Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now
 the Big Joe Biden Deal.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

No one could have predicted…

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

A consequence of cucumbers

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

You are here: Home / Politics / Education / Wokeness Update Open Thread: *First* As Farce…

Wokeness Update Open Thread: *First* As Farce…

by | 175 Comments

This post is in: , ,


Per the Columbus Dispatch:

The assistant director of communications for Olentangy Local School District abruptly stopped the reading of the Dr. Seuss book “The Sneetches” to a third-grade classroom during an NPR podcast after students asked about race….

NPR reporter Erika Beras spent the day in Robek’s class with Beeman for the podcast. As part of the district stipulations, politics were off limits. Six books were selected ahead of time by Beras and the district — including “The Sneetches.”

“I don’t know if I feel comfortable with the book being one of the ones featured,” Beeman is heard saying on the podcast during the middle of “The Sneetches” reading. “I just feel like this isn’t teaching anything about economics, and this is a little bit more about differences with race and everything like that.”

“The Sneetches,” published in 1961, is a book about two kinds of Sneetches: those with stars on their bellies and those without stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches are judged negatively by their appearance, so capitalist Sylvester McMonkey McBean makes money selling them stars for their bellies. Meanwhile, the Star-Bellied Sneetches don’t like associating with the Plain-Belly Sneetches, so they start paying to have a machine take their stars off. 

The Seuss family has said the book was intended to teach children not to judge or discriminate against others because of their appearance and to treat people equitably….

Beras tried to tell Beeman that “The Sneetches” is about preferences, open markets and economic loss, but Beeman replied, “I just don’t think it might be appropriate for the third-grade class and for them to have a discussion around it.”

On the “Planet Money” episode, Beras reached back out to Beeman to ask about what happened. Beeman replied, “When the book began addressing racism, segregation and discriminating behaviors, this was not the conversation we had prepared Mrs. Robek, the students or parents would take place. There may be some very important economics lessons in ‘The Sneetches,’ but I did not feel that those lessons were the themes students were going to grasp at that point in the day or in the book.”…

Looking back, Beeman said she does wish she had handled the situation differently by talking to Robek separately to figure out a way to continue the Seuss book and have the discussion geared more toward economics…

Reader Interactions

175Comments

  1. 1.

    GregMulka

    I’m getting really tired of all the people who think doomed to repeat it is the good outcome.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    So what is the opposite of woke? Is it oblivious or ignorant or some combination of the two?

  4. 4.

    japa21

    There are times I truly despair for this country.  I do settle down after a while, but the inanity of this is almost overwhelming.

  5. 5.

    trollhattan

    Meanwhile, this guyactual congressman.

    January 11, 2023 at 7:44 pm EST By Taegan Goddard

    “George Santos allegedly told a Republican official he was a star on the volleyball team in college,” the Washington Post reports.

    “The problem with that anecdote? The freshman GOP lawmaker from New York never attended the college for which he claimed to have played.”

    Does the dude have any actual friends?

  7. 7.

    LiminalOwl

    @Amir Khalid: Obliviot. (Not a term I coined, alas. Randy Cassingham, of the blog “This Is True,” or at least that’s where I picked it up.)

    (and he defines it differently)

    @Geminid: that’s good.

  11. 11.

    caring & sensitive

    @trollhattan: I am not a psychiatrist (although I play one on TV and once stayed at a Holiday Inn) but I expect that he has been living this fantasy so long he actually believes the bs he spouts

  13. 13.

    dexwood

    I woke up at 6:18 this morning because my newly adopted dog thought the day should begin. Shes a good girl.

  15. 15.

    Anoniminous

    “Critical Race Theory” = “American History”

    For example, the dude who wrote:
    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    1. Owned slaves
    2. Was a Pedophile – starting boffing Sally Heming when she was 14
    3. Was a Rapist – sexual slavery is rape “sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury ”
    4. Highly likely committed incest with his half-sister – Sally was the daughter of Jefferson’s father sex slave

    Try and teach that in school and see what happens

    White Americans are pig-ignorant about this country’s history.​​

  16. 16.

    Matt McIrvin

    Remember, when Sylvester McMonkey McBean wandered off chuckling “you can’t teach a Sneetch,” he was wrong. He had their money already, but he was wrong–they wised up from the experience. So are we more incorrigible than Sneetches?

  17. 17.

    Rebel’s Dad

    @Geminid: Surely there’s an insult in Yiddish that would be perfect for these fools. (Not being sarcastic, my Yiddish isn’t great, anyone got any suggestions?)

  18. 18.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    “Wake up, woke people.  I mean stay asleep!  I don’t know what I mean!  I’m a fucking maga dipshit! ”  As a 2nd grade teacher this make me extra pissed off.    I just saw this on twitter.  I read the NPR article and listened to the audio before seeing it again on this nearly top 10,000 website!

  20. 20.

    Ken

    You want to make Sneetches about economics? Fine. The rich guy ends up even richer by exploiting the rivalry of the two groups to convince them to give him all their money. This, children, is called a “crab bucket”.

  25. 25.

    Rebel’s Dad

    @WaterGirl: Where do we begin?

    OT: I don’t know why I still go into moderation (maybe the blog is keeping me from making a fool of myself…?) I did what you told me. Sorry for the inconvenience :(

  26. 26.

    dexwood

    @dexwood: She, and five pups, had been dumped in the high desert near Cuba, New Mexico. A family found them, brought them home, cared for them for weeks before delivering them to Animal Humane of Albuquerque. We brought her home on New Year’s Eve. She has been great. Adaptable, well-behaved, calm, and happy. Her pups have all found homes. She has, too.

