Courageous, Eloquent, Disturbing

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A teacher’s letter of resignation.

Of course, not all students are true believers. Many pretend to agree because of pressure to conform. I’ve heard from students who want to ask a question but stop for fear of offending someone. I have heard from students who don’t participate in discussions for fear of being ostracized. One student did not want to develop her personal essay — about an experience she had in another country — for fear that it might mean that she was, without even realizing it, racist. In her fear, she actually stopped herself from thinking. This is the very definition of self-censorship.  

Read the whole thing.

Kids who develop under an environment such as the one described will tend to become either cowards or bullies.   (Of course, they may also become both cowards and bullies)

What happens to a business or other organization that employs a high % of people who came of age in such an environment?   What happens to an entire society when many of its citizens–especially citizens in leadership organizations–grew up in atmospheres of conformity and bullying?

See also the comments of a Virginia woman who grew up in Maoist China and sees very disturbing parallels with what is going on at her son’s former high school in Virginia.

15 thoughts on “Courageous, Eloquent, Disturbing”

  1. I’ve said it before, here and in other internet threads, that Critical Race Theory inflicted on school children, is child abuse – a kind of intellectual child molestation. The teachers and bureaucrats pushing it ought to be treated as the vicious perverts and child molesters that they are. Laying a guilt trip on a white kid for something they never had a part in and cannot change, while telling the kids of color that they can never go anywhere ’cause the whites will keep them down? That’s unconscionable child abuse under cover of authority, as parents see it, and no damn wonder they are furious. I’d be going to school board meetings with torches and pitchforks if it concerned my kid. This is why Wee Jamie will be home schooled, if I have any say in it.

  3. Congratulations, Tatyana! And yes … exhilarating and frightening, too, seeing that what’s all around us. But the future belongs to those who bother to have kids to show up for it.
    I was so relieved by the road trip into the Hill Country, this last weekend. It was so nice … so normal. Wildflowers in the fields. Everything green, green, green. People going out for a good time on the rivers and lakes. At the local lavender festival, going for a weekend lunch at the burger joint in Johnson City. It was all real, ordinary, comfortable, and so, so nice. I love small town Texas so much…

  5. Thank you, Celia! And to you, too.
    I have only been to Dallas (and much impressed), not to the wide green country, it seems such a happy place. In contrast to NY, where we now have shootings every night and day, I guess it’s a competition with Chicago in a race to the bottom.
    Was just reading a post by a blogger in Vienna, who describes their “new normal”: “3G”: Geimpft, Genesen, Getestet”. The “green passport” is required for access everywhere: to a cafe, barbershop, grocery store, etc. If one didn’t submit to a vax, a covid-negative test is acceptable, taken from 72 to 24hr in advance. Imagine what life turns out to be – constant test-taking, and all the time spent in lines, and to get anywhere “an advance reservation is required”…

  6. Just remember that you will never “own teh libz” by pointing out hypocrisy. Because nobody cares about hypocrisy except Nazis.

  7. The purpose is not owning the libs.

    There are not too many leftists to kill, but they are sheltered by unwise moderates who mistakenly believe that these are people that they can live at peace with.

    Redpill the moderates, at least enough to get them to stand aside, and the problems will very nearly solve themselves.

    Once the Left gave up entirely on persuasion, the nature of the debate changed. It follows from that in a roundabout way that our goal in debating is not primarily persuasion.

    The left has vast apparati of disinformation, and coercion of false speech. This creates a situation of preference falsification, which is vulnerable to being overturned by preference cascade.

    Right now, the preference cascade is in an early slow phase of propagation. But it is just barely detectable that it is happening. If everyone was still convinced that leftist strength is too strong to resist, Manchin would not still be doing what he is doing.

    What happens next, and when, are unclear. Here and now, merely speaking truth is more than sufficient. It is definitely not futile or pointless.

  8. tl;dr: counting coup is not necessary when you can simply kill the m@#$er effers.

  9. “What happens to a business or other organization that employs a high % of people who came of age in such an environment?

    Also bear in mind that our military has to recruit from such a cohort.

