I've written previously about a San Francisco school board choosing to waste $600K on removing a "harmful" mural depicting history. (Should the school fall short by $600K for genuinely educational purposes sometime in the future, they shall elicit no sympathy whatsoever from this commonsense blogger.) To the irredeemable deplorables in flyover country clinging bitterly to their guns and bibles, that sounds pretty idiotic if not bewildering, but it's all too clear that the left-inbreeders don't care what those outsiders think.
Now we get more along the same lines: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids. (Tucker Carlson discussed some main points of this article on his show yesterday, but my attention was drawn to this Atlantic piece by Google News, of which I am a regular user.) This piece details the way in which, since roughly 2014, the "educators" have made a fervent effort to systematically degrade and ultimately destroy the NYC public school system in the name of, you guessed it, "diversity" and its cluster of associated "progressive" values. They have gotten really obnoxious about it, too. For instance, without informing parents, the "educators" removed the "Boys" and "Girls" signs from the bathrooms, leading to unpleasantness for the students who eventually went back to using the bathrooms they used before. (After the parents found out, the school had to come up with a better solution. "After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral." Gee, these progressive woke geniuses charged with "educating" the kids couldn't figure out such a common sense solution on their own?)
This paragraph in particular caught my eye:
But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.
If you can't tell the difference between satire and the real thing, that should be cause to reconsider the real thing.
So, how could one tell a satire of today's unhinged American left and Demo rats apart from the real thing? Apart from having knowledge of their histories, how could one tell idiots like AOC apart from a GOP plant?
As a result of ideological inbreeding, many prominent members of the American left today are lightning quick to identify controversial statements as racist. It's not enough to oppose racism; you have to agree with them on what qualifies as racism, and you'd better agree pretty quickly, because, well, that's what they're used to getting after all that inbreeding.
(Case in point: Yet Again, Trump Attacks a Prominent Black Journalist. So who's injecting race into this, and when race is injected into things, isn't that a subtle form of racism? Headlines like this only prove Trump's (and Trump voters') point. Anyone with a clue knows by now that Trump could very well attack anyone who isn't part of his own family. Have you seen how be badmouths numerous former high-level members of his administration? Nevertheless, he is a very stable genius at selecting high-level officials. As for the "prominent black journalist" in question, MSDNC's Joy Ann Reid - someone with an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome - she is symptomatic of the badly degraded opinion-quality standards on that channel.)
As you might suppose, I don't like ideological inbreeding wherever it occurs. I don't like the ideological inbreeding of the George W. Bush years that culminated in the GOP drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid. (How could you tell either way whether Palin was a plant, absent knowledge of her history? The parallels between Palin and AOC are quite strong, are they not.)
Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: philosophical education. Philosophers (the genuine articles, of course, not pseudos) avoid inbreeding by practicing the art of dialectic. Among human cognitive endeavors, philosophy is as progressive and woke as it gets.
