Tag: equality

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folly general freedom ideological culture

Comic-Book Isms

equity, equality, communism, egalitarianism, nanny state

“This is crazy,” says Reardon Sullivan, former chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Party.

He means the way Montgomery County has been selling vendor space at a comics convention, MoComCon, being held January 20. The county is charging vendors in a way that has nothing to do with what is being sold but that county officials call “inclusive” (having learned that this adjective transmutes any evil).

If you belong to a favored group, you get a special rate. Nonindigenous straight white males pay $275 per table or, with electricity, $325. But if you’re a woman or favored minority, the price per table is $225 or $250.

Sullivan says that as a black person who grew up in Montgomery County, he finds it “truly insulting to say that a seller who’s black or BIPOC is disadvantaged. All we ever want is a level playing field.” (“BIPOC” is kitchen-sink code for “black, indigenous, and people of color.”)

Sullivan has the right spirit but errs in suggesting that the only thing members of currently favored groups (“we”) want is a level playing field.

One can hope that this is true of most members of these groups.

But if white guilt or white male guilt were the only impetus propelling affirmative action and other forms of race-based or sex-based preferential treatment — if, like Sullivan, all intended beneficiaries regarded such policies as condescending, destructive lunacy — these policies would be dead and buried by now.

As they should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Chalk One Up for Equal Treatment

chalk art, street art, censorship, BLM

“The government may not enforce the laws in a manner that picks winners and losers in public debates,” ruled Judge Neomi Rao. 

This, in response to a case where anti-abortion protesters were arrested for chalking the words “Black Pre-born Lives Matter” on a Washington, D.C., street back in 2020.

Emma Camp makes clear, in her Reason coverage of the ruling, that the case is not as simple as it may sound in the headlines. “While writing chalk messages on public streets and sidewalks is considered vandalism in D.C., protest leaders had an earlier conversation with a police officer in which he ‘explained that he believed Mayor Bowser had effectively opened up the District’s streets for political markings.’”

Nevertheless, during the protest, “police told demonstrators that they would be arrested if they painted or chalked any messages.” Two individuals in the pro-life protest defied police order and scribbled their message in chalk.

It’s actually a bigger issue than just an altercation during a protest. The police in D.C. had not merely looked the other way, allowing helter-skelter displays of “Black Lives Matter” graffiti, but the city government had actually gotten in on the act and messaged “Black Lives Matter” on the streets itself — in bold paint.

This obviously sends a message to disagreeing citizens: we are on this side, not that.

As Judge Rao insists, “The government may not play favorites in a public forum — permitting some messages and prohibiting others.”

She interprets this injunction as pertaining to the First Amendment, but it goes much deeper than that, reaching to the core idea of a rule of law, and equality of treatment under it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Counterintuitive?

education, equality, egalitarianism

In this increasingly complex technological world, what can our school systems do to help students excel in advanced math?

Well, here’s a novel approach: “Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school,” The Boston Globe reports.

Hmmm. Rather counterintuitive: Take access away from students.

Silly me, helping students master advanced mathematics isn’t even on the list of concerns for this Massachusetts city’s “education” officialdom. “The district’s aim,” explains The Globe, “was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers.” 

By reducing the learning opportunities for all. 

“School districts throughout the country are moving to axe certain academic standards such as advanced courses, grades and homework in the name of equity,” The Daily Caller informs, “in California, a high school recently stopped offering honors courses because the courses were failing to enroll enough black and Latino students.”

The impetus behind these moves is racist and wrong. Moreover, the results are both predictable and pernicious: “limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons.”

“They’re shortchanging a significant number of students,” one parent complains, “overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.” This is the case because many of the more affluent parents can afford to bypass the antagonistic public schools and get their kids the education they need to succeed. 

Public schools are increasingly throwing in the towel on teaching low-income and many black and brown kids, deciding that racial “equity” can most easily be achieved by taking away educational opportunities from white and Asian students.

