#i took a political science class where a substantial part of the course

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

According to a narrative that’s currently popular in the mainstream media and the more lowbrow end of academia, the recent surge in popularity of the American nationalist right was caused by the radicalization of nerds. Dweeby white manchildren, so the story goes, retreated into video games, the science fiction fandom, and anonymous online forums like 4chan, and formed misogynistic, resentment-fueled subcultures within them. These neckbearded neo-Nazis gradually coalesced into the ‘alt-right,’ an internet hate machine that contributed greatly to Toupee Hitler’s otherwise inexplicable rise.

There are many versions of this narrative. The common feature is the ascription of Trump’s electoral victory — and, in some cases, the surge in right-populism all across the Western world — to the vile machinations of movements of fascistic, internet-based nerds; but the details vary. One version, laid down in a popular Tumblr post (at the time of writing, it has over 22,000 notes), ascribes the rise of the alt-right to a successful campaign by Stormfront to turn 4chan Nazi. Another version blames it on Gamergate, allegedly a hate campaign born out of a misogynist’s attempt to “punish his ex-girlfriend” that served as a breeding ground for far-right extremism, and as the petri dish that they organized in before taking over America. The Z-list Youtube celebrity Zinnia Jones has described Gamergate as “one of the worst things ever to happen” because it “enabled Trump” — apparently, a piece of fandom drama ranks up there with the Spanish flu pandemic, the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the post-Columbian plagues that depopulated the Americas, and the unfortunate events of the 1940s.

Deployments of the narrative abound. A popular Medium “32-minute read” bears the headline, “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Politico insists that “the Trump campaign … paid rapt attention to meme culture from the start.” CNET helpfully explains that “what began as a backlash to a debate about how video games portray women led to an internet culture that ultimately helped sweep Donald Trump into office.” Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, complains that “the overlap between Gamergate and Trump(ism) is astounding. GG was like the trial run for this whole mess.” The Independent, a British paper, speaks out against the “very geeky” Trump supporters of the alt-right, and claims that “The uncomfortable truth, that should worry anyone praying for a Trump defeat, is that the Alt-right following he has tapped into are more numerous and unpredictable than traditional political commentators understand.” And so on. And for every article that explicitly draws a connection between internet-based youth countercultures and Trump, there are a dozen more that simply make a point of mentioning them in the same breath, and let the reader work out the connection for himself. Trump… Gamergate… Trump… neckbeards… Trump… 4chan… Trump!

At this point, it’s worth taking a step back from the phenomenon of heavy internet users failing for the first time to line up in lockstep behind the Democrats, and looking at the bigger picture. Trump’s electoral success was not driven by the alt-right; it was driven by the usual factors. To make a long story short, Trump won because Clinton ran a bad campaign and took unpopular positions on the issues. Insofar as the election was unusual, it wasn’t because Trump posted a picture of a cartoon frog — Clinton made her own bids for pop-cultural relevance, as did her husband when he took out his saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show in 1992 — but because Clinton, in violation of a long-standing norm, directly insulted large swathes of the voting population with her “basket of deplorables” line.

Trump’s success is also not unusual in a global context. In recent years, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz won a supermajority in Hungary and proceeded to rewrite the Hungarian constitution to declare Hungary a Christian nation and ensure the electoral dominance of Fidesz for the foreseeable future. Britain voted to leave the European Union, and politicians like Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Andrzej Duda became household names among the set that pays attention to international politics. Trump is not a uniquely American phenomenon; if anything, he’ll likely prove to be a more moderate parallel to the trends sweeping Europe, just as FDR paralleled the European extremists of the Depression years. Of course, these trends are not just sweeping Europe, as is proven by the victories in Asia of politicians like Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte.

This global trend simply could not have been caused by an obscure piece of American fandom drama. Gamergate and 4chan cannot have contributed to the rise of the right, because the rise of the right happened to approximately the same extent in countries outside the Anglosphere and outside the cultural reach of Anglosphere nerd culture. Even Vox, which once described Trump as “the first Republican nominee whose ethos owes more to 4chan and Gamergate than it does the Bible,” has found that “polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least.”

Nor could Trump’s rise to power have been substantially helped along by pictures of cartoon frogs. A full analysis of Trump’s victory is beyond the scope of this article, but it borders on delusion to believe that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were flipped by 4chan trolls, rather than by such ordinary factors as Trump’s more popular positions on the key issues of immigration and trade and Clinton’s failure to run a functional campaign.

The internet has, however, reshaped American politics; just not in the way pundits say it has. The main effects have been on the left, not the right.

The most obvious effect is that leftists, especially those in the fields that shape and promulgate leftist doctrine, spend a lot of time online. Journalists spend less time cultivating networks of sources and more time ‘building their brand’ and interacting with other journalists; academics network on Twitter; and so on. Connection matters more than ever, and the internet has weakened local scenes and replaced them with placeless ones. Indie game developers from all over the world, for example, can compete for the attention of the largely U.S.-coastal ‘mainstream’ games journalism industry, whose writers are of course all on the same mailing lists, not to mention following each other on Twitter. Journalists, academics, political advisors and the like disappear into their own world — a world where it’s acceptable to wage war on large parts of one’s own audience, or to lead a mainstream presidential candidate to insult a large part of the voting population. And the scenes that are best able to capture the attention of this world will gain power, influence, and the propagation of their norms.

One scene that has been markedly successful in capturing the attention of the journalistic world is the one that developed from the pay-to-post forum Something Awful. Originally a humor site, it became one of the most influential sites on the internet — you probably know that 4chan was created by a Something Awful regular, and that its initial userbase drew heavily from SA. Its influence on politics, however, extends far beyond 4chan. Buckle up, folks: you’re in for a long, confusing, and terrible ride.

In the essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” Mark Fisher, who was roundly condemned for writing it and killed himself three years later, attacked not only the identitarianism that has metastasized in academia since the ’60s, an identitarianism in which “the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender,” but also the “paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog” and the “kangaroo courts and character assassinations” that are, as anyone who has observed the state of the left today, overwhelmingly common. This guilt and suspicion, these kangaroo courts and character assassinations, need not have anything to do with politics; in one memorable instance, a once-popular Tumblr communist blogger with the sadly real URL of “fuckyeahmarxismleninism” was dogpiled and laughed into irrelevance for admitting to watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with his daughters. This was seen as a far worse faux pas than even his support of North Korea. I am, unfortunately, not making this up; I saw it all happen firsthand.

These aren’t the kangaroo courts of Stalin. What they are is the schoolyard courts of Helldump, a Something Awful subforum created for the strange purpose of being a schoolyard court. The Something Awful wiki speaks for itself here: “The official birth of Helldump 2000 spawned a new creative outlet for pedophiles, racists, bigots, Ron Paul supporters, gun zealots, defenders of anime and otherwise crap posters to be outed in a thorough, convincing manner by an astute civilian task force. Essentially, it checks and balances the stupidity that seeps its way into the forums as a whole, although (unfortunately) it does not function as a preventive treatment (shit posters still propagate at an alarming rate). Rather, the modus operandi of Helldump is to profile and insult the (assumed) poor goon for his questionable views, and in turn function as a virtual tourniquet in an attempt to stop the bleeding, as well as force said shit poster into online anonymity and/or reclusiveness.” In practice, most of what Helldump did was dogpile furries.

As a side note, internet lore has it that the population of Helldump regulars itself skewed furry. This is not terribly out of the norm for Something Awful, the admin of which employed Shmorky for ten years before firing him on the sensible grounds that he was “secretly into pedophilia incest diaper shitting roleplay” and allegedly “would get way too excited over [SA admin Lowtax’s kids] coming to the office.” (Shmorky has also been reported to at least have once been friends with Rebecca Sugar, the creator of the TV show Steven Universe, which has a remarkably Shmorky-like art style and has as its target demographic the same Tumblr crowd that Shmorky fell in with.)

