HE SHOULD ASK THE FTC TO INVESTIGATE THE PRICING: Trump slams online learning, echoing students’ disapproval.
Archive for 2020
July 11, 2020
Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.
At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.
Read the whole thing.
Earlier: Joe Rogan interviews James Lindsay on the religious similarities of retroactive cancelling and wokeness (video):
The whole interview is here if you have the time.
DON’T TRUST CHINA, CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Chinese virologist accuses Beijing of coronavirus cover-up, flees Hong Kong: ‘I know how they treat whistleblowers.’
BODY CAMERAS HELP: Police video of fatal shooting shows victim fired on cops.
Detroit police released the body camera video, along with another video from a squad car’s dashboard camera which showed officers fatally shooting 20-year-old Hakim Littleton after he pulled a pistol from his left pocket and opened fire.
Detroit police chief James Craig said he released the video hours after the incident to quell “a false narrative” that the shooting was unjustified. The “erroneous information that was put out has incited violence,” Craig said during a press conference at Public Safety Headquarters.
It’s as if inciting violence is a goal.
QUALIFIED IMMUNITY IS ANTI-POPULIST; IT PROTECTS THE RULING CLASS’S SERVANTS. The Misplaced Populist Opposition to Qualified-Immunity Reform.
HOPING THAT THE CROCODILE EATS THEM LAST: Liberals’ Only Hope Against Neo-Marxists Is An Alliance With The Right.
AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE: This is how the Left campaigns to remove President Trump.
Things we thought were sacrosanct, the icons of our national identity, now are scorned. We can pretend that this doesn’t matter. They’re just statues, after all. But they do matter. Not for the pleasure they give the rioters so much as for the pain they inflict on patriots who love America.
Nor has it stopped with the vandalism. We’ve gone to the next level, with the looting and rioting. In the last month major cities have become unsafe, as rioters work out the logic of what “resistance” means. American stores lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and merchants boarded up their stores for protection. Nothing to see here, folks, said the liberal media, which gaslighted the looting and the boarded-up storefronts, and portrayed the riots as peaceful protests against an illegitimate president.
And that’s how to understand what is happening. We’re not to object to the riots because the bigger issue is defeating Trump. Nothing much else matters, and if an Antifa mob attacks a federal court building in Portland, don’t call this a riot. Say rather that it’s a campaign event, led by the good guys.
We’re in the middle of a chicken game, where the Left tells us they’ll let this go on as long as Trump is president. The liberal media will ignore the riots, the liberal mayors will tell the local police to stand down, the liberal prosecutors will promptly release anyone arrested. Try to defend yourself, and you’ll find yourself prosecuted.
The message is: this is what you’ll get, America, if you reelect Trump. Elect our guy, and the madness will stop, pronto. A Democratic president would forcefully suppress the riots without a peep from the press. But until then we’re held hostage.
They don’t even need a candidate. They can run Biden from his basement.
Read the whole thing.
(Via Ace.)
There once was a general who fought a war to protect slavery. That’s not how he would have described it. He would have said he was fighting to protect his way of life from a foreign invader. Whatever construction he put on it, his so-called way of life rested on the sweat wrung from forced labor on plantations and gold earned from buying and selling black flesh.
That general was Samori Touré. The West African chieftain is honored today by black nationalists for resisting French imperialism in the Mandingo Wars of the late nineteenth century, but thousands of Africans were enslaved by Samori’s raiders in the course of building up his empire. After his final defeat in 1898, for more than a decade, columns of refugees tramped into French Guinea to return to their home villages as they escaped or were liberated from Banamba or Bamako or wherever Samori’s men had sold them.
We need to ask some people why they identify with slavers.
THE UNWISDOM OF TURNING SCIENTIFIC DISPUTES INTO LEGAL FIGHTS: Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist.
PEAK 2020: Co-founder of cancel-culture activist group wants you to cancel the partner who canceled her, or something. “Is there a lesson to be learned from this? Maybe just that modern-day Robespierres will eventually suffer Robespierre’s fate, at least in a character-assassination sense. And perhaps another: if you partner with awful people on awful projects, don’t come crying to us when the outcome turns out to be awful to yourself.”
HAGIA SOPHIA: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has signed a decree converting Hagia Sophia in Istanbul — founded as a cathedral — into a mosque. “Founded 1,500 years-ago as a cathedral, the Ottomans made Hagia Sophia a mosque. But in 1934 it became a museum.”
