Doing It For The Kids
Apparently, the way to “help our black students develop positive racial identity” is to ensure that as many of them as possible leave academia sounding uneducated – indeed, unintelligent – and unable to write in an adult manner, and therefore have trouble finding employment, thus leading to plenty of exploitable resentment. I paraphrase, of course, though not by much.
Dr Asao Inoue, whose “research focusses on antiracist and social justice theory,” and whose scholarly insights include “destroy grading,” and “standards… are white supremacist,” has been mentioned here before. As when we learned that grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of, and I quote, “inclusive excellence.”
Rejecting “white racial habits of language” will, it seems, result in some kind of righteous emancipation, the particulars of which remain somewhat unclear. However, students sufficiently credulous to internalise this pernicious woo may find that their liberation – from being articulate and in possession of their thoughts – evaporates on contact with life beyond the campus. By which time, of course, those tuition cheques will have been cashed.
Update, via the comments:
The assumptions on which this woo is piled are both perverse and laughably impractical. If the broader population regards being inarticulate and unable to write clearly and precisely as warning signs – say, in terms of employing university graduates – then that’s unlikely to change. People will make those kinds of judgments widely and for the foreseeable future. They are not generally wrong to do so. A job application littered with basic errors of spelling and grammar, and which has evidently not been proof-read, is sending a message. One that will be detected and responded to accordingly.
And encouraging university students, would-be intellectuals, to give potential employers the impression that no education has in fact taken place – and that they don’t much care whether they are clearly understood by anyone outside of their immediate social circle – doesn’t seem likely to achieve much of anything, beyond a cycle of failure and disaffection, and more self-flattering fantasies of racial persecution. It’s certainly an odd measure of “compassion,” a term of which pointed use is made. Stripped of woke pretensions, Dr Inoue is encouraging students to waste their time, and money, and prospects, by shouting at the rain.
Readers may wonder how the objections above, which are hardly esoteric, have apparently escaped Dr Inoue. Despite these problems being obvious, glaringly so, they don’t seem to figure in his thinking. It should also be fairly obvious that encouraging teenagers to displace responsibility – to regard almost any shortcoming or failure as someone else’s fault, as proof of “systemic racism” or “white supremacy” – is not an act of kindness or “compassion.” It just propagates a kind of moral neoteny.
And when teenagers are being told that they deserve a place at university, and deserve to be thought intelligent and rewarded accordingly, while feeling entitled to disregard customary standards and expectations of competence, as if learning even basic skills were somehow unnecessary – indeed, an affront – this is not a recipe for success or any sense of lasting personal achievement. The only people who seem to benefit are the ones being paid to peddle this corrosive woo. And so, a word that comes to mind is parasite.
Should readers assume that Dr Inoue is some one-off aberration, feel free to think again.
a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon
Lethal it could be, to the egos and to the careers of his own kind.
Lethal it could be, to the egos and to the careers of his own kind.
The word parasite came to mind. And there’s an inexhaustible supply of rubes, delivered every year. Or, as noted previously,
And yet it goes on, and is applauded.
I’ve mentioned before how at my own state school there were several educators who felt that teaching even basic grammar was insufficiently forward-looking and therefore unnecessary. Consequently, at secondary school, my long-suffering German teacher was amazed to find that his ‘A’ stream students had no idea what a subordinate clause was and had almost no formal knowledge of grammar at all. As a result, the poor chap ended up spending large chunks of every lesson, for months, providing remedial English tuition to some of the brightest kids in school. So that we could eventually learn some German.
Similar views are still propagated by, among others, the Marxist, poet, and BBC regular Michael Rosen, who tells fellow Guardian readers that “there’s no such thing as correct grammar.” For Rosen – whose own grammar is of course carefully crafted – learning the rules of the national language is both oppressive and inegalitarian and should therefore be frowned upon. Presumably, Mr Rosen doesn’t believe that other people – poorer people or people with browner skin – should be offered the same tools to get on in life – the tools he employs. Perhaps they’re expected to compensate with proletarian gusto and ethnic charm.
at my own state school there were several educators who felt that teaching even basic grammar was insufficiently forward-looking
I had precisely the same experience when moving from a modern school who taught by “osmosis”. The French teacher uttered a series of guttural French noises, the class repeated them, and we were then expected to absorb the language as a baby might.
