Quotulatiousness

September 13, 2023

Michael Geist on the “relentless misinformation campaign that ignores the foundational principles of copyright law”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Education, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist discusses a recent public statement from the Canadian Federation of Library Associations on how changes to copyright rules in Canada may seriously impact the public:

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE

Last month, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations released a much-needed statement that sought to counter the ongoing misinformation campaign from copyright lobby groups regarding the state of Canadian copyright and the extensive licensing by libraries and educational institutions. I had no involvement whatsoever with the statement, but was happy to tweet it out and was grateful for the effort to set the record straight on what has been a relentless misinformation campaign that ignores the foundational principles of copyright law. Lobby groups have for years tried to convince the government that 2012 copyright reforms are to blame for the diminished value of the Access Copyright licence that led Canadian educational institutions to seek other alternatives, most notably better licensing options that offer greater flexibility, access to materials, and usage rights. This is false, and when the CFLA dared to call it out, those same groups then expressed their “profound disappointment” in the library association.

Yet what has been disappointing is that despite repeated Supreme Court of Canada decisions that have eviscerated the foundation of those groups’ claims, they insist on running back the same failed strategy again and again. The reality of Canadian copyright isn’t complicated: libraries and the education community spend more than ever before on licences that provide the right to access and use materials for teaching, course materials, text and data mining, and a myriad of other purposes. When combined with the gradual disappearance of course packs, the emergence of open access materials, and a reasonable interpretation of fair dealing consistent with Canadian jurisprudence, education and libraries are fulfilling their mandate by responsibly using public dollars to maximize public access, enable student learning, and ensuring fair compensation for authors.

The lobbying efforts to convince government to restrict fair dealing by requiring unnecessary licences would increase student costs, make education less affordable, and render Canada less competitive. Further, it would mean less access to materials for Canadian students. Universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars on licences that grant both access to materials (purchasing physical books has declined dramatically) and the ability to use them. The outdated Access Copyright licences only grant rights to use already acquired works for a limited series of purposes. Reverting back to the unnecessary Access Copyright licence would mean access to fewer works and reduced investment by the education sector and libraries in new works.

I wrote a six-part series on these issues earlier the year including posts on setting the record straight, the shift to electronic licensing, transactional licences, the disappearance of course packs, the emergence of open text books, and a fair reading of fair dealing. Once you get past the rhetoric, the data leaves little doubt that education and libraries are still actively paying for copyright materials through licensing and the claims of mass illegal copying in education in 2023 is a fabrication unsupported by the evidence.

September 9, 2023

QotD: Using the Socratic method in today’s university

Filed under: Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Assuming you’ve got your knowledge ducks in a row, you then need a method of getting it into young heads that isn’t straight lecture. Lectures were necessary in the pre-internet days, but now standing up in front of a lecture room, reading off a list of Famous Battles of the Civil War, is counterproductive. That’s what the assigned reading list is for. Instead, you need to pose leading questions, and let students blunder through them – NOT towards a predetermined conclusion, necessarily, but to see where they go with it. Figure out what they’re not getting, show them how to get it … and let them get it for themselves.

The problem is, the Socratic method isn’t just “asking a bunch of questions.” The idea of elenchus is to get students to question their own presuppositions. You’re teaching them how to think, not what to think. It’s a neat trick, and I’m far from an expert at it — not least because I was never taught how to do it, except by my teachers in undergrad, who did it to me.

Worse, if you had to put two words on Western Civ’s tombstone, ignoratio elenchii would be strong contenders. That’s “irrelevant conclusion” in English, and it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that “irrelevant conclusion” basically IS “education”, K-thru-PhD. It’s GIGO, as the computer nerds used to say back in my day — Garbage In, Garbage Out. It’s pretty damn tough, in other words, to have a logical argument with someone who pretends not to believe in logic. By the time you get them in a college classroom, they have twenty years’ experience parroting nonsense … but not the “arguments” for said nonsense, because there aren’t any, and that’s the first thing you have to demonstrate. It’s a tough row to hoe.

Which is why most profs won’t risk it. Because, of course, the other problem with actually arguing with students is the possibility you might lose. The student might be smarter than you — it’s rare, but it happens. They might know something you don’t (which happens all the time; see above). Or they might just refuse to engage. I’ve had a student ask me, to my face, why it is that when I say something it’s a fact, but when xzhey say something it’s an opinion. How do you even respond to that? Seriously — shouting “because it says ‘PhD’ after my name, motherfucker!!” is deeply, viscerally satisfying, but that would teach the kid exactly the wrong lesson, wouldn’t it? All of these are gross insults to egghead amour propre, to be avoided at all costs.

Severian, “How to Teach History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-23.

September 6, 2023

Some key planks from Scott Alexander’s presidential platform

Filed under: Education, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was a bit surprised to find that Scott Alexander has decided to toss his hat into not one, but two party primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination:

The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:

Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy

The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.

Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:

    Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants … The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.

So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!

The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles — yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires – usually careful to avoid taxes — will jump at the chance to do this?

The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now.

[…]

Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes

Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.

So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard”, and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.

Start An Internet-Pop-Up Trade War With The European Union

For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.

Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch

This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.

The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things

Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy — and everyone agrees that he is — let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Obviously the royal family can’t participate in regular electoral politics, which means no Trump would ever be able to run for office ever again. This is the only way we are ever getting rid of them, you know this is true, please don’t throw away this chance.