  27. 27.

    lowtechcyclist

    I figured all along that the point of the CRT panic (other than to turn Christopher Rufo into a Somebody in the wingnut right) was to make sure no teacher ever suggested that Black people might have ever had, let alone be having now, a more difficult row to hoe than White people do.

    But jeez, this manages to be even worse than I would have expected. And in the used-to-be-sane state of Ohio, too.

  28. 28.

    Citizen Alan

    Crap like this is why I’m so despairing. Because the goal of the GQP is to utterly destroy our educational system in order to keep future generations in bondage to their parents’ ignorance and bigotries. And they’re winning that battle. I want to weep for my younger nephew because he’s a 26yo teacher of 4th Grade students. And I give it 5 years at most before he gives detention or a bad grade to the wrong kid, and the brat’s parents will show up to school claiming he’s a “groomer.”

  30. 30.

    Gvg

    Ah yes, when banning something makes it go to the top of the best seller lists on a regular basis or brings it back into style. There is a good economics lesson.

    People will spend a lot of money to feel better than other people is a major reason for successful branding/marketing strategies. Not everything is as good as it’s advertised.

    That administrator pretty much guaranteed those kids are going to read that story and remember it far better than if he had kept his mouth shut. And every one of those kids is going to figure out that that admin is a defensive racist.

  31. 31.

    Matt McIrvin

    During the last flap about Dr. Seuss I remember people arguing that The Sneetches isn’t great as a parable about racism–too both-sidesy. It works better as a critique of fashion. But here we have it being booted as too on-the-nose about racism! I guess it’s good enough to tick somebody off.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @Rebel’s Dad

    Would you settle for an insult in German?

    Sie haben einen Dachschaden. (They have a damaged roof.) My German is beyond rusty, so grammatical tweaking welcome.

    Applicable even though so very, very flawed.

    “The truth is that men are tired of liberty.”
    – Benito Mussolini
    .

  33. 33.

    Elizabelle

    Interesting.   Planet Money committed some actual journalism here.  Good on them for releasing the full transcript.

    The administrator looks like a fool.  And would you want to be a teacher and have to thread your way through minefields opened by honest discussions of … Dr. Seuss?

  34. 34.

    Splitting Image

    What gets me is that these people spent years saying “wake up, sheeple!”

    Now that people are finally woke, they’re mad about it.

  36. 36.

    Ohio Mom

    I only listened to the first minute of the Planet Money episode and that was all I could stand. I started having flashbacks to the revolting economics curriculum Ohio Son was subjected to.

    The trigger was the boy in the episode describing the characters in the Eric Carle book as consumers and producers. It reminded me of the little book Son brought home from second grade titled “I am a consumer.” It was filled with his very adorable drawings of all the goods and services he liked consuming (computer games, French fries, etc.) My reaction then was wasted on him but I listed all the things he was that were more significant: son, grandson, cousin, student, friend, citizen, Jew, artist
and maybe some other categories that escape my memory at the moment.

    Economics is presented like it’s some fact of natural science rather than a human construct. And since it’s a fact, it has to be accepted and not critiqued, especially with an eye to improving it. You can’t change gravity and you can’t change capitalistic economics. They are givens.

    There are other ways of understanding the Eric Carle book — that even a young boy can be given and fulfill real responsibilities (in this case, helping to get all the ingredients together for the pancake), that we depend on one another in every aspect of our lives, that we are bound together in many ways, not just as consumers and producers.

    The point of the Sneetches story is precisely about biogotry, it’s not about the clever entrepreneur who alternatively sells the Sneetches stars and removes stars (that’s a plot device),however much the adults in this episode wanted to reduce the story to their fetish about economics being the one truth that explains everything.

  38. 38.

    Miss Bianca

    If I were that teacher, I would have given the administrator a thousand-yard stare and intoned, “you know, I tried to tell the children that this was a book about commodity fetishism, but they just wouldn’t listen!”

    And then I would have been fired, probably.

    And now you know why I wouldn’t ever make it as a public school elementary teacher.

  39. 39.

    James E Powell

    @trollhattan:

    Has anyone done a deep dive into how a total liar, a nothing, managed to win by eight points in a D+2 district?

    And everything I’ve read about that assigns no responsibility to the voters. Did they really choose this guy because of crime reports on the local news? Or the price of gas?

    This democracy thing, I’m thinking Plato had a point.

  41. 41.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Wait, last I heard, Dr Seuss was a cancel-culture martyr…

     

    I’M SO CONFUUUUUSED!

  42. 42.

    James E Powell

    @Anoniminous:

    White Americans are pig-ignorant about this country’s history.​​

    And they are pretty happy to stay that way. If you explain things, they get really angry.

  44. 44.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Our children are so much smarter than Christopher Rufo gives them credit for.

    Obviously.

  48. 48.

    The Moar You Know

    And every one of those kids is going to figure out that that admin is a defensive racist.

    @Gvg: the admin is defensive.  Her job and the teachers job is on the line here.  The threats are not idle.  I live in a pretty blue part of California and we’ve had a school board member and a superintendent quit because of the extreme number, amount and specificity of death threats.  My wife, who teaches in this district, has had five kids yanked from her class because she teaches kids that Hispanics and black people exist.  She’s got tenure and she’s in California, these people have none of that.  I know what happened is bullshit but it did not happen in a vacuum.  These people are terrified.  They should be. I am not no way no how going to blame the admin for what she did.

    ETA:  all it takes is one parent.  Of course, now that this has hit the news, they’ll both be fired anyway.

  49. 49.

