We Need More Hands-On Education Like This

I'm not being sarcastic. I think that the lack of hands-on know-how is damaging our children. They are not well-prepared for this world by clicking at their laptop computers and using their credit cards to hire other people to do so many of the physical things they need and want.

Thus,this video made my day:

I posted this on FB twice and FB took it down twice because it was "spam." I had merely posted this image with the link to Twitter, along with a comment that I enjoyed seeing this video of a Chinese kindergarten class:

This is the third time this month that FB has deleted my non-spam posts as "spam."

Here's how Facebook defines "Spam":

Spam Policy details

Policy Rationale We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead, or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.

Online spam is a lucrative industry. Our policies and detection must constantly evolve to keep up with emerging spam trends and tactics. In taking action to combat spam, we seek to balance raising the costs for its producers and distributors on our platforms, with protecting the vibrant, authentic activity of our community.

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The Coddling, Continued . . .

Greg Lukianoff offered this summary of The Coddling of the American Mind as part of an update:

The central premise of the book is that we are giving a generation of young people extraordinarily terrible advice and then being frustrated with them when they follow it. We argue that we are unintentionally teaching a generation of students three “great untruths.” They are:

The great untruth of fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The great untruth of emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The great untruth of us versus them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

(Note: In my most recent book with the great Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind, we have added a fourth great untruth, The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, “bad people only have bad opinions.”)"

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We Fabricate Our Opponents

From Steve Stewart Williams:

I wonder whether a motivator is that in these highly dysfunctional times, we crave being to be the morally pure protagonists of our story. It's cheap and easy to polarize the narrative and to blame others for every dysfunctional thing we notice.

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Copyright Law Being Misused to (Continue to Hide) Manifesto of Nashville Mass Murder

If the mass murderer had been an avowed white supremacist, his/her writings would have been public immediately after the murders. In the case of the March 2023 Nashville mass murders, however, the shooter was a transgender man, so the rule are completely different. The authorities are doing everything possible to prevent those writings from being public because the would (presumably) conflict with a powerful narrative relating to transgender ideology. FIRE explains:

A Nashville judge held that the journal entries of school shooter Audrey Hale, who went by Aiden, can’t be released under state open records law because to do so would violate copyright law. If you’re confused, that’s probably because you understand copyright law, open records law, or both. In the United States, copyright is an economic right. While those are important, they should not generally outweigh compelling public interests — like knowing how we missed the motives that led to the murder of three children and three adults. I recently wrote about the backstory of this case on FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff’s Eternally Radical Idea Substack newsletter, but let’s walk through how we got here.

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The Lack of Book Reading

I once had a dream about writing a book, but I was realistic about the slim odds that it would be read by more than a handful of people.

From a 2021 article by Elle Griffin.

Almost a third of Americans don’t read books at all. And, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to three hours per day consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year while a reader gets through only 16 books—and that’s presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books.

In reality, books compete for our reading time alongside newspapers, magazines, and other online publications. Even this year, when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year—by 2.8 percent. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215 percent with most of that time taking place on Facebook (23 minutes per day), Google (14 minutes per day), and MSN (five minutes per day).

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