I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance — ie the youngest son takes the throne — just so we can have a “King Barron”.

September 4, 2023

“… the ‘Teachers should tell parents’ people outnumber the ‘Teachers must not tell parents’ folks by something like four-to-one”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates segment of The Line‘s weekly round-up post, they discuss the suddenly “brave” Conservative provincial premiers jumping onto a hot culture war topic on the side of the vast majority of Canadians:

New Brunswick now has Policy 713, that requires teachers or school officials to notify parents and obtain consent if a child younger than 16 wishes to change his or her name or pronouns. Saskatchewan has announced a similar proposal; Ontario is considering one, too.

The Line looks upon these proposals with extreme skepticism. To be frank, we wish the provinces weren’t doing this. We think it’s strategically misguided: every moment a Conservative spends defending “parental rights” is a moment in which they are not talking about highly salient economic issues that affect far more people. Further, we don’t trust their motives. Either they’ve decided to pick this fight because they thought parental consent was going to be a winner for them, or they simply felt pushed into it by the more excitable elements of their respective bases. (We assign a probability assessment of absolute zero to the notion that the leaders might be doing this out of moral conviction.)

So yeah, it’s cynical and exploitive policy, but gosh, is it ever popular policy, too. Polling shows it’s like 80-per-cent approval popular.

Because of course it is.

Again, we stress that we don’t support the imposition of sweeping legislation. Absent evidence of abuse or mismanagement, we think parental notification of social transition should be handled on a case-by-case basis. In the midst of a moral panic on trans issues, we’d prefer to keep politicians as far away from this third rail as possible, with long pointy sticks and cages if necessary.

However, we also recognize that cynicism cuts both ways. We have also borne witness this week to some hysterical rhetoric from those who seem to seriously believe that schools should be forbidden from sharing this information, if the minor in question so chooses.

These people are in the minority, as we suggested above. The polling shows that the “Teachers should tell parents” people outnumber the “Teachers must not tell parents” folks by something like four-to-one. This is the kind of lopsided result you almost never see on contentious policy issues — the numbers are what we would expect if we asked Canadians “Is ice cream tasty?” or “Do you enjoy cuddling a puppy?” And of course this is so. Parents are, generally speaking, not going to have a whole lot of time for the suggestion that children will be better off if the state, at any level, adopts a policy of withholding information from them.

We don’t support what the conservative premiers are doing, because we think they’re doing it for cynical reasons, but we would absolutely oppose any policy that goes in the opposite direction. And the majority of the country — a massive supermajority — is onside with us on this one.

There are no easy answers here, because we do not dismiss the concerns raised by the minority. We absolutely agree and accept that there are going to be families and parents that may react badly, even dangerously, to their child changing their name or pronoun. But the answer isn’t to involve teachers and schools in a coverup; it’s to have policies in place that give any child that may fear for their safety all the help they need, including, if necessary, intervention. To this end, we would note that teachers are mandatory reporters — they must report a variety of issues (or concerns) because society has learned through tragedy and horror what happens when parents and other guardians are excluded from knowing details of their child’s life. If teachers have reasonable grounds to suspect abuse, mental health issues and more, they are legally required to inform authorities and families. Limiting their ability to inform parents would cut against this necessary and overdue progress. Further, we have already passed laws banning “conversion therapy.”

Your Line editors support the right of trans people to live lives of legal equality, safety and dignity, and we honestly believe that most Canadians would agree with us on that. We also note that the rising tide of trans activism has raised complicated concerns that exist at the edges of reasonable accommodation, and must necessarily raise thorny concerns about how we manage competing rights between disadvantaged people. Can minors consent to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Is it fair to allow trans women who enjoy the permanent physical advantages bestowed by male puberty into female athletics? When should trans men be permitted in women’s prisons and shelters, if ever? These questions demand a thoughtful and nuanced response. They don’t disappear the moment someone screams “trans women are women!” and threatens to kill that bigoted TERF J.K. Rowling. They aren’t resolved by hysterics and warnings of suicide.

By staking out maximalist positions on the most difficult topics, and granting no ground for concession and compromise, trans-rights activists have polarized their own cause. Shouting down critics worked for a while, but the pendulum is now rapidly swinging back to the plumb line. Labelling every concerned parent a transphobe is tired and played out. It’s failing as a strategy of persuasion. Which brings us to the current moment; the place of four-to-one support for cynical policies proposed by conservative premiers. Keep it up, and we suspect it’ll be nine-to-one in short order.

Backlashes are rarely measured, sane, or logical, and we fear this one is already teasing out some very dark and long-repressed demons, even among people who once counted themselves allies of LGBTQ people and causes. We are seeing this backlash in a rise in hate crimes, growing counter-protests, and in a decline in support for LGBTQ people generally. And, yes, we are seeing it in in heavy-handed and misguided legislation both here and in the U.S. We aren’t arguing that any of this is justifiable; rather, we are merely noting that it has long been inevitable and predictable. We were warned.

One of the only real questions we have is how self-styled progressive parties and leaders are going to navigate trans issues when the population is very much not on their side. We talk a lot about how the conservatives are beholden to the most vocal minorities within their parties; but we fear that the progressives suffer the same fundamental problem.

We’d like to think that the Liberals and the NDP will handle trans issues maturely, responsibly and well. But we know better. They’ll go all in, setting everyone up for a very nasty confrontation that we think they’ll lose, and badly. Brace yourselves, friends.

