Reheated

Reheated (98)

October 15, 2024 by David 159 Comments

For newcomers, some items from the archives:

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Expectations Of Politeness And Basic Consideration.

A tear-inducing tale of racial victimhood.

Ms Gonzalez, who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is, also tells us how she, “just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.” Say, when being a late-night annoyance to roommates and neighbours, a thing that by her own account happens repeatedly, or when playing music in a library. Where other people are trying to study:

“One day, when I accidentally sat down to study in the library’s Absolutely Quiet Room, fellow students Shhh-ed me into shame for putting on my Discman… I soon realised that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.”

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

Not Entirely Arbitrary.

On the non-random nature of who you are.

A person doesn’t just happen to be born into a context that their parents also just happened to be born into. I could not have been born to Mr and Mrs Jeong in South Korea, any more than I could have been born to a Yemeni peasant couple, or a Californian billionaire. Much as I – the person talking to you now – could not have been born in 1652.

The newborn me was a result of a particular lineage, of choices made by specific individuals and the genes of those individuals – who can of course say the same thing about themselves. To imply that anyone’s birth is a random thing, as if it could have happened anywhere, at any time, as if the particulars were immaterial, is, it seems to me, a little odd. Indeed, arse-backwards. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some random occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events. I’d imagine it wouldn’t seem random at all.

Unless you imagine a queue of souls waiting to spawn in some small but arbitrary body on a continent chosen by the spin of a wheel. Or cosmic bingo balls.

Impermissible Thoughts.

Ontario teachers’ union forbids “right-wing” opinions, endorses deception.

As we’ve seen, many times, some teachers and educational bureaucrats do seem rather titillated by the prospect of actively deceiving parents. As, for instance, when middle-school teachers in Missouri were urged to fabricate and publish a false curriculum, purely to hide from parents the details of their activism and what they were actually up to in class. A move pre-emptively described by its proponent, Natalie Fallert, as “not being deceitful.”

It occurs to me that when your solution to such complaints [from parents regarding classroom indoctrination] includes the words “so parents cannot see it,” it may be time to revisit your assumptions.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.




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