Category Archives: Reason

UPDATE V (4/8/016): Continuum Of Propaganda: Yale, Mizzou & Your Child’s School

Education, Family, Founding Fathers, Free Speech, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Reason

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“Continuum Of Propaganda: Yale, Mizzou & Your Child’s School” is the current, weekly column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… On the University of Missouri campus, atavistic youth have joined against hurtful words, symbols and unsettling, unorthodox ideas, and for “safe spaces,” where these brave hearts can hideout from “racial microaggression.” Examples of “microaggression” are asking a black student for lessons in twerking, complimenting her weave, or simply being white.

But mostly, these minorities and their propagandized white patsies are campaigning for the unanimous acceptance of the following destructive, dangerous, often deadly, dictum:

“White racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. White racism explains everything.”

The “systemic racism” meme you hear repeated by media, across the American campus, and preached from the White House is a function of “Critical Race Theory,” the sub-intelligent, purely theoretical, and logically fallacious construct, now creeping into American schools at every level.

As detailed in WND colleague Colin Flaherty’s “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry,” America’s children, black, white and brown, are being taught, starting at a tender age, about “racial hostility and resentment.”

This racial hostility is said to be endemic and always and everywhere a white on black affair.

Ask your state representative and your school board about Glenn Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group’s curriculum, deceptively titled “Courageous Conversations.” The PEG poisonous program has been adopted by “hundreds of school districts across the US,” and foisted on millions of pupils, very possibly your child.

Beware; propaganda is process oriented, and an insidious one at that.

ITEM: Your cherub’s project receives an A. His work the teacher praises before the classroom. Yet, oddly, the child’s identity she will studiously conceal. This is in furtherance of the egalitarian idea, implemented, whereby no individual student is to be identified as having produced superior work to that of the collective.

“[U]nder the Singleton influence,” explains Flaherty, “the Seattle schools [have] defined individualism as a form of cultural racism and said that only whites can be racist.” Moreover, “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology is a form of racism,” too.

The progressive educational project carries its anti-white bias into teaching about the Orient (East) versus the Occident (West).

ITEM: A Christian boy, placed in an academically advanced study program, is tasked with submitting a project about one of three ancient civilizations: Egypt, India and Rome.

Ancient Egypt, a big hit apparently, is spoken for. The teacher, generally “white, female, liberal,” advises the boy: “Choose India. Rome is … BORING.”

What is it that this colossal ignoramus has conveyed to her student with the words “Rome is boring”? Let us unpack the meta-message (with reference to History.org): …

… Read the rest. “Continuum Of Propaganda: Yale, Mizzou & Your Child’s School” is the current column, now on WND.

UPDATE I: “Campuses across country updating ‘insensitive’ mascots, mottos…”

UPDATE II (11/20): At The Unz Review David says:

November 20, 2015 at 12:14 pm GMT

Did anyone beside the author say, “Choose India. Rome is … BORING?” It appears she made it up so she could get really worked up about it, like the Ask-a-Mexican guy.

ilana mercer says:
@David

Both ITEMS in the essay are true. “Kid” in question is like family to this writer. Enough said. The article was prompted, in part, by this “close encounter.” Saying Rome is boring is so weird; too peculiar to make up. Even more peculiar is suggesting someone unknown to you is a liar. Nice.

UPDATE III (11/21): The manner of subversion is so subtle, a busy parent can’t hope to stay on top the propaganda underway in schools. If you are able to detect the programming, deprogram daily using Socratic questioning. So talk to the brats (unpleasant notion, I know). When my daughter used to return from school, and declare something preposterous, I would begin the deprogramming through questioning. Having a child in the public school system comes with the added responsibility to know your child is being programmed—not to doubt it or defend against it—and to be prepared to deprogram or access resources to so do. (Examples of resources are the Homeschool Courses of historian Tom Woods and Ron Paul, or this writer’s columns on economics and the Constitution (and all others focusing on proper reasoning), to be found in the Articles Archive (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_search.php?Search+by+Category=Search+by+Category). A list of books is a good idea (a short one is here: http://barelyablog.com/classical-liberalism/. Literature is here: http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=796). Send your suggestions. Kids can begin with Ayn Rand. We all do. Please post resources parents can access, under this thread.