August 29, 2023

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois “runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of ‘decolonise'”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds himself surprised at the inclusion of a very unusual book on a list demanded by those pushing for “decolonization” of university curricula:

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, from the National Portrait Gallery which has explicitly released this digital image under the CC0 license.
Wikimedia Commons.

“Decolonise the curriculum” is a movement that wants university courses to focus less on dead white European males and more on writers of colour. Its argument is that black students need texts that speak directly to them. They need books by authors who look like them. They need books about experiences and ideas they can more readily relate to than they can the stuff written about in “high white culture”. Black students must be able to recognise themselves in what they study, we’re told, or else they’ll feel cheated and demeaned.

I was surprised to find that one of the leading decolonise movements, at the University of Edinburgh, was arguing for WEB Du Bois’ 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, to be included on the English curriculum. The activists said it was unreasonable to expect black students to engage with so many white authors. They also need to engage with people like Du Bois, in whose work they might “recognise themselves”. I was surprised, not because I think The Souls of Black Folk shouldn’t be on more university courses – absolutely it should. No, it’s because The Souls of Black Folk runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of “decolonise”. It made me wonder if these activists have even read it. Du Bois’ book contains some of the finest arguments you will ever read against the idea that high culture is a white thing that others cannot connect with.

One of my favourite passages in the book, from the chapter on what kind of education black men are fit for, touches on this very question. Here Du Bois makes his critique of those in his own time who were arguing that blacks only require basic education and industrial training. He describes his own experience of higher learning, writing:

    I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas … From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension.

That passage, Du Bois’ moving belief that Shakespeare does not wince at him, captures a central thread of his writing: universalism. Du Bois agitates against accommodating to segregation or low expectations, and argues for the rights of “black folk” to assimilate into the spoils of civilisation; to become, as he puts it, “co-workers in the kingdom of culture”. To those in the late 1800s and early 1900s who argued that black people needed a targeted form of culture, one specific to their needs and capacities, Du Bois said: “We daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the privilege of white men, and the danger and delusion of black men.”

Du Bois insisted that it is only through assimilation into the “kingdom of culture” that self-knowledge and self-improvement can truly occur. As he wrote: “Wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.” The veil he’s referring to is the veil of colour, the one that separated blacks from whites in post-slavery America. For Du Bois, that veil was best lifted via assimilation into the American republic’s political universe and its realm of culture.

Du Bois’ critique of the notion that high culture was for white men, and would prove mystifying to black men, has sadly been superseded by an “anti-racism” with an entirely different outlook. Now, the supposedly radical stance is to believe that high culture is disorientating for black people, and possibly even damaging to their self-esteem, and therefore they require something more targeted. In short, they need release from the kingdom of culture. That, in essence, is what the decolonise movement desires: the “liberation” of non-white peoples from the cultural gains of Western civilisation. Behold the crisis of universalist belief.

August 28, 2023

Charter school students do better academically, yet are funded at a lower level than other students

Filed under: Education, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jack Elbaum on recent studies that show charter schools in the United States have higher academic success rates than ordinary state-funded schools, despite a significantly lower funding rate:

If you thought charter schools received anywhere near the same amount of funding as traditional public schools, then think again.

A new, massive study from the University of Arkansas finds that “On average, charter schools across 18 cities in 16 states (…) receive about 30 percent or $7,147 (2020 dollars) less funding per pupil than traditional public schools.” Over the past two decades, this funding disparity has remained relatively stable.

The gaps are, predictably, more severe in some places than others. The study notes that “Atlanta has the largest percentage-based charter funding disparity (about 53 percent), while Camden has the largest disparity in dollars ($19,711). Houston has the smallest disparity in terms of percent (three percent) and dollars ($417).”

Importantly, the regression analysis run by the authors did not suggest differences in the proportion of students in poverty or English Language Learners are the reason for the disparity. However, it did find that after taking into account differences in the number of special needs students, the disparity dropped considerably — although it remained significant ($1,707).

[…]

Based on these data alone, it would not be unreasonable for one to expect that these charter schools had worse educational outcomes than their traditional public school counterparts.

The only issue is that this is not the case.

A recent study from Stanford University, for example, found that charter school students gain 16 days’ worth of reading and six days of math per year relative to those in traditional public schools. These benefits were particularly pronounced among minority students who were also in poverty. Education Week reported that “Black charter students in poverty gained 37 days of learning in reading and 36 days in math over their counterparts in traditional public schools, and Hispanic students in poverty gained 36 days of reading and 30 days of math over their traditional public school peers.”

Economist Thomas Sowell’s 2020 book Charter Schools and Their Enemies also offers compelling data suggesting the efficacy of charter schools. He studied a set of charters and traditional public schools in New York City that served essentially identical populations. In many cases in the study, a charter school and traditional public school would even occupy the same building.

QotD: Progressives don’t have collections, but they may have fetish objects

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The reason SJWs are so hung up on “capitalism” is, as we’ve seen, they regard it as something very like an addiction. Specifically, like sex addiction — we “capitalists” are compelled to accumulate new, different, better, more-for-more’s-sake, though the acquisition is harmful to both ourselves and society. Ever known a Leftist with a collection? Coins, stamps, baseball cards, anything? It’s 100 to 1 that you don’t, because Leftists aren’t wired like that.

