As PJ O’Rourke has been known to note, only people who have never dated an EE [Elementary Education] major fail to understand what is wrong with education. We’re not exactly recruiting the brains of our generation into that workforce. Which is of course why that workforce falls for the sort of tripe the progressives tell them about teaching snots.
“Progressivism rests on the idea that children want to behave and they want to learn, the teacher needs to step back and allow the child to explore their natural curiosity, which will motivate them and keep them engaged,” Mr Bennett said.
Isn’t that fun as an assumption? Because if it were true then we wouldn’t need trained teachers in schools, would we? The brats want to learn, they will learn therefore. Actually, we don’t even need schools. Just release them into the wild somewhere near a library and they’ll get on with it themselves. [Perhaps the best known historical exponent of this theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Émile, a treatise on education.]
Ah, you say, that wouldn’t work? Then and therefore our assumption about all just wanting to learn is wrong, isn’t it?
To approach the same point alternatively. If kiddies just thirst for that knowledge to be imparted then why do we monitor truancy? If the first assertion is true then there won’t be any of the second. If we have incidence of the second – and we do indeed have a system to both monitor and try to prevent it – then the first assertion cannot be true. Not of all, all the time that is. And that’s all we need to be able to insist that a teaching method based upon its universal existence is wrong.
Not for the first time Progressivism fails when applied to actual human beings.
Jacob Rosser, “When Progressive Teaching Meets The Reality of Human Children — Not A Pretty Sight”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-13.
August 29, 2022
QotD: Refuting the “children want to learn” notion
August 5, 2022
“… what explains the growing enthusiasm for ‘Drag Queen Story Hour'”?
In UnHerd, Andrew Doyle considers the deep weirdness of how not just “Drag Queen Story Hour” but all things drag are being pushed on children at any cost:
“One thing that drag queens don’t get on FLICKR is tips” by kennethkonica is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 
.
One Easter Sunday, many years ago, some friends and I attended a showcase of performances in a network of dank subterranean vaults. The event was self-consciously avant-garde, and many of the artists were drag queens who were exploring the more subversive aspects of their craft. This involved a great deal of screaming, bloodletting and carnal depravity. At one point I wandered into a chamber in which two naked performers were engaged in full penetrative sex. Around them a cluster of middle-class hipsters had formed, pensively observing them as though they were connoisseurs contemplating a Henry Moore.
These days we are accustomed to a somewhat tamed version of drag. But the best performers have always pushed the limits of acceptability: I once appeared at a comedy night at the Edinburgh fringe hosted by a drag queen whose interaction with the punters was not so much waspish as downright libellous. At another, I remember a drag artist smoking liberally during the performance, blowing smoke at a pregnant woman on the front row and saying “I hope you have a miscarriage”. It was a far cry from RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Traditional drag is clearly meant for adults. So what explains the growing enthusiasm for “Drag Queen Story Hour”, in which drag queens visit schools, libraries and other council venues to read to young children? For whatever reason, this bizarre subgenre has been championed by celebrities and politicians who wish to be seen as being on “the right side of history”. Last week the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, tweeted about taking her infant son to a show in which a drag queen called Greta Tude “put so much energy into story telling and entertaining local children”. Her colleague Nadia Whittome replied, describing the event as “so wholesome”.
But do fans of drag really want it to become “wholesome”? The appeal of drag shows is that they revel in sexual dissidence, as the American drag queen Kitty Demure has pointed out:
I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children … Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child? It makes no sense at all. A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on, and backstage there’s a lot of nudity and sex and drugs. Okay? So I don’t think this is an avenue that you would want your child to explore.
The sexual element of drag is impossible to deny. Even the more tepid drag queens, whose repertoire extends no further than lip-synching to Donna Summer, tend to interlace their performances with suggestive gestures, provocative quips and the occasional slut-drop.
That’s not to say drag queens can’t adapt to a younger audience — they are actors after all. It’s perfectly possible for performers of Drag Queen Story Hour to read stories to children without all the eroticised preening and pouting we have come to expect from them. But why would any self-respecting artist want to do it? There is something deeply mystifying about drag queens who choose to anaesthetise their art form in order to regale infants with tales of teddy bears and picnics.
