Wokism
I’ll stipulate that comedian Sebastian Maniscalco’s story about a kindergartener who identifies as a lion is likely not true, but the exaggeration provides a useful framing, nonetheless: One of the kill-move cheats of progressives is to pose the question, of these identity politics instances, “How does it affect you?” Appealing to Americans’ live-and-let-live sensibility, that…
A theme one picks up from podcast discussions with cognitive scientists is that much of our perception — what we understand as real — is a matter of our choices about what we don’t pay attention to. A fully capable human has five senses, all of which are constantly sending more data to the nervous…
We’re getting strong reminders, lately, that a free society with mutual respect for rights is vulnerable to those who have no such respect and don’t much like freedom. Among the most-stark examples I’ve seen is this incident, in which pro-Hamas Columbia activists encircle and bodily remove a student who objected to their destroying a campus…
The recent spate of campus demonstrations supporting the anti-Semitic terrorist group Hamas returned attention to something I’m not aware of having seen since the Occupy Wall Street days: the activist “mic check.” Among Leftist organizers, this practice is offered as a humanistic means of amplifying a speaker’s voice without equipment. The person who has the…
… leads me to the conclusion that whoever is controlling education policy wants young adults to be ignorant and emotionally unstable: I’m glad people are starting to pay attention, but I’m not optimistic anything can be done. I couldn’t believe when this policy filtered down from the Obama administration a decade ago. And I still can’t…
… but it’s illustrative, at MIT: I should note from the replies to the tweet that some people are contesting the translation, saying it’s “death to Zionism,” not “Zionists,” which supposedly makes all the difference. On the other hand, some commenters say the chant references “Jews” in places where the translation says “Zionists.” I’m not…
Note something about the riotous behavior reaching American campuses, as Ted Gehring spotlights, here: The last go-round of riots took place mostly in urban areas, this one has been on campuses. Granted that they’re often in urban areas, but their attack on colleges seems like the revolutionaries’ taking another step. One or two more and…
This video of a police interaction with a young couple entered my awareness at a moment of reduced willpower, so I watched it. Although it escalates from a towed car to an arrest and flirts with even more-dangerous outcome, the entire twenty minutes is primarily a display of young adults, feeling their economic oats, whose…
This has become a focus of the Providence Journal’s city reporter: What stories is Russo not covering because she’s spending so much time on this one? Why is a personnel matter at a private organization newsworthy? As for the content, it finally provides some explanation for a mythical cliché. I’ve never understood the rule that you…
John DePetro and Justin Katz highlight some of the ways the local media and political establishment distort the public message.