School administrator: "As you go through, just try to remember the concepts of Bill 3979, and make sure that if, if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives."
Teacher: Holocaust?! How do you oppose the Holocaust? What?

Administrator: Believe me, that's come up.
Teacher: I think we're all just really terrified.

Administrator: I think you *are* terrified. And I wish I could take that away. I do. I can't. I can't do that.
Great fucking job, everyone. Great laws, great discourse, great work. Pack it in, you're making a difference, this is healthy and good and anything not working out exactly according to plan was, I'm sure, entirely unforeseeable.
Don't be shocked. Just prepare yourself for more. All of this was predicted.

arcdigital.media/p/laws-aimed-a…
I have made this point a dozen different times in print, podcasts, and on the air. I'll make it again now.

The question isn't "How should this law be interpreted?" Rather, it's "How will it be interpreted by terrified teachers, paranoid city attorneys, and cash strapped admins?"
And as it turns out, this is how they interpret it. Then when you're discussing the Holocaust, be sure to give the Nazis their due.
Texas is losing it.
reuters.com/world/us/texas…
Can you blame them? Image

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More from @JeffreyASachs

15 Oct
I have a serious allergy to this sort of thinking. Maybe it's because of rank self-interest (always a possibility!), but I genuinely think a big reason has to do with the Iraq War.
It's become popular these days to say that the "experts" were wrong about the Iraq War. That's not how it looked at the time to me. To me, it all just depends on which experts you were listening to.
I can recall, back during my undergrad days when the war was just starting and I was beginning to study Arabic, how all of my teachers and all the people whose books I was reading were vehemently opposed to the invasion.
Read 12 tweets
10 Oct
Valentina Azarova’s cancellation by UofT last year also generated massive pushback. Yet Cathy had no trouble treating that response as typical, and on that basis, playing down the Right’s threat to faculty free speech.

cathy.arcdigital.media/p/israel-and-t…
The same thing happened when Emily Wilder and NHJ were cancelled. The pushback was enormous, but was it typical? After all, they are very high profile!

Cathy says yes, so how bad can the danger really be?

cathy.arcdigital.media/p/cancel-cultu…
Invariably? Invariably academics rally to their Leftwing colleague under fire? Tell that to Nathan Jun, whose life this past year was absolutely annihilated. What, beyond a few supportive tweets, has any pundit Left, Right, or Center done on his behalf?
Read 5 tweets
8 Oct
“Thus, if we today sometimes have the sense that the practice of arguing within the bounds set by public reason is a chain on us, that it ties us to one sovereign perspective designed to prevent real controversies from erupting, that it restrains us from drawing upon our own 1/n
particular judgments, sentiments, and consciences when debating public affairs, or that it rests on fragile assumptions about what we unanimously accept–if we sometimes have these frustrations, one thing we can find in the study of Hobbes and his successors is an explanation. 2/n
These sources of frustration are not incidental or accidental by-products of the discourse of public reason. They are the intentional results of a well-thought-out early modern program of political thought, a program that explicitly aimed to quell controversy by having us...3/n
Read 4 tweets
8 Oct
No, *this* below is not honest framing. You have to be off-the-wall mind-blowingly naive to think that the parent (I'll link to her comments in a second) is genuinely upset about pornographic material.
First, here's the actual text at issue. It's a 400+ page book and this is the sum total of the "anal sex scene". Which if you actually read it is clearly not an anal sex scene.
Maybe Wokal figured that out on his own. It would explain why he deleted this tweet and abruptly shifted his argument.
Read 8 tweets
8 Oct
Good morning. The Lake Travis school board in Texas has banned a young adult novel depicting an interracial relationship set in the 1930s.

ncac.org/news/lake-trav…
This is not to be confused with the Spring Branch, Texas, school board's decision to ban a book featuring a trans character. That happened yesterday.

houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…
Nor is it to be confused with the ban in Katy, Texas of two books with black characters who enrol in a majority white school. That was on Wednesday.

reuters.com/world/us/texas…
Read 4 tweets
5 Oct
Once again, I want to draw attention to the plight of Nathan Jun, a philosophy prof at Midwestern State University who recently resigned his tenured position. The reason? Death threats.

leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2021/09/n…
For a full background on Jun, see this article from last year in the Chronicle. The gist is that during the height of the George Floyd protests, he took to his personal Facebook page to harshly criticized police. What followed was month after unremitting month of hell.
Read 10 tweets

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