Mandatory "Diversity" Course at Illinois State

Identity politics indoctrination, plain and simple.

Andrew Doyle: How to Prevent Children from Being (Trans-)Indoctrinated

I somewhat agree.

I do think that humor is a component of a winning strategy--though of course the pomo-prog left has a rhetorical strategy for demonizing all disagreement: see e.g. "punching down"...

But I think Doyle is still too optimistic. I think it's going to take a lot more than just humor/ridicule. The combination of a mind-numbing array of pseudointellectual gibberish that tends to leave ordinary people baffled and speechless, plus accusations of racism etc. against all dissenters plus shrieking hysteria up to the point of even actual violence has turned out to be astonishingly effective. It's taken a massive investment of time and energy to even slow the advancement of the madness to a small degree.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Buffalo and the Myth of Racist America

link

Christina Buttons: Why I Joined The CA Exodus

link

Totten: Hofstadter's Paranoid Style Revisited

I'm skeptical, but this is a respectable semi-counterpoint to much of my recent ranting. Sorta.

As commenter SuperGrooveMachine points out, Totten botches/inflates the numbers in the very first sentence. So there's that.

I've never taken the Qtards at all seriously. Maybe I should. But, given that the pseudoscientific conspiracy theories of the left are taken as gospel truth in our elite institutions, and are realio-trulio driving the country toward disaster...well...it's hard to get too worked up about fantastical alternative mythologies that don't seem to have any hope of gaining power... But, of course, I could be wrong.

Albamarle Mom Says School's CRT(-ish) Curriculum Changed Her Son

Not for the better, obvs.

I've been told that I'm pretty bad at understanding the rhetorical situation in such cases, and that may very well be. But I'd say it's not so much the content that's the problem as the fact that this psychotic, racist pseudoscience is being represented as unquestionable knowledge. This may not be the right approach for K-12, but, of course, the scholarly idea is that you can teach about any view that somehow or other becomes of interest--but you must always teach about it objectively, considering strengths, weaknesses and alternatives views. Progressivism, however, misrepresents outre and idiosyncratic views as not only established truth, but as unassailable truth. [Note: one more time: this is indoctrination.]

   And again I'll note: it's not exactly CRT that's at issue, but, rather a chaotic and largely incoherent cluster of views, largely from Continental philosophy and "theory"/lit-crit that took over much of the humanities in the '80s. CRT is just the current flagship view. Postmodernism was the flagship back in the day. ("Trans")gender ideology is making a strong move on the outside. The flagship might be queer theory next year. 

Former First Ladx Worries Overturning Roe Will Strip Womxn to Their "Right" to Hxthcxre

 So ridiculous.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: What did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America?

A lot.

But it might as well never have happened so far as progressives and the MSM are concerned.

CA Regulators Reject Desalination Plant (During Historic Drought)

I don't know anything about this at all...but...50,000,000 gallons per day?? It just seems kind of implausible that this is really going to do all that much damage to marine life. Irreplaceable marine life, anyway. And: "too expensive for low-income consumers"? Really? More expensive than what water's going to end up being in ten years at this rate? 

But then you get to the punchline: environmentalists are fixated on "recycled water." Drinking pee is exactly the kind of thing that gives leftists a tingle down their leg. 

Again: I don't know anything about this and probably shouldn't be saying anything...but it all fits the profile, doesn't it?

National Review: America's Crisis of Self-Doubt

I agree with this.

Yet Another Anti-Conservative Study is Fake News

I don't pay the slightest bit of attention to such nonsense anymore.

Racist Mass Murder in Buffalo

God knows what to say about this sort of abject insanity.

Re: Inflation, Biden Has Done Everything Wrong All At Once

link

Hillsdale Charter Schools Take on Biden's DoE--And Public Schools and Teachers' Unions and The Whole Rotten, Destructive, Failing, Anti-Western Lot

Needless to say, the Empire is striking back.

Bernard Lane: The White House's Specious Gender Manifesto

Men cannot become women. Girls cannot become boys. There is no such thing as "transgenderism" in any sense beyond this: some males misrepresent themselves as female; some females misrepresent themselves as male. 

There has never been any real doubt about this among the rational.

The fact that the progressive left was able to immediately convince its foot soldiers to believe / pretend to believe otherwise is a sign of how profound the madness is--and how little regard progressives have for truth.

The fact that they have been willing to support the sexual mutilation of innumerable children in order to maintain the facade boggles the mind.

Given their control of all of our institutions, I'm skeptical that there will ever be a reckoning.

But if there is...

Oh and:  link

James Carden: The Company Men Behind Biden's Foreign Policy "Blob"

Interesting.

I know nothing about this, and had not heard the 'blob' terminology.

Funny thing about it is, a lot of it sounded pretty good to me up until the end--some cautious, level-headed people in charge...even Kamala Harris has, allegedly, got a good team.

But the end was surprising: the suggestion is that they are too conventional to find an offramp.

I have no idea what to think about that kind of point.

Anti-War.com: Right on Cue, NYT Goes All-In on War

I don't have and don't deserve a position on the Ukraine situation.

I have some half-assed inclination to believe what I heard John Mearsheimer say...but probably only because I don't know anything about what's going on. That is: NATO should not have flirted with letting Ukraine in. 

But once Putin attacked Ukraine, I don't see how any normal person can't root for the Ukrainians.

But that doesn't mean we should go all-in on a proxy war with a nuclear power...especially when we seem to have provoked it.

