Today is this blog’s birthday. Fourteen bloody years. And the damn thing’s still here. Just sayin’.

Oh, and you may want a moment to process this.  

Consider this an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

In the Los Angeles Times, a tale of high roads not taken:  

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just ploughed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

The author of the above, Ms Virginia Heffernan, not only has a “pandemic getaway,” which must be nice, but also neighbours sufficiently thoughtful to clear her drive of heavy snow. Inevitably, this induces not gratitude or warm feelings, but fretting and resentment, such that the aforementioned act of kindness is framed, disdainfully, as “aggressive niceness.” Exactly how Ms Heffernan’s neighbours were being aggressive is unclear, but it seems that we, the reader, are expected to dislike them, quite intensely, on account of their being insufficiently leftist.

Of course, on some level, I realise I owe them thanks,

On some level, says she.

I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.

As readers may be a little confused by the air of displeasure, I should point out that no history of neighbourly rancour is offered as an excuse – no disputes over hedges or noisy pets. Nothing of that sort is mentioned at all. Ms Heffernan’s neighbours are, it seems, to be frowned upon, indeed despised, in print, in a newspaper they may well read, simply for failing to vote for Mr Biden.

I also can’t give my neighbours absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth.

Absolution, indeed. What a grandiose creature she is. And so, instead of the customary thanks, Ms Heffernan extends to her neighbours – via the medium of a newspaper column intended to shame them – an ultimatum of sorts:

In the clown-shoe world of San Francisco public schools, honking ensues:

The director of the district’s arts department told local ABC7 news that a decision has been made to change the name of their department, “VAPA,” which is short for visual and performing arts. The new name will be SFUSD Arts Department. “We are prioritising antiracist arts instruction in our work,” the director, Sam Bass, told the network.

I’ll give you a moment to process the notion of “antiracist arts instruction” and how one might prioritise this feat over more mundane matters. Say, encouraging competence. To say nothing of students of the visual and performing arts who apparently struggle with the words visual, performing and arts.

“The use of so many acronyms within the educational field often tends to alienate those who may not speak English to understand the acronym.”

At which point, readers unmoved by wokeness may be inclined to point out that a way to overcome alienation – here, it seems, a euphemism for ignorance – is via students learning things, perhaps even words. Which is, I gather, what takes place in schools, theoretically, even those in San Francisco.

However, the fretful and enlightened educators wish us to know that unremarkable terms that are not “proactively chosen” by minority students – including departmental acronyms – are “damaging” and “oppressive,” and actually a symptom of “white supremacy culture” and “white supremacy thinking.” Albeit in ways not entirely obvious, and in an environment where the imagined feelings of non-white students, or those who claim to speak on their behalf, seemingly trump those of everyone else.

And if a punchline seems in order:

It was not clear whether SFUSD was also considered a racist acronym.

Via Darleen.

According to the student activists, to disagree with any part of their agenda is to admit to racism.

Christopher F Rufo on the pantomime politics of spoiled children: 

Keep in mind that [The United Nations International School] is the school of choice for the world’s elites, teaching the children of diplomats and leading figures in international banking, finance, technology, and business at a cost of up to $44,000 a year. The school’s political climate was already thoroughly liberal and progressive… The dynamics at this bastion of elite progressivism reveal something important about the American political environment. The children of the most privileged people on the planet have donned the mantle of oppression to satisfy their moral narcissism and to exercise power over their elders. The adults, crippled with anxiety about any threat to their status, immediately bow to anonymous teenagers leading an online mob.

Needless to say, the well-heeled youngsters have eagerly embraced the buzzwords of woke status, such that “intersectionality” trips off the tongue, and standards and expectations are to be “decolonised.” The school must, we’re informed, “revolutionise the curriculum.”

Judging by the various demands and hyperbolical Instagram posts, it seems we’re expected to believe that the wealthy and statusful are paying $44,000 a year to have their own children abused by “oppressors,” that any kind of “disparity” is proof of bigotry, and that having one’s phonetically unobvious name mispronounced, even once, is “thinly-veiled racism” and a form of “racial trauma.” A trauma inflicted by “the white man’s mouth.”

Faced with an upsurge of opportunist theatre – and asked whether he is, as claimed, a “racist” and an “oppressor” – the school’s director, Dan Brenner, has shown all of the probity and spine one might expect. And so, the supposedly downtrodden Mao-lings behave more like aristocracy, with expectations of deference and impunity, as if they were entirely unaccustomed to be being told no. 

Via Nikw211, who adds,

If this is how, as children and adolescents, they are capable of treating people whose names they know, whose faces they recognise, and who they interact with on a regular basis, just imagine the kind of crude, stunted stuff that will have to pass for something like empathy when they inevitably move into the ranks of elite influencers in business and politics.

And they will have learned so much from ‘progressive’ educators.

“There were so many students who came into the school with no preparation for the conversation about race or racism. They knew nothing about white privilege and white supremacy,” social policy professor Amy Hillier said.

It’s a dental school, by the way. For dentists.  

It occurs to me that if you’re brandishing the terms “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” and invoking “implicit bias” as if it weren’t laughable woo, such that the indoctrinated must “come to understand” foregone conclusions, it doesn’t sound much like a conversation. More a series of begged questions, whereby some people can be deemed guilty or complicit by virtue of their skin colour.

And yet, if you plan to be a dentist and attend the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, it seems you must first submit to condescension and insults, and accusations of being either a bigot or an enabler of bigotry, based solely on unchangeable aspects of your appearance. Because apparently you can’t do dentistry without the weird political woo of dogmatic parasites who’ve managed to insert themselves into yet another sphere of life.