A simple either-or-or (re "educators" and "white privilege")

Say that caucasian students in America are brought up in the classroom from First Grade onward to acknowledge and make confessions of their "white privilege."  Can this be expected to:

(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way

"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1).  Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are?  Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?

I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes.  The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.

They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.

Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?

The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.

Am I missing anything here?

I'm going with (2).  Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward?  If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?

[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones?  The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks.  No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly.  See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]

Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps)

Might as well continue in drill sergeant mode for this one.  (And why not?  I find that I rather like writing in drill sergeant mode, for "mysterious" reasons I'll let you use your own fucking noggin to figure out.)

So, I learn about David Wallace-Wells's book, The Unhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (hereafter TUE), after reading Andrew Sullivan's seemingly well-reasoned piece on the toxic-as-fuck radical trans ideology madness.  (I say seemingly, because past experience has made me skeptical about Sullivan; his reckless idiocy about Rand stands out too far, and his verbal fellating of Obama in '08 didn't quite pan out in any sort of transformative presidency.)  (I have a fresh draft still in the queue about the latest ultra-toxic trans ideology madness, quite possibly the gravity well that ends up sucking in the entire political left in its already-near-batshit-crazy current form; long story short, if the left's goal is to get Trump re-elected, then embracing the madness as the Democrats appear poised to do might be a wonderful idea.  It'll help things along nicely if leftists (continue to) foam at the mouth and basically lie that Trumpism is fascism.)  Sullivan's comments on TUE appear at the link below the trans-madness piece.  His views echo those of the great majority of goodreads reviewers: it paints a picture of a future that is nothing short of frightening.

I have no expertise on the subject of climate change.  Whenever I hear about the latest in climate alarmism I am reminded of Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb from half a century ago; suffice it to say that its alarmist predictions did not come to pass.  He lost that resource-scarcity bet with Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource, HINT HINT).  But my well-developed (I think) "ring of truth" detector says that the climate change problem is for real, based on a comprehensive body of data which is best explained by man-made CO2 emissions.  The observed increase in temperatures appears to be happening at a pace well out of the usual range for such things over geologic time.  (Anyway, what do we do if we're still around when that Yellowstone supervolcano blows?  I don't know shit.)  My "ring of truth" detector also tells me that the American Right in particular has been epistemically reckless about this subject.  It's not just that the very stable genius Trump might somehow happen to be right that "climate change is a hoax" (etc.), but rather it's his dogmatic, unaccountable and therefore credibility-shitting way of speaking on the subject, the fucking dickhead.  If he has some kind of argument, I haven't seen it.  The piece of shit.  Speaking of that Ehrlich-Simon bet, Trump should put some of that money where his big loud mouth is and place a bet on climate change outcomes.  Also, the fat scumbag could stand to lose some weight.

The wikipedia page for TUE indicates a reception that's more mixed - as in, less ready than the goodreads reviewers to buy into Wallace-Wells' alarmism.

But I'm here to address issues surrounding the climate change debate - e.g., the nature of the debate itself.  I'm also addressing it as someone who regularly beats the drum for philosophical education as a comprehensive means of solving a vast range of human problems/challenges; the aim is to facilitate better living by making humans better problem-solvers.  And I have certain recommendations for living that make abundant sense in their own right, regardless of whether the lifestyle changes involved are necessary to combat climate change.

First off, the likes of Naomi Klein bring their own (leftist) baggage to this issue.  The left has hated capitalism well before climate change ever became a major concern.  All the shitty arguments these disgusting creatures made against capitalism has destroyed their credibility.  The overall credibility of the left today is in shambles.  Just as they are the boy who cried racism, they are the boy who cry that capitalism is inhumane and unjust, and they also happen to be the boy who's been crying climate catastrophe.  This is to say that the more we can leave discreditable and toxic leftist politics out of this, the better, and we'd better look for the most credible people we can find who are not affiliated with the political left (especially the far left).  AOC's credibility is in that toilet she claims the migrants were told to drink from.  Flush her and her ilk down so that we can get serious.

(Besides, anyone who knows about libertarianism/capitalism in steelmanned version knows that there is no such thing in such a version as a right to impose negative externalities.  Private property rights so constrained are consistent with ecological health.  So this is consistent with stiff penalties for the sorts of lifestyle decisions I prescribe against below.  [An issue I am no expert on is how the legal system rationally goes about relying on science to estimate the extent of externalities damages.])

Nuclear energy strikes me as a serious measure to reduce carbon footprint.  I don't know if the nuke facilities can be made redundant in their security measures well enough to avoid Fukashima-like fuck-ups.