Zoe Quinn herself was a SA member under the username Eris, and participated in at least one Helldump dogpile. It’s often believed that Gamergate began when her ex-boyfriend posted a ‘callout’ of her abusive behaviors, cheating, and so on — the “Zoe Post” — on 4chan, but he actually joined Something Awful to post it there first. He was quickly banned for it, and the ban message reads: “Thank you for joining the Something Awful Forums in order to post a giant loving psychopathic helldump about your ex-girlfriend in the forum about video games.” (The original phrasing was “giant fucking psychopathic helldump,” but SA has wordfilters.) The belief in a connection between Helldump and ‘callout culture’ is held by the SA moderators themselves.

Helldump was closed after two years, and many of its regulars migrated to a different subforum, Laissez’s Fair, “the original Dirtbag Left.” The SA wiki entry for LF helpfully explains that it was “opened up to put all the Ron Paul shit” and became a “refugee holding bay” for Helldump after the latter was closed. “Over time people started making effort posts about such things the nightmare that is our criminal justice system, social justice in general, as well as the ideas of Karl Marx. The lack of moderation was made up for by basically shouting people out of the forum who were stupid MRAs and concern trolls. Gradually the complexion of the forum shifted from liberal to socialist.” Eventually, LF was closed, because “LF posters went internet detective on mods and posted death threats,” including several to then-President Obama.

At least two regulars on Helldump and LF went on to get careers in journalism. Jeb Lund, who wrote a vague and rambling essay about his posting career for Gawker, went by “Boniface” and “Mobutu Sese Seko” on Something Awful. Under the former pseudonym, he threatened a Helldump victim: “how about you promise never to post here again on pain of being permabanned, otherwise there’s no reason for all the posters here with lexis-nexis to stop at just your email addresses and not go straight for driver’s license photos and info, tax records… the list goes on and on.” Sam Kriss was (or at least was widely believed to be) Dead Ken, as well as Red Ken, Dub Mapocho, Agenbite Inwit, Dead Skeng, and presumably other accounts. After LF was removed from SA, its regulars established and migrated to explicitly Communist forums offsite; he was a regular on one such forum, “tHE rHizzonE”, which was later given some sort of contest by the leftist magazine The Baffler, whose editor was “a fan” of said forum. (Sam Kriss has written for the Baffler.)

Many people from the more leftist parts of SA went on to become “Weird Twitter,” which was puffed by outlets like Buzzfeed. John Herrman and Katie Notopoulos, the authors of the linked piece, gravitated toward LF superstars on Twitter and tried to replicate their style. Some of them, such as Lund, Kriss, David Thorpe (who had a regular column on SA and is now a music journalist), Virgil Texas, Jon Hendren (who was, as docevil, once an admin of the “Fuck You And Die” (FYAD) subforum, but was shamed off the site after a bizarre incident involving a charity event featuring Smash Mouth and Guy Fieri), and Alex Nichols, parlayed those connections into posting careers.

Herrman also profiled a Weird Twitter poster, @CelestialBeard, whose claim to fame was tweeting a lot, and being followed by Herrman on Twitter. @CelestialBeard has since become a transgender brony.

From Weird Twitter, which attracted and assimilated people who weren’t active in SA’s leftist cliques (such as Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas, who just lurked), came Chapo Trap House, darling of every obscure Slate clone from Brooklyn to Queens. Chapo has featured several SA regulars, including Alex Nichols (@Lowenaffchen), who was active on LF as Golden Lion Tamarin (his Twitter username used to be @GLDNLNTMRN), and Dan O’Sullivan (@Bro_Pair), a now-banned former SA moderator whose username is now Fat Curtain Dweller. It’s interesting that a podcast heralded for ‘actually giving a shit’ comes from a subculture that began as pure trolling.

Providing a precise accounting of the impact of Something Awful on the Anglosphere left is difficult, as it would be with any subculture. The history is oral, largely lost, deliberately obfuscated, and shrouded in irony. It is likely that nothing will come of it, and that, in the end, it will be the farce mirroring the tragedy of neoconservatism: an insane political movement that developed out of a bizarre and insular clique in a world where having the right connections matters above all else, writing things that very few people care about but doing a great deal of damage along the way. It seems that the norms of Helldump have become callout culture, SA users’ trolling of the libertarians corralled in LF have become the dirtbag left, and some of those responsible have written for not only Gawker and Buzzfeed, but also The New York Times.

At the very least, the overlap in population is clear and suggestive. Someone can go from being repeatedly banned from a pay-to-post forum for something involving the word “nigger” to writing for the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New York Times, largely on the dubious strength of his Twitter account and forum fame. There are few lessons that can be drawn from this; the obvious one is that perhaps the media rewards expertise less than connectedness.

I’m told that this is what Gamergate was about. But there are many things I’ve been told Gamergate was about. The internet is something awful indeed. And it’s only going to get worse.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

One of FiveThirtyEight’s goals has always been to get people to think more carefully about probability. When we’re forecasting an upcoming election or sporting event, we’ll go to great lengths to analyze and explain the sources of real-world uncertainty and the extent to which events — say, a Senate race in Texas and another one in Florida — are correlated with one another. We’ll spend a lot of time working on how to build robust models that don’t suffer from p-hacking or overfitting and which will perform roughly as well when we’re making new predictions as when we’re backtesting them. There’s a lot of science in this, as well as a lot of art. We really care about the difference between a 60 percent chance and a 70 percent chance.

That’s not always how we’re judged, though. Both our fans and our critics sometimes look at our probabilistic forecasts as binary predictions. Not only might they not care about the difference between a 60 percent chance and a 70 percent chance, they sometimes treat a 55 percent chance the same way as a 95 percent one.

There are also frustrating moments related to the sheer number of forecasts that we put out — for instance, forecasts of hundreds of U.S. House races, or dozens of presidential primaries, or the thousands of NBA games in a typical season. If you want to make us look bad, you’ll have a lot of opportunities to do so because some — many, actually — of these forecasts will inevitably be “wrong.”

Sometimes, there are more sophisticated-seeming criticisms. “Sure, your forecasts are probabilistic,” people who think they’re very clever will say. “But all that means is that you can never be wrong. Even a 1 percent chance happens sometimes, after all. So what’s the point of it all?”

I don’t want to make it sound like we’ve had a rough go of things overall.1 But we do think it’s important that our forecasts are successful on their own terms — that is, in the way that we have always said they should be judged. That’s what our latest project — “How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?” — is all about.

That way is principally via calibration. Calibration measures whether, over the long run, events occur about as often as you say they’re going to occur. For instance, of all the events that you forecast as having an 80 percent chance of happening, they should indeed occur about 80 out of 100 times; that’s good calibration. If these events happen only 60 out of 100 times, you have problems — your forecasts aren’t well-calibrated and are overconfident. But it’s just as bad if they occur 98 out of 100 times, in which case your forecasts are underconfident.

Calibration isn’t the only thing that matters when judging a forecast. Skilled forecasting also requires discrimination — that is, distinguishing relatively more likely events from relatively less likely ones. (If at the start of the 68-team NCAA men’s basketball tournament, you assigned each team a 1 in 68 chance of winning, your forecast would be well-calibrated, but it wouldn’t be a skillful forecast.) Personally, I also think it’s important how a forecast lines up relative to reasonable alternatives, e.g., how it compares with other models or the market price or the “conventional wisdom.” If you say there’s a 29 percent chance of event X occurring when everyone else says 10 percent or 2 percent or simply never really entertains X as a possibility, your forecast should probably get credit rather than blame if the event actually happens. But let’s leave that aside for now. (I’m not bitter or anything. OK, maybe I am.)