July 24, 2022
Still no actual evidence of unmarked graves for Residential School children
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay updates the year-old sensational stories about First Nations children being buried in unmarked (in more unhinged reporting it might have been “mass”) graves on the grounds of former Residential Schools in Canada:
Canada’s unmarked-graves story broke on May 27th, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the existence of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data that indicated regularly spaced subterranean soil disturbances on the grounds of a former Indigenous Residential School that had operated in Kamloops, BC between 1893 and 1978. In addition, the First Nation’s leaders asserted their belief that these soil disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of Indigenous children who’d died while attending the school.
The story became an immediate sensation in the Canadian media; and remained so for months, even after the GPR expert on whom the First Nation relied, Sarah Beaulieu, carefully noted that the radar survey results didn’t necessarily indicate the presence of graves — let alone graves that had been unmarked, graves of Indigenous people, or graves of children. Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.
An explanatory image posted by GeoScan, a Canadian Ground-Penetrating-Radar service provider, showing how mapped GPR data can indicate the possible presence of graves.
Image via Quillette.But those details were swept aside during what, in retrospect, appears to have been a true nation-wide social panic. As other Indigenous groups announced that they’d be conducting their own GPR surveys, media figures confidently asserted that the original Canadian Residential-School student death-toll estimate of 3,201 would soon double or even triple. One op-ed writer went so far as to declare that “the discovery of the graves of the children in Kamloops may be Canada’s Holocaust moment.” Dramatic, tear-drenched acts of public atonement unfolded everywhere, with many July 1st Canada Day celebrations being either cancelled or transformed into opportunities for morose self-laceration.
I was one of many Canadians who initially got swept up with all of this — in large part because it seemed as if everyone in the media was speaking with one voice, including journalists I’d known and respected for many years. Looking back on the coverage, I note that headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves”. And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive.
The whole mission of Canada’s church-run Residential School system was to assimilate Indigenous people into white Canadian society, usually against their will, while forcing children to leave their families and communities for months or even years at a time. No one disputes that many students were subject to cruel (and sometimes even predatory) treatment and substandard medical care. Certainly, the death rate for Indigenous children attending these schools was much higher than that for children in the general population. No, I never bought into the idea that there was any kind of mass-murder plot going on at these schools. But it hardly seemed far-fetched that some victims of mistreatment and neglect had been buried in unmarked graves — “off the books”, so to speak—by malevolent white teachers, school administrators, and priests seeking to evade responsibility for their actions.
The other important aspect to mention is that — like most other Canadians, I’m guessing — I believed we were only a few days or weeks from seeing real physical evidence plucked from the earth. So it didn’t much matter to me that early commentators were temporarily playing fast and loose with the distinction between GPR data and actual corpses.
Canadians were being told that the old orchard in Kamloops where the GPR data had been collected was a crime scene — a site of mass murder, and the final resting place of 215 child homicide victims. As I’ve reasoned elsewhere: If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried somewhere in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police crawling all over the place, looking for remains that could be tested and identified. And so I naturally assumed the same thing soon would be happening in Kamloops.
But … no. Not at all, in fact.
As I wrote over a year ago, the way the story swept the media was as if the whole Residential School history was somehow new and previously unknown:
Despite being Canadian, my interest in Canadian history centres mostly on economic, naval, and military aspects, but I was certainly aware that the residential school system was a black mark on Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations and that the general outline of events — if not the gruesome details — had been known for many years. The first time I found out about it was in middle school, through what we’d now call a “Young Adult” novel about a young First Nations boy escaping from the residential school he’d been sent to and his attempts to travel hundreds of miles to get home. I read it in the early 70s and it may have been published up to a decade before then (I no longer remember the author’s name or the title of the book, unfortunately).
If I, as a schoolchild, knew something of this fifty years ago, why have people younger than me been shocked and appalled to be hearing about this widespread tragedy for the first time now?
