Erika Sanzi shared a post on Parents Defending Education about a school assignment to teach kids about sexual consent. Working in groups, students design a pizza that their partners will like by communicating with non-verbal cues. Everybody likes cheese, but not everybody will want olives. Here’s step number two: “Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!” The assignment gives a couple examples.
To be sure, assuming the underlying lesson is acceptable in a school setting, making lessons relatable is an important technique. We have to be wary of a fine line, however. As I noted the other day, part of the “pleasure-based sex ed” that progressives want to inject into public schools is sexualizing everything — having children associate everything from playing with their pets to making a pizza with the pleasures of sex.
Think about it. Did you ever have a math lesson that used pizza to teach about angles or percentages or probability? For a while afterwards, every time you had pizza you may have thought of that lesson and done a calculation. Now replace math with sex, and you get a very different outcome when your family opens the pizza box — something more like grooming.
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Something clicked as I listened to the podcast version of the Megyn Kelly episode embedded from YouTube below.
Her primary guest was Tristan Harris, a Silicon Valley player who’s been warning about the manipulative dangers of social media. He’s taken the Stanford classes on “persuasive technology” along with the tech entrepreneurs and knows how it works — what sort of information they can and do capture, what techniques they use to model users, what strategies they deploy when people start to escape their clutches.
As I listened to the challenge posed by social media manipulation, from the addiction of teens all the way to geopolitical problems and a new kind of warfare, one thought kept returning to me: The core of any solution, whether we’re talking for your mental health, for your children’s development, or for the health of the community, is actual human interaction.
Farther down the line of thinking about the universe that I’ve begun on Dust in the Light, I’m going to propose that human souls are drawn toward each other. The closer they are, the more truly they are living in the same universe, and just as quantum particles can become entangled without regard to distance, so can souls. Thus, as we form communities online with people who think like us, we move more and more deeply into a particular way of thinking — literally, a particular world. And what defines that world is the set of ideas toward which we in the community have a tendency.
In flesh and bone life, the people with whom we come into contact share close geographic proximity not typically based on ideological agreement, but because of a wide variety of considerations having to do with life itself. Theologically, we’re living in God’s reality, and our choice of location has to do with our individual interactions with Him. The relevant point for this post is that, through daily interactions, our souls are attracting and being attracted by others who live in different political realities. This keeps us in line with God, as I would frame it, rather than the false gods of our own intellectual creation.
Well, what have we had in the past few years to reduce flesh-and-bone interaction and make a response to social media involving human contact next to impossible? COVID restrictions.
We spend a lot of time arguing about the benefits and drawbacks to our health of various measures the government has been taking in response to the pandemic, but this one is almost never mentioned. Not being able to interact — or even having our interactions impeded by masks — is itself a profound harm, one that makes us easier to manipulate, whether for the profits of tech oligarchs or for Egregores.
Featured image by Uriel SC on Unsplash.
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Dr. Shafman on National Cancer Prevention Month
Middletown Chief of Police Bill Kewer
Dr. Stephen Skoly on his battle with the state
President Trump’s impersonated commentary on Rhode Island news and media
Accuracy in Media gave me some space to express frustration with the dishonesty of a video from NowThis that attempts to cover for Joe Biden’s pledge to pick the next Supreme Court justice from a narrow demographic:
NowThis is lying to its young audience when it claims that “conservatives are freaking out at the idea of a Black woman on SCOTUS” (i.e., the Supreme Court of the United States). Producer Emily Barger lays the nonsequiturs and condescension on thick in the short space of the one-minute clip, returning to the same lie over and over.
“Conservatives are pissed that President [Joe] Biden is considering replacing Justice Stephen Breyer, an old white dude, with a Black woman,” it begins.
Something is very strange about this all. The political strategy of calling Republicans racist is really old and stale, at this point. How can media ostensibly serving youth still get away with pushing it? Moreover, as I note in the article, it isn’t difficult to discover that it’s false — arguably inverted, politically.
Another curious aspect is the connection of this story with the Whoopi Goldberg dustup. Goldberg’s offense was claiming the Holocaust was not about racism because Jews are white, and that’s exactly how Barger treats Jews. Justice Breyer is just “an old white dude” as far as the blond, blue-eyed Barger is concerned.
It’s really amazing that progressives get away with the lies they tell. No wonder they’re so desperate to start pushing censorship throughout our society.
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Often, public corruption is simply a matter of special interests waiting out public attention. Voters don’t want to subsidize a non-viable bit of real estate in Providence? Just wait them out. They’ll forget or some money will come along:
It’s been nine years since Bank of America moved out of the 26-story skyscraper known as the “Superman” building, leaving the state’s tallest building vacant. But sources confirmed to the Globe Thursday that the state and the building’s owner, High Rock Development, could be “weeks away” from a deal.
