Thomas Frank: Two Ways to do Liberalism
Thomas Frank, the author of What is the Matter with Kansas was on Bill Maher's show recently. He suggested that there are now two ways to do liberalism.
Thomas Frank, the author of What is the Matter with Kansas was on Bill Maher's show recently. He suggested that there are now two ways to do liberalism.
I think of "the news" as what they are willing to let us know rather than what they could have shared with us based on unbridled curiosity. This is a massive lowering of the bar, of course, but this lowered expectation tamps down my daily sense of disappointment.
Glenn Loury and John McWhorter react to a recent decision of the Princeton School District to dumb down the math curriculum in the name of "equity." John McWhorter sums up the problem: In the view of some school administrators, "It is not authentically black to be nerdy."
Here is an article describing the problem: "Opinion: Princeton Public School parents express concerns about school district’s ‘new direction’"
From Matt Taibbi:
Now the script is flipped. The press mainstream has borrowed from the old Fox model and not only (as Shapiro notes) excludes dissent via the “laundering of expertise” but leads interminable crusades against an exploding list of deviationists within their own ranks. You may have thought you were solidly a progressive, but you can catch a permanent green-room ban for going against narrative on any issue, whether it’s Syria or Ukraine or Russiagate or trans issues or any of a hundred other things. This is the same losing strategy that hurt the old GOP, which logically should lead to the same losing outcome, except this is a political atmosphere where no one seems to be winning.
Here are some examples that I have collected over the past two years. Bottom line: You should now expect that Left leaning news media will preach to you, not inform you with wide-ranging perspectives, on politically contentious stories of the day. Left leaning legacy "news" outlets like to think they are much better than Fox News, but they are often engaged in the same tactics.
New FAIR video featuring Daryl Davis and Quay Hanna. Let's not write off our fellow American, even proud racists. Daryl Davis says, "Take time to sit down with your adversaries. You will learn something from you and you will learn something from them."