Leftists put their entire lives on display at all times. They might have some knickknacks or mementos (though it’s shocking how few of them have even that), but they’re all for show — if a Leftist ever had a baseball card, it would be framed and displayed in the center [of] xzhyr apartment’s living room, and would have something to do with the player’s politics (the only openly gay player on the Yankees or something). The collector’s joys are unknown to them, because the collector collects for personal reasons. Collectors often can’t wait to show you their collections, of course, and they can be godawful tedious about it, but — pace the Left — they aren’t showing you to brag about it; they’re showing you because you’re their friend, and they assume you’re interested in what interests them.

[…]

SJWs always project, right? They know better than anyone that money can’t buy you happiness, because SJW-ism is strictly an upper-middle-class pursuit. They have all the stuff in the world, and they’re miserable. Look at the ivory tower. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I can think of. Those people are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. They have everything. They work 24/7 — that’s “24 hours a week, 7 months a year” — and get comped, on average, nearly $100K for it. You can always tell which one is the faculty parking lot — no make cheaper than Volvo; no model year earlier than 2017. The houses in the faculty ghetto tend to be physically small, it’s true, but that’s because they’re all restored Victorians — go ahead and cost out what it takes to fully restore one of those puppies, and contemplate a lifetime of pauperism.

Commodity fetishism? In spades, kameraden, and we haven’t even gotten to the “lifestyle” stuff yet. Organic food — tiny little bananas from Trader Joe’s that wouldn’t feed a pygmy marmoset, but cost $4 per pound. Hot yoga lessons — $100 per hour. Eat-pray-loving your way across Indonesia — I can’t even begin to calculate it. SJWs live niiiice; way too nice for us deplorables to afford, filthy “capitalists” that we are.

Severian, “Junkies (II)”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-18.

August 25, 2023

Only an extreme right-wing bigot would say that “BDSM is not for four-year-olds”

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Noted extreme right-wing arch-conservative Brendan O’Neill somehow seems to think that the full panoply of LGBT sexual identities are not appropriate for the pre-school set:

This may not be an accurate portrayal of the book in question, by way of Blazing Cat Fur.

BDSM is not for four-year-olds. Apparently, that’s a controversial statement these days. Only a bigot would want to protect little kids from images of old blokes in fetish gear snogging the faces off each other in public. If you think under-fives should be reading books about hungry caterpillars or tigers coming for tea, not books featuring pictures of ageing men in dog collars and studded leather underwear, you’re a queerphobe and you need to pipe down.

Truly we have reached the seventh circle of woke lunacy. This week it was reported that a mum and dad in Hull in the north of England pulled their four-year-old daughter from a pre-school after she was shown a book called Grandad’s Pride which contains illustrations of “men who are partially naked in leather bondage gear”. The pre-school’s response? According to the mum and dad, it branded them “bigots”. Yes, who else but a hateful phobe would want to stop a toddler from seeing a tattooed, half-naked, grey-bearded homosexual kissing his boyfriend?

Grandad’s Pride is written by Harry Woodgate, an award-winning children’s author who uses they / them pronouns. Of course he does. Or of course they do. Whatever. It tells the story of a girl called Milly, who is playing in her gramps’ attic one day when she happens upon an old Pride flag. She asks what it is and grandad suggests they organise their own Pride march in the village. As you do. Then come the iffy illustrations: old men in fetish gear; a “trans man” (ie, woman) with mastectomy scars under her nipples; an activist in a spiked dog collar waving a placard that says: “Break the cis-tem”. And you thought Where the Wild Things Are was scary.

You don’t have to be a prude to think this is ridiculous bordering on sinister. My view is that consenting adults should do whatever they want. Wear chafing leather trousers, pierce your cock, whip your friends in dim-lit dungeons. It’s not my cup of tea, but knock yourselves out. But it’s not for kids! No four-year-old should be looking at illustrations of a mutilated woman who now identifies as a “man” or of pensioners in leather suspenders. And it doesn’t make you Mary Whitehouse to say so. When you read to little kids, you want them to ask questions like, “Can we have a tiger over for tea?”, not: “Why does that man have stitches on his chest?”

One of the most frustrating things for freedom-lovers like me is that when we raise questions about age-inappropriate woke crap in schools, we get lumped with the religious right or PC fanatics who previously waged war on classic texts like Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (too much talk about menstruation, apparently) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (too many utterances of the n-word). Nonsense. Of course schoolkids should read Blume and Steinbeck. Teens in particular should be expected to engage with challenging texts, even ones that contain racial epithets or girls eagerly awaiting their first period. Schools should err on the side of being open with literature, though let’s hope they don’t start stocking American Psycho or The 120 Days of Sodom.

August 16, 2023

That useful German word, Fremdschämen

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage recounts a cringe-worthy example of Fremdschämen from his university days:

Back in university, our English literature professor assigned Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.

After peeling myself off an undisclosed living room carpet, I trundled into university at the ungodly, semi-torturous hour of 9 a.m. The Geneva Convention still drags its heels in deeming this a cruel and unusual punishment.

The hall filled up in dribs and drabs. One kid, the type who nodded furtively even when there was nothing to nod at, couldn’t wait to tell the world what he thought of The Modest Proposal.

Reader, I cannot directly quote here. One, because memory fails, and two because memory fails. Anyway, he charged into the work.

“Quite frankly,” he said. “I think it is disgusting. To think that even a few hundred years ago someone of apparent letters would propose such a twisted solution to poverty and to hunger is quite frankly abhorrent.”

After relishing his clearly rehearsed diatribe, he sat down and glanced over at the girls. To reward his brilliance, had they disrobed in the hope he sires them with his superior genes right then and there? There was to be no public Genghis Khan moment.

