HardThrasher
Published 18 Sept 2024Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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September 23, 2024
Forgotten War Ep3 – Death in the Arakan
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In Toronto, school kids are being used as pawns in political protests
The Toronto District School Board has some serious issues if a recent high school “field trip” to a political protest is typical of how the board’s employees are allowed to insert their own political agenda into the teaching process:
There were some parents who opted out of allowing their children to participate in a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) sanctioned field trip to observe (not participate) in a public protest. Parents were informed that the event at Grange Park in Toronto involved the Grassy Narrows First Nation’s decades-long struggle with mercury contamination caused by industry. However, they should have taken this proposed field trip as a major red flag. Indeed, according to Spadina-Fort York MP Kevin Vuong, “What the TDSB teachers did was deceitful and unconscionable”.
When I was a kid, my school never attended a protest. And before last Wednesday, I’ve never heard of any school ever planning such an inappropriate field trip – that ended up being used by the ultra-woke TDSB as an excuse to indoctrinate children into social justice activism (which entails the labelling of all white/Jewish children as racists, colonizers, and settlers on stolen land). How many TDSB parents were even aware of what they were signing up for? It appears that many knew of the general shape of things – which had something to do with Grassy Narrows and mercury poisoning – but no parent could have known about the anti-Israel / anti-Semitic component (a mainstay of social justice), which appeared to be the focal point, eclipsing anything to do with Canadian First Nations.
Indeed, the email from the TDSB explained that the protest event was an “educational opportunity … to learn about Indigenous activism, environmental justice and human rights”. The red flag would have been enormous and flapping vigorously in a strong wind for those parents who are initiated into the tenets of critical social justice theory. To those parents, participation in woke activism is a hard hell no. However, many families are still oblivious, or maybe have misunderstood the intentions of the TDSB, or maybe just don’t quite get what critical social justice is. They are unaware that far too many school administrators, trustees, and teachers have decided that their priority is transforming society through a cultural revolution, not educating the young. This, of course, involves transforming children.
The letter to parents assured them that their children would not be participating in the protest. Students would be on site only to observe. However, videos have emerged on social media of middle school aged children marching alongside anti-Israel protestors. Understandably, many parents now feel betrayed. In my view, they should have seen this coming. The TDSB is literally infested with anti-Semetic black radicals and other such woke activists who follow the same identity politics playbook which entered North America through the period of violent 1960s era black radicalism. (I refer the reader to Cedric Robinson’s volume Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. And, to Dr. Scott Miller’s essay published in these pages “A Moral Chimera: Diversity, Illiberal No-White-Male Policies and the Power of the Black Radical Tradition“. And lastly, if you want to see black radicals in action, read my piece, “Exploring The Grievance Pathway Of Anti-Racism“, on a Parents of Black Children meeting I attended).
Concerning those videos of the protest which circulated social media sparking outrage amongst parents, according to the Toronto Sun, “footage showed students marching alongside flag-waving Elementary Teachers of Toronto members, while a masked woman in a white ‘Justice for Grassy Narrows’ shirt shouted anti-Israel chants into a megaphone”.
CG Idit Shamir (Consul General @IsraelinToronto) posted the following to X (I completely agree with her sentiment):
“Shocking. 7th and 8th graders from public schools in Toronto were taken yesterday on a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) -approved field trip—not to a museum, but to march in a political protest where they chanted pro-Palestine slogans. Adults in keffiyehs and face coverings led the way, while young minds were subjected to a one-sided political narrative.
“The @tdsb has crossed a line. Children get sent to school to learn; they should NEVER be forced to participate in political protests. It’s not just that they’ve taken a side—it’s that they have utterly disregarded the rights of pro-Israel and Jewish students and staff, along with any commitment to truth and balance. This isn’t education; it’s indoctrination—it’s an affront to the very purpose of education.”
MPP Goldie Ghamari, also had a strong reaction:
“What the actual f**k is going on with @tdsb educators in Toronto?
This isn’t 1944 Nazi occupied Germany.
This is 2024 in Canada.
This antisemitic behaviour is unacceptable.
If you stay silent after reading this, you’re part of the problem and need to hang your head in shame.”
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Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel wants to help you keep your kids from the perils of right-wing ideology
eugyppius on the help Berlin’s leading daily newspaper is offering to their readers whose kids are hearing the siren call of non-progressive politics:
This obviously charming, cheerful and not at all withered or overwrought woman is named Eva Prausner. She is a social worker, and she directs something called the “Project for Strengthening Parents“, which provides “Training, networking, and counselling in the area of family and right-wing extremism”. This means that she runs around telling parents what to do when they suspect their children are succumbing to political wrong-think. And this in turn makes Frau Prausner the woman of the hour, for never before in the history of the Federal Republic have so many undemocratic children bloomed under the noses of so many upstanding democratic parents.
