Tanista
7hr ago
Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.
It does tell us that there's only so long the media can resist before sticking its hand in the "lurid story about college men that may or may not be true" jar.
The UVA rape case was...twelve years ago? Mattress Girl was 11. So about a decade at max stretch.
Tanista
11hr ago
Seems deeply unwise compared to letting them into a coalition and having them disappoint people through governing, like the Tories did the Lib Dems, and Trump is doing now.
But, hey, I'm a naive observer of German politics. Maybe in a decade this'll prove some genius move. Maybe Germans really cannot handle their liquor and even a sip of the far-right will be a jump off the slippery slope.
Tanista
12hr ago
The whole Van Jones "character matters" critique of uncouthness is validated by Trump's later actions.
It's not like the man lied. He was quite adamant about refusing to even contemplate losing, or being transparent about certain things. Some people saw that as a game, while others argued that such a basic failure of character would show itself.
They actually have parties that challenge the orthodoxy, but that may make it worse. Germany's attempts to quarantine the AfD forces coalitions that cannot really be that ideologically coherent given the inherent compromise needed to neutralize the votes of a growing share of the electorate.
Tanista
12hr ago
I can't remember who said it, but I once saw a quote to the effect of "if you tell me one of your political opinions, and I can accurately guess every other political opinion you hold, you are not a serious thinker".
It's a take Sam Harris used to hammer on about.
Not sure if he lived up to it, since his anti-Islam takes flow pretty well with his zionism and other commitments.
This was John Carreyrou's take in his book, and he wasn't very sympathetic.
It fits really well with the anecdotes littered in the book about her obsession with Jobs.
Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it. Blickman didn’t return with it until late in the day. In the meantime, work at the company came to a standstill as Elizabeth and Sunny moped around the office, consumed by the hunt for the Apple flag.
Greg had been aware of Elizabeth’s fascination with Jobs. She referred to him as “Steve” as if they were close friends. At one point, she’d told him that a documentary espousing a 9/11 conspiracy theory wouldn’t have been available on iTunes if “Steve” hadn’t believed there was something to it. Greg thought that was silly. He was pretty sure Jobs hadn’t personally screened all the movies for rent or sale on iTunes. Elizabeth seemed to have this exaggerated image of him as an all-seeing and all-knowing being.
It all fits the image of a very immature , mentally ill person who thought she could just push through.
The real question is what the fuck Sunny Balwani was thinking.
Tanista
6d ago
NYT writer savior telling the principal that maybe they shouldn't let kids act rowdy. As if it never occured to them.
Dangerous Minds and its consequences.
Tanista
6d ago
Was funny to see the maneuvers Ta-Nehisi Coates went through in his most famous book to blame this - and the insistence that he stay disciplined do well at school from teachers - on white supremacy.
Even if black parents in America are reluctantly beating their kids so racist white cops don't shoot them, we have a bunch of natural experiments from dozens of countries that don't have the white man breathing down their neck.
Much like with prison you have to accept that, for some, the punishment is not to correct but to keep them away from people who can be corrected.
She had periodic bursts of energy (which the schools absorbed with apathy and meaningless validation) but then seemed to give up/assume the best based on the grades she was getting. I can only assume she didn't want to look at it too close precisely because she talked herself unto a hill. Once things seemed to be working out she was happy enough.
Tanista
7d ago
But if you can just separate all the poor people and put them in these schools over there, you don't care what happens to those kids in that school. A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school changes the school, right? Okay. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.
This is reminding me of The Exile's piece on Dworkin
Everyone in her circle knows that you say the right things and then fuck off with your kids because you're not gonna overcome institutional inertia and the consequences of disparate impact thinking. she was the one who actually believed it was just "resources" and that she could bully an entire school into shape.
How do you go nearly a decade without realizing your kid is learning nothing except how to avoid getting stabbed in the lunch room?
Besides being a stubborn narcissist and ideologue that knew she'd get this exact response if she quit these schools before her daughter was done schooling?