The lecturer, a Clark Kent lookalike with an expressive Roman nose, didn’t know what to say. Neither did anyone else. I admit that in my hungover, hangxiety-ridden, did-I-use-protection state, I briefly pondered whether the joke was on me. Swift was serious?! He meant we should feed poor children to the rich?

The professor said: “Interesting point”.

The lecture hall took on the air of the firing squad. Surely, someone would let fly the first bullet? Aiming neatly above his head, the professor revealed as one would deliver a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Swift’s Modest Proposal was “not given in sincerity” — the bourgeoise version of the proletarian phrase: Are you fucking stupid or something?

The boy crimsoned. His face beat so red he looked like a disgruntled toffee apple. “Oh, no. I knew that” he said. “Of course. I just. It’s just. I think. You know. Of course. I … it’s just shocking to me how … you know… how like … anyone could even print that as a joke?”

(I add the question mark to denote the Millennial tendency to dement declarative sentences into questions for fear of getting things wrong.)

I learned a new word that day. Fremdschämen: The German word for vicarious embarrassment or “cringe”.

August 13, 2023

QotD: Modern education

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Our schools have fulfilled the liberal educators’ every dream, abandoning educational achievement as their goal and systematically replacing it with nurturing self-esteem — or at least self-conceit — leaving their pupils unaware of their own disastrous ignorance, unable even to read properly, and without a counterweight to their chaotic home environments.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Murderess’s Tale”, City Journal, 2005-01.

Update 14 Aug: City Journal has changed their site structure since that article was posted, so I’ve updated the URL to the new location. H/T to somercet1 who called my attention to this.

August 10, 2023

“… most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school … boys are treated as defective girls”

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sarah Hoyt on the plight of boys and young men these days:

It’s far worse for the kids, because most of them are not even working at what they trained for. Or if they are, they are working at a level as though they were never trained.

But there is a bigger problem: most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school. If you’re older than me, you might think I lost my mind. Heck, if you’re younger than me, and never looked closely at what your kids’ school is doing, or you have no kids, you might think I’m nuts.

Well, I might be nuts but not on this. Starting at about middle school, boys are treated as defective girls. Because women are the majority and treated like a protected minority, every school is afraid of not “treating them fairly” which means giving them primacy. Now just your boy’s behavior as a boy will be punished, but assignments are geared for how girls/women think (which means they also annoy the living daylights of atypical females like myself), they are oriented to group work (which by and large punishes males, though again, atypical females ain’t too happy either), and they’re geared to at least external compliance (which again is a female trait.) Most of the teachers are not just women, but they’re women indoctrinated in a system that tells them that male work is superior and that women are unfairly discriminated against for “being kept out of it.”

If at this point you’re puzzled over my referring to male and female characteristics, and to male work, let’s take the gloves off and speak like adults, instead of the mush most of us have been fed our entire lives.

While we’re rational, thinking creatures, and creatures with our own will power, and therefore can work on a lot of our characteristics and change them: there are differences between men and women. Innate, inborn differences, starting in the uterus with the “hormone baths” that guide development of different sexes. Period.

No real scientist would ever deny that, unless of course he/she feared for his/her job.

… and because we live in retarded times, let me explain that though our bodies and brains are completely different and run on two models, yes, how much that difference manifests is a spectrum. First, because development has glitches. I.e. some people don’t get the right hormones at the right time, and might outright have a brain that leans more the way opposite their body. This is very rare. It is also, btw, not covalent with gender dysphoria. It’s mostly 100% living frustrated by the rest of humanity and assumptions made. But there are other issues. Other types of characteristics might emphasize/mitigate/mimic the way of thinking of the opposite sex. Autistic females tend to think more like males (go figure) and ADHD women might appear to (though it’s not necessarily true.)

Also, like every gendered characteristic, there is a spectrum. Gender doesn’t exist on a spectrum (mostly because it’s a grammatical construct and those are very binary/trienary) but GENDER EXPRESSING CHARACTERISTICS do. Every adult knows tall, hairy men with deep voices, and slight, almost hairless males who are tenors. And every combination thereof. This without regard to maleness/fertility/orientation. And every adult knows vavaboom females that look like they should be painted on the nose of WWII planes, and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females and every combination in between. And these women might or might not be straight/fertile without regard to those combinations.

And yes, all of us know strong women and weak males, though testosterone unreasonably favors males from early development.

[…]

Look, to level set: if you have a son, even a relatively high performing one, chances are he’s working under a level of throttling-down. And most boys are checked out. They no longer care. They’ve been told they’re oppressors and evil by reason of being born male from the moment they were conscious of being male. They no longer care. They no longer want to do anything. Burned out before they even start their lives.

And under it, because they’re males, with testosterone, there’s a level of anger that women will never understand, unless they live surrounded by males and really, really work at understanding. This means that this treatment of boys is creating that much ballyhooed “toxic masculinity” which idiots confuse with “being male”.

Yes, some boys are finding their way into professions the feminists have no interest in, and bless Mike Rowe, whatever his issues, for showing the way to a bunch of males.