When I changed to a much more backward school I discovered that there was an actual grammatical structure to both foreign and English languages and that books existed detailing these features which greatly facilitated their apprehension.
I never looked back.
Or should that be forward?
End of year ping. (For tax purposes you understand).
End of year ping. (For tax purposes you understand).
I’m more than happy to be implicated in any grey-area accounting practices you may indulge in. And bless you, sir. If you must be stuck in traffic, may scandalous gossip ease the passing of time.
The French teacher uttered a series of guttural French noises,
They do that, you know, the French.
[ Glares across English Channel, shakes fist. ]
Hm. Funny how a ping from my PayPal app really improves my mood. Feel positively jolly.
The French teacher uttered a series of guttural French noises
I always remember my first French language lesson when I was about 12. The teacher walked in to 30 kids who had never taken a French lesson in their life and proceeded to tell us entirely in French which page to turn to in our new textbook. The teaching went downhill from there really. I can understand how immersion language teaching can work (a colleague of mine learned English that way) but it is madness to ever think that technique could work with one hour long lesson a week.
A few years ago a read a book about National Servicemen were taught Russian & Chinese in the 50s so they could eavesdrop on radio transmissions. The author who had been one of the soldiers taught that way explained how it was only possible because all the 18 year olds selected had been to a selective School and had passed their Latin ‘O’ level so understood the rules and structure of grammar. The author had become a school teacher at a selective school after he left the army but resigned in the 70s when the school went comprehensive. At that point the Latin teaching was dropped as most of the kids weren’t capable of it and he was expected to teach using the immersion method something he described as an impossible task.
At the heart of racist discourse is the logic of categorization [… ] It creates haves and have-nots.
This point has been raised before, but I’m still curious as to how this same logic of Inoue’s would apply, if at all, to excellence in sport and athletic competition.
If the same logic is applied, I wonder how effectively it translates into actually successful outcomes?
I’m not against encouraging the participation of all in sport – for fun, for health, for camaraderie, and for a dozen other benefits of taking part in team activities or track and field and so on.
But not even the most delusional or slow-witted child fails to learn the lesson that differences in height, mass, speed, strength, intuition and so on applied to basketball or soccer lead to consistent and regular failure or success in those events.
The short, fat, asthmatic girl with the jam-jar spectacles can show as much grit and determination as any of the others on the volleyball team. She may even win the admiration of team mates and spectators – but outside of feel-good Hallmark made-for-TV movies she is hardly likely to contribute to her team’s success while at the same time she may actually be a principle reason for its failure.
And if the same logic is not applied to sport and athletic competition, what reasons are given for why not?
This is taken from a post entitled “Chapter 1: Racist Discourse as a Field” on Inoue’s own blog, Infrequent Words:
If you want to group people by race, socioeconomic status, or geographic habitation (where they are from), group them by how they talk. If you want to create an unfair system that privileges one group over others without naming any group, make one group’s ways of talking the standard by which privileges and opportunities are dolled out in the system. If you want that system to not look racist, then ignore the connections between racial groups and the languages they use. Ignore the fact that one group made the language standards and their language is racialized, as all languages are.
There are so many fundamental errors in this one short paragraph (e.g. “all languages are [racialized]”) that it’s a challenge to pick out the most egregious of them. Even so …
[G]roup them by how they talk …
This suggests that everyone writes the same way that they talk – we do not, not even in text messages is that true. And since the focus is on writing and not on speaking he already seems to have fallen at the first hurdle by not recognising these are two entirely different capabilities.
Certain disabilities aside, all children learn language and can speak before they reach the first grade. Writing is another matter entirely and requires more specific and focussed instruction.
A child writing the letter ‘o’ when they mean ‘a’ or ‘k’ when they mean ‘c’ and so on will have a hard time making themselves intelligible by writing e.g.’dO goT sed orn de matj’ for ‘The cat sat on the mat’.
This makes me wonder whether Inoue extends this ‘hands off’ approach to spelling and orthography. For if he does, how will he be able to tell which child is dyslexic and and which child simply needs to develop the accuracy of their spelling? Or perhaps Inoue thinks this does not matter and no intervention is needed?
