that we should be.  And that we should all be wearing masks.  So these people are much more accepting of mask wearing.  They even view it as a moral duty.  So of course it signals their virtue.

The people on the Right are skeptical of all government and government pronouncements.  They view any behavior modifications for Covid as a series of trade-offs, most often pitting the changes against economic concerns.  For masks, there is also the question of simple efficacy.  To the extent that these people wear masks, it is less out of respect for government and more out of respect for private enterprise.

But for the Left, there is a bonus:  Power.  The Left not only changes the behavior of their own members as true believers, the government faithful.  Yes, it's akin to a religion.  But as much as they possibly can, they forcibly change the behavior of those skeptics on the Right.  This is an exercise in raw power.

And they love it.

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Bari Weiss: The Miseducation of America's Elites

Bari Weiss again proves that she is the best actual journalist working in America today.

Last week, I wrote about Donald McNeil and how he does not seem to understand the culture of his former employer, The New York Times.  And how he allowed himself to be cowered by it.  It is hard to have sympathy for McNeil.  But what if you do see what is going on?  I mean the wokeness, the critical race theory, the anti-capitalism, white fragility, all of it.  The pronouns!  And yet you decide to inflict these ideas, not upon yourself, but rather upon your children.

See:  The Miseducation of America's Elites

Yes, it is bad enough that parents are tacitly, or actively, supporting this nonsense.  But worse, is this not a form of child abuse?

Indoctrination used to be a term we conservatives jokingly applied to the college experience.  Then it was not a joke anymore.  Now, it is not just found at the college level, but all the way down to preschool.  Here's how Weiss ends the piece:

I have a friend in New York who is the mother to a four-year-old.  She seems exactly the kind of parent these schools would want to attract:  A successful entrepreneur, a feminist, and a diehard Manhattanite.  She’d dreamed of sending her daughter to a school like Dalton.  One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly:  I need to draw in my own skin color.  Skin color, she told her mother, is really important.  She said that’s what she learned in school.

And this nonsense will not remain confined in America's elite schools.  It's coming to your school too.  And mine.  Weiss could have been writing about Soviet schools.  Or maybe she was.  Love how she starts the piece talking about the dissidents.  Because that is exactly what they are.  Dissidents meeting in secret?  We've read about that before.

Soviet dissidents were worried about being shipped off to some Siberian gulag, thereby risking their job, their family and friends, and their social position.

These dissidents are worried about being labeled racist.  Mind you, not being racist; merely labeled racist.  And in today's society, there is nothing worse.  It does not matter if it is true; the label itself is the death knell.  Being labeled racist, people risk their jobs, their family and friends, and their social position.

Soon all rational people will be dissidents.  This ideology is seeping into our workplaces and our governments and our culture at large.  We will all be shamed if we veer off narrative.

Shame, legitimate or not, serves as our gulag.  And for the woke disciples, truth matters as much as it did for the Soviet disciples.

The irony is that this is a gulag of our own making.

Comrades, what are we going to do about it?

Update, Tuesday, 16 March 2021

Weiss updates her piece here:  Rich People Problems, where she includes this nugget:

Worth considering.  But the problem is, if you have a smart kid who wants to be a doctor, you must go the indoctrination university route.  On the other hand, if you have a smart kid who wants to be an entrepreneur, I think Urban's advice is pretty solid.

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On Donald McNeil and The New York Times

This is a long read:  Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.  I really did not expect to make it all the way through myself.  But as someone who is deeply suspicious of The New York Times, I just could not stop.  I confess to an unworthy sense of satisfaction, even schadenfreude, as I read this.

I can't decide what is more sad.  The fact that Donald McNeil does not understand the completely broken culture of The New York Times, a place he worked for over forty years.  Or his tepid and timid response to it.  He should have fought, quicker and harder.  We, the sane, must fight this lunacy.  If we don't, we become part of it, and consumed by it.  Even now, McNeil describes the situation as a series of misunderstandings and blunders.

But it's so much worse than that.  McNeil seems to be under the impression that what he actually said and did in Peru in 2019 matters.  I guess that is why he goes into such great detail in Part Four.  At the end of which, he says:  I do not see why their [the students] complaints should have ended my career at the Times two years later.  But they did.

Well if that is his conclusion, he deserves what he got.  Because it was not the students' complaints that did him in.  They were children.  Rather, it was his respected colleagues, for whom virtue signaling outweighs integrity.

In fact, this entire extended episode demonstrates the complete lack of institutional integrity at The New York Times.  If the Times' leadership will treat one of their own loyalists so shabbily, is it any surprise they treat news and opinion with such low integrity as well?

Bari Weiss understands this.  Donald McNeil?  He's not so clever.

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