July 16, 2022
QotD: No, your baby isn’t racist
The insanity of all the “your baby is racist” studies is thinking that babies prefer people who look like THEM. This is not the case. They prefer people who look like those they identify as parents. Take a Chinese baby, at birth, and have him raised by Maori and they’ll react badly to people who look Chinese. Think of it in terms of the band of human (or pre-humans.) If a baby found himself amid a group that didn’t look like its caretakers chances were it was dead and/or lunch. Sending up a distress signal in the form of wailing is its only hope its caretakers will come and rescue it. (“It” because I’m including pre-humans. This applies — with bells on — to baby chimps, btw, who are just human-adjacent.)
Sarah Hoyt, “They’re Out To Get You”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-09.
July 1, 2022
Trying to reconcile the highly mediagenic “Residential School mass graves” stories with facts-on-the-ground
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — never one to miss opportunities to preen before the camera and shed a performative tear or two — quickly ordered Canadian flags to half-staff when the stories about unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools spread across the world. Claims and accusations flew, based on ground-penetrating radar scans that didn’t actually prove that the surveyed land contained lost graves. Once the narrative was established, it provided many opportunities for First Nations organizations, activists, and Canadian and foreign politicians to moralize, condemn, and demand investigations, restitution, and apologies from the Catholic church (which ran over 40% of the residential schools), and the provincial and federal governments.
So, more than a year later … what has been investigated? Not much, it turns out:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism.
An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” on 28 May and updated on 5 October under the same title. It asserted that: “For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.”
Because the corporate press take their cue from the New York Times, its perspective echoed widely. The discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was chosen by Canadian newspaper editors as the “news story of the year”. And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to “a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada”.
But the award this news report should have won is for fake news of the year. All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated.
First, no unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere. GPR has located hundreds of soil disturbances, but none of these has been excavated, so it is not known whether they are burial sites, let alone children’s graves. At her original press conference, the Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band called these findings unmarked graves, and the media, politicians, and even Pope Francis ran with the story without waiting for proof.
Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves ran into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It would hardly be surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery! But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children.
North American Indians did not conduct burials; they usually exposed the bodies of the dead to be worn away by predators and the elements. Christian missionaries introduced the practice of burial. But Indian graves were usually marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long withstand the rigours of Canadian weather. Thus Indian reserves today contain probably tens of thousands of forgotten unmarked graves of both adults and children. To “discover” these with ground-penetrating radar proves nothing without excavation.
Second, there are no “missing children”. This concept was invented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose members spoke at various times of 2,800 or 4,200 Indian children who were sent to residential schools but never returned to their parents. Indeed, some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities. But the legend of missing students arose from a failure of TRC researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them.
June 28, 2022
QotD: The economic pie fallacy
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. “You can’t make the pie larger,” say politicians. When you’re talking about the amount of money in one family’s bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year’s tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you’re planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is — and you specifically are — one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it.
In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven’t made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. *
Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don’t have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones — a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market.
* In the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else microscopically poorer, by doing a small amount of damage to the environment. While environmental costs should be taken into account, they don’t make wealth a zero-sum game. For example, if you repair a machine that’s broken because a part has come unscrewed, you create wealth with no environmental cost.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
June 26, 2022
The Toronto District School Board draws inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”
It’s normally a good thing when people in positions of power and influence have clearly understood the lessons from many sources, including speculative fiction. In the case of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), this isn’t the way it’s supposed to work:
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Thus begins Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s famous short story “Harrison Bergeron”. The satire story paints the picture of a dystopian future where absolute equality has been achieved thanks to various handicapping devices that force all the smart, good-looking, and talented people down to the same intellect, looks, and skills as everyone else. The rationale, of course, is that it wouldn’t be fair to let them get ahead because of their privilege while others are left behind.
The story has enduring appeal because it asks a question that strikes at the heart of our culture, namely, how much are we willing to sacrifice excellence in the name of equality? Should those who are endowed with more privilege or talent be allowed to reach their potential, even if it means others have fewer opportunities, or should those who are less gifted be given an equal chance at success, even if it means holding the gifted back?
