“Grumpy Thoughts” is a series in which I share quicker takes on recent news. To see the previous eight editions, click here.
As for today’s post, let’s begin with a short open letter.
Dear Ms. Smith (pro-abortion valedictorian):
I work with other studious young people your age, so I recognize in you a common desire to fight for justice and change the world. I take no issue with your spirit and believe you have a right to use any platform you’re given to express your political views regardless of what school authorities might think on the matter.
However, I strongly encourage you to examine the abortion issue more deeply and not simply accept the lies you’ve been told about the prerequisites for female accomplishment — for it is not the case that your future depends on an invented right to destroy human life. If you should find yourself facing an unwanted pregnancy, bearing the child and then, perhaps, giving it up for adoption will not utterly scuttle your chances — even in the worst circumstances you mention. There are other options besides murder.
But let’s suppose an unwanted pregnancy does irreparably damage your carefully laid plans. You and I - and every other human being on this planet - have a moral responsibility to look beyond the ends of our own noses and factor in the rights of others — especially those who are disadvantaged and defenseless. To put it another way, life is not all about you and your desire for career advancement. The fact that you would embrace terminating the life of your hypothetical child - who has committed no crime and cannot speak in his own defense - for the sake of your otherwise commendable ambition reveals a fundamental selfishness on your part that you should seek to root out rather than indulge.
You want to rebel? Why not fight the conventional wisdom that demands we women lay siege to the very thing that makes us women* in order to succeed. This, in my view, is the so-called “patriarchy” we need to dismantle.
Sincerely,
RG
*Yes, I am implying here that it is the womb that makes a woman. Howl all you want, but as a more masculine member of the distaff sex, I actually find that definition liberating.
“Life is not all about you.” I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot and in posts covering many different subjects. But I think that strikes right at the heart of one of my biggest problems with leftists: their eagerness to stomp on the rights of others for the sake of their own supposed “comfort”/”safety”/etc.
Leftists never take personal responsibility for their own happiness. Instead, they always ask us to bear that burden. If they’re upset about something, then it’s entirely our fault — even though, in reality, the leftist’s own cognition has a lot to do with her emotional state. (If you believe, for example, that honest, peaceful discourse is an unmitigated threat to your “existence,” you’re wrong, and you have a duty to seek help and change — not us.) If a thoroughly reasonable standard - or ordinary people leading ordinary lives, even - somehow gets in the way of a leftist’s absolute liberty to do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants without even the mildest of injured feelings or inconveniences, then she concludes that “the system must be dismantled” regardless of the chaos and despair such a revolution would wreak. A leftist demands that the entire world change to suit her needs — and said demands are never open to negotiation because that same leftist believes she is more important than anyone else on Earth.
In my political writing, I believe I have always tried to find the rare kernels of wheat amongst all this leftwing chaff. And I’m probably going to continue to make that effort; after all, I have a commitment to the truth as I understand it regardless of its source. But I’m also looking at what time it is right now — and thinking I need to be even harsher when it comes to calling out everything that is evil and base in the whole leftist worldview. Because it is evil to intimidate and shame people into doing your bidding, it is evil to condone eliminationist and hateful rhetoric against people you perceive to be “privileged”, it is evil to promote violence and rioting as a tool for “change”, it is evil to use your victimhood (real or imaginary) to sponge off others, and it is evil to assault excellence because you’re incompetent and marinating in your own ressentiment.
Quite frankly, I’m not going to sit here and kowtow to these lazy, aggressively stupid, and floridly diabolical activists. Call me an istophobe if you want. I no longer care. I’m going to say exactly what I think now with zero effs given. See above and below.
A few posts ago, I suggested that the teaching profession has been colonized by not-super-intelligent women who leap at every chance to avoid real work. I made this observation out of frustration with the utter failure of many public school systems to provide the services to which students and parents are entitled because “muh COVID.” But I still stand by it because it explains other aspects of the K-12 implosion as well.
For example, it certainly accounts for the eagerness with which school districts in my area have embraced critical race theory. In one county to my north, theory-addled officials have eliminated the standardized test that used to be required for admission to their nationally-respected STEM magnet because they’ve swallowed the lie that race-blind standards — aren’t. And in another, officials have even threatened to cancel parents who’ve dared to challenge them on a so-called “anti-racist” curriculum that actually explicitly promulgates anti-white bigotry. Why? I’ll tell you: CRT gives them an easy out. It allows them to deflect the blame for observed achievement gaps onto a nebulous “system” that must be razed instead of squarely confronting their own monumental failure to educate less-advantaged students.
Why do certain subgroups of students fall behind? The root causes for this are complex and multitudinous, but one reason is certainly the public school system’s addiction to stupid fads like “whole language” and “reform math” that appeal to “educators” who are thoroughly untutored on how the human brain actually works. More affluent students can get around these idiot curricula by seeking out someone like me (i.e., a traditionalist who has a degree in brain science); poorer students, however, are stuck with programs that fail to teach them to read, write and cipher. Unhappy with the outcomes generated by this state of affairs? You should be — and you should seek to rectify them by returning to what works: explicit, teacher-led instruction in the three R’s.
Of course, that seems yucky and hard to our aforementioned public school officials. Establishing need-based, drill-focused remediation camps to fix what “reformers” have broken? Ugh. That’s too much. Better to spread the idea that literacy and numeracy are “the white man’s standard.” That way, you don’t have to do anything at all.