[M]ake one group’s ways of talking the standard by which privileges and opportunities are dolled out in the system
Apart from the fact that, again, he is using talking and writing as if they are interchangeable – they are not – he is now also assuming that there is no necessary reason why language A happens to be the standard over language B and that if B were to replace A, then the only consequence would be to see “privileges and opportunities” awarded to group B and not group A.
This is such an embarrassingly idiotic premise that I can fairly feel my cheeks flushing just reading it.
For one thing, the standard version of any language, especially in its written form, is one that everyone has to learn. No child outside of an as yet unwritten sitcom is raised to write in the form of a government policy, executive summary or master’s degree thesis.
These are highly specialised forms of writing that no one has more access to than others as a result of the dialect they speak at home.
His assumption is presumably that it is only an accident of history, more or less, that has resulted in language A becoming the standard over language B. And in a way, yes, that is literally true – English is the official language of the USA for quite specific historical reasons.
However, it completely ignores the fact that language A has developed and evolved in response to the needs and purposes that it has been put to in an ever more complex and technologically advanced society such as the USA.
General American English is not the standard because “white” people speak it at home (quite apart from the fact that almost none of them if not actually none of them do), but because of the uses it is put to.
You could not simply replace General American English with African American Vernacular English and see no change but in who receives the “privileges and opportunities are dolled out in the system.”
And if by some means African American Vernacular English were to become a new ‘standard’ it would of necessity rapidly transform and evolve from what it is now in order to fit purposes that go beyond mundane things like what you did that day, who won last night’s ball game or can you get me some more orange juice from the store and so on.
And that’s just one paragraph of this.
If that weren’t enough to make me despair, the thought of a whole army of die-hard supporters ready to leap in to his defence on the grounds that as a self-confessed anti-racist scholar he must be right in whatever he says and whosoever would dare to question his ideas must by default be a foaming at the mouth racist terrified of losing his/her privileges in a white supremacist cissexist heteropatriarchal system.
There are so many fundamental errors in this one short paragraph… that it’s a challenge to pick out the most egregious of them.
Well, the basic premise, the assumption on which all of this is piled, is laughably impractical and indeed perverse. If the wider population regards being inarticulate, imprecise and unable to write in an adult manner as warning signs – say, in terms of employing university graduates – then that’s unlikely to change. People will make those kinds of judgments widely and for the foreseeable future. They are not generally wrong to do so. A job application littered with basic errors of spelling and grammar, and which has clearly not been proof-read, is sending a message. One that will be detected.
And encouraging university students – because, again, that’s who we’re talking about – to give employers the impression that no education has in fact taken place – and that they don’t much care whether they are clearly understood – doesn’t seem likely to achieve much of anything. At least, nothing positive. Dr Inoue is encouraging students to waste their time, and money, and prospects, by shouting at the rain.
To say nothing of the fact that the people most obviously indulging in the “racist discourse” of “categorisation” are very often inhabitants of the Clown Quarter. Which is to say, people such as Dr Inoue.
dO goT sed orn de matj’
A fine band name.
In Wales, perhaps…
(Not trying to outstay my welcome, but …)
Not entirely unrelated, this:
In late September 2020 children at Pimlico academy in central London took down a union jack that had been erected outside their school. The flag was then taken to Churchill Gardens, a large housing estate nearby, where more than half of the schools’ pupils reportedly reside, and set alight to resounding cheers [ … ] the pupils accused the school’s management of racism, claiming that the new policy [on school uniform and dress codes] would penalise Muslims and those with afro hairstyles.
School uniform was not the only thing found objectionable:
Another source said flying the union jack had been unnecessarily antagonistic and had fostered division.
And now this:
Over the weekend the school walls were daubed with graffiti, which has since been removed. Photographs seen by the Guardian included criticism of the union jack that remains permanently erected outside the school: “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …” There were also calls for [Daniel] Smith [the Head] to be sacked. Other graffiti said: “White schools for brown kids are u mad” and: “Pimlico Academy … run by racists … for profit!!!”
When I read that the graffiti had included “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …” I was for a moment dumbfounded.
For someone of my generation, “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …” was a chant associated with overtly racist movements such as the National Front and the British National Party. It was the kind of thing skinheads in stonewash jeans and 18-hole bull’s blood Doc Marten’s used to chant while giving Nazi salutes.