    Tony G

    My God. this is shameful.  This is a great illustration of the (intentional) danger of these kind of phony controversies.  WIth rare exceptions, administrators in all organizations are selected and trained to be as obedient and risk-averse as possible.  There are several generations of administrators who have allowed themselves to be indoctrinated into a culture that prizes C.Y.A. above anything else.  So when the right (and sometimes the left) creates these fake controversies, the obedient administrators don’t have to be coerced in any way.  They will submissively follow the path of least resistance to avoid getting in trouble.  Self-censorship, to the detriment of any kind of education.

  51. 51.

    Elizabelle

    @Anoniminous:

    White Americans are pig-ignorant about this country’s history.​​

    I really take issue with such a blanket statement.  It’s offensive, while it may be true for a subset of that group, and probably a bigger subset than we’d like.

    I don’t know if Dr. Seuss would let you get away with such sloppy thinking or slandering.

    Apply “pig-ignorant” now to Sneetches. To people of color.  To religious minorities.  To people who are left-handed, or speak Spanish.  Whatever.

  53. 53.

    Tony G

    @The Moar You Know: I’m sorry, but I blame the administrator.  If she’s too cowardly to work as an educator, she should have gotten a different type of job.  Despicable.  xx

  54. 54.

    Raven

    @dexwood: How Bout That Dawg!! I made it to Atlanta with minutes to spare and I’m only going to be two hours later than my original schedule. I’m feeling pretty lucky.

  57. 57.

    Tony G

    @Elizabelle: I’m a “white” guy (Italian-American — I’m “white” now, but my ancestors who came over here sure as hell weren’t considered “white”).  Pig-ignorant is a pretty apt description of most “white” Americans.  “Leaders” like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis (or Saint Ronald Reagan for that matter) didn’t land in a flying saucer.  They were elected by pig-ignorant “white” people.

  58. 58.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Ohio Mom:

    Economics is presented like it’s some fact of natural science rather than a human construct.

    Yes! Yes!  And I must say, some economists have cotton-onto this.  Brad Delong certainly has, in his latest book, the result of his wandering thru the desert after his self-acknowledged failure as a member of the “standard program” of econ.

    Econ is great stuff, as long as we remember that it’s a way to try to understand human society and history.  So when Econ is at odds with human society and history, the former has to yield.

  59. 59.

    Kent

    @Amir Khalid:So what is the opposite of woke? Is it oblivious or ignorant or some combination of the two?

    Woke just means awoke or cognizant.  So the unwoke are those who are permanently asleep or sleepwalking.

    The correct technical term for such people is ….

    ZOMBIES

  60. 60.

    dww44

    @Raven: So I’m obviously out of the loop. Which direction are you traveling? Assuming I inferred correctly that you are traveling.

  61. 61.

    Ohio Mom

    @The Moar You Know: I have to wonder how much of the administrators panic was because the lesson was being recorded and would be widely publicized. She probably wouldn’t have even been in the room if it was just another lesson.

    Not excusing her, just trying to find an explanation. As you point out, educators are under terrible political pressure right now.

  62. 62.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Ohio Mom:

    The point of the Sneetches story is precisely about biogotry

    Ohio Mom, I’m old enough that even if I read the story in school, I’ve forgotten what it’s about.  But I for sure know that the phrase “star–bellied sneetches” is a prompt for a story about bigotry, and *not* about, y’know, *economics*.  I mean, I’m not an imbecile and I’ve been reading in our country’s discourse the last N years.  So …. well, I have difficulty believing that this *administrator* was anything other than a fucking bigot.

  63. 63.

    Steeplejack

    @Rebel’s Dad:

    I thought we fixed this once before. FYWP does not like (straight) apostrophes in nyms, because of some code issues behind the scenes. The solution for a possessive nym—which I thought WaterGirl went over with you before—is to use a “fancy” apostrophe  in your nym, such as this one > ’ <, which you can copy. Once you have used that in your nym and you have had a comment approved by a front-pager, you should be good to go for the future—unless your device is set up so that you have to reĂ«nter your nym every time you comment. If that is the case, you’ll have to manually insert the “fancy” apostrophe to make your nym match what is on record. From the “special characters” menu above the comment box, you should select the “right single quotation mark” character. That should  put you right.

  64. 64.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: Like most Boomers my age I had relatives who went through hell in World War Two, as well as some in-laws who were Holocaust survivors.  I have no patience for people like that cowardly school administrator.  I’m sorry.  As long as people VOLUNTARILY comply with this bullshit, the bullshit will continue.

  65. 65.

    Elizabelle

    @The Moar You Know:

    It’s a good comment, because that administrator, Amanda Beeman, may very well be terrified of bringing controversy down on her head, and on the school.

    But she is helping to fail these children in acquiring an education, and that is very plain to see from the transcript.  I bet a lot of people are cringing tonight, seeing this story, for various reasons.

    Maybe a “teaching moment” for administrations:  you lose a lot more by being so risk adverse, and there are some discussions that teachers and kids just have to be able to have.

    If “all it takes is one parent”, maybe we need to cut that parent’s power down.  A lot.  All it takes is one gun in a school, too.

  66. 66.

    NotMax

    @James E Powell

    Mom lives in that district. First, would question it being D+2, subjective impression is more like D+0.2.

    Second, in the few months leading up to the election she harped on the crime and inflation memes ad nauseum. (Did not vote for Santos, however.)

    Last solid. reliable and efficacious D from that district (boundaries altered more than once) was Lester Wolff. And he was defeated after eight terms in office by (ugh) the specious Republican John LeBoutillier.

  69. 69.

    Kent

    @Ohio Mom:

    @The Moar You Know: I have to wonder how much of the administrators panic was because the lesson was being recorded and would be widely publicized. She probably wouldn’t have even been in the room if it was just another lesson.

    Not excusing her, just trying to find an explanation. As you point out, educators are under terrible political pressure right now.