And: the obvious moral arguments are easy for everyone to see; but at least many experts argue that this has to (also?) be seen as a matter of realpolitik, as a matter of great power politics. There are people who really understand this stuff. Most of us are just kibbitzing on the basis of our moral outrage. (Note: no, I'm not sure 'just' belongs in that sentence.)

Anyway: right on cue, the NYT is beating the war drums. 

It's baffling to me how the very-lefty MSM always seems to eager to war.

The populist right is now agin' it--probably to some extent because the left is for it. But I guess that's always a factor on both sides.

Initially, I was for providing a lot of aid to Ukraine. But then I started suspecting that we were getting a rosy picture of the war. Though I'm not exactly sure why/how-much that matters...

I'm also not wild about another $40 billion for Ukraine.

It'd be different if the administration hadn't already been spending like drunken sailors...or if the economy weren't already in danger...or if we had any reason to believe the Dems might sober up sometime soon.... But they have and it is and we don't.

Well, tl;dr:  I don't know.

[Also: I have an ignorant inclination to agree with those who say that we should be doing more-or-less whatever we can to patch up relations with Russia in hopes of moving toward an anti-China alliance. That seems like a long-term goal that might only come to fruition, if at all, post-Putin...but what do I know?]

Did A Kindergarten Teacher in British Columbia Send Students Home With a "Masturbation Instructions" Worksheet??

Apparently so.

At some point merely calling this madness seems inadequate...

Of course every faction has its crazies. And this was apparently the act of one teacher, not sanctioned by the school. 

OTOH it's madness...

And, of course, as with so many of these isolated cases: it's continuous with the general views and direction of the postpostmodern progressive left. It's an outlier...but not all that much of one. And, since the radical left always pushes leftward, this seems to be where the entire faction will end up if it isn't stopped.

The Life Cycle of Russian Tanks

Someone actually made a David Attenborough style voiceover for this video of a destroyed Russian tank. pic.twitter.com/NBmEazYb4F

— Christian Borys (@ItsBorys) May 9, 2022

The Degenerate State of the Abortion Debate in the Era of ("Trans")Gender Ideology

A link that almost doesn't matter.

So the problem with ("trans")gender ideology is that it is either incoherent or false. Those of us who have pointed that out since the beginning have been vilified--though, of course, many stopped pointing it out long ago, when they couldn't take the heat. 

   "That view is incoherent/false" is not a permissible criticism in the age of political correctness. 

   It carries no weight.

   The progressive left cares little about truth--which its intellectual foundation considers suspect at best, relative (or fictional) at worst.

   The ACLU was lost years ago; it went over to the Dark Side when it came out against un-PC speech.

   The only criticisms--of TGI or any other PC thing--that are permitted are harm-to-the-"vulnerable" arguments. This is because the progressive left sets the terms of debates now, and everyone else with the temerity to debate at all debates tacitly accepts those terms. "Gender critical" feminists are--barely--permitted to object to TGI if they do so in terms like these: Men suck, partially in virtue of being dangerous to women; TGI puts men in women's "spaces," etc. That is, because they are leftists and accept that men are bad and endanger women--and they say so--they can't quite exactly be shut out of the debate by the left. If I simply stand up and say "This view is absurd"...which I do, actually...well, that is impermissible.

   I think radical feminism is a crock--except for a few things here and there that I'll admit I've learned from them. So I am hesitant to make common cause with them, even for so important a purpose. Somehow Women are adult, female humans has come to be identified as a "GC" view--though, of course, it's simply the truth recognized by everyone, always...except for the progressive left of the last 7.5 years...  

I feel as if I had another point. But I'm tired of typing.

George Neumayr: The Steele Dossier: Pure Democratic Farce

So for--what? two years?--all we heard about was Russian collusion! Russian asset! Russia, Russia, Russia!

   Democrats swallowed the obviously-fake Steele Dosseir hook, line and sinker. The MSM could talk of nothing else. When Mueller admitted there was no there there, they briefly floated a The-Rooskies-Got-Muller-Too trial balloon. Then they switched to: Well, he wasn't exonerated! Muller just said he couldn't find anything! That doesn't mean no collusion! That is: they decided it would be better to reject the foundational principle Innocent Until Proven Guilty than to admit that Trump was the former. 

   I knew people who for months or years could talk of nothing else. Until it turned out that Trump was--as an objective observer could already see--innocent. Then the excuse-making and ad-hoc-hypothesis-formulating began. Now, several years on and long after it's become clear that, in fact, "Trump's Russian collusion" was a massive Democrat-MSM-Deep-State conspiracy--an actual, realio, trulio conspiracy--many or most on the left seem oblivious. A combination of MSM silence and lies...and political correctness...allow them to be ignorant of / ignore the fact that they were wrong about the plain and obvious facts of perhaps the greatest political scandal in American history.

   It's that latter, really, that may be more a matter of concern: we now clearly see the important facts of what happened in Russiagategate. Trump is gone. It's a relatively cool hour. It is crucial that we admit the truth. But the Dems still can't bring themselves to do it. That'd be one thing if the MSM had an ounce of damn integrity. But it doesn't. It's a hard-left propaganda apparatus at this point. What's worse than a whole party/faction losing its mind about Russian collusion for two years? I'd say: not even being able to admit that's what happened. 

But here we are.

Parents Fight Back Against Transanity and The Gender Cult

link

John Schindler: Democrats' Most Undemocratic Disinformation Debacle

The party of disinformation puts a disinformatiocrat in charge of suppressing politically incorrect information.

File under: Shit You Couldn't Make Up.