But the real solutions lies in basic lifestyle changes (and these are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give the general flavor/mindset):

Don't have kids.  You don't need them.  (Not as a pressing need, anyhow.  [Edit: Okay, so it's context-dependent, I guess; context-dependent needs...?  I shall think through this more thoroughly, I might be wrong, maybe have fewer kids, etc....]  Existing humans are in abundance and a great many of those could use some Aristotelian-eudaimonic social capital to help get their acts together.  How about prioritizing things in that direction if legacy-traces is the motivation here.)  Easy way to reduce your carbon footprint.  Your biology has programmed and perhaps fooled you into thinking it is an imperative within the framework of a reflective sapient creature's meaning-fulfillment.  Wake the fuck up.  Chances are non-zero that having kids these days will consign them to that uninhabitable-earth scenario.  Don't be a fucking moron.

Stop eating so fucking much, you fat fucking pigs, especially you sedentary and slovenly American pigs.

You don't need that big car, and the big house, with that big yard that you wastefully water and manicture.  Instead of spending all your time and money on that shit, buy some books and read some more.  E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful may not be a bad choice.

Unplug from your devices and screen-time once in a goddamn while at least.  (If you must have screen time, why not use it to be a film buff, and fucking listen and learn any and all necessary film references/quotes.)  You are dopamine addicts seeking your next momentary fix, you fucking pathetic pieces of shit.  Shut 'em off cold turkey if you have to, go outside and exercise (which will require energy but then again your not having kids should offset problems there).  Get off your twitter feed, stop caring about getting the "likes."  Nobody was ever great by virtue of being liked.  No monument has been erected to honor a critic.

Make wisdom and its pursuit the centerpiece of your existence.  Learn to learn better.  If you're going to be online (2 hrs a day is about the healthy limit), seek out and read philosophy blogs rather than the latest twitter turd-pile.  Seek out opposing opinions as much as you can and try to prove your own ones wrong if they haven't been established by exhaustive research.  (Have I established by exhaustive research that wisdom(-pursuit) is a really wise idea?  Am I reasoning in a vicious circle, or a virtuous one?  Is any attempt to refute wisdom-pursuit self-defeating?  You tell me, genius; I don't know fuck-all.)  You're not entitled to your opinion qua opinion, you entitlement-mentality lazy little shit.  Get obsessed with wisdom and character because that's really all that matters, and not all those material consumables.  The more wise you are, the better you can meet your ultimate fate (natural death, car crash, inevitable ecosystem collapse, tech-based immortality, whatever it turns out to be).

Learn some aesthetic appreciation if you haven't yet.  That'll tune you in better to the beauty of nature and cause you to respect it more.  Stop subsidizing factory farming with your thoughtless, inhumane cakehole-stuffing.  You'll also develop an appreciation for having an aesthetically pleasing figure rather than that tub of lard you're probably dragging around.

If you're having trouble finding guidance, ask yourself what Aristotle, Jesus, Einstein, Ghandi, MLK, the Buddha might do.  Even if you know next to jackshit about these figures, certain shall we say archetypical behaviors and attitudes may pop into mind.  Then adapt for your own personality and circumstances as necessary, since in fact only Aristotle is (was) eligible to do what Aristotle would do.  What if you draw inspiration from both Aristotle and Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the senior drill instructor (and/or the Snake Diet Wizard, the Fat Shaming King)?  Then incorporate both inspirations into your act.  Don't stop there.  Dialectically synthesize the fuck out of all your positive influences and add your own unique touch, for shit's sake.

When in doubt, try being kind instead of being an asshole.  Try not going out of your way to misconstrue someone's statements on the internet, as insecure strawman-mongering pieces of shit do.  If you do have to be an "asshole," have a good reason, like motivating some weak-ass limp-dick fools into becoming the versions of themselves they can and should be.

Become more acutely aware that human flourishing is a social activity involving a congeniality of diverse and complementary excellences, and act accordingly.  Strive for excellence and nobility and encourage it in others (which is part of striving for excellence and nobility).

===

Is it really hard to believe that if humanity adopts the spirit of these recommendations/guidelines that problem-solving abilities can and will go through the roof?  I mean, after all, how much is the problem-solving potential of AI constrained by the quality of those AI is meant to assist?

Here I'm trying to finally get around to delving into Hurley's Natural Reasons (written at the age of 35 by someone with clearly more raw talent than I possess) presumably in preparation for my own treatise, and I keep getting distracted by this other shit?  Goddammit!