Is this where the logic of public education leads — race as an excuse to play Procrustes, sawing off the tops of our heads to make us “equal”?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

In the Name of Equity

equity, egalitarianism, collectivism

Last year, I noted complaints by Virginia officials about the high proportion of Asian students attending Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. These students studied too hard, supposedly.

Now we learn that TJ High administrators have been conniving to prevent students who won National Merit awards, issued for excelling on the PSAT, from being informed of this. Principal Ann Bonitatibus and another official, Brandon Kosatka, have been memory-holing the notifications for years.

You can’t report having won a National Merit award on a college application if you just don’t know.

The policy is consistent with the Fairfax County school district’s ugly new Harrison-Bergeronesque ideal of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”

Kosatka told a parent that the idea was to “recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” a nonsensical proposition. Individuals don’t just sit around being themselves; they do stuff. Kosatka also said that the principal didn’t want to hurt the feelings of non-winners of the Merit awards by acknowledging winners.

Bonitatibus and Kosatka should be fired — at least. Their job is to help students achieve, not to undercut them.

We’ll never rid the world entirely of resentment against achievement — or, for that matter, the benefits that flow from achievement. But we can teach kids that the proper response to disappointment at doing less than their best is to resolve to do better at the next opportunity. 

And to be inspired — not, heaven forfend, demoralized — by the heights that others do achieve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

Party Like It’s Versailles

Met Gala, equality, hypocrisy

It was quite the party. All the big names were at the Met Gala, coughing up $30 thousand per ticket. Representative Alexandria “Woman of the People” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) turned heads with her stunning dress . . . emblazoned with the big red words: “Tax the Rich.”

Other women at the event sported similar ideological markers: “Equal Rights for Women” and . . . excuse me . . . “Peg the Patriarchy.”

The most common comment? The sheer elitist effrontery. 

This was of and for the poshest of the posh: celebrity culture. And couture. 

The stars and politicians and multi-millionaires presented themselves proudly, smiling, unmasked — while waited on by staff all masked up.

It takes a certain amount of gall to parade before the plebes, maskless while they are masked — though we are told the celebs masked up once the red carpet parade was over. To pretend to be “with the people” and somehow against the rich while hobnobbing with the super-wealthy is one thing, but twirling and smiling and showing off while the lowly servants are not even allowed to show their faces . . . undermines that whole “tax the rich” theme.

Meanwhile, the president expressed pent-up anger at those who resist being vaccinated (“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin”) and the vice president tweeted that one way to “end the pandemic” is by “protecting the vaccinated.”

The vaccinated are allegedly protected — by their vaccines.

All this echoes Marie Antoinette — had she ever possessed the temerity to parade about as Jean-Paul Marat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

Handicapping the Best

Harrison Bergeron, egalitarianism, equality

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

That’s the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story about how everybody with above-average intelligence, looks, or talent is chronically handicapped, by law. To enforce equality.

“Harrison Bergeron” is satire. Vonnegut exaggerates and invents. Our world will never be like the world he depicts.

But not for lack of trying.

The latest episode ripe for satire? The decision of the Vancouver School Board to kill honors programs to enforce “equity.” 

What is that?

Don’t bother using an old dictionary.

Today, equity is a code word for bringing everybody down to the same low level in defiance of the real differences in abilities among students — not to mention effort expended.

The board had already killed English honors programs. Now it’s killing science and math honors programs. To foster “an inclusive model of education.”

Jennifer Katz, professor at University of British Columbia, accuses parents angry about the decision of supporting “systemic racism.”

My family has been subjected to this mentality. Years ago, my daughter was advanced in math, way ahead of other first-graders at a private school. My wife asked the teachers to give her some more difficult problems in addition to what the class was doing so that she wouldn’t die of boredom.

Answer: “No.” Reason: “Then she would be even further ahead.”

We never took our daughter back to that school. How could we? How could we knowingly keep her in a place where she would be allowed to stagnate for the “greater good” of keeping people “equal”?

Whether in my state of Virginia or in Vancouver, British Columbia, children should be free to learn, to progress. Let’s keep Vonnegut’s work fiction, not prophecy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron (2013)

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