Yet if I’ve understood that report correctly, protestors have apparently used “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …” as an anti-racist statement. Even accepting that it must have been intended as an ironic inversion of that once well-known racist slogan, it seems an absolutely incredible thing to willingly dredge up from the past. Still, on the other hand, it casts the slogan “White schools for brown kids are u mad” in an even more alarming light regarding the attitudes of whoever daubed that on the wall.
Sometimes, all this feels like finding yourself faced with a dangerous lunatic who insists that you are to blame for his having handcuffed himself to you (a fact he vehemently denies), who keeps demanding you give him a key you have never had, and who therefore finally decides that there is no other way for him to gain his freedom from you, his oppressor, than by trying to throw himself into the path of every passing truck, somehow believing that he will come out of it unscathed.
Also – “dolled out” seems a bit… odd, no?
Don’t these idiots (I’m being polite) understand they are promoting apartheid – or is that what they want?
Per Insty yesterday, here’s what happens when these kids hit the job market:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/campus-diversity-program-accused-of-having-toxic-environment/
“Among the allegations was that women of color were told their writing was not eloquent or effective and that microaggressions were common, according to the March 16 report.
“There were lies about my performance which relates directly to white supremacy culture at ADVANCE,” said Maria Ozor Commer, a former program employee and a central source in the Daily’s investigation.”
Hoisted by their own petard, sure, but it’s still a disgrace to brainwash kids into believing that grammar is racist.
Ah, I think I’ll relax with Aldi’s Espresso Machine
protestors have apparently used “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …” as an anti-racist statement. Even accepting that it must have been intended as an ironic inversion of that once well-known racist slogan,
It’s this. Very much this. Control the language, control the minds. AIUI from reading excerpts, essays and such, Noam Chomsky was pushing this Orwellian understanding. But whenever I would try to point this out to people I would learn quite quickly how few college educated people had any idea who that was, or cared one wit about Orwell. If noticed at all it was just something to laugh about. Now we’ve reached a point where one can read entire essays that go on for pages and still have no concrete evidence that the author believes in the subject thing or it’s exact opposite. It’s as if the word ‘literally’ no longer literally means ‘literally’ and there are no consequences for such. Perhaps it is for the good if it causes Skynet to meet the same fate as the Tower of Babel.
It’s ‘oww’ and ‘garn’ that keep her in her place; not her wretched clothes, or dirty face. Why, if you spoke as she does, sir, instead of the way you do – you might be selling flowers too.
George Bernard Shaw may have been a hoary old socialist, but he wasn’t wrong about language and classism.
told their writing was not eloquent or effective
Mediocre students have been hustled into higher education (and debt) as if simply being there will somehow, dramatically, boost their IQs, while universities continue to lower standards in order to hide the obvious problem. With the result that, as Duke Pesta noted, it’s all but impossible, career-wise, for a professor to fail 40% of his students, even if 40% of his students really shouldn’t be there. And as universities approach the cognitive barrel bottom in order to achieve unearned “diversity” quotas, the more these issues will be apparent. The more contortion and dishonesty will be required. Most likely, as above, any shortcomings in competence will be blamed on some gaseous “white supremacy culture.” It’s farcical.
as if simply being there will somehow, dramatically, boost their IQs
Well, in these former colonies, the “degree” has become a “job checkmark” (See Griggs vs Duke Power) with no bearing on one’s actual edjumication. You see, Kolledge is now required for just about anything.
Including Sushi server.
… explains that his book discusses “grading literacy performances more broadly” — namely, by judging “final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing.”
And here I’d thought Marx’s Labor Theory of Value had been comprehensively rubbished, even among those with powerful antibodies to the glaringly apparent.
If you want to group people by race, socioeconomic status, or geographic habitation (where they are from), group them by how they talk. If you want to create an unfair system that privileges one group over others without naming any group, make one group’s ways of talking the standard by which privileges and opportunities are dolled out in the system. If you want that system to not look racist, then ignore the connections between racial groups and the languages they use. Ignore the fact that one group made the language standards and their language is racialized, as all languages are.
Fine. Let’s run with this.
As it happens, there are writing genres where meaning very much matters, and that meaning can only be conveyed by widely agreed rules on grammar, syntax, logic, etc.
