Reheated

Reheated (108)

June 23, 2025 by David 91 Comments

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

What You Wish For.

Embezzlement, magic blackness, and intersectional complications.

The company in question, Raheem AI, is a chatbot app launched in 2017 with a stated mission to abolish the police and to replace them with “community-based crisis teams” and “liberated dispatchers” – namely, anti-police activists and likeminded social workers – who would respond to emergencies armed with bottles of water and lots of “social justice.”

I know. You’re tempted to invest.

In the comments, Mags notes the claim that Mr Anderson committed “the perfect crime,” on account of those he robbed being much too busy fretting about “the way that police treat masculine-presenting black people.” She adds, not unfairly, a plausible definition of the perfect crime: “Suckering wokies?”

Well, it’s a nonprofit whose employees gratuitously announce their pronouns, and who regard as some kind of injustice the fact that criminal activity often results in arrest, or as they put it, “police terror.” And so, they’re “building a life-affirming world where police are obsolete.” I think it’s fair to assume there’s quite a bit of unrealism and credulity to exploit.

May Contain Drama.

Culture for the implausibly delicate.

Readers will doubtless recall the Chichester Festival Theatre warning patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most famous and widely-seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.

Levelling.

When cleverness is unfair, inegalitarian, something to be corrected.

And so, instead of all that problematic academic rigour, all those challenging tasks that not everyone can complete, exceptional students will now be obliged to mingle with those less academically inclined, and offered an education “accessible to all,” one “open to the voices of divergent experiences.”

The practised doublethink in play, in which precocious interest in advanced material is actively discouraged, and in which “access” is invoked while gleefully denying it, has been noted here before. Along with educators’ hostility to students and parents who dared to complain about the downgrade, and whose concerns were dismissed as perpetuating “systemic racism.”

As in California, where differences in “school experiences,” i.e., differences in ability and achievement, are something to be eliminated by holding back high-achieving students, with curriculum guidelines based on “social justice,” and educators who are visibly “committed to social justice work.”

And likewise, we have Jennifer Katz, a professor of education at the University of British Columbia, scolding parents who question the conceit that bright children will somehow flourish if taught more slowly and in less detail in a more disruptive environment. While implying, quite strongly, that any parents who complain must be racist.

And then there’s San Diego, another bastion of progress, where teachers are instructed that in order to be “anti-racist,” they must “confront practices” deemed inegalitarian and which result in “racial imbalance” – say, norms of classroom behaviour, a disapproval of tardiness and cheating, and oppressive expectations of “turning work in on time.”

There’s a through-the-looking-glass quality. A fun-house mirror malevolence.

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

This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below. Just sayin’.




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