The catch about calibration is that it takes a fairly large sample size to measure it properly. If you have just 10 events that you say have an 80 percent chance of happening, you could pretty easily have them occur five out of 10 times or 10 out of 10 times as the result of chance alone. Once you get up to dozens or hundreds or thousands of events, these anomalies become much less likely.

But the thing is, FiveThirtyEight has made thousands of forecasts. We’ve been issuing forecasts of elections and sporting events for a long time — for more than 11 years, since the first version of the site was launched in March 2008. The interactive lists almost all of the probabilistic sports and election forecasts that we’ve designed and published since then. You can see how all our U.S. House forecasts have done, for example, or our men’s and women’s March Madness predictions. There are NFL games and of course presidential elections. There are a few important notes about the scope of what’s included in the footnotes,2 and for years before FiveThirtyEight was acquired by ESPN/Disney/ABC News (in 2013) — when our record-keeping wasn’t as good — we’ve sometimes had to rely on archived versions of the site if we couldn’t otherwise verify exactly what forecast was published at what time.

What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events[footnotes]Although we’ve issued a lot of forecasts, the sheer numbers slightly exaggerate the volume of what we’ve done because a lot of forecasts are somewhat redundant, i.e., the odds of the New York Mets winning the World Series on May 15 don’t differ much from the odds on May 16, but each one is technically a separate forecast. The statistical techniques that we’ve applied to measure whether forecasts are well-calibrated account for these redundancies.[/footnote] that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time.

We did discover a handful of cases where we weren’t entirely satisfied with a model’s performance. For instance, our NBA game forecasts have historically been a bit overconfident in lopsided matchups — e.g., teams that were supposed to win 85 percent of the time in fact won only 79 percent of the time. These aren’t huge discrepancies, but given a large enough sample, some of them are on the threshold of being statistically significant. In the particular case of the NBA, we substantially redesigned our model before this season, so we’ll see how the new version does.3

Our forecasts of elections have actually been a little bit underconfident, historically. For instance, candidates who we said were supposed to win 75 percent of the time have won 83 percent of the time. These differences are generally not statistically significant, given that election outcomes are highly correlated and that we issue dozens of forecasts (one every day, and sometimes using several different versions of a model) for any given race. But we do think underconfidence can be a problem if replicated over a large enough sample, so it’s something we’ll keep an eye out for.

It’s just not true, though, that there have been an especially large number of upsets in politics relative to polls or forecasts (or at least not relative to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts). In fact, there have been fewer upsets than our forecasts expected.

There’s a lot more to explore in the interactive, including Brier skill scores for each of our forecasts, which do account for discrimination as well as calibration. We’ll continue to update the interactive as elections or sporting events are completed.

None of this ought to mean that FiveThirtyEight or our forecasts — which are a relatively small part of what we do — are immune from criticism or that our models can’t be improved. We’re studying ways to improve all the time.

But we’ve been publishing forecasts for more than a decade now, and although we’ve sometimes tried to do an after-action report following a big election or sporting event, this is the first time we’ve studied all of our forecast models in a comprehensive way. So we were relieved to discover that our forecasts really do what they’re supposed to do. When we say something has a 70 percent chance of occurring, it doesn’t mean that it will always happen, and it isn’t supposed to. But empirically, 70 percent in a FiveThirtyEight forecast really does mean about 70 percent, 30 percent really does mean about 30 percent, 5 percent really does mean about 5 percent, and so forth. Our forecasts haven’t always been right, but they’ve been right just about as often as they’re supposed to be right.

[bpcparents]

INTEGRITY: The imperfect path toward a more perfect union starts at home

In January of 2020, students at Darien High School entered faculty offices on a Saturday and took photos of answers to two sophomore exams, one in English and one in Social Studies. The information was then widely distributed over social media, implicating about 300 students.

In December of 2020, 73 cadets at West Point were accused of cheating on a calculus exam at the US Military Academy, where an honor code requires students to pledge that they “will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The majority of the students involved (55 of them) had actually been enrolled in a program designed to be an “honor code boot camp” as a second chance.

Debates unfolded in both learning communities in the wake of their respective scandals, revealing divided opinion about both the causes and effects of academic dishonesty. While a student in Darien complained that those who had cheated at her school were “not really experiencing any consequences that are substantial enough for their actions," the parents of one of the teenagers involved actually hired an attorney to contest the school district’s handling of the penalties for his client.

Even officials within West Point were at odds over the matter there. Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt, the academy’s public affairs director, said that the rehabilitation program was designed to increase the likelihood that people would report violations, since the penalty could be less severe than expulsion. Despite the 2020 lapse, he defended the Military Academy’s response, arguing that West Point “has slowly transitioned to a developmental model that relies on a combination of punishment and additional development to restore a cadet to good standing after a violation.” Tim Bakken, a West Point law professor took a less rosy view, charging that failure to handle a cheating scandal aggressively and transparently — and to encourage a culture of honesty — could infect the thinking of generals and their approach to informing the public. “The United States has not been successful in its last four wars,” Professor Bakken said. “The failure of the military to tell us the truth is a big part of the reason.”

As a parent and an educator who has taught for more than twenty years at both the secondary and university levels, I can testify that the battle for academic integrity is not a new one. That said, it has been surfacing with unprecedented intensity in the last year. In reaching for reasons, it’s easy to blame online learning, since the pandemic has forced so many students of all ages to connect to their classes from home. As a high school teacher conducting courses remotely since last March, however, I can testify that the online argument is a red herring. The internet has been accessible for decades now, and the exams stolen in the cases detailed above were both in hard copy. The problem isn’t the medium; it’s the context of our current political culture.

After more than 200 years of peaceful transitions of power in the United States, rioters stormed the nation’s Capitol in a violent insurrection that culminated in the death of five Americans, including a US Capitol police officer. The attack was incited by baseless claims of voter fraud from the highest office in the land and intended to interfere with certification of electoral college ballots. But the events of January 6th, 2021 were not isolated incidents; they followed years of falsehoods and misinformation perpetuated by an administration that vilified the free press and perpetuated conspiracy theories by trafficking in “alternative facts.” From climate change to COVID-19, science was denied within policies that saw the US withdraw from international agreements on the environment and has already resulted in the nearly 450,000 American lives lost so far to a virus for which no national defense was undertaken.

What do these developments in the government have to do with dishonesty in the classroom? Everything.

Accountability is learned, and when discourse at the national level takes place within a context that relativizes rather than reveres the truth, we model to the younger generation that integrity has no meaning.

The weeks ahead are critical: the former president has been impeached again and his Senate trial this time puts the entire country on the witness stand. Neither partisan squabbling nor legal loopholes will redeem the damages already done. Whether or not convictions are delivered, there is an opportunity that this country cannot afford to miss: we must categorically condemn acts of violence and stand firmly against forces that erode our very democracy. As a Resolution recently adopted by the Town of Bedford reminds us, “the insurgents carried Confederate flags, displayed antisemitic symbols and slogans, and erected a gallows on Capitol grounds, manifesting bigotry, hatred, and utter disregard for the rule of law.” True justice can only be achieved when leaders commit to political processes that uphold the safety and welfare of all.

Holding people accountable for their actions matters, from high school students to politicians. And there is far too much at stake at this juncture for anybody to give in to self-righteousness. I’ve encountered the most constructive conversations through Civics education courses. More than just grounding people in the basics of governing structures, Civics done well critically begins by backing up well beyond 1776 to reckon with our country’s history before it declared itself an independent republic. The three branches of government after all are rooted not just in political philosophy but in lands stolen from Indigenous populations and labored over by enslaved human beings. The inconsonance of stated values with enacted policies strikes even the youngest students. These foundational hypocrisies require more than polite classroom debate; they merit real and often uncomfortable engagement in the facts in pursuit of truth. Winning a trial or even being “right” can’t alone achieve true justice; that takes genuine understanding forged in brave spaces.

