Rep. Gill confronted the Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History after we uncovered an exhibit that called Mickey racist for allegedly symbolizing blackface.
These exchanges are hard to watch unless you enjoy watching dishonest, woke propagandists being publicly exposed as the disgraces to their professions and the enemies of democracy that they are.
When the White House announced that it was reviewing Smithsonian exhibits for left-wing bias about a year ago, I wrote here (in part):
“There can be little question that the current curators of the Smithsonian museums have used their positions to promote woke agenda items and to manipulate the exhibits to try to indoctrinate museum visitors. Most of what the Federalist flagged as well as the White House’s items are genuinely objectionable…For example, Ibram X. Kendi is a race-hustler, and his presence anywhere in the museums is signature significance.
“Does the Pride Flag have genuine historical significance? I suppose so. But emphasizing Ben Franklin’s early slave-holding stinks of the “1619 Project”: by the time that he was a Founder, Ben had become a vocal foe of slavery.
“I believe that a nation’s museums should err on the side of emphasizing the positive aspect of its history and culture, but that’s easier to say than to execute. Substituting one extreme bias for another is not a solution. But as I wrote in the previous post on this topic, I think finding an ethical balance will be a futile exercise.”
Trinity College has the gall to charge over $72,000 per academic year to students, and yet passes woke, divisive, fact-free mumbo-jumbo (aka. Authentic Frontier Gibberish) off as “education.”
“White supremacy and racial capitalism structure our world, setting in motion the systems of domination that Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly describes as a ‘racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation’…Students will learn to turn their anthropological gaze upon whiteness itself and understand its insidious modes of self-and-other construction thus destabilizing its ocular power to define others. We will pay special attention to how the white colonial gaze has operated in the liberal discipline of anthropology and explore ethnographic methods for studying whiteness and white supremacy,”
Oh. What??? And who the hell is Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, and why should what she says matter to me any more than what, say, Adam Sandler says? [I just checked. It shouldn’t matter. She’s an obscure anti-white ideologue. Dropping in an appeal to authority using an obscure race-baiting academic is pretty desperate; then again, would any respectable scholar say something like “racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation” ?
Not to pile on too much, but gaze at her faculty photograph. A professor choosing to radiate such ‘tude—“Bring it on, whitey!” is to be avoided at all costs.
Ugh.
Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot,Assistant Professor of Anthropology, teaches “Unsettling the White Gaze,” and she is obviously an Authentic Frontier Gibberish master herself. She describes herself as a “white, disabled, trans anthropologist whose work focuses on how criminalized people who use drugs envision and experiment with abolitionist horizons of transformation, healing, self-determination, and solidarity beyond incarceration and forced-cure.” She also explains that she “participates in abolitionist, harm reduction, and transformative justice organizing projects in NYC and beyond.”
Okaaaaaay…
If students are willing to sign up to take such self-evident crap and parents will pay for it, there’s not much that can be done. There were really silly, obscure courses at my college too, but they weren’t political indoctrination courses. These offenses to common sense and democratic society won’t dry up and blow away until there is sufficiently competent secondary and primary education to ensure college freshman have a sufficiently solid foundation in critical thinking to recognize a course like this one for what it is: pseudo-social science contrived to fulfill a political agenda.
Has any conservative law professor—there aren’t many, but I can think of a few—ever argued that scholars, lawyers and legal commentators who advocate positions disfavored on the professor’s side of the ideological divide should be punished and “forced to recant” their stated opinion? If there has been any example of that, I must have missed it. Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, however, did exactly that after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, held that the 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship.
After the decision, Professor Pfaff went on BlueSky—I regard posting on that platform prima facie evidence that the poster doesn’t believe in pluralism and freedom of speech— to announce his contempt for and desire to discipline any law professor who disagreed with his obviously unchallengeable analysis of the issue, writing,
“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments. Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic. They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash. Which undermines the work of ALL of us.”
Those “untenable arguments” and “trash” were supported by four Supreme Court Justices in the minority, but never mind. The fascists of the Left believe that it is in the best interests of society to enforce “goodthink” and punish “wrongthink;” to prevent dissent and open civic discourse from threatening its power.
Pfaff was responding to similar sentiments posted by Georgia State University Professor Anthony Michael Kreis, and he’s an Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development. In his BlueSky posting, Kreis wrote that he considered it loathsome that any Justices disagreed with what he, like Pfaff, considers the only position on birthright citizenship that it is honorable and legitimate to hold:
The House this week passed a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would set America’s clocks to daylight saving time permanently once it clears the Senate and is signed into law by the President. The bill itself raises no ethics issues at all: it is the reactions to it and the reasons, real and alleged, for those reactions that ping ethics alarms.