I suspect the good Dr. would not prefer the results of his turd-polishing grading standards writing, oh, say, manuals for the installation and maintenance of high voltage power lines.
Instead, they will be perfectly suited to careers as SJWs — a field where supply nearly infinitely exceeds demand.
The word parasite came to mind.
That word cannot be used too often. Nor is it unjust to apply it to the supposedly more moderate “liberals” who hire, promote, subsidize, and defend these parasites.
I have a My Woke Lady production in my head where Act II consists of a pissed-off Eliza convincing Freddy to “Show Me” his love by breaking out the Antifa drag and throwing bricks and Molotovs at the Higgins house. (All bankrolled by Alfred’s newfound riches, of course.)
George Bernard Shaw may have been a hoary old socialist, but he wasn’t wrong about language and classism.
Unsurprisingly I’m not the first to make this connection.
Karl, thanks so much for the link. I’m lovin’ him! I’m especially loving the YT commenters, some of which are quite funny, and many wondering if he’s for real (I suspect he is).
I’m also reminded of an excerpt on Althouse about “Grumpy old white dudes” trying and failing to make money from writing.
Meanwhile, James Hoffman has 784K subscribers and a video with over a million views, of him taking on an espresso machine from Aldis. And Steven Crowder with more than five million subscribers commentating on the news. Heck, Scott Adams draws viewers on YouTube and it’s just him and a camera and a cup of coffee.
Like the Kinks sang, you gotta give the people what they want.
Students graduating without language skills, ignorant in math, deficient in technical subjects will not fail – if they are BIPOC/LGBTQ++. To the contrary, they will be hired quickly, receive high performance ratings and be promoted swiftly to the upper echelons of management.
As when we learned that grading a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon, and therefore to be abandoned in the name of, and I quote, “inclusive excellence.”
Amazing how individuals afraid of black literacy have come full circle.
The word parasite came to mind.
“Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts”, only a racist would think something like that would be “parasitic”, look at his CV, before being An Academic™ for the last 23 years he had a job, excuse me, Industry Post, for 16 months after all.
It is such a racist and yte supremacist practice that it is practiced in every country on the planet without regard to race, creed, color, or religion. It never ceases to amaze me that this lot can continue to spout things that are so obviously antipodal to reality, and not only continue to get away with it, but be lauded as Deep Thinkers™.
A related discussion regarding admissions tests.
The French teacher uttered a series of guttural French noises…
To quote the immortal Robert Benchley, “There are five French vowels, ong, ong, ong, ong, and ong.
“Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …”
Of course there is no black in flags of Somalia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, and many others. Is that why Blacks leave those countries ?
As a youth long ago, I thought about joining the US Army (this was decades ago). I got far enough in the process to be sent off to take their languages exam. Still the hardest test I’ve ever taken (I have a PhD, for whatever that’s worth). It simply assumed you knew English grammar cold – you got a set of rules for an imaginary language and 10 minutes to memorize them; the rest was oral.
Can’t imagine what it’s like today. It’s possible a lot of our military blunders stem from the lack of competent people able to learn the required languages.
And here I’d thought Marx’s Labor Theory of Value had been comprehensively rubbished
well, yes, Jeff, unless you REALLY want to believe. The Prof is putting his Marxist theory into practice, but as he is not the one who is harmed when it fails I’ll give him no credit for that.
Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …
I am gobsmacked how often a modern’anti-racist’ practice is the same as a racist practice from decades past. It used to be considered racist to not educate or mis-educate minorities.
I haven’t read the prof’s book, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t written in the way the prof is advocating his students write. I doubt his Ph.D. thesis is written that way. Is he trying to prevent his students from achieving the success that he has? Trying to restrict the competition in his field? This looks like class warfare to me 😉
And yet, for pointing this out, I’m the racist?
Bear with me, this is highly intersectional of sub-standard academic performance (the author having been dropped from a surgical residency), white supremacy, and, from the last thread, Asians being set upon.
Behold, the real reason for black on Asian crime, not that you expected anything different. What is worse is all the ninnies agreeing with this (not that that is really surprising anymore either).
Coffee machine chap was amusing. All that fuss! He ought to get a Nespresso instead.
He ought to get a Nespresso instead.
