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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Choosing defection over cooperation is the strategic equivalent of a public suicide.

Randomly scraped from the hopper:

Minnesota’s new K-12 social studies standards — now in the final stages of rulemaking approval — exemplify this ideology. The standards add ethnic studies to the core social studies disciplines of history, civics, economics, and geography, and incorporate its concepts throughout. One ethnic studies “anchor standard,” titled “Resistance,” is typical. It requires students to “organize with others to resist systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized,” oppressed groups.

Obviously, I agree that k-12 education should emphasize the necessity of resistance to oppression. I merely insist that the correct definition of oppression be the one taught; that is to say, mine. Currently that's not the case, and I think that should change. Why would that be an invalid preference?

Kindergartners, for example, must “retell a story about an unfair experience that conveys a power imbalance.” First-graders must “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power and use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.”

High school students will be required to “analyze how caste systems based upon race, social class, and religion have been used to justify imperialism, colonization, warfare, and chattel slavery” and to “examine the construction of racialized hierarchies based on colorism and dominant European beauty standards and values.”

...The ethnic studies-driven campaign to discredit American institutions as illegitimate is most clearly evident in the standards that focus on criminal justice. Students will study our police departments and justice system in connection with an ethnic studies standard that requires them to “understand the roots of contemporary systems of oppression” and “eliminate” “injustices.”

...Fifth graders, for example, will “examine contemporary policing” and its alleged “historical roots in early America.” (The claim is that our police departments sprang directly from slave patrols of the Old South.) Sixth-graders will study the “impact” of “Minnesota’s juvenile justice system” on youth “from historically disenfranchised groups.” High school standards suggest the notion of criminality itself is racist: “Explore how criminality is constructed and what makes a person a criminal.”

...And you and I, I think, share common knowledge that the "understanding" they're inculcating of the "roots of contemporary systems of oppression" has little to no basis in fact. That is to say, they cannot actually point to discrete mechanisms by which these "systems of oppression" operate, and they cannot successfully intervene to make those "systems of oppression" stop oppressing. It's a name, not an explanation. Meanwhile, the 30% increase in the murder rate post-BLM-riots has sustained itself, it's mostly black people getting killed, and it is definately not the result of police hunting black people for sport. The people who wrote this curriculum do not actually have a way to "eliminate" "injustices", only ways to give themselves more power, and they are successfully doing it with taxpayer money.

I don't think you approve of this, but I don't think you have any real solution to it either. I think describing the strategy that produces that material is fairly described as "reject and subvert systems that work against our interests. Deny their power, hamper their operations, refuse their legitimacy, appropriate or destroy their resources". I think if you were unfortunate enough to be forced to live under a total victory by my side, you'd still be happier than under total victory by the woke. I think the overwhelming majority of the woke would be better off, though I would greatly prefer they live somewhere else. What makes you so invested in a detente that arguably never existed and certainly is no longer sustainable?

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