UPDATE IV (11/22): In reply to David Davis’ heroic efforts (thread at the Libertarian Alliance):

Inculcating proper reasoning in a child is vital in the deprogramming effort. My columns are anchored in argument and reason (as best I can). For example, and in context of David’s comment, my “Reincarnation of the Reds” brings up the concept of “the theory that can’t be falsified.” (This is not to say one can’t be, as I am, a private property conservationist.)

David Gordon, Ph.D, is magnificent on the reasoning front; he has written a kid compatible “Introduction to Economic Reasoning.”

UPDATE V (4/8/016):

Blind, Self-Absorbed Media Lose Out In The NYC Marathon

Human Accomplishment, Pop-Culture, Reason, Sport, The Zeitgeist

In the context of the 2015 TCS New York City Marathon, whose “story” ought to be more compelling to a rational individual?

The story of Kenyans Stanley Biwott and Mary Keitany who won the race, or the quirky story of some blind Frenchman, who resides in the US, seems to have access to all the resources in the world, and decided on a whim to recruit friends to assist him in running a marathon (the result of which would be guaranteed face-time on the American mass media, which is forever searching out freaky stories, or ways to shape their viewers’ notion of heroism).

The correct answer—yes, I’d argue there is such a thing—is the two Kenyans. You can be sure that the two gifted, heroic runners acquired their endurance and speed by running barefoot to school and back, each day. Barefoot not because it’s the latest (Western) trend in running, but by necessity.

Wow! Can you believe that the barefoot line was written above before I looked up the story, “What Makes Kenya’s Marathon Runners The World’s Best”?

In addition, most kids usually run to school barefoot, which I think has some effect because it means they grow up being excellent runners …

In fact, the “ran to school every day” thought was first floated on Barely a Blog in 2012, on 07.26.12 @ 3:01 pm, to be precise.

In any event, our heroes are: Anyone who runs a marathon, in general. And the incredible Kenyan champions who run against all odds.

In sum, sentimentality clouds judgment and leads to misplaced sympathy and, consequently, to the blind self-absorption and solipsism on display in the blind man Fox News segment.

The Race That Began & Ended In Media’s Mind

Democrats, Elections, Media, Reason

The race that never was: Joe Biden for president.

The Biden presidential bid began in the collective mind of Mainstream-Media, and ended in said swamp. Or has it ended? CNN’s Mad Michael Smerconish postulated, today, that by dropping out of a race he never joined, Biden was brilliantly signaling he’s actually joining it.

Why are these mad men, with zero astuteness or predictive powers, on TV? (“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” addressed that quagmire in 2004.)

Meantime, CNN keeps their flame for Biden burning.

Conservatives for Abolishing the Fact of Evil

Conservatism, Ethics, Media, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Reason

“Conservatives For Abolishing The Fact Of Evil” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

The public personas who pass as conservatives are NOT system builders. We know them as conservatives not by their well thought-out, philosophically consistent thinking; but because they’ve staked out certain positions on The Issues, over time.

“Gun violence” is the term used by conservatives with this messy habit of mind. A careful thinker would allude to “goon violence.”

“For guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of manufactured illness in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is integral to the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. It is here to stay.”

In cahoots with their left-liberal partners in crime, conservative jurists, journalists, politicians and pundits now routinely debase this moral vocabulary. “Gun violence,” they all jabber, is caused by mental illness.

Their cure for goon violence: Bring in the big therapeutic guns to do the diagnosing. With state imprimatur, the witch doctors will lay the “scientific” cornerstone for walling-in society’s oddballs.

Democrats concur: If someone does something awfully wicked, he must have an illness as real as cancer or Alzheimer’s.

Still, progressives are pioneers in abolishing the fact of evil and replacing it with a diagnosis amenable to state intervention. Did not Joseph Stalin replace the wisdom of the ages with a scientific system that deployed the therapeutic idiom to murder and imprison dissenters? Yes he did.

But while they dare not cop to it openly, a secondary goal exclusive to progressives is to destroy the very idea of a self-reliant citizenry. …

… Read the rest on The Unz Review.