The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) seems to have chosen the latter approach. In May, the board’s Trustees voted to approve the Student Interest Programs Policy, which will change the way students are admitted into specialized arts, athletics, and STEM programs. Currently, admission into most of these programs is based on various “assessments of ability” such as auditions, portfolios, and report card marks. But starting in September 2023, these assessments will be scrapped and replaced with a random selection from students who express interest in the programs. In short, equality will take precedence over excellence.
“It is our responsibility to take action to improve access for all students where we identify systemic barriers,” said Alexander Brown, Chair of the TDSB. “This new policy will ensure a greater number of students have access to these high quality programs and schools while reducing barriers that have long-prevented many students from even applying.”
Unsurprisingly, the move was first proposed by the board’s Enhancing Equity Task Force.
“The idea that your child entered one of these programs because of his talent, which he had the privilege of cultivating, I don’t think is appropriate in a public school system,” said Trustee Robin Pilkey. “We need to make sure people have access to all programs.”
To paraphrase, “it wouldn’t be fair to let them get ahead because of their privilege.” Sound familiar?
June 23, 2022
QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future
We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)
Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.
I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”
Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)
And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.
Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.
Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.
Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.
June 15, 2022
When adult responsibilities become overwhelming, the retreat into childish things beckons … hence the cultural dominance of “British Twee”
Ed West isn’t a fan of Britain’s universal adoption of “British Twee” as an escape from the burdens of “adulting” (as the Millenials call it):
James Marriott wrote about the phenomenon in the Times last week; noting the strangeness of seeing a drone corgi in the sky at the Jubilee, he felt “awe at this almost imperial triumph of twee”.
“Once culturally marginal — a series of aesthetic mannerisms associated with greetings cards and downmarket children’s books — twee is now the establishment style”, he wrote: “When the Queen was presented to her subjects at the coronation 70 years ago, the emphasis was on dignity and mystery: uniformed soldiers, a naval review, the BBC’s cameras forbidden from capturing the sovereign’s face in close-up. In the 1950s, this was still the language of power: formal, pompous, sternly detached. Parading for the Queen in 2022 were Teletubbies, a man in a Shaun the Sheep costume, women dressed as afternoon tea, a towering motorised cake.
“Twee is now a cultural default; the distinctive style of our age. Our emojis, gifs and memes will mark us as surely to the generations of the future as the wing collars, tailcoats and elaborate ceremonies of social deference marked our ancestors. Grown-up men and women love Disney and Harry Potter.”
Twee is egalitarian, anti-highbrow and obsessed with childhood, he says. “A love of childish things is a mark of democratic taste and an aversion to pomposity. Britain, with its long (often admirable) tradition of anti-intellectualism is especially vulnerable.”
Marriott concludes that “I can’t bring myself to hate Paddington and corgis but twee can be as oppressive as the formal, serious culture that preceded it. If our ancestors denied themselves the silly, child-like side of human nature, we now ourselves deny its solemn and difficult aspects. Twee is an aesthetic for an age uninterested in ethical complexity, which prefers good and bad as neatly separated as they are at Hogwarts. It fits the childish behaviour of social media’s most active users who swing between condemnatory temper tantrums and cooing over anthropomorphised animal.”
He also notes how twee has been “appropriated by powerful corporations” because “it’s easier to rip someone off with a smiling wide-eyed chatbot.” In my experience, the more informal and “I’m yer mate” a service provider is, the worse it treats its customers.
And that applies to social classes, too; the more informal a ruling elite behaves, the less they care about boring old customs, the less they can be trusted to do the right thing for the people they’re supposed to lead.
Tweeness is terrible, but there’s a particular indefinable, British kind of twee, which is infuriating but hard to articulate. British Twee, or British Cringe, is not so much a definable illness as more like a cluster of symptoms.
Cockwomble, as explained by Ben Sixsmith, is British Twee. Needless posh swearing is very British Twee; used sparsely, swearing is very effective, especially by people with RP accents; used liberally, it’s cringeworthy, especially when discussing politics. The post-referendum anti-Brexit campaign was filled with British Twee, mixing both a loathing of the country with an assumption of cultural superiority, all done in a self-consciously frivolous way.