But that’s not going to solve our problems as a society in general. Because, sure, we need machinists and HVAC technicians. But we also need engineers who are more fascinated with the “thing” that is the main part of their job, than with office politics. We need researchers who will work hard at figuring the problem, and not spend most of their time figuring out on whom to step to get higher. We need doctors who are gruff and not particularly good at “customer service” but view disease as an enemy to be conquered. (I could go for days about medicine. I’m not going to. But part of our favoring women in medical school is that we are importing most of the people involved in actual day to day doctoring — a dirty, unpalatable position educated women tend to disdain — from countries without the same standards of training. This is one of the idiotic consequences of denying biology in favor of bizarre Marxist social engineering. And not that, yes, I have several female doctors among the regulars. Yes, females can be good and passionate doctors. And several of them are. But those who read here are old enough they were admitted on an equal footing with males. No one was trying to make it 80% female, which is what I’m complaining about. That level of discrimination distorts everything down the line.)

We are INTENTIONALLY blocking males from pursuing their interests and talents, while pushing women to pursue what are traditionally male interests and talents.

This extends from professions to modes of behavior. Women are encouraged to join the hook up culture, with no emotional attachments and behave like BAD and IRRESPONSIBLE men of the 50s (or at least the popular image of those. None of us lived them. Wait. Some of you did. But I didn’t. And those who did as adults are, at this point, a minority.)

The only possible conclusion is that our culture has gone insane and thinks that male modes of work, and male modes of social behavior are VASTLY superior to females. And that females would normally behave like males, unless they were prevented. So, women must have been prevented for MILLENNIA. MILLENNIA. And now, we’re taking revenge for all those oppressed women, by making men behave like women and women like men. Ah. See how they like being oppressed!

Stated like this, openly, it sounds completely insane. It’s like these people are bizarrely misogynistic aliens, who never met a human. Which is largely true. They’re Marxists, for whom every human is a widget, interchangeable with every other human.

August 8, 2023

QotD: The British imperial educational “system”

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The history of “education”, of the university system, whatever you want to call it, is long and complicated and fascinating, but not really germane. Like all human institutions, “educational” ones grew organically around what were originally very different foundations, the way coral reefs form around shipwrecks. Oversimplifying for clarity: back in the day, “schools” were supposed to handle education […] while universities were for training. That being the case, very few who attended universities emerged with degrees — a man got what training he needed for his future career, and unless that future career was “senior churchman”, the full Bachelor of Arts route was pretty much pointless.

(At the risk of straying too far afield, let’s briefly note that “senior churchman” was a common, indeed almost traditional, career path for the spare sons of the aristocracy. Well into the 18th century, every titled parent’s goal was “an heir and a spare”, with the heir destined for the title and castle and the spare earmarked for the church … but not, of course, as some humble parish priest. It was pretty common for bishops or abbots, and sometimes even cardinals, to be ordained on the day they took over their bishoprics. See, for example, Cesare Borgia. Meanwhile the illiterate, superstitious, brutish parish priest was a figure of satire throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A guy like Thomas Wolsey was hated, in no small part, precisely because he was a commoner who leveraged his formal education into a senior church gig, taking a bunch of plum positions away from the aristocracy’s spare sons in the process).

That being the case — that schools were for education, universities for training — the fascinating spectacle of some 18 year old fop fresh out of Eton being sent to govern the Punjab makes a lot more sense. His character, formed by his education (in our sense), was considered sufficient; he’d pick up such technical training as he needed on the job … or employ trained technicians to do it for him. So too, of course, with the army, and the more you know about the British Army before the 20th century, the more you’re amazed that they managed to win anything, much less an empire — the heir’s spare’s spare traditionally went into the army, buying his commission outright, which meant that quite senior commands could, and often did, go to snotnosed teenagers who didn’t know their left flank from their right.

Alas, governments back in the days were severely under-bureaucratized, meaning that the aristocracy lacked sufficient spares to fill all the technician roles the heirs required in a rapidly urbanizing, globalizing world… which meant that talented commoners had to be employed to fill the gaps. See e.g. Wolsey, above. The problem with that, though, is that you can’t have some dirty-arsed commoner, however skilled, wiping his nose on his sleeve while in the presence of His Lordship, so universities took on a socializing function. And so (again, grossly oversimplifying for clarity) the “bachelor of arts” was born, meaning “a technician with the social savvy to work closely with his betters”. A good example is Thomas Hobbes, whose official job title in the Earl of Devonshire’s household was “tutor”, but whose function was basically “intellectual technician” — he was a kind of man-of-all-work for anything white collar …

At that point, if there had been a “system” of any kind, what the system’s designers should’ve done is set up finishing schools. The “universities” of Oxford, Cambridge, etc. are made up of various “colleges” anyway, each with their own rules and traditions and house colors and all that Harry Potter shit. Their Lordships should’ve gotten together and endowed another college for the sole purpose of knocking manners into ambitious commoners on the make (Wolsey might actually have had something like this in mind with Cardinal College … alas).

But they didn’t, and so the professors at the traditional colleges were forced into a role for which they were not designed, and unqualified. That tends to happen a lot — have you noticed? It actually happened to them twice, once with the need for technicians-with-manners became apparent, and then again when the realization dawned — as it did by the 1700s, if not earlier — that some subjects, like chemistry, require not just technicians and technician-trainers, but researchers. Hard to blame the “system” for this, since of course there is no “system”, but also because such a thing would be ruinously expensive.

Hence by the time an actual system came into being — in Prussia, around 1800 — the professors awkwardly inhabited the three roles we started with. The Professor of Chemistry, say, was supposed to conduct research while training technicians-with-manners. As with the pre-machinegun British army, the astounding thing is that they managed to pull it off at all, much less to such consistently high quality. They were real men back then …

Severian, “Education Reform”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-17.