The headline is tongue-in-cheek, incidentally. Most of my life I heard that Daylight Savings Time was Ben Franklin’s idea. Ben was an amazingly prolific innovator and out-of-the-box thinker, but he was not the originator of the practice, so we can neither blame him nor praise him. Another myth is that DST was implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the strongest opponents of DST because the factors that influence farming schedules, like dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are dictated by the sun, so clocks going back and forth just complicates things. In general, Retailers, sports, and tourism interests like daylight saving, while agricultural and evening-entertainment interests do not.
Personally, I just want one time in place all year, because the changeover is traumatic for me whenever it happens. I have a long list of screw-ups, missed deadlines and meetings on my record. I bet no year has ever passed without one.
Like so many policies, the Daylight Savings Time tradition has had and continues to have all manner of unintended consequences, and those are controversial too. There is some data that shows that crime and accidents are reduced by DST, but precise causation issues make such data inherently dubious. A 2017 analysis of 44 studies concluded that DST leads to electricity savings of 0.3%, but we now know, or should, we can’t trust studies because we can’t trust the reseachers who perform them. Ditto for a 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics that estimated that “the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually,” primarily by increasing sleep deprivation. Another study claimed that hospitals see a 24% increase in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal crashes each year when the time changes.
President Trump has advocated permanent Daylight Savings Time, so that’s enough for the Axis of Unethical Conduct to oppose it. Predictably, the Washington Post rushed to publish “Why standard time is better for your health than daylight saving time:A proposed bill would make daylight saving time permanent. But standard time is actually better for your body, according to science.”
According to science! Even the Post’s readers tended to agree that this take was hooey. A typical reaction:
62 %, approximately, of the students in New York City’s public schools are black or Hispanic. In its eight most prestigious and academically rigorous high schools, however, only10% of the students in the incoming freshman class will be black or Hispanic, just like last year. 80% of the seats will be filled with Asian and white students, mostly Asians. This pattern of racial and ethnic disparity has existed for years at the city’s elite public high schools. Not surprisingly, the seeming inequity creates anger, frustration, demagoguery and and accusations of racism. Solutions, however, have been elusive and remain so.
Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, perhaps the most famous of the city’s specialized high schools (after the renowned High School For the Performing Arts), only awarded three of its 777 offers to black students, 21 to Hispanic students, and the rest to white and Asian students. Admission to these schools is considered a potential way out of poverty, but that factor (true or not), is not included in the consideration of who gets in. The sole criteria are the scores on a 114-question, three-hour exam, the Specialized High School Admissions Test. It is designed to assess a student’s math, English and critical thinking skills, along with time management ability.
Under the boot-strapping “disparate impact” logic used to find racism whenever results don’t fall neatly into demographic percentages, the admission test has been perpetually attacked as racially discriminatory, but no one has figured out how or why. Nor has anyone been able to devise a skills or ability test that does not consistently result in the same racial and ethnic stratification. Hispanics do better than blacks, whites perform better than Hispanics, and Asians perform the best of all. Sure enough, while just 19% all public school students in New York City are Asian, they received 57% of the offers for the specialized schools.
Prof. Robert Serrano, who has been teaching in Brown University’s Economics Department for 34 years, is sounding off in horror about the scourge of artificial intelligence being used by students to cheat. He apparently missed the last two years.
Serrano had allowed the class in Econ 1170, an advanced course he has been teaching for many years, to take the mid-term exam at home. He was shocked—shocked!—that a large number of his students apparently cheated and used ChatGPT to do it. The grades for a midterm exam were not only significantly higher than in previous years, but a review of the answers submitted found that many responses were identical to those the bot came up with. Not only that, but when Serrano told the class that they could keep the midterm grade they received but that the final would be taken in an exam room with a monitor, nearly a third of the class , 27 out of 86, dropped out. Coincidentally, most the drop-outs had scored 100 on the mid-term.
This was sufficient evidence for the professor to conclude that his students had cheated on the test. No shit, Sherlock.
“This is a very challenging course that attracts typically very strong students, and in the past, the average grade for the midterm ranged from 65 to 80,” says Serrano. “The average this time was 96.” He also saw a huge increase in enrollments in his class this year. “In past editions of the course, the enrollments were at most 30, as low as 8 one semester,” he says. “This semester it jumped to 86. Perhaps many of them saw that this exam would be take-home.”