[Possibly in the queue if/when priorities permit: tying together common strands in Ayn Rand and The Big Lebowski.  I am quite possibly the only person on the planet who is very well-versed in both, which should make for some kind of potent combination that manifests itself somewhere/somehow if one makes the effort to look around.  They both have had the word "cult" attached to them in some way or other.  Let's just say I'm an enthusiast for both, and Rand-bashers are a bunch of fucking amateurs; the dipshits don't have the goods they represent themselves as having.  They are high in the running for intellectually laziest worldwide.  Their weakness is vanity.  Rand went out, overcame obstacles, and achieved while they're just looking for a credibility-handout, pretending that it was she who micturated upon their own credibility.  Leftist losers, indeed.  I can't solve their problems, only they can.  As for Rand herself: wonderful woman, I'm all very fond of her.  But as some wiser fella than myself once said, . . . aw hell, I've lost my train of thought here.]

Re: those always-crying-racism leftist losers

The image above says a bunch but here's another image that also comes to mind:

There is no racial bigotry here! I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops, or greasers; here you are all equally worthless!

America needs to get rid of its racism, structural and otherwise, but more than that the American left in need of getting its philosophical act together.  And that is why I intend to trigger these fucking losers as much as needed to get the point across.  They are in desperate need of the boot-camp treatment because as disappointing, dysfunctional and occasionally disgusting the racial situation in this country is, it hardly even begins to compare to the absolutely and utterly loathsome, shitty, grabasstically unorganized intellectual state of the American Left.  They have reduced themselves to subhuman scum (qua leftists; they might be functional people in other respects).  But inside every one of those filthy maggots is a lover of wisdom trying to get out.

I've written about the main fundamental problems with leftism before.  To recap the basics plus whatever else new comes to mind: Leftists are obsessed with the political because it's their religion-substitute, their source of meaning in "something greater than themselves."  They're full of hubris and conceit about their supposed intellectual and moral superiority.  They refuse to listen in good faith to the strongest, steelmanned version of their opponents' thinkers/arguments.  Their anti-capitalism is for losers, at root a rationalization of envy and resentment.  They have their own lives together no more than anyone else and yet they think they have the wisdom (although they don't think in terms of wisdom, or else they'd be full-on dialectically advanced steelmanning-as-fuck philosophers) to direct the lives of everyone else, and all by force no less (given their politics-as-meaning mindset).  As an expert on Ayn Rand's thought I know with a 100% certainty that they haven't the faintest how to steelman Rand's philosophy and insist on attacking a strawman version, every time.  They're oblivious to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, anyway, else they'd demonstrate having a single fucking clue about the virtue-ethics tradition over and above their own ethically narrow fairness-and-harm set of criteria (the steelman version of which are found in the Kantian and utilitarian traditions, especially).  I think I have developed over time some pretty well-attuned (not infallible, mind you) "ring of truth" sensibilities, and Dennis Prager's claim that there is no wisdom on the left rings true as a general diagnosis of the left's present potentiality-squandering condition.

When it comes to the subject of race or racism in particular, they come across as even more appallingly pathetic than usual (qua leftists).  Their ever-expanding racism-narrative is borne of one basic flaw in their worldview: they refuse to face up to the fact that their preferred social policies have failed to the situation of blacks and minorities, and so instead of responding to the intrusion of reality in this regard they double down and insist that this failure is attributable instead to structural and other racism.  But the reality is that their essential failure here is one of hubris and lack of wisdom.

Case in point:

When University of Pennsylvania Law Prof. Amy Wax said - quite eminently reasonably and in obvious good faith - that the black community could benefit from an infusion of bourgeois values, the reaction of the campus left at Penn (faculty as well as students) was to melt down in epic fashion.  This bunch of ill-educated Ivy League fuckheads reacted by pulling out every little dirty trick in the current leftist playbook to try to discredit and smear Prof. Wax.  Much as they do with Donald Trump, they seized upon mainly one statement she made about the success of European whites (probably in response to a question for the article in which her statement appeared, so we don't have the full context for that statement, now, do we), amplified the racial element of that statement, and made it the only story - going out of their way to miss whatever legitimate point was contained therein.  Likewise, when Wax referenced the era in which she saw bourgeois values flourishing - roughly, the 1950s - the leftist Ivy League fucks decided to focus only on the pre-Civil-Rights racial discrimination that existed then, as if that were the thing Wax was talking about.  So instead of it being about bourgeois values the leftist Ivy League shit-for-brainses went out of their way to make it about "white supremacism" instead.   Go look at the link for yourself and read in detail what this bunch of loathsome lowlife leftist losers did in response to Wax's reasonable argument.

Now, where on earth, pray tell, would an entire mass of Ivy League students and faculty have ever gotten the idea that this was a normal and acceptable approach to conversation about difficult and contentious subject matter?  Is it possible that the mentality that led to such an easily-triggered meltdown when the chips were down is pervasive in the academy?  And what measures, exactly, have the academic Left taken to remedy this problem after it's been made abundantly evident by Jonathan Haidt and other researchers?  I ask because, as far as I can tell, they haven't done jack shit to remedy the problem.

