Sponsored Content




Intermarkets' Privacy Policy
Support


Donate to Ace of Spades HQ!



Recent Entries
Absent Friends
Bandersnatch 2024
GnuBreed 2024
Captain Hate 2023
moon_over_vermont 2023
westminsterdogshow 2023
Ann Wilson(Empire1) 2022
Dave In Texas 2022
Jesse in D.C. 2022
OregonMuse 2022
redc1c4 2021
Tami 2021
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published. Contact OrangeEnt for info:
maildrop62 at proton dot me
Cutting The Cord And Email Security
Moron Meet-Ups

NoVaMoMe 2024: 06/08/2024
Arlington, VA
Details to follow


Texas MoMe 2024: 10/18/2024-10/19/2024 Corsicana,TX
Contact Ben Had for info





















« Saturday Morning Coffee Break | Main | Saturday Gardening Thread: Berry Delicious [KT] »
July 13, 2019

The Left, Books and Culture [KT]

1984444.jpg

Are today's progressives actually totalitarians?

A piece worth reading, from 2014

Happy Saturday! I am seldom around to comment on the Book Thread on Sundays, but I still love it. Books are important. It's nice to see some discussion about which ones are worthwhile.

Some books have deeply shaped the way today's Left thinks and acts. They have had too little push-back for too long.

A voice from the past:

I'll say it again: look up "Cloward-Piven." Throw in Said's Orientaliism, Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and Stalin's Soviet Constitution -- then run it all through critical race theory -- and here we are. The New Left, having hijacked D party, has spent 50 years waiting for this.

And there are complications today, with people reading fewer books. The ones they DO read take on added importance.

What distinguishes Fahrenheit 451 from other dystopian fiction is that it's less about censorship than it is about self-censorship. Bradbury imagines a future in which technology has lulled people into complacency with mindless entertainment and a barrage of endless trivia. As a result, citizens have become sheltered from the realities of life and desire only to perpetuate an anodyne existence of pleasure and comfort. They have developed an intolerance for unpleasant truths, politically incorrect ideas, and opinions that might knock them out of their safe-spaces. Hence the burning of books, those containers of ideas from thinkers from the past that preserve and perpetuate a free and liberal society. . .

It's a strange irony that, in the age of the Internet, which was supposed to encourage more transparency and debate, the open exchange of ideas is under threat. This was pointed out by another famous science fiction writer, Michael Crichton. "In the information society," says Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, "No one thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."


I don't think that MLK could have formulated his ideas on civil rights if all he had to read in school were the things Colin Kaepernick read in school:

From the Birmingham jail cell where he was unjustly imprisoned, Martin Luther King Jr. could still write of his dream that the country would eventually recognize the real aim of the civil rights movement: "bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

I doubt that many of his generation have read much about the background of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. No more civics classes. Now it's "social studies". Heck, it was "social studies" when I was growing up, and I'm considerably older than Kaepernick is. But they still taught some civics back then. And they didn't teach a lot of the toxic stuff that kids have been taught more recently.

The Barrister at Maggie's Farm picked up this quote from James Lileks, apparently set off by the New York Times and others trying to get us to feel guilty and hateful about miracles like air conditioning:

Free-floating, petty gripes are a result of Miserabilism as a world view, the idea that viewing Western Civ as a hellish, gruesome burden destined to collapse of its sins and conceits is the only possible worldview for a Serious Person. Hence the more fault you find, the deeper you are. It comes from being grounded in nothing but the shallow soil of the present, with no sense of history except for a series of pre-approved narratives intended to culminate in an argument against the recent past, which was bad because it prevented the wonderful possible Tomorrow from happening Today. It's a recipe for life-long alienation.

Push-back

In J.J. Sefton's Morning Report yesterday, there was a link to a piece concerning textbooks in public schools.

An existing struggle over the nature of culture and politics has been reenergized in recent years, in part due to the election of Donald Trump. At least if recent curricular changes for Texas K-12 social studies programs are any indication, that shift has also come to the rarefied world of state education politics.
Texas has long been a battleground of choice between conservative groups and an alliance of Islamist and progressive organizations. In 2013, conservatives gained support when Roy White founded Truth in Textbooks (TNT) to counter what he saw as indoctrination in the Texas school system. According to White,

"The idea has always been to diminish the significance of America, diminish its historical figures and its exceptionalism. They've won this by making the learning process about emotions rather than facts."

White's organization has now trained over 200 people to review state textbooks . . .

In the first year alone, White says TNT found over 1500 errors of fact in the history and social studies textbooks they reviewed, 60% of which were eventually corrected.

Now an organization called Florida Citizens Alliance has asked TNT to review textbooks in Florida for accuracy after the organization filed and won a lawsuit against a local Florida school system for inaccuracies in one of its course textbooks. Following that lawsuit, the state of Florida passed a law, which White describes as "having teeth," that allowed local residents to challenge school curriculum.

A worthy project. Hope it's not too late. Think something like this would fly in California?

And there is even a book written to counter some of the damage done by Howard Zinn:

He says he doesn't mean his new book as "some saccharine whitewash of American history." But he's seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. "Just as nature abhors a vacuum," Mr. McClay says, "so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one."

I was struck by how awful history and social studies textbooks were during a stint as a substitute teacher years ago. To make up for their vapidity, the authors formulated inane "group learning" exercises for students which turned them off even more.

The decline in book reading is not too surprising to me. But maybe if we start reading more to kids ourselves . . . .

Music

Stars and Stripes Forever

Dallas Winds with 94 piccolos, 2017. Wait for it.


Yes, this is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Serving your mid-day open thread needs

It's the weekend! Hope yours turns out well. Let us know if you are affected by flooding and such. Got a book to read?

digg this
posted by Open Blogger at 11:18 AM

| Access Comments




Recent Comments
Nova Local: "69 "Local news here quietly discussed that most/al ..."

redridinghood: "Wishing all a blessed Good Friday. ..."

LinusVanPelt : "No. Burr was a POS, certainly. But it was a duel, ..."

Rufus T. Firefly: ">>>Local news here quietly discussed that most/all ..."

Village Idiot's Apprentice: ""Local news here quietly discussed that most/all w ..."

Ben Had: "..., boggles the mind, it does. May Spring bring ..."

Nova Local: " And the names of the two deceased workers who's ..."

... : "We MUST defend Ukraine. And we MUST stop Israel ..."

Dem Propagandists: "Republicans made Obamacare expensive and unafforda ..."

Ben Had: "JT, Good morning. Hope all is well with you ..."

JT: "Hiya BenHad ! ..."

m: "Where's our SFGoth? ..."

Recent Entries
Search


Polls! Polls! Polls!
Frequently Asked Questions
The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick
Top Top Tens
Greatest Hitjobs

The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon
A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates
Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny
More Margaret Cho Abuse
Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny
Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman
Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format
John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia
World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading
Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree
Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears
Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed"
Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility
Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips
They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan
Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq
Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town
When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool
What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means
Wonkette's Stand-Up Act
Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour
Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider
My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty
Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA
An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear
The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report!
Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet
The House of Love: Paul Krugman
A Michael Moore Mystery (TM)
The Dowd-O-Matic!
Liberal Consistency and Other Myths
Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias
John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate
"Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long)
The Donkey ("The Raven" parody)
Powered by
Movable Type 2.64