    Teacher here.

    I have an instinctual low opinion of administrators.  About 25% are really really good.  But the majority seem to be instinctual suck ups and cowards.  Maybe it just comes with the job, or those are the types who manage to get promoted into those sorts of positions.  Most good teachers actually want no part of those jobs.

  70. 70.

    Elizabelle

    @Tony G:  Wait until that teacher tries to teach the Holocaust, or how Nazis and fascists came to power, with some anxiety-ridden administrator sitting in on the class.

    It’s a fight we are going to have to have.

  71. 71.

    Tony G

    @Chetan Murthy: That’s right.  F*** NPR for making a story published during the darkest days of the Civil Rights movement, which is OBVIOUSLY a metaphor for racism into an anodyne story about economics.  NPR is another example of the culture of C.Y.A. cowards.

  72. 72.

    Raven

    @dww44: I’m coming home from the National Championship game in LA. My sis lives about a mile from the stadium and I got to spend good family time and a spectacular win! I woke up at 5 west coast time and my wife called me and said “have you looked at the news??” All-in-all I couldn’t have done better under these circumstances.

  73. 73.

    Another Scott

    @Rebels Dad:

    I think this was explained a while ago, but you may have missed it. (Sorry if others got there first.)

    You have to use something that looks like an apostrophe to our eyes, but doesn’t act like one to the WrodPress code.  Apostrophes in the ‘nym mess up WrodPress.

    Some details on different apostrophe marks are here.

    E.g.

    Rebel’s Dad (with normal apostrophe)
    Rebel’s Dad (using HTML for Right Single Quotation Mark)

    If you use the 2nd one as your handle, you shouldn’t have problems after the first time (and WaterGirl’s approval).

    HTH a little.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  74. 74.

    Tony G

    @Elizabelle: People should do their goddamn jobs.  If that administrator doesn’t want to be an educator, she should find another job.  WalMart might be hiring.

  75. 75.

    Kent

    @Elizabelle: @Tony G:  Wait until that teacher tries to teach the Holocaust, or how Nazis and fascists came to power, with some anxiety-ridden administrator sitting in on the class.

    It’s a fight we are going to have to have.

    I would turn to such an administrator and say:  “And now because we have to be balanced,  Mrs. Williams is going to present the other side and tell you all about how the Nazis could have been right when it came to the Jews.

  76. 76.

    Tony G

    @Elizabelle: That’s already happened in one of those dumb-ass Southern states (Tennessee I think?) when a teacher tried to include “Maus” on a middle-school reading list.  Shameful.

  77. 77.

    Robin Goodfellow

    @Amir Khalid: The word to describe people like that is that they are like the common clay of the new west. You know, morons.

    Woke to them is associated with mental acquity,  which they find highly offensuve.

    A recent example of this was the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia,  people were murdered for wearing glasses, which was deemed to be intellectual.

  78. 78.

    NotMax

    @Kent

    Maybe we can resurrect the term the publisher which later became Marvel Comics used when the Comics Code Authority first came into being during the 1950s, banning the word zombies: zuvembies.
    ;)

  79. 79.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @NotMax: Mom lives in that district. First, would question it being D+2, subjective impression is more like D+0.2.

    Interesting. Chris Hayes had a local reporter on who said the redistricting, by adding a large portion of Queens to the Nassau County portion, made it redder, which caught me a bit off guard since, as she said, it’s the Nassau part that makes it one of the richest CDs in NYS. That “college-educated suburbanite” part of the recent anti-trump coalition that’s always looking for an excuse to vote for tax cuts.

  80. 80.

    dww44

    @Raven: Aah! I now am clued in as I kinda recollect a comment you made a few days ago about that sister becoming deTrumpified. You were obviously in LA.

  81. 81.

    Elizabelle

    @Tony G:  The problem there is, Ms. Beeman does not want to be an educator.  She wants to be a bureaucrat, and get a nice state pension for doing it.

    A lot to think about from that NPR segment.

    Also think the teacher chose savvily.  She set that segment up well with a book thats full message could fly under the radar, a bit.

    Wonder if anyone will ask Virginia governor CRT Youngkin which Dr.  Seuss (or Eric Carle) books he is going to be banning from the Commonwealth’s schoolrooms.

  84. 84.

    Ohio Mom

    @Chetan Murthy: Ohio Son’s economics curriculum started in at least second grade and went on through the rest of his public schooling.

    Some other highlights were the sixth grade worksheet that described a public good as “a business run by the government,” and a junior high survey of economic systems throughout the nations of the world that just happened to omit the Scandinavian countries’ approach to social welfare.

    It’s not that I believe students shouldn’t be introduced to economics, but as you say, it should be presented along with a critique.

    One measure of how deep the current curriculum is into neoliberal economics is the teacher in the episode saying she had lots yet to teach about the Sneetches story — preferences, open markets, economic loss. If you are using time in the elementary school classroom on these topics, what topics were sacrificed?  Can young children really understand these topics in meaningful ways?

  85. 85.

    Elizabelle

    @Kent:  Something close to that happened, on audio or video, with some Texas administrator going over schoolbooks.  Don’t remember the particulars, but she definitely fell into the “both sides” morass, and possibly over actual Nazis, if memory serves.  She was instructing teachers on how to teach.

    Does anyone remember that one?  It’s from like a year ago.

  86. 86.

    Chetan Murthy

    I have to say, the fact that some of these third-graders could be aware enough to ask these sorts of questions …. is wildly promising and makes me optimistic about our country.  We were too busy picking on the short kid at our bus stop, to be thinking of these things.

  87. 87.

