Via Darleen, Mary Hudson on the dirty secrets of ‘progressive’ public education:

There was an ethos of hostile resistance. Those who wanted to learn were prevented from doing so. Anyone who “cooperated with the system” was bullied. No homework was done. Students said they couldn’t do it because if textbooks were found in their backpacks, the offending students would be beaten up… I tried everything imaginable to overcome student resistance. Nothing worked. At one point I rearranged the seating to enable the students who wanted to engage to come to the front of the classroom. The principal was informed, and I was reprimanded. This was “discriminatory.” 

Somewhat related, this, this, and the third item here. 

Jonah Goldberg on the immorality of “social justice”: 

Among the myriad problems with this worldview is that individual circumstances are boiled away… Vast abstract categories of human beings are swept up into notions of collective guilt — or victimhood… Traditionally, a person is only supposed to be responsible for the wrongs he or she committed against a specific person. If Person A does something terrible entirely unbeknownst to Person B, it is unjust to hold Person B accountable solely because of the colour of his skin. It’s even more grotesque to hold Person B accountable for the things done by Person A if Person A lived 300 years ago.

Andy Meek on a modern vice: 

Robocallers and spam callers are getting quite good at masking their identity. They do this partly by “spoofing” local numbers, making it seem like a legitimate local number is calling to increase the likelihood that you’ll answer. That’s the reason, according to [caller-ID app] Hiya, that around 9 percent of spam calls a month actually get answered by phone owners even though they don’t recognise the number calling. Nine percent might not sound like much, until you consider the fact that 26.3 billion robocalls were made to American phones in 2018. That’s up 46 percent from 2017’s total of 18 billion.

And via Ace, some news from the world of powerlifting, an activity we don’t often cover here:

James Kirkup on modern policing and the case of Harry Miller: 

The cop said he was in possession of 30 Tweets by me. I asked if any contained criminal material. He said…. No. I asked if any came close to being criminal… and he read me a limerick. Honestly. A limerick. A cop read me a limerick over the phone. I said, I didn’t write that. He said, “Ah. But you liked it and promoted it.” I asked why he was wasting his time on a non-crime. He said, “It’s not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident”… The cop repeatedly called the complainant “the victim.” I asked how there could be a victim if, as he’d established, there was no crime. He said, that’s just how it works.

Allen Farrington on when accusations of “white privilege” are revealed for what they are: 

When challenged to defend her accusation [of “white privilege”], but before she was informed by [David] Webb that he is black, [CNN analyst, Areva] Martin retorted that “this is a whole long conversation I don’t have time to get into.” But if she were confident in her position, she would be able to explain it in plain English. Instead, she assumed that by simply invoking this concept, the discussion would be resolved in her favour. Because she was using the term as an ideological cudgel and not an argument, she didn’t want to explain at all, and was noticeably annoyed when asked to do so. “By virtue of being a white male, you have white privilege” has the appearance of an explanation, but she was really just rephrasing her previous assertion using more words.

As Farrington notes, Ms Martin seems to have assumed Mr Webb’s skin colour based solely on his reference to personal responsibility, which no non-white person would ever invoke, you see. So, no racism there, clearly.

Somewhat related, the second item here. 

And Katherine Birbalsingh on the fallout of pretentious racial guilt:

Christopher DeGroot on attempts to pathologise masculinity: 

Published this week, the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Boys and Men is a remarkable and frightening document. Throughout, value judgements are expressed under the guise of “science.” Social constructivism is assumed to be true, the implication being that “gender roles” don’t represent anything deeper, such as biology or an enduring human nature. Thus, if most nurses are women, and if most engineers are men, the only explanation is the patriarchy, that insidious, mysterious, inescapable evil. One is struck by the facile, trendy cant that the authors take for granted. Three sentences in, we read this assertion: “Boys and men, as a group, tend to hold privilege and power based on gender.” There is no recognition here of male accomplishment — that falls into the category of “privilege and power,” words which, like “patriarchy,” we encounter with mind-numbing frequency.

Readers who can bear to plough through the entire APA document, supposedly thirteen years in the making, will note the framing of masculinity (or “traditional masculine ideology”) as entailing violence, bullying, sexual harassment, “dominance and aggression,” ableism, ageism, racism, and outright sociopathy. Or as Stephanie Pappas says in a summary here: “Traditional masculinity… is, on the whole, harmful.” In poking through the document, readers may also note the absence of any meaningful reference to biology, testosterone, evolution, etc., as if such details were irrelevant to fathoming male behaviour. However, the word privilege occurs 19 times, and the word transgender no fewer than 60.

As DeGroot points out, it seems unwise to redefine masculinity in order to flatter the resentments and insecurities of the fringe and maladjusted – say, “social justice” enthusiasts who consider themselves “marginalised” by expectations of competence, competitiveness and emotional self-possession. Or those who describe themselves as transsexual, non-binary or “gender non-conforming.” As if a proclivity for adventurousness or risk-taking, and a desire for achievement, were fundamentally a problem, something to be fixed. And it goes without saying that the writers of the APA’s guidelines would be unlikely to enjoy lives of comfort and status without a great many others embracing the values and inclinations – including ambition, stoicism and courage – that our self-imagined betters strive to pathologise.

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania sent out an email to parents after a photograph of a student in a white hooded robe made the rounds on social media and caused some sort of panic. The individual was in a hallway in Lower Merion High School.

Run, children! The Klan are in town! 

The student was wearing part of a monk costume from the play Romeo and Juliet, which was being used by a 9th grade class. The student appeared to be returning to the classroom.

The image, of a child dressed as a monk for a school play, was deemed “disturbing” by school administrators, and as a result of this mind-shattering trauma, “The costume will not be used in future enactments of Romeo and Juliet.”

With expectations of competent spelling:

[Professor Inoue] will lecture about “language standards that just kill our students” by subjecting them to “single standards,” which perpetuate “White language supremacy.”

You see, those composition classes you’re paying for, or that some poor sap is paying for, shouldn’t teach students how to write clearly. Instead, “compassionate” classrooms should be grounded in “dimension-based rubrics” and “labour-based contracts,” which presumably reward the length of time a student spends getting something wrong, repeatedly, irrespective of whether they actually, eventually, get it right; thereby avoiding “white racial habits of language.” It’s the path to “a socially just future,” apparently. And not, as one might suppose, somewhat narrowed hopes of employment. Because an “anti-racist” education, at a university, should ideally leave its beneficiaries sounding uneducated. With mangled conjugation, missing verbs, and saying axe instead of ask.

Professor Inoue has, of course, been mentioned here before.

Very much related, this. In which, fellow “social justice” enthusiast Dr A W Strouse informs us that correcting errors of spelling and basic grammar can “make students feel bewildered, hurt, or angry,” and should therefore be avoided. We’re also told that job applicants who, as graduates, struggle with even elementary spelling, should bristle at any acknowledgement of this shortcoming, telling potential employers – and I quote – “Fuck you.”  

Update, via the comments: