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ideological culture national politics & policies

Awake to Evasion 1.0

There are people who still debate the term “woke.” From the beginning, defenders of woke judgments, discourse, and activism claimed it was “just good manners”; others said it didn’t exist, a mere figment of “right-wing paranoia.” 

Truth is, it was a new, trendy term used to replace “social justice” and the peculiar bent and activism methods of “social justice warriors,” after “SJW” became fodder for ridicule by collegiate leftism’s opponents.

Now, more than a few Democrats are trying to distance themselves not only from the rising tide of know-nothing communism but also the woke style itself, which increasing numbers of Americans have come to loathe. The bellwether in this is U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.).

What she and her comrades said in the time of the COVID lockdowns was “not rhetoric that we would use today,” she told an ABC This Week interviewer. But she insists that the extremist/radical positions of her fellow Democratic Socialists (she’s still a member of the New York chapter) were “useful.”

Nevertheless, her apologetics for defunding the police and other crazytown nonsense was not what went viral. It was her repeating of a local politician’s statement to the effect that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” that dominated commentary.

Ha ha ha, it was a confusing time; we can move on, seems to be her takeaway.

But she herself was a big part of the madness, says Robby Soave — and so says your memory. “No one,” declares Soave, “should accept these conversions at face value.”

Of course they aren’t even conversions. They are evasions and spin. AOC is a politician, and no more honest about her past positions than she is her ignorance of economics, political philosophy, and especially . . .

Common Sense.

Of which This Is. (I’m Paul Jacob.)


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Categories
Thought

Galsworthy

Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.

John Galsworthy, Windows (1922), Act I,
Categories
Today

Steamboat One

On August 17, 1807, Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat left New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.

Categories
Update

An Especially Icky Aspect of the Pandemic

The white fibrous clots, previously mentioned in these pages, has received scholarly attention at last: “Self-Reported Observations of Unusual White Fibrous Structures in Embalmed Corpses: Multi-Year Survey Results from Embalmers in Five Countries, 2022–
2025.” The paper, written by Thomas F. Haviland, Laura Kasner, and Daniel Santiago, has appeared in International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science (IJIRMS).

Dr. John Campbell discusses it here:

This is one of the several controversial topics irregularly updated on this website.

Categories
Today

Against Central Banking

On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-establish the Second Bank of the United States. This made him deeply unpopular with his former supporters in the Whig Party — which was the party of “internal improvements” as well as an anti-Jacksonian party, and Andrew Jackson had previously set himself against central banking. It is apparent that Tyler did this because he had come to believe a central bank was unconstitutional.

We have a central bank, now, of course. It is called the Federal Reserve.

Categories
Thought

William J. Locke

We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.

William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905).

Categories
Update

Hong Lost

In “Uh & Other Naughty Words,” this week, Paul Jacob considered the apparent meteoric success of Francesca Hong, on Election Day expected to win the Democratic primary in her state.

She did not succeed.

Major media blames the polls. Forbes, for example. The polls were wrong. “Socialist Francesca Hong was heavily favored to win the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday in betting odds and among politicos, but the few polls taken proved unreliable in a primary with several major last-minute developments that changed the dynamics in the race.”

But really, why did she lose? Some say it is the result of the alleged fact that “progressives don’t vote.” Karlyn Borsenko has a different opinion:

Categories
Thought

Galsworthy

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

John Galsworthy, Windows, Act II (1922),
Categories
Today

A Wind, Divine

On August 15, 1281, the Mongolian fleet of Kublai Khan was destroyed by a “divine wind” for the second time in the Battle of Kōan.

Categories
education and schooling

Grades Versus Feelings

In the 1960s, MIT introduced a “Pass or No Record” system for the first semester of freshman year. The idea? Help students adjust to greater workloads and “variations in academic preparation and teaching methods.”

You’d think that letter grades themselves would help students adjust by providing information about how well they are learning and adjusting — assuming that the grades are at least a roughly objective indication of mastery not yet rendered useless by grade inflation.

Some universities let first-semester freshmen convert a poor letter grade into a pass/no credit “grade.” Only a few have sweepingly replaced letter grades with the pass/no credit system in the first semester.

Now University of Michigan has joined those few. One reason: to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding.”

Why not at least make the pass/no credit “grade” optional for the sake of students who do want their academic achievement to be more specifically recorded on their transcript?

Well, this would “defeat the purpose of facilitating students’ transition to campus.” See, if “covered grades are optional, covering [hiding] an individual’s grades will inadvertently become equated with [their] not doing well in a class.”

Sounds like a reason for keeping letter grades. And what if the mental problems persist into sophomore year? Junior? Senior?

The mental health of some students may be a problem. But it won’t be fixed by hiding the evidence of how well they’re doing academically. Or by being systematically unfair to the best students.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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