And while we’re on the subject, the Very Smart People claiming that our complaints in re: the propaganda leftists are trying to force upon our children are alarmist/reactionary/a white-washing of history/etc. need to shut the eff up right now because you’re either actively lying or you just don’t know what the eff you’re talking about.
Oh, I know you think you’re oh-so-clever pulling your faux-mystified “critical race theory is something discussed in law schools” schtick, but your dishonest obfuscation of the point doesn’t erase the direct intellectual through-line connecting those academic discussions and the applications of neo-racist thinking that we’re now seeing with our own damned eyes in our local schools. Whether these curricula are technically employing CRT as its academic originators understood it or not is a side question that doesn’t change the fact that they are morally wrong and incredibly damaging if you care about fostering genuine justice and solidarity.
And that false dichotomy you’re setting up between the 1619 Project and “not teaching black history at all”? It’s absolute BS and everyone knows it. I’m almost 42 years old, yet I learned about slavery and segregation and was exposed to the thought of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and others. (I also learned about the Trail of Tears and our interventions in Latin America, just FYI.) True: my high school course didn’t cover the black American experience with the exhaustive depth activists evidently prefer. But that same high school course also boiled down the presidency of John Adams to the X-Y-Z Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts (which, as a fan of Adams, I take personally), so — I’m thinking maybe it’s hard to fully explore the details of anything in a survey course intended to instill elementary factual knowledge about the history of our own country (which everyone needs first before we start diving into the nitty-gritty).
BLATE: There’s a vast field between “anti-racist” indoctrination and covering up the negatives in our national story, and every. single prominent anti-CRT activist lives in that space. If you are asserting otherwise? Again, sit the eff down so adults who aren’t functionally retarded can hash this out.
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| Yep, this is precisely what these radicals are trying to pull. And we see right through it. |
Some psychopathic speaker who was given a platform at Yale (and is therefore unbelievably privileged despite her caterwauling to the contrary) reportedly dreams of murdering white people because she believes we’re all predators illegitimately seeking congratulations for what we’ve done for her. Well, allow me to correct the record: I don’t want to be praised, cupcake. I want to be left the hell alone. I’m sick of being held responsible for crimes other people committed before I was born. I’m happy to help anyone who’s genuinely struggling*, but when push comes to shove, I don’t owe anyone anything just because of my skin color. Collective guilt is a bullshit concept that leads to mass graves wherever it’s taken seriously.
*And let’s define “genuinely struggling,” shall we? If you’re low income and/or a victim of family dysfunction and/or community disorder and decay, you probably do need a hand up. Weirdly, though, those folks generally aren’t the ones clamoring for special consideration. Weirdly, the loudest voices demanding I abase myself before their righteous “suffering” are thoroughly bourgie mediocrities living quite comfortable lives who’ve discovered that appealing to grievance gives them power akin to wielding the One Ring. To them, the only thing I’m willing to offer is my two middle fingers.
To the whiny brat complaining about the prevalence of American flags from her rarefied perch at the New York Times: if you don’t like the United States, you’re free to leave. I’ll help you pack your bags. Hell, I’ll even set up a damned GoFundMe to buy your ticket if you don’t have the resources to emigrate. Why? Because I don’t want to share this country with contemptuous people like you. People like you want me and mine dead — or at least oppressed and immiserated. And as it is obvious there’s no room for reconciliation or negotiation here, I’m more than happy to consider divorce. Eff right off — and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.
James Lindsay is the unquestioned master at translating “woke” terminology into sane people English and you should absolutely peruse his stuff over at New Discourses. But here, I’m going to indulge in some translating of my own — after which I will propose a more helpful, less Marxian way to discuss the very real phenomenon at issue.
When I hear the phrase “systemic racism,” I hear: “I’ve noticed a disparity in outcome between whites and blacks in the US, and I’ve decided to blame all white people. It means nothing to me that in eras much more rife with legally sanctioned racial oppression, blacks were becoming professionals and raising well-adjusted kids. It means nothing to me that Asian immigrants on free lunch are cleaning white kids’ clocks on standardized tests. And I’m unwilling to consider the possibility that decades of condescending government handouts and affirmative action (i.e., stealth racial quotas) may have actually disincentivized educational attainment and healthy family formation in the black community and therefore done more harm than good. If I’m black, I enjoy humiliating guilty liberal white people, and I want historical mistreatment to be an excuse for all time because I just can’t be bothered to do anything for myself. If I’m white, I’m a peacock seeking carte blanche to lord my superior social status over other whites who don’t have my credentials or my position of power.”
What should be used instead: lingering disadvantage. It is true that black development was actively suppressed in the US by slavery, segregation, and misguided “urban development” for a few centuries, and it is true that black people today are now behind on several metrics (like, for example, accumulated wealth) in part because of that history. But these after-effects cannot properly be called “racism” without stretching the definition of “racism” beyond all meaningful bounds. The term “racism” should be preserved for concrete, clearly documented differences in treatment in present-day organizations for which bias seems to be the prevailing cause. For everything else, “lingering disadvantage” is a more accurate term that avoids abusive finger-pointing - because, of course, white people living today didn’t commit yesterday’s sins - and enables multivariate analyses of our current problems.
And with that — I think I’m done for this week. Let me know in the comments what I should cover next!