In a recent community event online focused on the documentary True Justice, panelist Dr. Alexander Smith with the New York organization Rehabilitation Through the Arts was asked how he holds people accountable in working for racial justice. He answered by imparting the term “Critical Humility,” which he defined as “the practice of remaining open to the fact that our knowledge is always partial and evolving -- while at the same time remaining committed to speaking up and taking action in a world based on our current knowledge, however imperfect.” The concept has the potential to make confrontations truly transformative. As Dr. Smith exhorted the audience of young people and adults alike, “We need to expose our vulnerabilities; we need to be there and live in that and help others expose their vulnerabilities... that’s how we have change.”

Parents can begin to cultivate critical humility at home by exercising accountability that starts with themselves. Think hatching an excuse to avoid an awkward social situation is just a harmless “little white lie”? There’s no such thing, and the children are watching. Rather than duck a difficulty, we can face it candidly, without manipulation. We can apologize to our kids when we make mistakes. We can trade out “blame and shame” routines of punishment for a growth mindset that builds responsibility and mutual respect instead. Doing so anchors accountability as a shared practice and social standard by which young people can then measure the wider world and their place in it.

This also means letting go of the ego-bound aspirations for our children that are more self-serving as status-boosters for parents. Recent SAT scandals involving celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman brought to light much larger college admissions schemes that pointed to corruption at all levels, including coaches, administrators, test proctors, tutors, and others in pay-to-play agreements that involved millions of dollars.

Is there an antidote to this rampant dishonesty? If so, it may lie in exhortations from Julie Lythcott-Haims, the best-selling author whose books highlight how ego-based parenting stunts the development of children and society at large. Adulting, she argues, is a process of “becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going.” Just as parents need to halt freighting their kids with expectations and micromanaging their lives, we need to embrace the imperfections inherent in any project -- whether childrearing or democracy -- that aspires to self-sufficiency, resilience, and integrity.

Elizabeth Messinger is a former journalist with NPR and The Economist of London. Through her educational consultancy, Mind in Motion, she guides children of all ages to think for themselves, and she teaches Humanities at an independent school in Stamford, CT. She raised her son in Bedford, where together they ran the Toddler Room at the Presbyterian Church for nearly a decade. She continues to parent from NY as he attends college in California.

[stephenmccull]

California School Districts Grope for Sensible Reopening Plans

School leaders in Elk Grove, California, wanted to leave as little to chance as possible. So they brought nearly 150 voices into their decision-making process, and canvassed the parents of the estimated 63,000 students in the district to ask how they wanted their children taught. The result was a four-item menu of instruction choices for the coming academic year, none featuring a full campus.

About 45 minutes down Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley, seven trustees in Manteca took a 5-2 vote: School would resume on campus, at full classroom capacity, five days a week. Parents would have the option to enroll children in a 100% online academy — although it didn’t yet exist. After a protest from teachers and the health department, the district later relented and agreed to put students on campus for five days every two weeks.

Two districts in the same part of the world; two groups of educators and families; two substantially different decisions. This is education in the age of the pandemic.

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While the national conversation whipsaws between President Donald Trump’s threats to cut funding to districts that don’t fully open and some health experts’ warnings that crowded campuses could be petri dishes of disease, school districts are grinding forward amid the chaos of conflicting information. Trying to track the moving target of COVID-19 and the state orders that move with it, while facing parent pushback and political manipulation, board members and teachers sometimes feel they are running the gauntlet.

“These decisions are subject to constant revision,” said Nancy Chaires Espinoza, a board member with the Elk Grove district. “Every few days or once a week, we learn something new that changes the way we approach things — even the physical arrangement of the classrooms.”

With a public school enrollment of more than 6 million and a population still firmly gripped by the giant first wave of the coronavirus, California’s attempts to answer the school question have been many — and mostly futile. The Los Angeles school district announced that its entire system, the nation’s second-largest, would be 100% online to begin the academic year. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, the plan was for a full reopening on campus, with no distance learning offered.

Wildly differing decisions up and down the state reflect its geographical and demographic diversity. It may be easier, for instance, to consider full-class learning in smaller or more rural districts, where physical distancing is a more realistic goal. In any case, neither the federal government nor the state sets the policy for any individual district. That is up to school boards and trustees.

Elk Grove, near Sacramento, is the state’s fifth-largest district; it has an active board that receives plenty of parental input. The district closed down schools the first week of March, well before most districts in the state, after members of a student’s family tested positive for COVID-19. Elk Grove offered distance learning for the rest of the spring.

In the months since, school leaders have tried to incorporate parents’ preferences, teachers’ concerns, the cost of constantly disinfecting and sanitizing more than 60 campuses and, of course, the science. Consensus on that last part is lacking, however; while some experts warn that opening schools is a nightmare scenario, others point to the evidence that children for the most part don’t transmit COVID-19.

According to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people under 18 account for fewer than 2% of COVID cases in the U.S., despite representing 22% of the population. But it’s far less clear to what extent schoolkids carrying the virus might pass it to their teachers, parents and other members of their communities.

“There are still a ton of questions to be answered,” said Chris Nixon, an elementary-school teacher in Elk Grove. Nixon and his wife, Tina, who is a teacher in the district as well, have two football-playing sons at Sheldon High School, one of the district’s nine high school campuses.

Elk Grove’s approach includes a “transitional” hybrid of staggered in-class cohorts plus remote learning; distance learning only; a charter school system heavy on independent study; and a virtual-only academy for grades K-8. Parents may choose the option that best fits their family’s needs.

“I just don’t see how social distancing is possible with full classes, and my wife and I would be concerned about teaching in that environment,” Nixon said. But he’s unsure what the transitional approach — classrooms in the mornings, distance teaching in the afternoon — will look like. “We really haven’t been provided with a model to show how it works, so we’ll see,” he said.

And there are no sure things. Elk Grove’s emergency attempt at distance learning in the spring was not well received, one reason that trustee Carmine Forcina argued at a June board meeting for reopening. Parents, teachers and students told him that remote learning had been “videos, self-teaching and extended vacations. That’s unacceptable.”

“I am on record supporting a full return to school with a full complement of activities, along with a quality distance-learning program for those not comfortable with returning to school,” Forcina told California Healthline.

That one-two approach is closer to what happened in Manteca, which has 24,000 students. It happened quickly, too: Meeting in June, the school board voted to open all campuses for the fall.

“They voted to go back every day, all day, with class sizes up to 34 students and no [mandatory] masks — but we get hand sanitizer,” said Ken Johnson, a teacher for 39 years and president of the Manteca Educators’ Association. Teachers had no input on the online academy, class size, working conditions or safety protocols, he said. “A lot of our teachers are freaked out, as well they should be with the recent events.”

The district laid out an array of possible on-campus safety measures, including limiting visitor access, strongly encouraging the wearing of masks and requiring daily temperature self-checks for staff and students. After teachers protested and county health officials “strongly recommended” to begin the school year with only distance learning, a modified plan — five days in the classroom, followed by five online — was hatched during an emergency board session. Details were to be determined.

Manteca’s approach is unusual in California. Liability concerns may be one reason few districts reviewed by KHN have seriously considered full classrooms on everyday schedules. A state bill was introduced to shield districts from COVID-related lawsuits as long as they follow state and local health directives, but its fate is uncertain.

“If [Manteca] does not lay out a clear plan on how kids will remain safe, then there is no point in opening schools back up,” said David Garcia. Garcia, a tech specialist in the private sector, is able to work from home and said he and his wife will take the online-only option for their sixth-grade son.