    Tony G

    @Kent: Actually (at a High School level) I would be all in favor of presenting the Nazi point of view so that it can be analyzed and critiqued.  When I was sixteen I presented a paper on an English translation of “Mein Kampf”.  Everybody thought I was nuts.  The book was very informative because (to me) it showed how Hitler’s ideology was an exaggerated version of all of the ugly facets of European culture — racism, anti-semitism, militarism, imperialism, social Darwinism — that had been festering for centuries.  Everyone should read Mein Kampf (although perhaps that might backfire).

  89. 89.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    George Santos @Santos4Congress 9h
    I was elected to serve the people of #NY03 not the party & politicians, I remain committed to doing that and regret to hear that local officials refuse to work with my office to deliver results to keep our community safe and lower the cost of living.

    I will NOT resign!

    Narrator….? NARRATOR….?

  90. 90.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chetan Murthy: Well, there’s microeconomics. The Sneetches’ prejudice allows them to be taken by a fellow who builds a pair of machines that can convert a plain-bellied Sneetch into a star-bellied one and vice versa, for a modest price. And then he keeps telling them the master race has switched from one to the other so the fees keep rolling in.

  91. 91.

    Soprano2

    Have any of you heard about the Stanford “banned words” thing? There was an editorial in our Sunday paper about it saying they wanted to ban the word “American” because people use it to identify people from the U.S. but there are 43 other countries in the Americas. Sounds like BS to me but Google wasn’t helpful. Also that they wanted to ban “he” and “she”, among other words.

  92. 92.

    Tony G

    @Chetan Murthy: … and people like that “administrator” will do everything that she can to make sure that those kids stop asking questions and start doing what they’re told.

  94. 94.

    dnfree

    @Tony G: Where we used to live, there was a black man who used to appear as Frederick Douglass and also do presentations on the racial history of the town (located in northwest Illinois).  The town did have an “informal” dividing street that blacks lived east of, with the western side of town mostly white.  I remember the man saying once that the Italians lived with the blacks on the east side, but then “all of a sudden the Italians became white!”

    In Rockford Illinois, in the 1950s when I was growing up, the situation was the opposite.  East high school was identified as the Swedish high school, and West high school was where the blacks and Italians attended.  I never thought twice until the 1960s about why that was.

  95. 95.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: There are certainly people in other countries in the Americas who get steamed at the US use of the adjectival form “American”, because to their ears it describes them too. One problem is that American English doesn’t have anything as euphonious as “estadounidense”.

    Often these stories get blown up from “somebody expressed offense” to “massive campaign of persecution”. But there have been cases of school administrators being silly too.

  96. 96.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: One of the stupid things about (many) economists, is that they build models that assume that economic behavior is separate from politics.  Economic behavior exists in societies, and all societies have politics.

  97. 97.

    Tony G

    @Elizabelle: Yes, that is the problem — and it’s in many organizations, not just schools.  I worked in I.T. for forty years, ten of them as a low-level supervisor.  A lot of my time as a supervisor was spent battling with or sweet-talking high level administrators so that they would leave the technical people alone to do their jobs.  I re-read “Catch-22” during that periodic of my life, and found it to be an accurate analysis.

  98. 98.

    Ohio Mom

    @Soprano2:
    Lots of words have two meanings, so someone is just going to have to deal with American meaning citizens of the US and also people of the Western Hemisphere. That campaign isn’t going to go anywhere.

    I have heard us described as USAians. That was by my sister’s family when describing the student body in the English-speaking private school her kids attended when they lived in Japan. There were Canadian, English, Australian and USAian students. But USAian hardly rolls off the tongue.

  101. 101.

    Ohio Mom

    @Tony G: Another stupid idea economists base their models on is that people make rational decisions. Sociology and psychology would like a word.

  103. 103.

    Sherparick

    @Anoniminous: Not quite incest, but still very creepy. Sally Hennings was the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and came to Monticello to be one of Martha Jefferson’s maid servants. So after Martha died, Jeferson began having relations with her enslaved half sister.

  104. 104.

    Another Scott

    @Soprano2: I saw something about it a few weeks ago.  I thought it was on Popehat, but I can’t find it there.

    Horse’s mouth:

    Update on Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative in Stanford’s IT Community

    Wednesday, January 4, 2023

    The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) was an effort co-sponsored by the Stanford CIO Council and the People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group. This initiative was catalyzed by events at the national and campus level during 2020. It was created by and for the IT community, not the broader community, and intended as a guide, not a mandate. More specifically, EHLI was created to address racist terms historically used in IT, such as “master” and “slave” to describe aspects of systems. The initiative’s scope of “racist terminology in technology” was later expanded more broadly as “harmful language in technology.” It was this expansion in scope that is at the heart of the intense recent feedback from the Stanford community and beyond.

    The Stanford IT community remains steadfast in its commitment to the university’s values of diversity and inclusion. The primary motivation of this initiative was always to promote a more inclusive and welcoming environment where individuals from all backgrounds feel they belong. The feedback that this work was broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity means we missed the intended mark. It is for this reason that we have taken down the EHLI site. The path forward will be determined after reviewing all recent feedback and consulting with university academic and administrative leadership. All efforts will be guided by Stanford’s commitment to academic freedom.

    Steve Gallagher
    Chief Information Officer
    Stanford University

    One should always be skeptical when something suddenly blows up on RWNJ media.

    HTH!

    Cheers
    Scott.

  106. 106.

    Jackie

    @Soprano2: My Dad was that way! Every time anyone used Americans to replace citizens of the USA, he went straight into correcting. Every country in North America, Central America, and South America were “Americans.”

    He was as Democratic as could be and stuck to his guns until his death in 2018. Even showing him the dictionary defining America aka the USA never swayed him! 