This kind of Twee British Cringe, because it’s at once both self-hating and also uniquely self-obsessed, seems to suppose that certain British things are uniquely terrible — the awfulness of our government, or the prejudice of our great unwashed — but certain British things are uniquely brilliant and envied, such as the BBC and NHS, not to mention our famous sense of humour.
British Twee is the patriotism of the soft-left. While consciously anti-nationalist, this kind of tweeness is obsessed with defining British national character and values. This reaches its peak with pride about Britain’s universal healthcare, something enjoyed by literally every developed country except the United States.
“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government
Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:
Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.
The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.
Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.
June 12, 2022
“Culture is upstream of politics; and the culture is clearly changing”
In the free-to-cheapskates segment of Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish, he discusses some of the cultural sea change convulsing American society and how that will inevitably feed into the political situation in an election year:
A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.
We]re now two years out from what may in retrospect be seen as peak “social justice”. In the summer of 2020, a hefty section of the elite was enthralled with the idea of the police being defunded, demobilized and demonized. Critical theory’s critique of liberal democracy as a mere mask for “white supremacy” everywhere. Countless people were required to read woke tracts — from DiAngelo to Kendi — as part of their employment. Corporate America jumped in, shedding any pretense of political neutrality; mainstream media swiftly adopted the new language and premises of critical theory. The Trump madness, and his attempted sabotage of an election, largely silenced liberals in their clash with the left. They had a more immediate threat. And rightly so.
But now look where we are.
Last year, Eric Adams became mayor of New York City, propelled by minority voters horrified by surging crime and chaos. This past week, DA Chesa Boudin, scion of leftwing terrorists, was ousted by minority voters in San Francisco, after he allowed much of the city to become a chaotic hellhole in pursuit of “racial justice”.
Recent polling suggests a sea-change in attitudes. Pew found that only three percent of African-Americans put “racism/diversity/culture” as the most important issue to them while 17 percent cited “violence/crime”, and 11 percent said “economic issues”. (Among Democrats overall, “49% now view racism as a major problem, down from 67% about a year ago”.) New York City voters now put “crime” ahead of “racial inequality” as their most urgent concern by a huge ratio of 12:1. Polling in San Francisco found that 67 percent of Asian-Americans wanted Boudin gone — a sign that the Democrats’ ascendant coalition of non-whites is now fast-descendant.
Hispanics also appear to be fleeing the left. In the usually Dem-friendly Quinnipiac poll last month, “48% of Hispanic registered voters said they wanted Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives, while just 34% said they wanted Democrats in power. In addition, 49% of Hispanic voters said they wanted the GOP to win the Senate, while 36% said they wanted Democrats to remain in control of the chamber.” Biden’s approval among Hispanics is now 24 percent. I’m not sure what to make of this, but even if it’s half true, it’s an electoral emergency for Democrats.
Some Dem pols have noticed the vast cultural gap between most Latino voters and wealthy white leftists, and adjusted. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres last week criticized the use of the absurd term “Latinx” — because denying the sex binary is not exactly integral to a culture where the language itself is divided into masculine and feminine. AOC, of course, demurs.
Elite imposition of the new social justice religion — indoctrinating children in the precepts and premises of critical race and gender theory — has also met ferocious backlash as parents began to absorb what their kids were being taught: that America is a uniquely evil country based forever on white supremacy; that your race is the most important thing about you; that biological sex must be replaced by socially constructed genders of near-infinite number; and that all this needs to be taught in kindergarten. Yes, some of this was politically exploited or hyped by the right. But if you think there is no there there in this concern about schooling, you’re dreaming.
Across the country, school boards are thereby in turmoil, with those supporting less ideological education on the march. On the question of trans rights, there is broad support for inclusion — but most Americans are understandably uncomfortable with pre-pubescent kids having irreversible sex changes, and with trans women competing with women in sports. For which those normies are called “hateful”.
May 26, 2022
Alex Tabarrok reviews The Parent Trap
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok looks at Nate G. Hilger’s new book, The Parent Trap:
Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.