It is very hard to understand how this happened. The leftists and the Greens, after all, have been doing the Lord’s work teaching leftism and Greenism in schools for decades now, but despite their valiant efforts we are rapidly losing our youth to malign antidemocratic forces. It can’t be that elevating leftoid lunacy into an establishment ideology has backfired, transforming the once cool, counter-cultural left into a political movement for middle-aged scolds and schoolmarms – the kind of thing from which teenagers flee in terror. No, nothing could be less plausible. The real reason for the pandemic of right-wing children must simply be that we haven’t indoctrinated them enough. If parents will not do their part and bring indoctrination also to the home, our democracy will collapse and it will be 1933 all over again, just like it was 1933 all over again two weeks ago after the elections in Thüringen and Saxony.
For these reasons, Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, interviewed Prausner on her advice for parents who find themselves forced to deal with their evil, right-leaning spawn. The product is a prescient write-up for the ages bearing the headline “Help, my child is turning right-wing! Eight tips for democratic parents with undemocratic children“.
The rightward shift in East Germany is a shift above all among the youngest, as the elections in Saxony and Thüringen have shown. One in three young people there voted for the far right. In Thüringen, as many as 38% of 18- to 34-year-olds cast their ballot for the AfD – more than in any other age group. Many a parent who values living in a democracy will have wondered: “What have we done wrong?”
In Brandenburg, too, it is becoming clear that even the youngest are now leaning towards the right. In the under-16 vote a week before the state election, the AfD came out on top with around 30% … In the state elections on 22 September, the AfD could become the strongest force, thanks in part to young first-time voters.
Do parents still have any influence over their AfD-voting children?
Alas, Prausner is not very certain that they do, but she believes that democratic parents “should at least try” to rescue their children from the grave heresy of voting for the wrong political parties. Children in Brandenburg are particularly endangered, because Brandenburg is largely rural, and Prausner has discovered that the countryside is absolutely dripping with “condensed prejudicial attitudes”. There is so much racial prejudice in the Brandenburg air that it is collecting on cool surfaces, like windows and beer glasses, that is how bad things are there. Also all children everywhere are in danger because the internet is a powerful right-wing force that helps bad organisations like the AfD pump their fascist mind virus directly into millions of young yet-forming cerebral cortices.
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What Food was Served at Wild West Saloons?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 11, 2024Baked beans made with molasses and salt pork
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1886One of the definitions for a saloon is a place that serves food and drink, but makes most of its money from drink. This certainly was the case in the Old West, where a lot of saloons served a free lunch as long as you bought a drink. Just because it was free, didn’t mean it was low quality food. In fact, many saloons, especially those in larger cities with more competition, served fancier and fancier meals to draw in patrons.
These beans aren’t the French cuisine that some saloons served, but they are delicious. Even without the onions and spices that some recipes used, they’re so flavorful and much better than canned versions.
Baked Pork and Beans
Wash and pick over a large heaping cupful of navy beans and steep them in water over night. Put them on next morning with fresh water to more than cover, and baking soda the size of a bean and let boil about an hour. Then carry them to the sink, pour all into a colander letting the water run away and put back into the saucepan with cold water enough to come up to a level. Boil again and in a few minutes they will be soft. Season with a little salt and tablespoon of molasses. Put them into four pint bowls or tin pans, lay an ounce slice of salt pork on each and bake half an hour.
— Cooking for Profit by Jessup Whitehead, 1886
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QotD: On Roman Values
I wanted to use this week’s fireside to muse a bit on a topic I think I may give a fuller treatment to later this year, which is the disconnect between what it seems many “radical traditionalists” imagine traditional Roman values to be and actual Roman cultural values.
Now, of course it isn’t surprising to see Roman exemplars mobilized in support of this or that value system, as people have been doing that since the Romans. But I think the disconnect between how the Romans actually thought and the way they are imagined to have thought by some of their boosters is revealing, both of the roman worldview and often the intellectual and moral poverty of their would-be-imitators.
In particular, the Romans are sometimes adduced by the “RETVRN” traditionalist crowd as fundamentally masculine, “manly men” – “high testosterone” fellows for whom “manliness” was the chief virtue. Romans (and Greeks) are supposed to be super-buff, great big fellows who most of all value strength. One fellow on Twitter even insisted that the chief Roman value was VIRILITAS, which was quite funny, because virilitas (“manhood, manliness”) is an uncommon word in Latin, but when it appears it is mostly as a polite euphemism for “penis”. Simply put, this vision bears little relation to actual Roman values. Roman encomia or laudationes (speeches in praise of something or someone) don’t usually highlight physical strength, “high testosterone” (a concept the Romans, of course, did not have) or even general “manliness”. Roman statues of emperors and politicians may show them as reasonably fit, but they are not ultra-ripped body-builders or Hollywood heart-throbs.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, March 29, 2024 (On Roman Values)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-29.
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