The schools seem to avoid any chance of being held accountable. By her account they didn't do any standardized (racist, she would have called them) assessments and it was pulling teeth to get them to do it, gave no homework (which would help parents get a benchmark) and at a certain point they were just passing her on effort in algebra.
Given most of the likely parents in that school, this would have served to satisfy people and draw no attention until it was too late.
She herself was almost certainly negligent despite her claims to have been open to tutoring her kids, but all of these factors seem to have made it worse.
Tanista
7d ago
and also just how old some of the characters are. Frodo is 50!
The time between Frodo finding the Ring and the quest beginning is another thing where Jackson's view of it dominates in my mind. Intellectually I know it, but the movie seems so much smoother that that's what sticks in my head.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has a piece currently lighting up the internet about the impact of putting her daughter in a public school: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?
So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
...
We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.
After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn.
...
The school turns out to be - sit down for this - full of rowdy and rambunctious students and attempts to fix it were met with slow, pro forma responses (the well-behaved kids also complained about the bad kids eating up all the attention or getting praise for basic behavior):
Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”
Teachers apparently failed to perform basic evaluations and passed her through:
Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.
Finally, a few days before school let out for winter break, I received a folder in Najya’s backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.
Not learning their lesson (NHJ admits all the other midde class parents left this school) she decided to double down for middle school. Except now she was getting the additional problem of receiving straight-A report cards while her child was apparently learning nothing.
She eventually cracks and sends her daughter to a white and asian school of her choosing, despite much bellyaching. But still, she's haunted by her past:
Algebra, she thought, was the one exception — this was a subject she believed she knew. She had taken it in eighth grade but had to retake it because she hadn’t passed the statewide exam. At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests. When she had to take the course again, I thought that the concepts would be familiar to her. One night early in the semester as we were eating dinner, Najya gushed about how easy the test had been. “I know I got an A, or at least a B,” she said smiling. A few days later, she came into the house, ran to her room without speaking, slammed the door and sunk to her floor, sobbing. She’d failed it.
But there's a happy ending: her child's new school, in addition to her tutoring, actually do help her catch up on all she missed out on. What conclusion does NHJ draw from this?
Most New York City public elementary students attend a school zoned to their neighborhood — children in wealthy white neighborhoods attend wealthy white schools, and poor Black children attend poor Black schools. But if affluent parents move to a gentrifying neighborhood, they can exercise “school choice” and send their children elsewhere. There are schools in neighborhoods like Harlem, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I live, where about a quarter of the kindergarten students zoned for those attend them, according to a 2018 report by the Center for New York City Affairs. By middle school and high school, a majority of students take part in the school-choice attendance system, but most kids cannot get into selective schools and instead find themselves in schools that have no enrollment criteria.
That leaves schools like Unison with few students from affluent families and a disproportionate number of students who are low income and diagnosed with learning disabilities. While more than one-third of Unison students have learning disabilities, 17 percent of students at Najya’s high school do.
Essentially, the "racial apartheid" described in this article is that affluent parents independent of race - like NHJ - do not want to deal with the incompetence of public schools so there isn't enough bread to spread the jam of disruptive, incompetent children and educators over.
The article is making waves as a chronicle of absolute parental abdication, and also a sign that the light may be breaking through even on the Left about schools, given how much of an advocate NHJ was against "apartheid'.
For the former I have to say that, as a third worlder, I just find it despicable (Susan Wolf didn't have to work hard to convince me sainthood wasn't necessarily an unalloyed good). You send your kid to the best school you can and damn everyone else. I suppose it can be defended as an act of admirable tribal solidarity performed by a moron with strange ideas about education, but imo even a steadfast refusal to contemplate HBD wouldn't change your duty to put your kids first. We did so with a 99% black population with a token Indian/Arab presence.
As for whether it represents a start on the road to progressive course correction, which requires a validated member of the Party to make the crituque, it's encouraging that someone like Nicole Hannah-Jones is the one writing this, but note what's missing.