“At home we have the necessary items to keep ourselves safe,” he said, while overwhelmed teachers won’t be able to manage amid COVID precautions. “If in regular times teachers have to ask for donations to do their jobs, how can we expect them to do it now, in these times?”

In both Manteca and Elk Grove, teachers say they want to be back on campus and in classrooms. “With all of the challenges to the other models, I don’t see how it can be argued that any of them beat the educational benefits of a traditional full-class model,” said Elk Grove’s Nixon. “Unfortunately, we just aren’t there yet.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

California School Districts Grope for Sensible Reopening Plans published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[dinafbrownil]

California School Districts Grope for Sensible Reopening Plans

School leaders in Elk Grove, California, wanted to leave as little to chance as possible. So they brought nearly 150 voices into their decision-making process, and canvassed the parents of the estimated 63,000 students in the district to ask how they wanted their children taught. The result was a four-item menu of instruction choices for the coming academic year, none featuring a full campus.

About 45 minutes down Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley, seven trustees in Manteca took a 5-2 vote: School would resume on campus, at full classroom capacity, five days a week. Parents would have the option to enroll children in a 100% online academy — although it didn’t yet exist. After a protest from teachers and the health department, the district later relented and agreed to put students on campus for five days every two weeks.

Two districts in the same part of the world; two groups of educators and families; two substantially different decisions. This is education in the age of the pandemic.

Don't Miss A Story

Subscribe to KHN’s free Weekly Edition newsletter, delivered every Friday.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

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While the national conversation whipsaws between President Donald Trump’s threats to cut funding to districts that don’t fully open and some health experts’ warnings that crowded campuses could be petri dishes of disease, school districts are grinding forward amid the chaos of conflicting information. Trying to track the moving target of COVID-19 and the state orders that move with it, while facing parent pushback and political manipulation, board members and teachers sometimes feel they are running the gauntlet.

“These decisions are subject to constant revision,” said Nancy Chaires Espinoza, a board member with the Elk Grove district. “Every few days or once a week, we learn something new that changes the way we approach things — even the physical arrangement of the classrooms.”

With a public school enrollment of more than 6 million and a population still firmly gripped by the giant first wave of the coronavirus, California’s attempts to answer the school question have been many — and mostly futile. The Los Angeles school district announced that its entire system, the nation’s second-largest, would be 100% online to begin the academic year. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, the plan was for a full reopening on campus, with no distance learning offered.

Wildly differing decisions up and down the state reflect its geographical and demographic diversity. It may be easier, for instance, to consider full-class learning in smaller or more rural districts, where physical distancing is a more realistic goal. In any case, neither the federal government nor the state sets the policy for any individual district. That is up to school boards and trustees.

Elk Grove, near Sacramento, is the state’s fifth-largest district; it has an active board that receives plenty of parental input. The district closed down schools the first week of March, well before most districts in the state, after members of a student’s family tested positive for COVID-19. Elk Grove offered distance learning for the rest of the spring.

In the months since, school leaders have tried to incorporate parents’ preferences, teachers’ concerns, the cost of constantly disinfecting and sanitizing more than 60 campuses and, of course, the science. Consensus on that last part is lacking, however; while some experts warn that opening schools is a nightmare scenario, others point to the evidence that children for the most part don’t transmit COVID-19.

According to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people under 18 account for fewer than 2% of COVID cases in the U.S., despite representing 22% of the population. But it’s far less clear to what extent schoolkids carrying the virus might pass it to their teachers, parents and other members of their communities.

“There are still a ton of questions to be answered,” said Chris Nixon, an elementary-school teacher in Elk Grove. Nixon and his wife, Tina, who is a teacher in the district as well, have two football-playing sons at Sheldon High School, one of the district’s nine high school campuses.

Elk Grove’s approach includes a “transitional” hybrid of staggered in-class cohorts plus remote learning; distance learning only; a charter school system heavy on independent study; and a virtual-only academy for grades K-8. Parents may choose the option that best fits their family’s needs.

“I just don’t see how social distancing is possible with full classes, and my wife and I would be concerned about teaching in that environment,” Nixon said. But he’s unsure what the transitional approach — classrooms in the mornings, distance teaching in the afternoon — will look like. “We really haven’t been provided with a model to show how it works, so we’ll see,” he said.

And there are no sure things. Elk Grove’s emergency attempt at distance learning in the spring was not well received, one reason that trustee Carmine Forcina argued at a June board meeting for reopening. Parents, teachers and students told him that remote learning had been “videos, self-teaching and extended vacations. That’s unacceptable.”

“I am on record supporting a full return to school with a full complement of activities, along with a quality distance-learning program for those not comfortable with returning to school,” Forcina told California Healthline.

That one-two approach is closer to what happened in Manteca, which has 24,000 students. It happened quickly, too: Meeting in June, the school board voted to open all campuses for the fall.

“They voted to go back every day, all day, with class sizes up to 34 students and no [mandatory] masks — but we get hand sanitizer,” said Ken Johnson, a teacher for 39 years and president of the Manteca Educators’ Association. Teachers had no input on the online academy, class size, working conditions or safety protocols, he said. “A lot of our teachers are freaked out, as well they should be with the recent events.”

The district laid out an array of possible on-campus safety measures, including limiting visitor access, strongly encouraging the wearing of masks and requiring daily temperature self-checks for staff and students. After teachers protested and county health officials “strongly recommended” to begin the school year with only distance learning, a modified plan — five days in the classroom, followed by five online — was hatched during an emergency board session. Details were to be determined.

Manteca’s approach is unusual in California. Liability concerns may be one reason few districts reviewed by KHN have seriously considered full classrooms on everyday schedules. A state bill was introduced to shield districts from COVID-related lawsuits as long as they follow state and local health directives, but its fate is uncertain.

“If [Manteca] does not lay out a clear plan on how kids will remain safe, then there is no point in opening schools back up,” said David Garcia. Garcia, a tech specialist in the private sector, is able to work from home and said he and his wife will take the online-only option for their sixth-grade son.

“At home we have the necessary items to keep ourselves safe,” he said, while overwhelmed teachers won’t be able to manage amid COVID precautions. “If in regular times teachers have to ask for donations to do their jobs, how can we expect them to do it now, in these times?”

In both Manteca and Elk Grove, teachers say they want to be back on campus and in classrooms. “With all of the challenges to the other models, I don’t see how it can be argued that any of them beat the educational benefits of a traditional full-class model,” said Elk Grove’s Nixon. “Unfortunately, we just aren’t there yet.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/california-school-districts-grope-for-sensible-reopening-plans/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

California School Districts Grope for Sensible Reopening Plans

School leaders in Elk Grove, California, wanted to leave as little to chance as possible. So they brought nearly 150 voices into their decision-making process, and canvassed the parents of the estimated 63,000 students in the district to ask how they wanted their children taught. The result was a four-item menu of instruction choices for the coming academic year, none featuring a full campus.

About 45 minutes down Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley, seven trustees in Manteca took a 5-2 vote: School would resume on campus, at full classroom capacity, five days a week. Parents would have the option to enroll children in a 100% online academy — although it didn’t yet exist. After a protest from teachers and the health department, the district later relented and agreed to put students on campus for five days every two weeks.

Two districts in the same part of the world; two groups of educators and families; two substantially different decisions. This is education in the age of the pandemic.

Don't Miss A Story

Subscribe to KHN’s free Weekly Edition newsletter, delivered every Friday.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

While the national conversation whipsaws between President Donald Trump’s threats to cut funding to districts that don’t fully open and some health experts’ warnings that crowded campuses could be petri dishes of disease, school districts are grinding forward amid the chaos of conflicting information. Trying to track the moving target of COVID-19 and the state orders that move with it, while facing parent pushback and political manipulation, board members and teachers sometimes feel they are running the gauntlet.