Let’s unpack some details. Begin with schooling. It’s very common to bemoan the state of schools in the “inner city” or to complain about “local financing” which supposedly guarantees that poor counties will have underfunded schools. All of this, however, is decades out-of-date.
A hundred years ago there really were massive public-school resource gaps by class and race. These days, however, state and federal spending play a larger role than local property tax revenue and distribute educational resources more progressively … In fact, when we include federal aid, 42 states spent more on poor school districts than on rich school districts in 2012. The same pattern holds between schools within districts
… The highest spending districts are large urban centers such as New York City, Boston and Baltimore. These cities spend large sums to educate rich and poor children alike. p. 10-11
Hilger is correct. No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.
Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.
But what about discrimination? When it comes to wage discrimination, Hilger is brutally honest:
If we compare individuals with similar cognitive test scores, Black college graduates earn higher wages than white college graduates. Studies that don’t control for test score differences but examine earnings gaps within specific professions — lawyers, physicians, nurses, engineers, scientists — tend to find Black workers earn zero to 10 percent less than white workers. These gaps could reflect discrimination, unmeasured skill differences, or other factors such as geography. In any case, such gaps are small compared to the 50 percent overall Black-white earnings gap and reinforce the idea that closing skills gaps would go a long way toward closing income gaps.
Hilger argues that racism does play an important role in explaining Black-white wage differentials but it’s the historical racism that made black parents less skilled and less able to pass on skills to their children. In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination. The success of Nigerians and Jamaican immigrants in the United States also speaks to this point. (Long time readers may recall that in 2016 I dubbed Hilger’s paper on Asian Americans and Black Americans the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Year.)
May 4, 2022
QotD: Masking a young child
New York, where two-year-olds are forced to wear masks all day in nursery.
I have a single memory – a three second “video clip” of my brother’s fourth birthday – that I can confidently date as having happened before I was three. Humans do not seem to lay down recoverable memories of most of what happens to them before the age of four or so. Yet a child’s experiences in those early years have a profound effect on their later personality. That little boy will probably never remember that he tried again and again to push away the damp thing that made it hard to breathe but that his carers, with pitiless good cheer, always forced it back on. But he will have learned the lesson of the powerless. You are weak, they are strong. Crying and protesting do not help.
I am told that in Muslim societies where women must go fully veiled it is difficult to get the little girls into their coverings at first. But even they wait until the girls are at least five.
Natalie Solent, “The carers”, Samizdata, 2021-09-19.
April 16, 2022
Remember all the angst about untold numbers of unmarked graves at former residential schools?
Oh, c’mon man! You must remember the performative grief and anger as even the Prime Minister got into the act by declaring Canada a nation that had committed genocide against as-yet-uncounted First Nations children (oh, and upping the ante, he also implied that this genocide was still ongoing). Do you remember the number of times these graves — often described as “mass graves” rather than merely “unmarked graves” — were investigated in the wake of all this media attention and the fate of at least some of the victims confirmed? No? Well, there’s a good reason for that:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
Rosanne Casimir, the chief of the local Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, said that “knowledge keepers” within the community had guided investigators to the area to be searched — which had once been an apple orchard on the residential school’s premises. The chief also said that knowledge keepers had already told her that what lay below the surface were graves of children whose deaths had previously been undocumented.
Following that announcement, several other First Nations announced their own discoveries. And in December, the Canadian Press called the discovery of unmarked graves, the “news story of the year”.
If you aren’t from Canada, it’s hard to understand the scale of the national reaction to this story. It’s been known for decades that thousands of Indigenous children died during their time in the residential-school system, many of them from tuberculosis. But this new discovery set the country off emotionally. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, lowered the Canadian flag on public buildings, and didn’t raise it for another five months. And journalists became unrestrained in the language they used. In one Canadian newspaper, a headline ran, “Is this Canada’s Holocaust moment?”
Canadians were assured that these weren’t just graves, they were the graves of children; and furthermore, it was suggested, these children hadn’t just died from malnutrition or untreated disease — which is obviously bad enough. Some suggested these children were flat out murdered and dumped in shallow graves in the middle of the night. These claims were even aired by the national broadcaster, CBC, on an investigative show called Fifth Estate.