  109. 109.

    Tony G

    @Ohio Mom: Yes, that’s right.  I took several economics classes in college back in the Stone Age (seventies).  I came to the conclusion that it’s not totally useless — but that it has very little to do with the real world.  (I also took a class on “The Philosophy of Karl Marx” and came to a similar conclusion.)

  111. 111.

    Soprano2

    @Another Scott: One should always be skeptical when something suddenly blows up on RWNJ media.

    Oh I know, that’s why I asked about it.  I assume that not one of the people in this group thought about how it was going to play with regular people when they released a list of words deemed harmful that included “American”, “he”, and “she”. So now the idea that “‘liberals don’t want you to say “American”‘ is out there. It’s dumb, that’s not what actually happened, but it’s out there. Kind of like “Defund the Police”, which has great intentions but to the average person sounds completely idiotic. Thanks for posting that, I tried to search it but got mostly right-wing hair on fire crap about it.

  114. 114.

    Anne Laurie

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Chris Hayes had a local reporter on who said the redistricting, by adding a large portion of Queens to the Nassau County portion, made it redder, which caught me a bit off guard since, as she said, it’s the Nassau part that makes it one of the richest CDs in NYS.

    Queens, when I was growing up, was where city employees who were legally required to live in the city (firefighters, cops, et al) moved to avoid Those People.  In the decades since then, it’s become a haven for new immigrants from all over the world (Central / South America, Africa, South Asia) — who mostly can’t vote in American elections.

    It’s the tension between these two classes that, I suspect, makes this part of NYC almost as red as notoriously unwelcoming Staten Island!

  115. 115.

    Kent

    @Tony G:@Ohio Mom: Yes, that’s right.  I took several economics classes in college back in the Stone Age (seventies).  I came to the conclusion that it’s not totally useless — but that it has very little to do with the real world.  (I also took a class on “The Philosophy of Karl Marx” and came to a similar conclusion.)

    I took economics in college too.  And as a hard science major I was always annoyed and frustrated by the lack of any damn specificity.  The professor was always drawing some supply curve and some demand curve and where they crossed was the magic spot. But there were never any units or numbers so it was all meaningless.  Why can’t you draw the supply curve further to the right or left?  How do you KNOW that is the correct place to draw it?

    Never got any answers and happily went back to biology.

  116. 116.

    Anne Laurie

    @Tony G: Economic behavior exists in societies, and all societies have politics.

    I like the description from an Econ 101 professor:  Economics is the science of who eats… and who gets eaten.

  117. 117.

    Tony G

    @dnfree: My simple-minded view of U.S. history is that each immigrant group is despised for about a generation — but finally that group is allowed to be “white” as long as they join the other “whites” in hating the Blacks.  (Simple minded generalization, not-every-white-person, etc.).

  118. 118.

    Tony G

    @Kent: The problem with all social sciences is that you can’t really run experiments.  (Although the Nazis tried …)

  119. 119.

    Tenar Arha

    @Soprano2: It sounds like it was a list of harmful terms, sorted & categorized, they were trying to mostly remove from their website  & it got picked up by the usual suspects & run thru the RWNJ morph machine & turned into “banned words”. Then the university administration flinched & canceled the update. Here’s an Inside Higher Ed article, IMHO based on the title & lede, it is thankfully not full of the hyperbolic rage of all the articles I found from the right.

  121. 121.

    Kent

    @Another Scott:

    One should always be skeptical when something suddenly blows up on RWNJ media.

    Exactly.  They always just lie and make up shit completely out of thin air.

    A perfect example was the right wing media buzz about how “woke” school administrators were putting out litter boxes for kids who identified as “furries” or some shit.  Politicians and right wing media were repeating and amplifying it.

    Whereas any actual teacher could tell you that in this day and age, nearly every single HS kid in the country has a cell phone and if such litter boxes actually existed there would be about 5.5 million TikTok videos of them circulating in 3 hours.   Seriously.

  122. 122.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Tony G: My simple-minded *addition* to that view, is that it only works as long as the “immigrant group” is sufficiently whiter-than-the-[epithet elided].  When the immigrants are pretty damn brown, it breaks down.

  123. 123.

    Another Scott

    @Soprano2: Scrolling down that link, an earlier entry is:

    We have particularly heard concerns about the guide’s treatment of the term “American.” We understand and appreciate those concerns. To be very clear, not only is the use of the term “American” not banned at Stanford, it is absolutely welcomed. The intent of this particular entry on the EHLI website was to provide perspective on how the term may be imprecise in some specific uses, and to show that in some cases the alternate term “US citizen” may be more precise and appropriate. But, we clearly missed the mark in this presentation.

    Emphasis in the original.

    They’re in the “when you’re explaining, you’re losing” mode now, so they had to take it down.

    There’s nothing wrong with what Stanford’s IT people were doing. Thinking about language is important, because terms guide and constrain thinking. The RWNJs are twisting things, as they do.

    The Internet Archive has a capture of the site before it was taken down, if you want to see what they were really doing, rather than the spin.

    Imprecise Language
    Imprecise language is terms that utilize euphemisms, vagueness, or inaccurate words to not say what one is trying to say.

    Instead of: American

    Consider using: US Citizen

    Context: This term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas (which is actually made up of 42 countries).

    It seems like a fine list to me.

    I understand that you understand what the RWNJs are doing. ;-)

    HTH!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  124. 124.

    Ohio Mom

    @Another Scott: In interior design, it’s no longer the “master bedroom,” it’s now the “primary bedroom.” Could be the master/slave thing or could be women (who must be the majority of interior designers) didn’t like the master of the house/wife thing. Or both.

  125. 125.