“These decisions are subject to constant revision,” said Nancy Chaires Espinoza, a board member with the Elk Grove district. “Every few days or once a week, we learn something new that changes the way we approach things — even the physical arrangement of the classrooms.”

With a public school enrollment of more than 6 million and a population still firmly gripped by the giant first wave of the coronavirus, California’s attempts to answer the school question have been many — and mostly futile. The Los Angeles school district announced that its entire system, the nation’s second-largest, would be 100% online to begin the academic year. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, the plan was for a full reopening on campus, with no distance learning offered.

Wildly differing decisions up and down the state reflect its geographical and demographic diversity. It may be easier, for instance, to consider full-class learning in smaller or more rural districts, where physical distancing is a more realistic goal. In any case, neither the federal government nor the state sets the policy for any individual district. That is up to school boards and trustees.

Elk Grove, near Sacramento, is the state’s fifth-largest district; it has an active board that receives plenty of parental input. The district closed down schools the first week of March, well before most districts in the state, after members of a student’s family tested positive for COVID-19. Elk Grove offered distance learning for the rest of the spring.

In the months since, school leaders have tried to incorporate parents’ preferences, teachers’ concerns, the cost of constantly disinfecting and sanitizing more than 60 campuses and, of course, the science. Consensus on that last part is lacking, however; while some experts warn that opening schools is a nightmare scenario, others point to the evidence that children for the most part don’t transmit COVID-19.

According to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people under 18 account for fewer than 2% of COVID cases in the U.S., despite representing 22% of the population. But it’s far less clear to what extent schoolkids carrying the virus might pass it to their teachers, parents and other members of their communities.

“There are still a ton of questions to be answered,” said Chris Nixon, an elementary-school teacher in Elk Grove. Nixon and his wife, Tina, who is a teacher in the district as well, have two football-playing sons at Sheldon High School, one of the district’s nine high school campuses.

Elk Grove’s approach includes a “transitional” hybrid of staggered in-class cohorts plus remote learning; distance learning only; a charter school system heavy on independent study; and a virtual-only academy for grades K-8. Parents may choose the option that best fits their family’s needs.

“I just don’t see how social distancing is possible with full classes, and my wife and I would be concerned about teaching in that environment,” Nixon said. But he’s unsure what the transitional approach — classrooms in the mornings, distance teaching in the afternoon — will look like. “We really haven’t been provided with a model to show how it works, so we’ll see,” he said.

And there are no sure things. Elk Grove’s emergency attempt at distance learning in the spring was not well received, one reason that trustee Carmine Forcina argued at a June board meeting for reopening. Parents, teachers and students told him that remote learning had been “videos, self-teaching and extended vacations. That’s unacceptable.”

“I am on record supporting a full return to school with a full complement of activities, along with a quality distance-learning program for those not comfortable with returning to school,” Forcina told California Healthline.

That one-two approach is closer to what happened in Manteca, which has 24,000 students. It happened quickly, too: Meeting in June, the school board voted to open all campuses for the fall.

“They voted to go back every day, all day, with class sizes up to 34 students and no [mandatory] masks — but we get hand sanitizer,” said Ken Johnson, a teacher for 39 years and president of the Manteca Educators’ Association. Teachers had no input on the online academy, class size, working conditions or safety protocols, he said. “A lot of our teachers are freaked out, as well they should be with the recent events.”

The district laid out an array of possible on-campus safety measures, including limiting visitor access, strongly encouraging the wearing of masks and requiring daily temperature self-checks for staff and students. After teachers protested and county health officials “strongly recommended” to begin the school year with only distance learning, a modified plan — five days in the classroom, followed by five online ��� was hatched during an emergency board session. Details were to be determined.

Manteca’s approach is unusual in California. Liability concerns may be one reason few districts reviewed by KHN have seriously considered full classrooms on everyday schedules. A state bill was introduced to shield districts from COVID-related lawsuits as long as they follow state and local health directives, but its fate is uncertain.

“If [Manteca] does not lay out a clear plan on how kids will remain safe, then there is no point in opening schools back up,” said David Garcia. Garcia, a tech specialist in the private sector, is able to work from home and said he and his wife will take the online-only option for their sixth-grade son.

“At home we have the necessary items to keep ourselves safe,” he said, while overwhelmed teachers won’t be able to manage amid COVID precautions. “If in regular times teachers have to ask for donations to do their jobs, how can we expect them to do it now, in these times?”

In both Manteca and Elk Grove, teachers say they want to be back on campus and in classrooms. “With all of the challenges to the other models, I don’t see how it can be argued that any of them beat the educational benefits of a traditional full-class model,” said Elk Grove’s Nixon. “Unfortunately, we just aren’t there yet.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

California School Districts Grope for Sensible Reopening Plans published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[topmixtrends]

CALL ME A KILLJOY but I am sick to death of hearing about Karl Marx. I am sick of his name, his -isms, his undoubted genius, and his “philosophy.” I am sick of him “having reason,” as the French say, or “being right.” But most of all I am sick of his “relevance.”

As someone whose parents were born and grew up in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and who missed the same fate by the skin of her teeth, I know perfectly well what Marx’s relevance amounts to. Marx gave it a name, even if for him it meant something else than it did for the people of Yugoslavia. I am talking about the oft-quoted and seldom understood “religion of everyday life.”

In post–World War II Yugoslavia, Marx’s “relevance” was to be a member of the ruling communist party. Outside of that supra-religious institution no substantial share in the social wealth was possible. “[T]he life-process of society,” as Marx observes in what turned out to be a weird prediction, “which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”

The constitution that enshrined this religion in law and etched it in the consciousness of Yugoslavs did not survive the county’s horrific civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2001, resulting in the deaths of 150,000 and the displacement of 4,000,000 people; in all, more than one sixth of its total population. And yet remarkably its “religion” survived, despite the fact that today it’s the “freely associated men” — or the freemasonic cabals that rule over the remnants of Yugoslavia like buzzards circling a herd of listless cattle — whose mystical veil is in urgent need of being torn to shreds.

Imagine if Marx had been a theater producer. That was surely far more his style. He certainly knew how to flatter egos, as he did when Ferdinand Lassalle asked him to appraise the manuscript of his dud of a play Franz von Sickingen. “I must applaud both composition and action,” Marx lied, “and that’s more than one can say of any other modern German play.” It might have been his true vocation, putting on dramas and musical comedies at London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, the street where the German Workers Educational Society held its meetings, and where its members could partake of recreational activities, from poetry to fencing. I wonder if Marx ever lamented during those irreproachable sessions the fact that all the world’s a stage, and that he was overseeing the wrong one.

I can’t resist citing that hilarious Mel Brooks film The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, in which a washed-up theater producer’s accountant persuades his client to deliberately stage a Broadway flop in order to avoid a hefty tax bill. When Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden becomes an unexpected and inexplicable hit, Mostel’s livid reaction is worthy of Marx himself (Karl, not Groucho) for its topsy-turvy contrariety: “I was so careful,” bemoans the producer. “I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast — where did I go right?”

Is it too outlandish to speculate that in Marx’s case the critique of political economy had been the stand-in for a juvenile passion? Poetry was Marx’s Thing (das Ding an sich), the Real that a combination of his father’s bitter chastisement and his encounter with Hegel’s “craggy melody” managed to cure him of during his Berlin student days. The prospect of earning a living to provide for his future wife, the Baron von Westphalen’s daughter, no doubt helped to tear the veil of his metaphysical illusions. Like a restless artist, Marx’s lifelong fanaticism might thus be read as a nostalgic yearning for an irreplaceable fetish-object, “the sensibly super-sensible” (sinnlich übersinnlich) as he calls it in Capital. Nothing could ever compete with art, no amount of critical veil-tearing could ever substitute for Marx’s love of lyrical poetry. And so he took the only career path left open to him. He became a producer instead; an impresario in the art of critique.