August 4, 2023

QotD: The “knowledge base” problem in teaching history

Filed under: Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Knowledge base. This is both over- and under-supplied in the Biz [teaching history]. If one were inclined to make efforts to remain humble, History is a good place to start, because a) it’s accessible to all, which means b) a lot of your “students” know a LOT more, about a lot more things, than you do. […]

The point is this: Even if I were an expert in that particular field (I’m not; as with Sovietology, I’m a gentleman amateur), there are zillions of people who know more of the details than I do. It seems like half the Internet can reel off, from memory, the entire command structure of the 6th Volksgrenadier regiment. Teach a “Modern Europe” class, and you’re guaranteed to have at least one of them among the studentry. Knowledge, in that sense, is over-supplied.

It’s over-supplied in another way, too. There have been tremendous recent advances in the study of, say, the Roman Empire. Computer modeling of seed-distribution patterns and asdzlsjdfjkha … sorry, my head hit the keyboard, I can’t stay awake for this stuff, but I’m sure glad someone can, because it’s important. As I understand it, there have been revolutions even in older fields like numismatics and epigraphy — you can learn a lot from coins and inscriptions, and they’re changing our understanding of some fundamental stuff (see e.g. Roman coins in Japan).

But knowledge is also under-supplied, especially from the teachers’ side. Not just “knowledge of human nature”, above, though of course that’s a biggie. Here’s a far from exhaustive list of what I was NOT taught in graduate school:

  • economics
  • military strategy
  • ecology
  • agriculture
  • logistics
  • Western languages
  • non-Western languages

and so on. Now, some of these you’re supposed to have supplied yourself (e.g. the languages, provided you don’t need them for your specialty, and at one time I could muddle through a few), but nobody checks. Obviously nobody checks when it comes to economics, because everyone in the Biz is a Marxist, and sentence one of page one of any basic economics textbook should read “Marxism is a comprehensive crock of horseshit”, but it works that way for all the others, too. Considering that “farming” and “fighting” are two of the Three F’s that comprise “what almost all humans did, all the time, for all of recorded history”, those are some pretty goddamn big oversights … you know, if actually knowing how humans do is the point.1

Severian, “How to Teach History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-23.

    1. the third F, for the record, is “fucking”, and like the languages, you’re supposed to have acquired a working knowledge of that on your own before you arrive. Alas, that obviously didn’t work out as planned. The 40 Year Old Virgin wasn’t supposed to be a documentary, but it’s pretty much cinéma vérité in your average graduate program. Trust me: The persyn with bespoke pronouns has them because xzhey have absolutely no idea what to do with their naughty bits. When I say that a night on the town with a sailor on shore leave would cure most of these … organisms … of the majority of their problems, I mean it. Getting eggheads blued, screwed, and tattooed wouldn’t save America, but it would be a damn good start.

July 27, 2023

Instead of a malignant conspiracy, consider the possibility it’s really a society-wide dearth of competence

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on a topic I’ve been pushing for years in casual conversation:

Recently, in a conversation between friends, the hypothesis was floated: what if all the burning farms, derailed trains, crop failures, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad scary nauseam aren’t really enemy action, but more a competency crisis.

As in these things happen not because big-bad is plotting against us, but because no one knows how to do the things they purportedly do anymore. Some kind of know, but they are hampered, slow, and sometimes hemmed in by counterproductive regulation or the result of previous “strokes of genius” decisions that broke the system.

I’m not going to bore anyone with what I know to be a massive crisis of competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing again.

But here’s the thing: All of us can live without a functioning fiction writing/selling market. Maybe not as pleasantly/happily, at least for those of us addicted to reading, but we can survive. We have old books to re-read, and if we get really desperate we can write our own fanfic.

It’s another thing when you talk of transportation or medicine, or farming, or – Well, everything else.

I have friends and fans in a lot of places. And almost everyone’s story is of being caught in the middle of a system where nobody knows or can do much of anything. It’s all the way the cogs and bureaucracy move. And the way they move is completely divorced from what needs done, or what anyone knows how to do.

To give an example: Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.

So, you do what you can. You fudge the books. On paper, you’re getting all this water up. Where the water goes no one knows, every one down stream (pardon the pun) from you does the same.

If this sounds like the soviet system? It is. It’s just that the directives don’t come directly and traceably from the government. (Though under the infestation of Bidentia they increasingly do.) Instead, they come from “experts” “scientists” “Studies” “marketing gurus.” And sometimes they are curtailed or made worse by agencies and regulations.

Yes, the managerial or worse “expert” class is the same that furnishes government. These are not your friends, are not meant to be your friends, and are convinced they know much more than you do.

What they know in fact is “how to manage.” But it’s not how to manage anything. They know theory of management (or whatever) derived from no reality (mostly from the writings of Marx, if you dig a little) and pushed ALL THE WAY DOWN.

It’s like — exactly like — being run by “experts” who memorized the Little Red Book. It might please those in power, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing the actual job in front of you.

Part of this has to do with colleges. Remember all those student demonstrations of the 60s? If you’re like me, and didn’t hit college till the eighties or younger, you might think these are, as the movies show, all anti-war and for civil rights, and all that jazz.

Unspoken to any of us is the fact that half of these demonstrations were to DUMB DOWN THE CURRICULUM. To demand easier grading. And social factors taken into account. And to “update” to “relevant things.”