In the Kamloops press, meanwhile, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, the ground-penetrating-radar expert who’d helped with the discovery, described — as a newspaper put it — “recollections of children as young as six years old being woken up in the middle of the night to dig holes for burials in the apple orchard.”
But there was one odd aspect to the story — and it got odder as the weeks and months marched on: No one seemed to be in any kind of hurry to see what was actually beneath the surface. All we had were ground-penetrating-radar images. And those images don’t show bodies, or caskets, or anything like that. What this technology shows are soil dislocations, which, depending on their depth and spacing, can sometimes indicate the possible presence of grave sites. Why weren’t police, or indigenous authorities, or forensic teams searching for the remains of these poor children?
It’s important to remember that Canadians were being told that this was a crime scene — indeed, not just any crime, but mass murder. If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried in a field in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police all over the place — to see if they could find remains that could be tested and identified. Maybe evidence could be collected showing the manner of death.
And remember that many of the abuses identified at the Kamloops residential school and others like it date to the middle of the 20th century. This means that some of the perpetrators of these claimed child homicides — that is, the teachers, administrators, priests, and ministers who worked at these schools — some of them could still be alive. Shouldn’t we be getting evidence and building a case against them?
How much of teenagers identifying as transgender is “social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture”?
The sheer number of children and teens who are deciding that they are “trans” is far in excess of previous generations. How much of this phenomena may be accounted for by social contagion?
My teenage daughter has decided that she is “trans”. So have all her friends. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every. Single. One.
She had never heard of trans, and had no signs of gender dysphoria, until she was moved to a new, cool trans-friendly school by her unsuspecting, politically liberal parents. There she met a group of geeky (or dare I say nerdy?), smart, slightly (but not very) gender nonconforming, artsy kids. As I understand it, they all discovered “trans” together. The old “cis” friends were swiftly discarded in favour of this exciting new peer group.
Exploring “trans stuff” online with friends is a source of great interest and excitement — a real social event. What’s not to love about 245 gender identities, complete with their own unique flags? Then there are those cool neo-pronouns. Forcing your out-of-touch old parents to refer to you as “ze” or “ey” (how do you pronounce that again??) in the name of “inclusivity” is just too delicious to resist. The manga, the cute avatars in computer games, the blue or pink hair — all part of the fun as well. Mocking the outgroup (in this case so-called “cis” people in general and the dreaded TERFs in particular) is also good for a laugh — especially if they happen to be your parents as well.
There is even a special vocabulary with lots of new terms — deadnaming, misgendering, sex assigned at birth, and much more. If these concepts need to be explained to your uncool parents (accompanied by eye rolls of course), so much the better.
Bonding with friends, searching for their identity and place in life, working out their sexuality, separating from family — these are all normal developmental tasks for teens. For many, youth subcultures can be a natural part of that. Some are harmless. Some, like drug use and extreme dieting, not so much. But in the case of the latter, sensible adults usually intervene to help steer the young people in the right direction. Not in the case of trans. Here we have adults steering kids down a dangerous path, which involves permanent, life altering drugs and surgeries for which there is no good evidence base.
For many of these kids, LGBTQ+ is a youth subculture. It really is as simple as that. Recent surveys have been identifying skyrocketing rates of “trans” or “queer” identification in young people. One found that an astonishing 39% of young adults in the US aged between 18-24 identified with the label LGBT — the figure for teens <18 may well be even higher. Of course this figure includes gay and lesbian people as well as those identifying as trans. Another poll, which looked only at gender, found that nearly 10% of US high schoolers identified as “gender diverse”. Yet another survey gives a lower figure of 1.8%. Whichever figure is correct, this is a huge explosion in numbers over a very short period of time. As endocrinologist Dr Will Malone asks; “How do we reconcile these numbers with 2013 data reporting the prevalence of adult gender dysphoria to be a rare 2-14 in 100,000?”
Social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture, that’s how.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
