Is to embrace the lies and deplorable arguments required to defend the Left.
I've stopped following the page that monitors Catholics on Twitter because I'm more and more convinced that Twitter is of the Devil. I know there can be good people who post good things on Twitter, but the bad far outweighs the good from what I've seen.
Nonetheless, one individual I will check on is deacon and film critic Steven Greydanus, simply because I continue to watch in amazement as he has descended deeper and deeper into the shadows of the Leftwing pit. Things I know he once would have condemned, or arguments he rightly would have laughed at, are now his stock and store.
He and I used to have some pretty good discussions back in the day. While we didn't always agree, he was respectful and had little tolerance for lousy or lame arguments that were used to make a Social Media point. Of course he was also against the name calling and calumny that defines so much online discourse. That made debating things with him a pleasure, even if I never thought much of him as a film critic.
I say all of this because:
His source is a Huffington Post piece - which should raise a thousand alarms right there - about how Texas Republicans are banning the teaching of evil and good. They are literally saying schools can no longer teach the KKK is bad or mention MLK, at least according to the HP hit piece.
Which is false of course. And not just false, but head-up-a-donkey's butt idiotic lies. You would have to be some special level of partisan dumb to think that's what this or any major bill would seek to accomplish. It's nothing but the old trick of saying 'Republicans won't teach that Stalin was a bad man' while failing to mention it's because they won't promote the policies and ideologies of Hitler, who said Stalin was a bad man.
It wasn't easy to find, but if you dig a bit you can see what is happening. The Texas GOP is going after the racist based Critical Race Theory that alternately does and doesn't exist based on the moment, and is founded on the principle that going to a pre-WWII approach to sizing people up and judging them based on group identities including, but not limited to, skin color and ethnicity is the only way to go. Sane people of virtue and common sense see CRT for the evil stupidity that it is.
FWIW, here is an alternate view over at FOX. I unusually don't reference FOX for more than fluff or trivial pieces, but I had to go there in order to see almost any attempt in our propaganda ministry national press to ask the Texas Republicans their point of view. Most outlets seemed happy to take the HP's 'GOP wants to praise the KKK and Nazis' narrative as gospel truth because, well, of course they do.
The emergent Left is a grave evil, a sort of 'History's evils' greatest hits.' It poisons everything, including deacons of good will who once would have recognized and condemned the lies and evils used here in order to perpetrate even greater lies and evils, but who now must support the same.
Maybe a coincidence, but when I clicked the link to the Fox article, I got an "Access Denied," message
ReplyDeleteThat's odd, because I'm getting that, too. I even went back to history to go through the link there, and it said the same thing. That was the one outlet I found with actual quotes and examples of what the bill will advocate, including teaching about the KKK and segregation, just not in the CRT manner. I'm not sure what that means, but I'll leave the link in case it's fixed.
DeleteWeird... when I first clicked Dave's link it did that to me too. Then I did a search and was able to locate the article at the exact same link Dave was using. Now when I click on Dave's link I see the article.
DeleteI've worked in web programming and I'm completely baffled. If you keep having trouble, you might try right clicking on the link and select "open in private...etc" option.
On my end: clicking the link leads to access denied. Opening in a private window causes it to be loaded fine. However going to the blog article in a private window and then clicking the link gets an access denied. Refreshing after that leaves it at access denied, but simply pressing enter in the address bar to load the site at that url will cause the article to be loaded, after which point I can get to it from the blog no problem.
DeleteI checked and foxnews.com did create a cookie at the time I loaded the page. Furthermore deleting said cookie gets me the access denied message again. So what is probably going on is that it is blocking redirects from blogspot for some reason, but there is an override to that that allows anyone who has already read the article to load it regardless of whether the browser was redirected.
According to the Huffington Post article, CRT does exist, I guess. This is getting confusing
ReplyDeleteYep. We had a local news report of a school district in our neck of the woods a couple weeks back come out and say it would teach CRT, while the local news then had a story about a week ago where there is no CRT, and it's mostly hysterics driven by right wing media. One of the warning flags right there.
DeleteWhat if Bigfoot was behind CRT all along...
DeleteIt was wasn't it or did I miss something?