    Ken

    @Anne Laurie: I like the description from an Econ 101 professor:  Economics is the science of who eats
 and who gets eaten.

    I think the professor was quoting Sweeney Todd.

  126. 126.

    NotMax

    @Kent

    Economics professor in college was European and so old school he instructed his students he expected them to applaud at the end of every class, as he had experienced overseas.

  127. 127.

    Kent

    @Tony G:@Kent: The problem with all social sciences is that you can’t really run experiments.  (Although the Nazis tried 
)

    Yes, but in the real sciences you collect data and do quantitative analytical work based on observations all the time.  For example, climate change.  We can’t find some other planet and run a big global warming experiment. But that doesn’t stop us from collecting billions of lines of observational data from our own planet and doing immensely sophisticated quantitative modeling.

    I get that economics collects a lot of data too.  But all the unquantitative  theory and endless graphs just annoyed me.  You don’t see that in say biology.  The textbooks and lectures are full of examples using real data.

  128. 128.

    Ken

    @Tony G: The problem with all social sciences is that you can’t really run experiments.

    The “laboratories of democracy” sometimes provide opportunities.  I vaguely recall a David Anderson post (might have been Richard Mayhew) that was comparing health care outcomes in counties along some border — Pennsylvania and Ohio, perhaps — where every factor was pretty much the same except the ACA Medicare expansion.

  129. 129.

    mvr

    I’m late to this thread but if I had kids I would encourage them to bring up discrimination a lot so that it would make the lives of those who want to squelch such discussions difficult.

    In 1968, in fifth grade in my very conservative Republican run segregated town we discussed racism and discrimination. Fifty years later I guess some adults can’t handle the thought. FFS!

  132. 132.

    gene108

    Via “Wonkette”

    Later, Beras checked back with the school district, receiving an email making clear that the district fears the loonies who’ve been making life hell for educators. It said “school districts across the nation are being scrutinized for book selections in our schools on both sides of the spectrum,” which is true if by “both sides of the spectrum” (a spectrum by definition is not binary) you mean “Republicans and also Proud Boys.”

    Shouty conservatives bullied a school district into banning a Dr. Seuss book, because it might veer the school into wrong think about the reality of American history.

  134. 134.

    The Moar You Know

    Whereas any actual teacher could tell you that in this day and age, nearly every single HS kid in the country has a cell phone and if such litter boxes actually existed there would be about 5.5 million TikTok videos of them circulating in 3 hours.   Seriously.

    @Kent: each classroom in our district was issued one five gallon bucket of kitty litter.  My wife just confirmed.

    They are so kids and teachers wouldn’t try to leave the class to go to the bathroom during school shooting lockdowns.

    Fox won’t cover that.  Not in a million years. 

  135. 135.

    Soprano2

    @Another Scott: Oh I know what the right wingers are doing. The problem is that Stanford IT did put the word “American” on a list of “harmful” words. It’s easy to make a big deal out of that. It sounds stupid to the average person.  The truth is that it’s probably better not to be that transparent about it because most people don’t understand the nuances of stuff like this.

  136. 136.

    Another Scott

    @Soprano2: No, they didn’t.

    “American” is on the list of “Imprecise Language”.  And they’re right, in some contexts, it is imprecise.

    Yes, the page header talks about “Harmful Language”, but critics are twisting what the initiative was doing.  The RWNJs got their pound of flesh, and the site was taken down – for now.

    But, as others have said, the RWNJs will twist anything to get attention – it’s how they reinforce their memes and their tribal identity.  We don’t have to play along.

    tl;dr – Always beware the ellipsis.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  139. 139.

    Kent

    @The Moar You Know: Never heard of that in any school I have ever worked at.  Sounds incredibly stupid.  I mean in the one in a million chance that your school is actually in the middle of a real school shooting crisis, that is the least of your worries.  Just grab any ordinary trash can or paper recycling bin in your classroom and use that for any kid who can’t hold it.   Seriously.

    We do have buckets of kitty litter in all our science labs, but that is for chemical spills and is the standard thing to spread on your lab floor if you have an oil spill or some spill of any volatile chemical.

  140. 140.

    James E Powell

    @NotMax:

    Mom lives in that district. First, would question it being D+2, subjective impression is more like D+0.2.

    It has to be something like that or that it’s one of those areas where people will vote for Democrats in state & local elections, but vote R in federal elections.

    I feel that way about the two southern California districts that I keep ranting and raving about.

  142. 142.

    James E Powell

    @Tony G:

    I re-read “Catch-22” during that periodic of my life, and found it to be an accurate analysis.

    Similar. I found that Catch-22 is an accurate analysis of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

  144. 144.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    The attempt by the Right to censor education is pretty hilarious; history is like porn, science and other naughty things, it’s out there on the Internet.  The reason history is taught in schools  is make it so unpleasant the kids don’t start thinking.

    @Anoniminous: White Americans are pig-ignorant about this country’s history.

    History is a complex topic, hard to understand and ruins EVERYTHING, no exceptions. That’s why people hate it and make up myths.

    “We were heroically rescuing our queen who was kidnapped by those degenerate women abusing Asians, totally NOT on a tawdry raid on for as much shit as we could steal and farmer’s daughters we could kidnap!” Homer, the Iliad

  145. 145.

    Raoul Paste

    So we are going to tiptoe around Dr. Seuss?  What are these people worried about?  Are they worried that parents won’t be able to teach their kids to be little racists?

    this is really irritating

  146. 146.

    ian

    @Soprano2: That sounds like the perfectly designed fox-news boogieman.  I am skeptical to say anything about it without seeing and hearing a lot more about it.  Do you have a link

    Edit: I see anotherscott has one.

  147. 147.

