See, I think this is progress. “CRT” was a deliberately sloppy label slapped on every imaginable discussion of race in schools. It got purchase because you could indeed find occasional instances of schools or individual teachers doing actually dubious stuff.
And that provided cover for those who were uncomfortable with honest discussions of America’s racial history, or didn’t really understand the concept of “structural racism” but were pretty sure it was accusing them of something.
The explicit strategy behind labeling everything “CRT” was to take the nuttiest most objectionable thing you could find on a powerpoint from a faculty DEI training, and pretend it represented the same phenomenon ...
… as any discussion of American history that made a White parent vaguely uncomfortable. Disaggregating these things is good.
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This is a very strange conception of “liberty,” and reveals a very strange concept of how education works. I learned about all sorts of wrong ideas at my (private) university—including Marxism!—and do not consider myself “poisoned."
It is difficult to think of a more chillingly Soviet principle than Dan Patrick’s: That ideas are poisonous, and therefore politicians must determine which are the Correct Ideas fit for discussion in a university classroom.
In college, I read the views and arguments of Marxists and libertarians, Kantians and utilitarians, natural law theologians and Rawlsians, relativists and rationalists, Cartesians and physicalists…
I suppose I need to do a proper thread about this Durham filing folks are losing their minds over. OK, here goes.
First, virtually none of what appeared in the recent filing from Durham’s office is new information. Here’s a New York Times story from *over four months ago* with basically all of it. nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/…
Second, nothing in the filing supports breathless claims technically illiterate cable hosts are making. It does not allege anyone “hacked” Trump computers, or was paid to “infiltrate” networks, or that anyone “intercepted e-mails and text messages."
So, this feels like cheating a little. Doubtless we’re “better informed” on net, in that we have instantaneous easy access to all sorts of facts that once would have been either totally unavailable or required lengthy research most people won’t do...
The problem of misinformation is more a problem of *convergence* on a set of interlocking false beliefs about important matters, held with high conviction, that yield coordinated action.
It might well be that 30 years ago, people had a numerically larger number of assorted false beliefs about elections. But now a lot of people have the same seemingly-incorrigible false belief about elections, and are acting to install election officials who share it.
So, this is all maddeningly vague, but a couple of observations based on the very limited information available…. wyden.senate.gov/news/press-rel…
The bulk program referenced here was the subject of one of two PCLOB “deep dives” into EO 12333 programs, summarized (barely) in what can charitably be described as a rather disappointing public report at the culmination of a six-year investigation. documents.pclob.gov/prod/Documents…
The first “deep dive” concerned a financial records collection program, and the report notes CIA had implemented or was implementing all PCLOB’s recommendations. The second “deep dive” ended with a set of staff-produced recommendations in 2020, but nothing on CIA’s response.
I just got a graphic novel adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and was pleasantly surprised to see they included the Appendix “Principles of Newspeak” (as unillustrated text). I think readers often forget about it, but it’s a diegetic appendix and radically alters the ending.
For those who haven’t read it recently: “Principles of Newspeak” is an explanation of how Oceania's totalitarian government controlled thought through language. But critically, it’s written *by future historians within the world of the novel* explaining a defunct system.
So while (what most think of as) the novel proper ends with the triumph of Big Brother, the appendix makes clear the regime has fallen, and strongly implies that this collapse occurred sometime before 2050. Turns out Nineteen Eighty-Four has a happy ending! Sort of.
Technically illiterate county officials in NM are about to waste $50,000 in public money “investigating” nonsensical fantasies about hacked voting machines, in a county Trump won by 25 points. washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…
Chaser: They want to contract the “investigation” out to a notorious charlatan & crank best known for falsely (but very insistently) claiming that he invented e-mail (about a decade after e-mail was invented).
The worst part is that Ayyadurai has a long history of using his MIT credentials to launder absolute nonsense & make it sound technical & impressive to the untrained. Like this inept effort to statistically demonstrate vote tampering in MI.