As Douglas Murray of the Spectator tweets, “I am really looking forward to the campaigners against empire, and all those generally opposed to land seized in conquest, to get going on this one.”
Sen. Josh Hawley [R-MO] sent a letter to the NBA Commissioner protesting the league’s decision to allow its players to wear woke slogans on their jerseys, but not speak a word of protest on behalf of those persecuted by communist China…Good for him!
* * * * * * * *
A very woke reporter for the very woke ESPN was not so impressed. Adrian Wojnarowski, a top ESPN basketball analyst, responded to Hawley:
Wojnarowski issued a sorry-not-sorry for defending China apology, to which Hawley responded:
To be fair, we’ve long known how Disney, ESPN’s parent company, feels about China, and its motives for defending it:
Earlier: China’s Long Tentacles Extend Deep Into American Media.
OUR RULING CLASS KNOWS WHAT IT DOESN’T LIKE: In the news — the attack on individualism.
IN 2020 AMERICA, THE DEMAND FOR HATE CRIMES FAR EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY: Police say Texas A&M student who found racist notes on his car put them there.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE OPERATION AIMED AT NORMAL AMERICANS AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: CBS Decries Trump Stockpiling Glass Vials for American COVID Vaccines.
LONG, LONG AGO: When did you first notice the left’s ‘epistemic breach’?
THIS IS AN EXCUSE, AS DEATH RATES IN PRISONS ARE MINUSCULE. California to release up to 8,000 prisoners to curb spread of coronavirus.
It sits well with the defunding of the police, though. Kind of reminds me of Saddam emptying the prisons of common criminals as his regime collapsed.
I’ve seen countless stories about ICE’s “new” requirement barring student visas for students who would be taking only online classes (e.g., NPR). The idea that this is “new” is false.
Foreign students have long been required to take a “full course of study” to fulfill visa requirements. The longstanding rule is that a study may take only one online class per semester as part of the full course of study. ICE *may* allow a student to take more than one online course, but any additional course must be taken in the physical presence of a university employee. Here is the DHS webpage from 2012, in the Obama years. . . .
ICE waived the rule for the Spring and Summer 2020 semesters due to the Covid emergency. Given that Congress has now had four months to address the issue but has not, it’s not clear that ICE would be legally justified in asserting a continuing “emergency” that would allow it to ignore a binding regulation.
In any event, given that the regulation is clear that foreign students may not stay in the U.S. on student visas if they are taking online only classes, and given that universities knew they may have to go all online this Fall, why are so many university “leaders” acting like the government actually enforcing the rule once the immediate emergency has passed is a complete surprise? Surely it was *possible* that ICE would agree to continue to not enforce a rule, but surely any decent university lawyer would have understood that it was not a certainty, and would have been advising the provost to make contingency plans for foreign students.
The important thing is assimilating this development, like all developments, to the #OrangeManBad narrative.
PAUL RAHE: The Case Against Further Lockdowns.
July 10, 2020
#JOURNALISM: NY Times: Oops, Never Mind. “Over the years, we have tracked a number of newspaper corrections (as often as not featuring the New York Times) where, if you match the belated correction against the original article, the conclusion is that the article was pointless and never should have been published. This is a good example of that genre. Today the New York Times issued this correction on a front page ‘news’ story attacking President Trump.”
BREAKING: Warrant Served On St. Louis Couple Who Defended Private Property, Rifle Confiscated, Report Says.
Related: Who is Kimberly Gardner, St. Louis prosecutor investigating gun-toting couple? “Gardner, who was elected in 2016 on a platform of reforming the criminal justice system, was reportedly backed by liberal billionaire George Soros.”
More: “Gardner, one of four Democrats running for St. Louis circuit attorney in the Aug. 2 primary, is taking heat for a new political ad paid for with money from a national super PAC that is at least partly funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.”
#JOURNALISM: NBC Contributor Reveals He Never Had Coronavirus After Network Documented His Recovery. “An NBC medical expert who was brought on air nearly a dozen times to detail his struggle with COVID-19 never had the virus, he revealed this week. After believing he had the coronavirus in spite of getting negative tests, virologist and NBC News science contributor Dr. Joseph Fair tweeted Tuesday that he had tested negative for the antibodies and that the illness that hospitalized him in May ‘remains an undiagnosed mystery.'”
Was he tested for “the vapors?”