The story is all about "apartheid". No mention of the fact that her daughter's failing schools were receiving upwards of $40,000 a year per student and had good teacher-to-student ratios. The story never has a mea culpa for all the parents she would have looked down on. The story has nothing to say about the persistent disciplinary issues that wrecked the chance to teach. It's all the fault of apartheid and if only we could have less apartheid and spread around the good students enough that they could actually overcome the laziness and incompetence of the school administration (it never seems to occur to her that the fact that her child's principal barely got out of high school has any bearing on the situation her daughter finds herself in)
This makes some sense, given her own history:
My husband and I had largely avoided segregated schools like these. He and his siblings attended integrated schools that served the military bases where their family lived. Starting when I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me in a school-integration busing program that allowed a limited number of Black students to leave their segregated neighborhood schools for white ones on the other side of town.
But the problem comes when people just won't sit still for this. NY schools have lost parents even as spending has gone up for a reason. There aren't enough pristine white schools to give an extra ~5% minority population. And the minorities that do well at NY magnet schools themselves see little reason to avoid "apartheid" and go deal with this. As NHJ herself and the quoted UCLA notes, they run away to better schools too.
So does this article represent some sort of climbdown from the myth that all these schools need is more money, more of other people's children? No. It's an emotional read, but it seems like nothing about her underlying views has changed at all except for the fact that she should have let someone else be the greater fool. If anything, this can easily be read as a call for more radical action.
Not sure it matters. As the article makes clear the parents who have the skin in the game and wherewithal don't need a national debate, they just leave. And the system flounders in their wake.
Old ladies tutting reproachfully at anyone who makes non-socially-approved arguments turns out to be an existential threat.
I am also often stunned by the power of consensus in a variety of fields but don't they also just arrest you for wrongspeech over there? It's not like it's a fair playing field.
Tanista
10d ago
I apostatized because of basic bitch New Atheist critiques of religion in general and the whole thing became very embarrassing when I realized there were much funnier reasons to reject Islam.
Except... when you read it, it's just not a very good book. It's mostly vague references to the bible, with a lot of aimless repition
This is actually generous. A lot of it doesn't even refer to the Bible. It refers to Syriac apocryphal tales and legends.
Dhul Qarnayn is based on the Alexander Legend, the Sleepers of Ephesus are in there for some reason as fact instead of legend, the stories of Mary are from known apocryphal texts like the Protoevangelium of James, the story of Adam in the Garden it uses dates is from the Cave of Treasures and dates back to the 5th century iirc.
The best bit of marketing Islam ever pulled was convincing even its critics that it merely copied the Bible. If only.
The best thing it has going for it is that most Muslims never read the original sources. Or the Qur'an itself for that matter. In Senegal people send one kid to a cram school to memorize it and never bother with actual scholarship.
It doesn't have any of the interesting insights or metaphors that other famous holy books have
I was stunned the first time I read Ecclesiastes. It was unbelievable to me that Jews had such an open wrestling with the existential dilemma in their Bible.
To be fair to Mohammed, he's just hamstrung by the format: the Qur'an is the direct speech of God so there's no existential dilemma. There's no chance for iterative development since it's a single book/oral tradition and not a core library. The Gospel authors got to draw on both the Bible and Greek bioi, Mohammed's people had no Scripture.
For a first draft Scripture I suppose it's impressive. The Arabs had one shot to avoid being subsumed by larger cultures and he pulled it off.
In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing screed I'd expect from a charismatic, but illiterate leader.
What makes you say that?
O believers! Do not enter the homes of the Prophet without permission ˹and if invited˺ for a meal, do not ˹come too early and˺ linger until the meal is ready. But if you are invited, then enter ˹on time˺. Once you have eaten, then go on your way, and do not stay for casual talk. Such behaviour is truly annoying to the Prophet, yet he is too shy to ask you to leave. But Allah is never shy of the truth. And when you ˹believers˺ ask his wives for something, ask them from behind a barrier. This is purer for your hearts and theirs. And it is not right for you to annoy the Messenger of Allah, nor ever marry his wives after him. This would certainly be a major offence in the sight of Allah.
You may have heard of this guy named Donald Trump. His anti-immigration ire is only marginally focused on Muslims right now
Yes, because he said he would do it and then ran into a series of legal speed bumps precisely because he said he would do it and then settled for a much less ambitious policy. Even his attempts to target Somalis specifically yielded very little, because many of them already had citizenship.