DeleteI had an eye opening experience about leftists years ago. There was a thread where leftists complained about a new law that "would make it illegal for poor people to carry cash." Of course the law did no such thing (because what would that even mean?) Instead it limited the amount of cash that people using a certain welfare debit card could withdraw, since the purpose of the card was to buy food but users had been withdrawing their entire account into cash and using it to buy whatever they wanted.
ReplyDeleteNow the interesting thing was that the original poster of the thread had posted the entire text of the bill at the end of his post. You didn't even have to do any additional research to see what the bill was about, and yet almost everyone acted as though it meant that police would now frisk "poor people" and throw them in jail for having too much cash. There was one person who actually read the bill and pointed this out, after a long string of caveats of "I hate republicans and poor people are actually getting screwed, but... shouldn't we tell the truth?" He was immediately trashed as a fat cat nazi, though of course no one even tried to show that the law said anything else because it would have been impossible to do so.
SDG is just taking part of the same sort of "conversation."
Yep, and that's the sad part. SDG knows better because I remember him criticizing the same. But the tabloid approach to discourse that the Internet has almost sanctified seems the easiest way to imagine I'm right, and he's Hitler.
DeleteWell, a fellow I was once acquainted with offers this:
ReplyDelete"When I grew up in the 50s and 60 in Maine, then and probably still one of the whitest states in the nation, I was taught in school that the cause of the Civil War was a dispute over states' rights. I also "learned" that while some slave owners treated their slaves brutally, most slaves were treated pretty well. The idea that slavery itself is brutal and destroys human lives more cruelly than simple murder never came up. That's the "teaching" to which Republicans want to return. Despicable."
My mother received her secondary schooling in metropolitan Washington and my father around Boston. They both seem to have avoided being assigned to the classrooms of Southern doughface history teachers. That would have been ca. 1945, about 20 years before this man would have had his secondary schooling.
What's interesting about this is that the two questions raised - the issues at stake in the Civil War and the daily life of slaves - are well worth exploring and discussing. Just not in his addled head.
And you notice of course how he attributes motives to the opposition that likely never crossed their minds and fails to acknowledge what the actual source of the disputes at hand are. (The sources are the imposition of a pseudo-history on the young and the manufacture of a hostile environment for white students and white teachers. See the Dalton School for examples).
These are bourgeois street-level Democrats in our time.
To be honest, this country has so many schools (public, private, charter schools, homeschool co-ops, etc....), and there's so much difference between different states (or even different areas within a state), you can probably find all kinds of teachers with all kinds of different opinions. Everything from "America is the chosen perfect city of God," to "America is the Evil Empire, " and pretty much any perspective in between. To be honest, I get the feeling that how a school teaches history actually dosen't make much difference. Most Kids are generally more influenced by parents, friends a d pop culture than by teachers.
DeleteI'm cool with exploring how slavery is destructive, and all that, as long as we talk about where we got those slaves in the first place (slavery existed in Africa long before the Portuguese arived).
DeleteI dunno. I think the schools have played their part, and not just in the trashing of the West/venerating everywhere else approach. It's schools that have raised a generation on the idea that they deserve every 'A', every trophy, and every award. So sure are they, that more and more young Americans are brazen about wanting an end to such pesky things as freedom of speech since they're sure their awesomeness will make them immune to the logical consequences.
DeleteYep Art, that's a common narrative I'll hear people throw at me. Yes, there is much to learn, but learning I fear is no longer the goal. We no longer follow the truth where it leads, we begin knowing we are the truth, and look only for the facts and tidbits that affirm that. To that end, Presentism, much maligned in my college and graduate days, is now almost the Grade A Mandated approach to studying history today.
DeleteTo be honest, this country has so many schools (public, private, charter schools, homeschool co-ops, etc....), and there's so much difference between different states (or even different areas within a state), you can probably find all kinds of teachers with all kinds of different opinions. Everything from "America is the chosen perfect city of God," to "America is the Evil Empire, " and pretty much any perspective in between. To be honest, I get the feeling that how a school teaches history actually dosen't make much difference. Most Kids are generally more influenced by parents, friends a d pop culture than by teachers.
ReplyDeleteI'll take that seriously when you can locate a school where black children are set aside and told to acknowledge their supposed inadequacies from birth. Here's a research project for you: locate teacher training programs which refuse to waste salary money on creatures like this:
https://www.barbararegenspan.com/
Note, she's held faculty appointments at two selective institutions. How common are the programs which have no one like this on their faculty?