So I submit that the ugly incident at Penn is, roughly speaking, the "best" that the American left is able to come up with when confronted with a reasonable argument from the other side that triggers them in just the right way.  Yes, their response to a law professor's reasonable argument about bourgeois values was to cry racism, and that's the best we can expect from the crowd of lunatics that is the American Left today.  Fucking pathetic.  Fucking worms!

[Edit: New shit has come to light.  Reportedly Prof. Wax said something directly and unambiguously racist, although Wax is saying her comments have been distorted.  And guess what: the left has so badly shit away its credibility that when I see reports such as this I cannot believe them on their face any longer, without full access to the original materials.  That's what these fucking losers get for their established pattern of intellectual malpractice.  They blew it.  Further, none of this affects the facts about the 2017 bourgeois-values episode linked and discussed above, nor absolves the Penn leftists of their intellectual malpractice then.  They're every bit as much the losers even if there happens to be a racist around when they cry "racist!"  Tough shit, huh?  [Update: and guess what, it's the same ol' caricature/smear tactics, quite obviously so to anyone exercising decency and restraint.  Racism-crying leftists being scum again, not surprising in the least.  Fuck 'em!]]

Unless/until the leftist worms fix their own problems they forfeit all moral right to whine and cry about racism and attribute blame, because I for one am sick and tired of hearing all that from them.  I have had it up to here with their shit.  No more; putting the foot down.  Can you imagine MLK acting like this bunch of divisive, angry, dialogue-avoiding whiners?  No, you cannot.  He was too constructive-minded, and he also took seriously - something the left no longer does - the ideal that people be judged by the content of their character, and that means that the cultivation of character (so as to make lofty judgment commensurate with lofty character, of course) should be of the highest priority.  And it also means some basic intellectual honesty about how much the mentality of leftism (which becomes more unhinged and epistemically reckless by the day) has victimized minorities perhaps more than anything else this past half century.

(And, yes, I've already anticipated the "best" rhetorical chicanery the left might come up with in response to Wax: she's claiming that black people fail to adopt bourgeois values such as hard work and thrift, thereby perpetuating mean stereotypes about blacks.  Of course, the same thing coming out of the pen of a Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams elicits crickets from the racism-cryers.  But another dialectically appropriate response to the chicanery about mean stereotypes is that what triggers the left about "bourgeois values" is the prescription standing fundamentally at odds with what their worldview dictates, which is that the solution is political/taxpayer-funded.  This is not even to touch upon what may be the elephant in the room, which is the percentage of single-parent households in the black community.  Blaming, e.g., mass incarceration doesn't really ring true to me, since that demographic trend was already in place before the last half century.  And when a leftist like Sen. Cory Booker is pointing to mass incarceration since the early '90s, the natural thing to wonder is whether he looks at the benefit side of the equation as well as the cost: what has happened to the nation's murder rate since that time, and what does that mean in terms of the number of black bodies in prison instead of six feet under?  While I don't know all the specific numbers here, I do know that the nation's murder fate has fallen considerably.  And what I do know - the Wax episode being Exhibit A - is that leftists have avoided a good-faith dialogue about these difficult and controversial topics.  And, to top off this little digression about sociocultural trends and their effects on life opportunities and outcomes, this item which very recently came to my attention points to what may be the one most fundamental causal factor for a given locale: social capital.  Well, duh, Aristotle had that figured out long ago.  And what better and more comprehensive a way to build that social capital than, you know, philosophy?  If leftists weren't so busy misplacing their priorities and obsessing about the narrowly political while pretending to be intellectually superior, they would know this already.)

In short: Someone needs to gouge out leftists' eyeballs and skullfuck them without the courtesy of a reach-around while they drop and give the instructor 20 push-ups, which is another way of saying they need philosophy fucked right into them if that's what it takes to get it in there.  This is in no way to deny the role and responsibility of the Right in the nation's intellectual bankruptcy (they'll overcome the presumption of blame here just as soon as they start talking all about philosophy), but neither the Right nor even the Left until recently have been nearly as vile and vicious as the Left has become today.  (I'd say the pathology involved became more screamingly obvious in the last 5 years or so.  But the roots run deep and the chickens have come home to roost.)  Incontrovertible proof of this point is that it wasn't until recently that the Left resorted to crying racism every 5 seconds as reality keeps intruding upon their worldview.  Hopefully this not-so-slow-mo trainwreck can serve as a lesson to both Right and Left about how not to go about things, and perhaps even lead them sooner or later to philosophy as (at the very least) the best prophylactic against such degradation.