    LeftCoastYankee

    I had to hit Refresh 15x (no, I counted) to get the cursor to show in this box, so I can type anything.  Therefore I am typing this instead of whatever half-assed pithy observation I was thinking 2 minutes ago.

    Mozilla version whatever the latest is.

    Oh, and pithy observation is Cheney/Turd Blossom administration packing the NPR board in the lead up to the Iraq debacle has not been fixed in the near 20 years since, and people still wonder why NPR sounds like David Brooks on Ecstasy.

  148. 148.

    NobodySpecial

    @dnfree:

    In Rockford Illinois, in the 1950s when I was growing up, the situation was the opposite.  East high school was identified as the Swedish high school, and West high school was where the blacks and Italians attended.  I never thought twice until the 1960s about why that was. 

    As a resident during the People Who Care lawsuit, I can tell you Rockford didn’t really change until into the 21st century.

  149. 149.

    Ken

    It’s ironic that these white conservative christians want families to have lots of kids, but the first thing kids notice is the (perceived) injustice and inequity of how they are treated with respect to their siblings.  (he got more than me!!! how come I can’t do what she gets to do?)

  152. 152.

    Geminid

    @James E Powell: New York voting reminded me of Virginia’s 2021 election, when Youngkin won by 2 in a state Biden carried by 10 the year before. Some Democrats were complacent and stayed home, Republicans were hungry and had good turnout.

    A third difference in voter behavior (I think) is that some Independents swung from the Democratic to the Republican column.

    The presence of Trump on the 2020 ballot and absence in Virginia in 2021 and in New York in 2022 changed voting behavior in all three groups. He boosted Democratic turnout much more than he did Republican in New York and Virginia, I think. So the swings in those two states were in part a reversion to the norm.

    Independents are a pretty disparate, if not motley, group. Some political scientists say a common behavior of some Independents is voting against the party in power, and a preference for divided government.

    That may exlain some of the difference from 2020 and 2022 in the NY 3rd CD. A crude voting model might posit a 4 point drop in Democratic votes relative to Republican and swing among Independents causing causing a net 6% shift in votes. That would account for a 10% divergence between the D+3 PVI and the +8 Santos win.

  153. 153.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Another factor in the NY 3rd CD result was that in the 2020 race Tom Suozzi was the incumbent, and notoriously a moderate. In 2022 Mr. Zimmerman was a relative unknown, and easier to tag with various Republican stereotypes of Democrats.

  155. 155.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @Anoniminous: Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s wife’s half sister.  Still horrible.  Add to the list that Jefferson had Ms. Hemings  serve as a personal attendant to one of her nieces.

  156. 156.

    Tony G

    @LeftCoastYankee: “David Brooks on Ecstasy”.  I’ll have to remember that one!  That timeline sounds about right.  I’ve been listening to NPR since the late seventies, and I don’t think that it’s always been as bad as it’s been in the past twenty years.  One annoyance (for me) has been the emergence of those “economics-only” shows like “Planet Money” and “Marketplace” — as if economic issues can be separated from other social and political issues.  This latest atrocity seems like the latest manifestation of that: “Don’t you dare talk about the obvious metaphors for racism in the children’s book.  Focus on the Invisible Hand of the Free Market!”.

  157. 157.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: As for that administrator — I agree that she’s an enabler of the problem, not the root cause of the problem.  Humans are human, and very few people have principles that are not self-serving, and even fewer will risk their livelihood for those principles.  The administrator is just another mediocrity who will do what she’s told to do.

  158. 158.

    Geminid

    @Cheryl from Maryland: Historian Annette Gordon-Read’s book, The Hemingses of Monticello (2008) has a whole lot of material on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Gorden-Reed’s analysis varies somewhat from that expressed by people here tonight, in detail at least and maybe in conclusions.

    The Hemingses of Monticello is, as its title says, a history of the whole Hemings family (including Sally Hemings’ brother George, who also accompanied Jefferson to France). Gordon-Reed’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

  160. 160.

    Tony G

    @Ken: Yeah, kids seem to have an inborn sense of fairness (at least fairness toward themselves).  So they have to be taught that “those people” don’t deserve to be treated fairly.

  162. 162.

    mvr

    @NobodySpecial: Hey, I grew up in Rockford as well. 1958-63 & 1968-76. It is the conservative Republican-run town I mentioned above. And I know all about the People Who Care lawsuit, which was what the town deserved after decades of diverting educational resources to us white folks.

  163. 163.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Look we can all agree that racism happens (passive voice) and is bad, but when you start tying it to something pure and color-blind like Economics, that is just a bridge too far.  That’s why they hate 1619 Project so much; because it ties Slavery to economics, personal wealth, healthcare etc., so eloquently and in a language that everyone here can easily understand.  Same goes for Kendi’s Stamped From The Beginning.

  164. 164.

    J R in WV

    @Rebel’s Dad: ​
    The problem is the apostrophe in your nyn… WordPress, the tool that BJ runs on doesn’t like punctuation in nyms, esp apostrophes.

    I’m sure someone already said this…

  172. 172.

    GibberJack

    @The Moar You Know:

    a school board member and a superintendent quit because of the extreme number, amount and specificity of death threats

    Klan America has discovered how to achieve the same goal without cross burnings.

    It’s still terrorism.

  174. 174.

    dssq

    @Tony G: i read an english language translation of mein kampf about a year ago and agree with tonyg that people should read the book.

  175. 175.

    Tony G

    @dssq: Yup.  As the thirties and forties fade into the distant past, Hitler and the Nazis have become cartoon figures.  But my impression from reading Hitler’s magnum opus years ago was that his ideology was primarily an exaggerated version of European (including American) ideology.

Comments are closed.