OTOH, he could just dump a Number 10 can of grounds into a 5 gallon pot of boiling water and enjoy coffee as served in the finest MKTs everywhere, and quit complaining.
Behold, the real reason for black on Asian crime,
Imagine that being your mental landscape.
Previously.
Yet if I’ve understood that report correctly, protestors have apparently used “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack …” as an anti-racist statement.
Anti-racist as defined by a standard wherein “smash the white man!” is not only accepted as an anti-racist sentiment, but as a required element.
Sometimes, all this feels like finding yourself faced with a dangerous lunatic who insists that you are to blame for his having handcuffed himself to you…
It only feels that way because it is that way.
Don’t these idiots (I’m being polite) understand they are promoting apartheid – or is that what they want?
Maybe and precisely, respectively. That is, they desire the sort of racialist madhouse Mandela ushered in, but in circumstances where they will have so many more potential victims to toy with.
Some may recall Muhammad’s promise to his followers that, come the Last Day, every true and faithful believer would have his own Jew to slay.
Meanwhile, back to standardized testing, a congressman does not make the point he thinks he does (NY is not covering itself in glory with its politicians lately).
Out of curiosity how is Dr Asao Inoue’s grammar?
Thought so.
Good stuff here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/31/at-last-the-myth-of-institutional-racism-is-collapsing/
“privileges and opportunities are dolled out in the system”
If we were referring to someone with an appreciation of the language, I’d assume this was supposed to be ‘doled’ out, and was a typo.
But it is difficult to be certain…
a congressman does not make the point he thinks he does
If what he does can accurately be called ‘thinking’.
Coffee machine chap was amusing. All that fuss!
We used to say anal, as in anal retentive. Given observed behaviours on youtube and other social media, it is, perhaps, time to revive the usage.
I can’t be the only one who wanted to bitch-slap the chap.
…and now for something completely different, well not really, more Marvel/Star Wars wokeness.
Prescient
Prescient
Well, they do say economics isn’t a real science.
Yeah…Sagan….another pathetic part of 5he problem. Who was ever seriously clutching their crystals and consulting our horoscopes? There have always been such people in the margins and always will, but they weren’t who he was signaling about. You know to what ‘superstition’ he was truly referring, correct? And while he was spewing this sort of content, he was bringing along his own protege of a secular blind faith, the insufferable Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as Daniel Ream also points out, the great scientific mind of Sagan was a proponent of letting the “smart” people, like him of course, run things via socialism. Seriously, I never understood what people saw in that guy. Especially relative to Feynman and so many others like him who were also popularizing science, just not as their main purpose. Aside from restating facts that other real scientists discovered about the universe, the billions and billions schtick never resonated with me. He sounded like some sort of religious fanatic himself. Well, to me anyway.
I never understood what people saw in that guy
Like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, he was personable and amiable. The type of personality necessary to do science well is meticulous, detail-oriented, and introverted. Scientists generally make poor science advocates. What Carl Sagan, Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson really are is salesmen, selling Science! as an idea to non-scientists. That a little agenda-mongering sneaks in there along with the Science! is a feature, not a bug.
Most scientists hate salesmen because salesmen’s personalities and motivations are generally the polar opposite of scientists. In a sense, all salesmen lie for a living.
the great scientific mind of Sagan was a proponent of letting the “smart” people, like him of course, run things via socialism
That bollocks about the infant mortality rate is easy to debunk, too: countries define “infant mortality” differently. The US counts infant deaths that occur any time after a live birth, whereas most countries in that list do not count infant deaths that occur a short time after the live birth as an infant death (they’re coded as miscarriages or stillbirths). That artificially depresses their numbers.
It’s a common canard, and easy to debunk, and it’s fun to watch people who spout the factoid sputter and blink and BSDO when you point out the two numbers aren’t comparable because they’re measuring different things.
I am, theoretically, a grownup (61). Would any grownups reading care to comment on this?
https://www.salon.com/2021/03/29/i-want-to-be-more-like-ramona-quimby-beverly-clearys-patron-saint-of-messy-girls-as-an-adult/
As a grownup, would you model yourself on a fictional 10-year-old? I found this weird to the point of needing treatment.
(Beverly Cleary, Ramona’s creator, just died a couple of days ago.)