Category Archives: culture

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.

The Diversity Officer Doesn’t Understand

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Recall the Somali student at Ohio State University who attacked so many of his fellow students because he blamed the US for anti-Muslim fervor in Burma and who “wanted to kill a billion infidels.”

Stephanie Clemons Thompson, Ohio State University’s Assistant Director of Residence Life, put this up on Facebook, according to Debra Heine of PJMedia:diversityofficercompassionHeine has already addressed the pain of his fellow students whom he attacked and other of his fellow students, pain which Thompson has chosen to ignore.  I’ll just note that Thompson plainly does not understand family, community, association.

Artan removed himself—no one removed him—through his own criminal acts from his earlier status as a Buckeye, from his membership in the OSU family, from his membership in the community of the United States.  He created himself an outlaw.  Thompson should review her Locke, which she surely read in her own freshman General Studies coursework.

Oh, and Thompson appears to have taken down her Facebook post.  Apparently she doesn’t even have the courage of her own conviction.

Nonsense

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The Left never seems to run out of it.  This time their foolishness runs to their disapproval of the No Shave November campaign for calling attention to male health questions ranging from prostate cancer to men’s suicide rates.  They object because…well, just because.

Next they’ll be claiming that focusing on men’s health is heteronormative male chauvinism and exclusionary.

Oh, wait—they already are.  Seb Starcevic, of the Sydney Daily Telegraph:

It’s disappointing that what could’ve served as a much-needed dialogue about the many ways in which men, trans men included, can express their masculinity without resorting to chauvinist caricatures is in danger of devolving into at best a pissing contest between bros about who can grow the most facial hair to prove their manliness and at worst an implicit endorsement of 1950s-style gender norms, complete with transphobia.

And Jacob Brogan and Christina Cauterucci in Slate:

Above all else, Movember [No Shave November—yeah, I know] irritates me because it’s not so much about cancer awareness as it is about masculinity awareness. It starts from the assumption that men are somehow uniquely imperiled—threatened by all these horrible diseases….

Of course, there’s nothing at all unique about prostate cancer—women, too, are starting to be victimized by an epidemic of it….

Nah.  Charity, support for less fortunate, cannot be done in any way but that in which these Precious Ones personally approve.

All they’re capable of thinking about is themselves.

The Bias of the Press

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It’s going to continue, as Howard Kurtz, writing for FoxNews has recognized.

Many in the media, mostly on the liberal side, have come up with a verb that captures their disgust at the man who will be America’s 45th president.

It’s a word that clearly signals that they will remain in opposition, in a state of perpetual outrage, that, in truth, they don’t fully accept the results of the election.

Donald Trump, they say, should not be normalized.

Especially that perpetual outrage part.  That’s not normal; that’s pathology.  Here’s Slate, as cited by Kurtz, describing the typical NLMSM and its refusal (not inability) to accept Donald Trump as the duly elected next President:

In an essay for the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole wrote, of the days following Trump’s win, “All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion.” David Remnick told CNN, “We’ve normalized [the results] already. Less than a week after the election is over, suddenly Washington is going about its business talking about who’s going to get what jobs. You would think that Mitt Romney had won. It’s a hallucination.” …  “He is not normal,” insisted John Oliver over the weekend. “He is abnormal.”

The NLMSM as Fourth Estate?  Not anymore.

Of Course

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Here‘s Senator Mark Warner (D, VA):

The coalition needs to be broader.  The Democratic Party has a history that it’s been about working Americans. We cannot be a party of the East Coast, West Coast and metropolitan areas.

And yet, that’s exactly what the Progressive-Democratic Party of Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) and Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Barack Obama (D, President) has made itself into, with policies that actively suppress, with Know Better monumental regulation and governance by Executive Order, the middle and poorer classes of Americans.  Here’s that divide in geography, in two maps from The New York Times.  The first shows the vote for Donald Trump; the missing parts of the US are regions that voted for Hillary Clinton. trumpmap_1

This second map shows the vote for Clinton; it emphasizes the regions of Progressive-Democratic Party support, which are the two coasts and some urban enclaves.trumpmap_2

That’s the physical location of their bubble.  This, from the subhead of the WSJ piece under the first link above, illustrates their intellectual bubble.

There are big parts of the country that just aren’t hearing us.

Of course Progressive policies are panacea.  Us Americans are just too stupid, or to deaf, to hear and understand the Progressive message.  Or we’re just too irredeemably deplorable a collection of bitter, gun toting religion clingers.

Yeah.  That’s the ticket.  That’ll get the Progressive-Democratic Party back into power.