Your money. Somebody else’s profit. Union support.
If this sort of thing is off the table indefinitely, the people closest to the building will have no choice but to find the highest and best use for their possession. But in Rhode Island, they know there’s always a way to turn a trick.
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That’s the question I have reading this:
[Open full post]“The impact of COVID-19 indeed goes far beyond the disease itself. Cancer touches all our lives, either directly or through its effect on family and loved ones. 1 in 4 people in Europe and Central Asia will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. It is one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in the WHO European Region, accounting for more than 20 percent of all deaths.
“Looking back over these past 2 years, cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment have suffered in an unprecedented way as health services have struggled to respond to COVID-19,” the WHO Europe Director added.
About one hour and fifty-five minutes into Wednesday’s hearing of the Rhode Island House Education Committee, Democrat Representative Justine Caldwell (East and West Greenwich) jumped in with her cat from the comfort of her home to ask Democrat Senator Tiara Mack (Providence) a question about “pleasure-based sex education” legislation, of which Mack is obviously a key originator.
In essence, the door that Caldwell was trying to open for Mack was to say that this suspicious new term she wants to introduce into the state’s mandates for Rhode Island schools is really just about safe sex. If something isn’t pleasurable, Caldwell elaborated, then that’s evidence that something’s not right or isn’t safe.
Mack refused to play along. Yeah, yeah, we can say that’s part of it, but it’s not really what we’re talking about, here. “Pleasure-based sex education” isn’t narrowly about safe sex, she explained. Actually, it goes well beyond only being about sex. It’s about a whole way of viewing life, relationships, and your body. That is: reality. If this starts to seem as if Mack would like the state to establish her religion in schools, that’s exactly what she’s doing.
From the practical perspective, however, the key point to realize is that it doesn’t matter what these people say. It matters what’s in the bill. Mack and Caldwell’s assurances in a committee hearing have almost no relevance to how the law will be implemented. They know this. They’re lying in order to trick the public and give other legislators cover to pretend they thought the legislation was no big deal.
As I’ve said before, if it were no big deal, they’d change the word or take it out altogether. They know that including specifically this phrase is the key to grooming children into their ideology, if not into sex with adults.
That isn’t Caldwell’s biggest lie, however. The award for maximum dishonesty comes around the two hour, twenty minute, mark:
I have had kids in school for six or seven years, now, and I have never once thought I should be part of developing their curriculum at school, even though I have been an educator and have an advanced degree and have taught, umm, kids. I am not an expert in curriculum. Neither are many of us, and I don’t think that we should be in a place where I’m deciding what gets taught in math because I prefer this, or I decide, for example, in a timely example, that I should decide what books my kids are reading in English class. You know, we allow experts to do that. We don’t allow parents of any student to determine what goes on in their curriculum.
Think what you will about Caldwell’s approach to parenting, but telling the experts what they must teach is the entire purpose of this bill. Progressives want to mandate a particular approach to sex education in the law. If the “experts” conclude that this approach is not ideal, schools would still have to follow it. And Caldwell doesn’t think parents should have a say, either way.
This language — which even its supporters cannot define uniformly in a hearing on the bill — injects Mack and Caldwell’s ideological, religious worldview into education, down to the age of eleven (for now). At least for the time being, they can trust that “the experts” are on their side, but they want to write it into law to make sure their cult maintains its grip on your children even if the experts decide to return to facts, evidence, and respect for parents.
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That advice has been coming to mind a lot recently.
For instance, defending his support for the child-grooming bill, Democrat Representative Brandon Potter (Cranston), asserts that about one-quarter of youth suicides are sexual minorities. He doesn’t provide a source for his claim, but let’s stipulate that the statistic might be true. It still doesn’t tell us whether children with that sort of identity are more likely to kill themselves or suicidal children are more likely to assume such identities.
This isn’t an ideological quibble. As we make decisions on the basis of statistics, how we interpret them (and the confidence with which we do so) makes a big difference.
Less controversially, the same thing applies to a Japanese study finding association between screen time and autism in boys. It could be that the screens are to blame, or it could be that greater difficulty managing and/or bonding with autistic babies and toddlers makes parents more likely to use screens as pacifiers. If we proclaim causation in the wrong direction, we can do unexpected harm — increasing autism in one direction, yes, but perhaps scaring parents away from needed relief in the other.