We are living in a culture that sees tragedy everywhere: that fetishizes it. It’s something of a neurotic obsession. In mid-19th-century England, around 60,000 people, including many children, would die each year of tuberculosis. When Charles Darwin’s daughter Annie died of the disease in 1851 he wrote in his diary: “We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age. […] Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & and shall ever love her dear joyous face.” Another child, Mary, died in early infancy. But people don’t refer to Darwin’s life as tragic.

High birth rates were normal for Victorian families irrespective of class. Marx’s wife Jenny gave birth to seven children, only three of whom survived to adulthood; the Darwins had 10. There is nothing tragic about this high mortality rate. Indeed, Darwin accounts for it himself in On the Origin of Species, noting that the number of individuals of a given species is governed by natural selection, which determines how each individual’s inherited characteristics aid and abet it in the “struggle for existence.” Only a culture profoundly anesthetised to the causes of human suffering would dare mention tragedy in relation to infant mortality, given that it’s derived from the Greek word for “goat” (tragos), whose blood sacrifice would have been lamented in song at the Theatre of Dionysus in fifth-century Athens. For all their apparent lunacy the producers were clearly carrying on a long tradition.

Although Marx’s favorite poet was the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, his was certainly not a tragic life, at least according to the historical definition of tragedy handed down to us from Aristotle. It was sad. And of course it was defined by struggle. But it was not tragic, since the mere fact of being born, becoming ill, then dying, sooner or later, is a biological fact. In order to be a tragic figure the deaths in question would need to be attributable to an act of hubris on the protagonist’s part. But there is no evidence to suggest Marx committed any such act in the case of any of his four deceased children.

It was arguably Charles Dickens — like Darwin, Marx’s contemporary — who was largely responsible for this perversion of the idea of the tragic or sacrificial death, which he memorialized through his depictions of children and their poor unfortunate souls, to such an extent that the plight of almost any Victorian child is today thought of as “tragic.” But this Dickensian propensity for melodrama is more worthy of a satyr play. As Oscar Wilde put it: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

To be honest, one knows why Marx is so often portrayed as a tragic hero. It is to humanize him, thus attenuating any controversial aspect of his thought. By depicting Marx as a “19th-century life,” to borrow the title of Jonathan Sperber’s wholly unconvincing biography, one relativizes the man and his ideas. One quarantines it, much like the dangerous animals one locks inside cages at the zoo, so much the better to prod and gawp at the exotic creatures, in clear ignorance of the social context that facilitates such saccharine objectification.

Marx is not a tragic specimen, and I for one am not prepared to let him off the hook so easily. To say that his was a 19th-century life is to forget that his name and ideas only entered into common currency in the 20th. If the specter of communism makes any sense today then it’s because the thing itself was barely stirring when Marx and Engels prophesized it in 1848. It would be another hundred years before Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their supporting cast succeeded in turning one third of the global population red.

But! his devoted fans insist, Marx cannot be blamed for the crimes carried out by the inheritors of his political legacy! Which is like saying that the makers of gunpowder cannot be blamed for its misuse. That is perfectly true — assuming we can agree on what might constitute “misuse.” Gunpowder isn’t intended for washing the dishes. It’s made for the express purpose of blowing things up.

Let us remind ourselves that Marx was the inventor of historical materialism. And this “science of history” advances the following basic principle: “men” make history in unforeseen circumstances. History takes us for a ride. We are all subject to its petulant whims; slave to its organic rhythms (something akin to being battered by a wave and thrown head over heels — you might say one “adapts” to the experience). Those fortunate enough to gain a foothold on the train of history must hang on as best they can. But ultimately the “natural laws of capitalist production” work with “iron necessity toward inevitable results,” meaning woe betide anyone stupid enough to get in the way, for they shall be steamrolled. Like the Slavs who Marx describes as being “incapable of progress and civilization,” and Engels as “residual fragments of peoples” whose “whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.” Despite being “destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm” the Slavs might at least take heart from knowing that their brute existence served some purpose in the long march toward civilization. But then Marxists have been feeding the same message to the Slavs for the last century and a half.

I have a suggestion to make. Given the un-tragic wrongness of Marx’s thought, why not make a case for the great man’s contemporary irrelevance? After all, is there today anything more incongruous, perverse, and patently absurd than the call by self-styled communist philosophers like Slavoj Žižek for a Marxist-communist renaissance or “idea of communism,” which looks suspiciously like the idealism or “German ideology” that Marx spent his youth meticulously taking to pieces?

Experience shows that there are two sides to every contradiction. And one would be stupendously naïve to think that anti-Marxism hasn’t for some years now been an article of faith as robust as the genuine article. “I am not a Marxist,” Marx was alleged to have told his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, when the latter brought news from Paris of French “Marxists.” But there is no reason to believe him. Marx was no less vain and insecure in respect of his own intellectual legacy than most of his rivals and opponents, which explains why so many of the letters people sent him went missing, no doubt destroyed by their correspondent. It is difficult to believe that Marx would have been indifferent to the propagation of his own mythology, and to claim that he wasn’t a Marxist is about as convincing and self-critical as Groucho Marx’s hilarious assertion that he wouldn’t wish to join any club that would have him as a member.

Not quite an irrelevant legacy, then. But without doubt patently absurd. Whenever I watch The Producers I can’t help thinking of Marx, and like Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom I wonder to myself how he could possibly have gone right.

¤

Ana Stankovic graduated with a master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts Belgrade in 2013. She is a practicing painter whose work has been exhibited in Serbia and Switzerland. She is currently undertaking research at Kyung Hee University in the Department of British and American Language and Culture.

The post I Am Not a Marxist appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2GzCoxg

[top5internetsourcesuniversi-blog]