  10. Nada…true there is a hard core who won’t be bothered by the hypocrisy…because they don’t really think it is hypocrisy. Just as a 1920 Soviet Communist didn’t think it was hypocrisy to deny the son of a landlord a college education when an equally-or-less-qualified son of a peasant was admitted–because the cases were different, in his mind. Just as a 1933 Nazi supporter didn’t see any hypocrisy in laws discriminating against Jews.

    But I think (hope) that Bob The Registered Fool is correct that such people are a minority of those who identify and vote as Democrats / ‘progressives’ and that there are still a fair number who can be reached by rationality IF the information blockade can be pierced and effective persuasion tactics are used.

  12. It doesn’t really matter if a majority of identify/vote Democrat are unreachable, if the fraction that identify/vote Democrat are a sufficiently small minority. 80% isn’t so much a problem if that is out of 10% of adults.

    One of the fundamental uncertainties is whether we are looking next at electoral remedy, litigation remedy, or civil war remedy.

    Electoral remedy is the one where the largest fraction of adult opinions are relevant. Because it is very easy to vote. Fundamental issue, if there is enough reasonable suspicion of fraud, there is little cause to treat an election as binding.

    For litigation to bind, you need some reasonable expectation of process integrity. Law is a profession, which means that the process does not admit much opportunity for laymen to go in and adjust things directly when they are not confident in trusting the experts. So, a lower fraction matters, but it is not necessarily a subset of the most hard core Democrats. Lawyers are trained in academia. Thus, they may be responsive to theoretical arguments. Appearance of profession wide collusion, principle-agent trust, the theory that the value of an expert lies in the public’s willingness to trust, and that law faculty often overlook certain aspects of the foundational theory of law are all things with which one can try to persuade judges and lawyers.

    Civil wars suck, are a terrible alternative, and are almost certain to be less binding than even very flawed elections and legal systems. The thing about civil wars, sometimes the people who need to be persuaded are a small subset. Issue with this argument, the current proto civil war looks like it will hinge on a great many opinions. Even if some of the hard core Democrats are too infirm or too out of contact with reality to matter.

    I am forced to conclude that the answer I least want is most correct. I do not wish to speak with lawyers.

    I’m prejudiced against lawyers, prefer to have nothing to do with them, do not think I can reach the small number I know, and fear the consequences of trying to speak to my local law faculty.

    I also do not know how to phrase my arguments not to sound like insanity and venom.

  13. I also do not know how to phrase my arguments not to sound like insanity and venom.

    I sympathize. I generally think the same about my own comments, made worse by the words I mistakenly leave out and other errors. Anyway, I think your comment was clear enough and quite lacking in insanity.

    It seems to me that the left has become weary of losing arguments to people who have noticed reality, and has simply decided to declare reality racist. I used to argue with leftists for fun on the internet, and after a while I noticed that the default reaction was simply to ban from commenting anyone who disagreed with them. The leftists today who are attempting to force schools to teach CRT, etc, don’t seem any different to me than people I was arguing against twenty years ago online. Crazy then, crazy now. But now the mask has fallen off.

    “But I think (hope) that Bob The Registered Fool is correct that such people are a minority of those who identify and vote as Democrats / ‘progressives’ and that there are still a fair number who can be reached by rationality IF the information blockade can be pierced and effective persuasion tactics are used.”

    The left surely thinks so. This is why they fight so hard to prevent any sort of alternative media from existing, and why they and their Gee Ohh Peeee pets fought so hard against Trump. Their grip on power cannot survive a genuine opposition, and they know it.

  14. When we drive to California, as we did this past weekend, we listen to audio books. Driving over Friday, we listened, for perhaps the third time, to “Means of Ascent” the second volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. This volume has the story of the 1948 Senate election in which Johnson stole the election from former Governor Coke Stevenson. Caro, as he often does, writes an entire biography of Stevenson since the man has been demonized by Johnson partisans, including the presidential library. Stevenson was four times governor of Texas and has an interesting life story, mostly lost until Caro restored it. The story of the election fraud is so similar to the 2020 election, even though old fashioned methods were used. Harry Truman aided the theft because he needed Texas in the 1948 presidential race. Hugo Black, a former Klansman supreme court justice, put a stop to the investigation in Texas agreeing with a brief by Abe Fortas, Johnson’s fixer who he would later try to elevate to Chief Justice.

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