This topic is closely related to the suspension of Whoopi Goldberg that I mentioned earlier. For personal, ideological, and political reasons, we’ve increasingly been accepting a “conclusion first” culture. Only facts that support our conclusions are recognized, and those that don’t support our conclusions are forbidden. That can mean promoting or ignoring entire studies based on their conclusions, or it can mean insisting on particular interpretations.
I’d note that my first example in this post feels risky. Somebody who wanted to cancel me for personal, ideological, or political reasons could seize on it as if I’m harming children by dismissing their identities as related to a mental disorder. In fact, I’m only encouraging people to be careful about overconfidence. The way to increase confidence is to test alternative possibilities, and yet it’s easy to imagine researchers’ refusing to investigate the direction of causation on identity issues out of fear of being fired and ostracized.
Whatever our intentions toward children may be, the focus of our culture is actually on maintaining the ability of politicians like Potter to score political points and gain power.
Featured image by Ludovic Toinel on Unsplash.
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Online and in testimony, enough people spoke out against legislation that would mandate the sexual grooming of school children that legislators clearly felt the heat. To my experience, they often sign onto these bills with next-to-no thought — like people signing a meaningless petition on their way into the local pharmacy. “What’s this do? OK, that sounds alright; I’ll sign.”
This comment from the primary sponsor, Democrat Rebecca Kislak (Providence), deserves note:
The primary sponsor of the bill, Rep. Rebecca Kislak, would not define what “pleasure” meant in the legislation during an interview.
“I think that one word in the legislation is not, should not be the focus here,” Rep. Kislak said.
If you suspect she’s giving away which one word is actually the heart of the legislation, you’re probably right. Otherwise, they’d just take it out. It’s a Marxist bomb, inserted into the law as if its definition doesn’t even matter, only to be an exploitable linchpin to the harm of our children and our community later.
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She slipped up and exposed the direction of the narrative before all of the necessary special interests were pinned down. Wokism, intersectionality, anti-racism, proclamations about “white supremacy”… in all of these variations on the theme, whiteness is bad, whiteness is everywhere, and racism only goes one way. People of European descent are white; Jews are white; even Orientals can be white in some circumstances.
So, we come to Whoopi Goldberg’s comment that “the Holocaust isn’t about race.” Did it target “Jews and Gypsies,” as another host of The View, Ana Navarro, said? Well, responded Goldberg, “these are two groups of white people.”
We’re living in confused times. Goldberg’s comment exposes the absurdity of an ideology that insists white people have no race and therefore can never be victims of racism, while non-white people can never be racist. We’ve heard this said a million times. Hereabouts, we can also explain the backlash: Universalizing the Holocaust as about “man’s inhumanity to man,” in Goldberg’s words, makes it impossible to follow important threads that have run through millennia of human history.
On the other hand, another thing that makes it impossible to follow the threads of history, up to and including current events, is making such topics impossible to talk about candidly. Collectively, we need people to feel free to test out ideas openly before they become settled internally or insinuate themselves throughout our institutions in coded or academic language.
This requires balance. On one hand, we should want people to speak openly; on the other hand, the adverse reaction must be observable. But correction doesn’t have to be done with outrage or punishment. Let Goldberg give voice to her thoughts. Let Navarro respond. Eventually, they’ll grope their way to the obvious logical next step, which is to say that old-blooded Germans are just more white than Jews and Gypsies on the intersectional scale. That step will bring us closer the inevitable end point at which society manufactures a minority to persecute (those of whom nobody is whiter than), but it also brings us closer to the logical contradictions.
The key in these matters is to get there quickly, before we’ve covered over too many layers of our common sense. Hoping that the Whoopis of our society will learn from this episode that nobody can win the cancellation war is an incredible risk; more likely, they’ll learn not to speak up too confidently about anything, which plays into the hands of the social deconstructionists.
Above all, we cannot erase the status of independent adults for a momentary advantage in the ideological tug-of-war. Watching the notion of punitive suspensions make the leap from the playground of social media to an institution like ABC is terrifying. If ABC no longer wishes to be associated with Whoopi Goldberg, that would be foolish, but it would be principled. If ABC upholds Goldberg’s right to err, then it should stand by her.
We suspend students because they’re young and not yet fully accountable; we suspend athletes as an extension of penalties in a game; we suspend professionals during the course of an investigation. A punitive suspension in this case is shocking in the degree to which it exposes our cultural blindness to what words and actions truly signify. In a sense, ABC is denying Goldberg’s adulthood and human agency in an act that is uncomfortably close to a statement of ownership.
Rather than a mutually assured destruction of cancellations wherein the only test is of raw power, let’s step back from the edge and encourage people to speak, and then to change their minds.
Featured image by Ian on Unsplash.
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