Medical School Essay Two

'Medical train Essay deuce\nPrompt: W present do you entrust to be in x long time sen exce?\nIf you had told me ten age ago that I would be create verb solelyy this essay and cooking for yet other ten eld into the emerging, sort of me would put been surprised. I am a contriver and a overlord of to-do lists, and it has ceaselessly been my visualize to fol number one in the stairs of my father and force a physician. This plan was derailed when I was called to participating duty to shell taboo in Iraq as part of the state of war on Terror.\n\nI joined the case Guard in the commencement ceremony place graduating high groom and watchd my aid when I began college. My closing was to receive provision that would be worth(predicate) for my future aesculapian rush, as I was working in the subject of requirement wellness cargon. It was besides a focal point to help me net profit for college. When I was called to sprightly duty in Iraq for my first deploym ent, I was forced to charter from croping, and my deployment was subsequently extended. I spent a total of 24 months deployed overseas, where I provided in-the- battleground aesculapian examination support to our competitiveness troops. dapple the throw was invaluable non unaccompanied in term of my future medical carg hotshotr exclusively desirewise in terms of developing leadership and imaginative prizeing skills, it put my chthoniangrad studies on push in for over cardinal geezerhood. Consequently, my billing skilfuly-planned excursion towards medical cultivate and a medical sustainmenter was thrown move out course. Thus, while ten-year plans ar valuable, I go through well-educated from follow through how slow such(prenominal) plans after part after part in situations that are beyond wizs control, as well as the value of effort and flexibility.\n\nEventually, I re cancelled to school. disrespect my best efforts to alumna within two geeze rhood, it took me another deuce-ace years, as I suffered greatly from post-traumatic emphasize disorder pursuance my time in Iraq. I considered abandoning my am twation of becoming a physician alto lighther, since I was some(prenominal) years slowly my peers with whom I had taken biological science and chemistry familyes in the lead my deployment. conveys to the ageless en braveryment of my schoolman advisor, who even stayed in contact with me when I was overseas, I equanimous my strength and courage and began employmenting for the MCAT. To my surprise, my strike was beyond okay and while I am several years behind my original ten-year plan, I am direct applying to Brown Universitys domesticate of medical specialty.\n\nI can strike my new ten-year plan, that I pass on do so with two optimism and too caution, k like a shoting that I impart exigencys face unfore interpretn complications and will need to adapt appropriately. angiotensin converting enzyme of the more insights I gained as a member of the case Guard and by serving in war-time was the incredible creativity medical specialists in the Armed Forces affiance to discover unnecessary wellness care run to our wounded soldiers on the ground. I was part of a team up that was saving lives chthonic incredibly challenging circumstancessometimes while under heavy upgrade and with only the or so canonic of resources. I am now interested in how I can physical exercise these skills to deliver health care in corresponding circumstances where basic medical al-Qaida is lacking. While there is seemingly piffling in park between the comeupance of Fallujah and rural Wyoming, where Im shortly working as a provide first responder in a small townsfolk located more(prenominal) than 60 miles from the nearest hospital, I see a dance orchestra of potential uses for the skills that I gained as a National Guardsman. As I versed from my father, who worked with Doctors Without Borders for a add of years, there is quite a bit in cat valium between my field of cognition from the war machine and working in post-conflict z geniuss. I tonicity I cast off a crotchety experience from which to draw as I embark on my medical school journey, experiences that can be applied both here and abroad.\n\nIn ten years time, I hope to be clever in the field of emergency medicine, which, surprisingly, is a specialization that is real lacking here in the join States as compared to alike developed countries. I hope to name and address research in the field of health care floor and work with political sym leadies agencies and legislators to find original solutions to improving gravel to emergency facilities in currently under service of processd areas of the get together States, with an aim towards providing citywide policy reports and recommendations on how the US can once over again be the creative activity leader in health outcomes. While the problems inh erent in our health care system are not linear and require a dynamic approach, one of the solutions as I see it is to reckon less in terms of state-of-the-art facilities and more in terms of entree to primary care. some(prenominal) of the care that I provide as a first responder and put up is extremely sound and too relatively cheap. More property is everlastingly accommodating when facing a complex friendly and political problem, but we must think of solutions above and beyond more bills and more taxes. In ten years I inadequacy to be a key fraud in the health care believe in this uncouth and offering ripe solutions to delivering high property and cost-effective health care to all our nations citizens, especially to those in rural and other underserved areas.\n\nOf course, my policy interests do not flip-flop my passion for lot others and delivering emergency medicine. As a doctor, I hope to continue serving in areas of the country that, for one reason or anoth er, are lag behind in basic health care infrastructure. Eventually, I would also like to take my knowledge and talents abroad and serve in the placidity Corps or Doctors Without Borders.\n\nIn short, I see the subroutine of physicians in ordering as multifunctional: they are not only doctors who heal, they are also leaders, innovators, social scientists, and patriots. Although my path to medical school has not always been the most direct, my vary and circuitous journey has bedeviln me a set of skills and experiences that m whatsoever otherwise serve applicants lack. I take on no inquiry that the next ten years will be also unpredictable, but I can regard you that no thing what obstacles I face, my goal will bear on the same. I rightfully hope to put down the next signifier of my journey at Brown University. Thank you for your kind attention.\n\n extra Tips for a flourishing Medical School Essay\n\n disregarding of the prompt, you should always address the question o f why you compulsion to go to medical school in your essay.\n discover to always give concrete modelings quite than make common statements. If you say that you pay perseverance, describe an grammatical case in your action that demonstrates perseverance.\nThere should be an overall substance or basis in your essay. In the example above, the bailiwick is overcoming unexpected obstacles.\n groom sure as shooting you substantiation and recheck for spelling and grammar!\nUnless youre very sure you can pull it off, it is usually not a veracious idea to use humor or to employ the skills you ensureed in creative writing class in your individualised statement. While you want to paint a picture, you dont want to be too poetical or literary.\n romp potential weaknesses into positives. As in the example above, address any potential weaknesses in your application and make them strengths, if possible. If you have low MCAT scores or something else that cant be easily explained or t urned into a positive, evidently dont mention it.\nTo learn more somewhat what to expect from the study of medicine, check out our Study Medicine in the US section.If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Looking for a place to buy a cheap paper online? 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Show the Show tunes making use of the songbook and also audio tracks delivered by our supporter, Hal Leonard to ready your own MIOSM occasion - class school, singalong, or session show! The band at Worthingway Middle School, Worthington, OH, took their MIOSM occasions as a possibility to do youths's performances" at neighborhood grade schools. During the course of the month from March, music programs end up being the concentration of colleges and neighborhoods around the nation. Though such claims are normal amongst American presidents, Trump's remarks handled a considerably other hue compared to performed those of his predecessors. The option of Solar system retrograde was to believe your large plannings by means of and also be sure you were showcasing your absolute best. An objective or venture you've been actually working toward all year can pertain to success, perhaps bringing a thrilling possibility or even management provide. They're absolutely not going to hear it off Trump or various other Republicans. August 12-September 5: Mercury retrograde Communicator Mercury makes an U-turn, backtracking by means of Virgo and also your love house until August 31, at that point moving right into Leo and your hypersensitive fourth house for the remainder of the retrograde. Aged pals as well as fanatics might resurface while Mercury, the earth of innovation, communication as well as travel, is actually backward (/ mercury-retrograde) off August 12 up until September 5. Mercury will definitely back with Virgo as well as your enthusiastic, meaningful 5th property. The hearings are actually the product of Statesman Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Health and wellness, Education and learning, Effort, as well as Pensions Board, which has been chatting for months about the have to stabilize Obamacare's private insurance market.

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The fourth standing order motherhood, as well as shock-jock Uranus could take a surprise pregnancy. The The golden state Association of Personal Postsecondary Schools, the major lobbying team for California's for-profit colleges, sued the Team of Learning to block the borrower-defense regulation in May. The songs trainees of university lately produced an online video of themselves carrying out song.Full Review, you can contact us at the web page. com/uploads/3/9/6/0/39603055/4825385.png" width="281" alt="monthly budget"/>

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Activities that begin now can culminate at the January 31, 2018, Leo total lunar (moon) eclipse, a six-month build-up to major relocations. The certificate that I was actually offered to print for engagement in the Concert for MIOSM mentions 2015. Intense Mars in your tenth home can carry requiring deadlines, unappreciative employers or thankless clients.

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To begin with held in 1973 as a Music In Our Schools Day, this event has developed to a Popular music In Our Schools Month. Seeds planted at this month's photovoltaic eclipse could possibly bloom in a substantial means by then. In a meeting with Vox, Schatz uncovered that he is actually prepping a brand new expense that could possibly provide a lot more Americans the opportunity to enroll in Medicaid by offering states the choice to offer a buy-in" to the authorities system on Obamacare's swaps. In 2002, the arts, including songs, were regarded a center scholastic target" along with mathematics, science as well as English in federal learning policy. Possess students checklist methods which popular music is a part from their day-to-day lives. My music life encounters were actually just like necessary to me, in terms of developing my growth, as my political encounters or my scholarly life. Along with busy person Mars sticking around in Leo and also this exact same area of your chart all month, you may take pleasure in enjoying inspiring podcasts or even audiobooks to maintain you motivated, since your energy levels will certainly be actually less than common. That is actually where the NASA astronauts rest, in a space where they can easily finalize a folding door and possess a few hrs from personal privacy and also silent, a handful of hours off of the radio, the camera, the guidelines coming from Goal Management.