Tag Archives: culture

Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick

Posted on by
Reply

Or, in the eyes of some sports commentators, it’s Tim Tebow vs Colin Kaepernick. Because white privilege.

I don’t ordinarily comment on sports in this blog, but this item isn’t about sports. It’s about respect and patriotism.

The proximate subject and source of commentators’—the personage at the link isn’t alone—manufactured angst is that, after a number of years, Tim Tebow has signed with an NFL football team to try to earn a slot on the roster for the coming season, while Colin Kaepernick has sat out for a similar number of years, unable to get a contract.

However.

When Tebow takes a knee, it’s to give thanks for a successful play and a successful game. And to give thanks even after an unsuccessful game.

Kaepernick, on the other hand, takes knees in utter, deliberate disrespect for our national anthem, our national flag, and in deep insult to all the generations of American soldiers who’ve fought, been killed, been maimed fighting for everything our anthem and our flag symbolize—including Kaepernick’s right to be an insulting ass.

And Kaepernick does this while oh so piously insisting that he’s protesting social injustice and police brutality, instead of going into the neighborhoods and working, concretely, for more and better opportunities for the locals and working with the police to improve their neighborhood performance.

Oh, and Kaepernick did get a specially arranged tryout—and walked away from it at the last minute over another of his made-up beefs.

Arithmetic and Social Justice

Posted on by
Reply

California education officials—at least that’s how Williamson Evers, Senior Fellow, Director of the Center on Educational Excellence, refers to them; you and I might have different, colorfully metaphoric terms—want to base arithmetic training in K-12 on whether the classes have sufficient social justice in them, rather than on whether 2+2 equals 4 (Polish proverbs are not allowed, either). California’s Instructional Quality Commission is looking at requiring arithmetic to be taught in accordance with A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.

This manual claims that teachers addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” teaching math in a “linear fashion,” requiring students to “show their work” and grading them on demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter. “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” the manual explains. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates ‘objectivity’.”

This, of course, is…nonsense.

If the Left, or their so-called educators, were truly interested in “social justice,” they would desist from their blithe, if carefully unspoken, assumption that blacks (all minorities, come to that) are inherently inferior, intrinsically incapable of mastering arithmetic—or anything else—as well as can any other group of human beings.

But if they did that, the Left would have to find a different means of feeling superior to others so that they could feel good about themselves.

Instead, they cling desperately to their (not so) soft bigotry of low expectations.

“Merely as Districts”

Posted on by
Reply

Recall the spendiferous $1.9 trillion bill enacted in March that President Joe Biden (D) and his fellow Progressive-Democrats have been pleased to call their “American Rescue Plan.” This enactment included funding explicitly for the States. Recall further that this…plan…seeks to bar recipient States from reducing their own tax rates as a condition of receiving the money.

…can’t use their share of the funds to “directly or indirectly offset a reduction” in “net tax revenue.”

Ohio demurred from that Federal intrusion into State prerogatives, as those prerogatives are made explicit in our Constitution’s 10th Amendment.

It’s possible that the Biden administration will lose on Constitutional grounds, as the Editors noted at the end of their piece, which centered on a Federal trial judge’s ruling allowing Ohio’s suit to go forward:

[I]n a preliminary opinion last week, federal Judge Douglas Cole found the state has a “substantial likelihood of success on that [Spending Clause] argument.”

But this is just an early skirmish in the Progressive-Democrats’ war on our federal republican system of governance. After all, this is the position of Biden and his brethren:

It is my first wish to see the United States assume and merit the character of one great nation, whose territory is divided into different States merely for more convenient government and the more easy and prompt administration of justice, just as our several States are divided into counties and townships for the like purpose.

And

…one of the first wishes of my heart, viz., to see the people of America become one nation in every respect; for, as to the separate [state] legislatures, I would have them considered, with relation to the Confederacy, in the same light in which counties stand to the State of which they are parts, viz., merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government….

No, wait—that was John Jay, both times, regarding the power he wanted in our then nascent central government prior to the Constitutional Convention.

Biden is just bent on reviving that. Americans successfully defeated Jay in those early days. We Americans need to defeat the Progressive-Democrats’ assault today.