And Muslim immigration continues, and will continue after Trump. And Muslims are now politically relevant in Democratic primaries and will continue to be so.
The high watermark for this sort of thing was 2016 and even then it didn't get particularly far.
In Europe it's even worse.
but your rhetoric would make my "Ginsberg t-shirt and coffee mug" mother want to limit and deport.
Okay? My goal wasn't to evangelize for Islam.
You can put my post on a flyer if you want but I just don't think it'll help you. IME progressives are incredibly stubborn about this. People will sit with an exmuslim who grew up in the faith and they'll listen to them tell them things like this and they'll decide they know better, when they don't even know anything about Christianity. Limits on white/mansplaining go completely out the window and you get subject to Tafsir Al Kaffir about what the religion obviously meant when the Qur'an or scholars said X or how this or that American policy or material conditions are why people are being killed for making the wrong cartoon.
Much smarter, more eloquent people like Sam Harris have been trying their entire career and achieved nothing.
Tanista
12d ago
It's cause he was satirizing a particular Jew. A Jew widely known for being incredibly unpleasant and disliked but too powerful to take down. I'm sure many in the industry enjoyed it, including Jews. Who he also assaulted (though, running it through a couple of AI, surprisingly few). He certainly assaulted their movies.
Tanista
12d ago
Lots of people are discussing how politics can't be avoided, and they're right. This is an excellent case study of how the endgame of "politics" convolutes everything and makes everyone miserable. Everyone loses here: Macklemore for taking a mild pro-Palestine stance gets kicked out of venues and attacked by Palestine opposers, Sheeran for taking a pro-peace neutral stance gets his tour lineup wrecked and attacked by Palestine supporters. There is nothing these performers can do, even be completely silent, that won't get them attacked by some group.
This is true only insofar as the thing being fought over is irrelevant or impossible.
I don't think it's likely to make much of a change to US-Israel relations, but it's not impossible. People imposing politics on putatively neutral experiences have achieved wins before.
So I'm not sure it's irrational or pointless.
Tanista
12d ago
I’ve even met some who will drink vodka like a fish and then refuse beer or wine because Islam.
You know, I can understand trying to rules-lawyer with the notion that the Qur'an only refers to fermented grapes when it says khamr is haram (most schools read the prescription as being against "intoxicants", period, but I think a minority did try that) but being fine with vodka but not beer is very odd.
Wish I knew what exegetical maneuvers justified that.
When I got to college I preferred vodka too, but that was because I came to alcohol late and just hadn't acquired the taste for beer and decided I'd rather get fucked up as fast as possible. But I was past justifying it religiously.
Tanista
12d ago
Oof, fair. It's about your daughter/sister/relative being a whore and harming the family's collective honor, and needing to correct this (presumably because she refused to be corrected the easy way).
Geographic and class bias but, ime in West Africa, killing your daughter for being a slut wasn't something commonly contemplated but the idea that the gays and their flags were not to be tolerated and the President could just handle them harshly enough to drive them out or at least underground was much more common. It was bad for the President to be torturing locals but those people...eh.
Meanwhile, heterosexual sex tourism was apparently ineradicable.
Tanista
12d ago
You're thinking like a Puritan. The point isn't to eliminate sin, it's moral hegemony.
Abdul from Riyadh can both watch porn and still be all for the murder of any gay person who got uppity and tried to challenge the faith.
Notice that adultery never triggers the same defense mechanism as homosexuality, because it's widely seen as a sin while the homo stuff is a challenge to the prevailing moral order. (A lot of Muslims love to sin while vociferously resisting pork since it's an outgroup marker, for another example)
The real problem is whether Mohammed bin Salman feels the same. The state can only keep it's people fat on oil-created do nothing jobs for so long.
Don't think this is possible under Title IX (which is what I believed Obama used to get them to get more involved in these cases). Universities need administrators to manage compliance like any other business and the government will react to lobbying for more interference in captive institutions.
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