It’s been a long time since Ethics Alarms had one of its trademark Naked Teacher Principle tales or even one of it’s many variations, like the Nearly Naked Teacher’s Volunteer Principle, the Drag Queen School Principal Principle, the Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle, and the Too Sexy Firefighter Principle, to name just a few. This one, from Alexander, Georgia, has nothing to do with July Fourth, except that I discovered the story this morning. It is certainly past time for one of these posts: the last one under the tag was here, and it was only about the related Naked Mayor Principle, involving the moronic mayor of Minot, North Dakota who accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to the city’s attorney.
Above is Maris Nichols, 25, a married Georgia high school teacher, who really likes having sex with students: she’s been indicted for showing at least six students the sweet mysteries of life in her classroom, at a golf course, and in a closet). Two of the teenagers were younger than 16. What puts Maris into the Naked Teacher Principle category is that she is a very provocative OnlyFans performer, and was being blackmailed by some of her students—it is unclear if they were among the one she was boinking—for better grades. They had discovered the OnlyFans channel she owns, operates, and uses to display her excellent Linda Lovelace impression, among other things.
In April, Brazilian father and mother, Audato and Ieda Denardi were found guilty of the crime of “intellectual neglect” and were sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their two daughters without sufficient instruction on“gender and sex education” or “tolerance and diversity.”
The court also found that the girls, aged 15 and 11, not enjoying popular Brazilian musical genres such as “trap” or “sertanejo” was evidence of a criminal deficiency in their cultural education.
Even though the prosecutors in the São Paulo trial requested an acquittal after concluding that the minors were not suffering from any neglect and were demonstrating appropriate academic and social development, the conviction was handed down. It is currently under appeal before the Seventh Criminal Court Chamber of the São Paulo State Court of Justice. The Christian legal organization ADF International is representing the family, and it denounced the case as “a grotesque abuse of criminal law.”
Ya think?
Despite the fact that both girls are pianists with advanced training and are fluent in several languages, the judge accused the parents of “using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle, subjecting them to a form of unregulated education, the effectiveness and quality of which lack adequate metrics within the Brazilian legal system, while completely excluding the state’s involvement.” Julio Pohl, legal counsel for Latin America at ADF International, neatly pointed out the obvious: to be concise, the verdict is crackers.
“An independent educational psychologist found no sign of neglect. The girls themselves described rigorous daily education,” Pohl said. “The judge convicted anyway because a fifteen-year-old said she finds some music lyrics morally questionable, and because the curriculum didn’t include state-approved content on gender. A parent has been sentenced to prison not for failing to educate her children, but for educating them according to her own values. This is a grotesque abuse of the criminal law, and we will not let it stand.”
Let’s go through the occupants of Congress, the Senate, state houses and mayors’ offices and speculate which of them secretly (or not so secretly) would like to see similar “justice” in the United States. Do we even have to speculate on the how the leadership of the teachers unions would regard the Denardi case?
“And beneath the bluster, Trump’s limited view of the American Revolution is very familiar… it reflects, like so much else about him, the mainstream culture of the Cold War era, when museums and films did indeed tell a relentlessly upbeat story of American accomplishment — in vivid contrast to the plodding drudgery of communism. The leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s dissented noisily from this cozy view, but the majority accepted it unquestioningly. Since then a more extreme view has taken root: those who see the revolution not as the start of an unfinished project but as a fixed source of authority, a 250-year-old set of final answers. But as the US blows out its birthday candles, does it still have the capacity it once had for political renewal, while retaining its founding principles? It is always easier to start revolutions than to end them. This is why so many Americans have believed theirs was superior to others: it had been brought to an elegant conclusion by the constitution of 1787. Americans, it seemed, had escaped the spirals of radicalism and authoritarianism that beset France, or Latin American republics….”
I’m going to take a bit of time off from having to fend off insults, protests and rationalizations from the alleged legal ethicists who are furious at me for raising this issue to point out why I couldn’t be less interested in a Brit’s critique of the U.S.
Althouse summed up one excellent reason concisely with her sole comment on the article: “That’s the London Times. The view from the losing side.” That losing side has seen its empire collapse, its culture overwhelmed and destroyed by unrestrained immigration, the right of free speech trampled, its women brutalized, and its economy disastrously mismanaged while the country stands as a cautionary tale regarding the false promise of socialism. Its Prime Minister just resigned, the sixth leader of the government since the beginning of 2016: a seventh will arrive before the year ends. Meanwhile, its revered royal family is riddled with scandals and embarrassments, for King Charles’ pedophile brother to the obnoxious expats grifting off of their titles in the U.S.
Where does this rotting country get off criticizing us?