The idea being that we were in a sort of an year zero and anything else, in the long storied glories of Western civ no longer counted, except for us to declare ourselves superior to it.

July 26, 2023

Justin Trudeau’s odd choice to agitate Muslim Canadians over his LGBT beliefs

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the weekend’s roundup post from the editors of The Line, one of the topics discussed was Prime Minister Trudeau’s attempt to blow smoke up the collective butts of deeply religious Canadian Muslims that the only reason they were upset about his blatant dedication to LGBT issues was due to brainwashing by extreme right-wing Americans:

this week offered us a video clip of Trudeau that was just too interesting for us to pass up. Readers may recall a story from a few weeks ago in which several Muslim students in Edmonton absented themselves from Pride events and were lambasted by their teacher, who told them that they had to support this event or they “can’t be Canadians.” We didn’t make much note of it at the time because our colleague and friend at the National Post Colby Cosh had the definitive and winning take: that is, the teacher is a fucknut. These kids didn’t protest or object to pride or make their peers feel uncomfortable in any way. They just declined to participate. And in a pluralistic society, politely absenting oneself from ideological events with which one disagrees and instead hanging out at the Orange Julius or wherever the hell kids spend time these days is about the most perfect and Canadian response.

Perhaps not coincidentally, upon receiving such clear signals about the conduct that is now expected of a Canadian, Muslim parents are organizing ever louder protests against what they deem to be LGBTQ “indoctrination” in schools. And if you’ve been paying any attention to the logic pretzels that have been spun about intersectionality, lived experiences, the importance of listening to minority voices in majority cultures and so on, this is about the point at which you’re going to grab the popcorn, because what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide clash of values between competing minority interest groups.

So we give the prime minister a lot of credit for meeting with Muslim parents in a Calgary-area mosque last week to discuss the issue. And we mean that! Genuinely! Heading face-first into a mob of angry parents is a really difficult thing for anybody to do. He deserves credit for doing this.

However, the response that was recorded by attendees was also very, very interesting. The furore over LGBTQ issues in schools is much ado about nothing, he insisted; the result of right-wing extremists spreading “a lot of untruths about what’s actually in provincial curriculums”.

Trudeau continued: “They are weaponizing the issue of LGBT, which is something that, yes, Islam has strong opinions on …. That is something that is being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community.”

A few notes about this response: The first is that it is undeniably true. There are anti-LGBTQ activists who are trying to mobilize the Muslim community because this minority population has greater moral suasion among the intersectionality set than socially conservative white Christians. There are right-wing commentators out there who focus on cases, videos, examples and books that they claim demonstrates a pervasive trend of “indoctrination” on LGBTQ issues in school environments. The examples are out there, and some are age-inappropriate. However, we have no sense that those examples are representative of what’s happening in most classrooms. Are there a lot more non-binary 12-year-olds in middle school nowadays? Sure. Is that a problem? We don’t know. Maybe? But we’ve yet to walk into an elementary school hosting a 24/7 Pride Parade with naked men and women throwing rainbow glitter and condoms to the kiddies. We are savvy enough media consumers to know that in a social-media age, edge cases have a habit of being falsely portrayed as routine.

Our snark aside, Trudeau’s response is interesting because it is also a dodge. Trudeau doesn’t actually want to deal with the hard problem of how to accommodate competing minority rights. So instead he pretends there is no problem. He blames the perception of a problem on disinformation agents. Marvellous — right up until the moment we see some video from a Toronto school of a teacher screaming at eight-year-olds that there is no such thing as boys and girls and that the whole concept of biological sex is an expression of imperialism and white supremacy. (Ed note: pin this graf for future victory lap.)

Or, just as an example of the sort of thing that just maybe could happen, when an ostensibly trans shop teacher shows up to class in a wig and Size-Z prosthetic breasts with armour-piercing nipples and the school board responds by saying “This is not a problem, you bigot,” and then it turns out that the teacher in question hasn’t been entirely upfront about their life! Or until, well, some teacher tells a bunch of Edmonton kids that skipping pride to head to the mall makes them un-Canadian. Oops! Wait, so who’s lying now?

The second reason we found this response interesting is that it’s become this government’s go-to deflection. All criticism is just disinformation. Anybody who disagrees with the Liberals is a baddie because can’t you see how awesome and empathetic and genuinely well intentioned they are? Throw in a little threadbare virtue, a touch of white saviour: “you, poor, deluded, Muslims, are just being manipulated by malign forces and can’t possibly understand what you’re saying or what you really believe,” and you’ve got a pitch-perfect urban progressive Canadian non-comment. It’s a mask slip moment, when we see exactly how Trudeau seems himself, and how he sees the people he’s talking to. Oh wait: actual Muslims find this statement condescending and insulting? Don’t they know whose side they’re supposed to be on? Maybe they’re just watching too much Matt Walsh. Why does anybody need to define what a woman is anyway? Maybe we need a new law for that so the plebes stop getting so confused …

You see where this logic takes us. We may wade into this one a bit more at The Line in coming days and weeks, so enough said for now. But for now, it’s enough to note that this is not how a mature, pluralistic society handles irreconcilable differences in values and beliefs. Generally speaking, everyone is pretty content to let adults live and let live, but when you bring kids into any ideological agenda, expect matters to get ugly quickly. And you’re going to need a better response to legitimate concerns about how an emerging secular ideological consensus around gender and ideology crashes against deeply held religious values than: “YouTube lies”.

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