1. Academic Freedom Alliance. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
The AFA seeks to counteract pressures on employers to take actions against employees whose views, statements, or teachings they may disapprove or dislike. We oppose such pressures from the government, college or university officials, and individuals or groups inside or outside colleges and universities.
I clicked on “members” and it seems like a prestigious list. FITS candidates include Cowen, Pinker, Haidt. . .
2. Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Pointer from a commenter. This one looks even better.
Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.
And check out their Board of Advisors. FITS candidates include Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Pinker, Pluckrose. . .
It looks like they are ready to take the fight to the K-12 sector, where I believe it may be most needed. I think this one is worth joining.
Thanks for the pointer, I just joined and donated to FAIR.
We have contributed too. This organization is absolutely on the right track with a path forward!
Icymi – the president of the organization recently posted an editorial in the WSJ (link should be ungated).
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I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology underlying the “racial literacy” guide distributed by the school wasn’t like that. Instead of emphasizing our common humanity, it lumps people into simplistic racial groupings. It teaches that each person’s identity and status is based largely on skin color, and leaves no place for people like me, who are of mixed race or don’t place race at the heart of their identity.
My wife came to the U.S. as a refugee from the former Soviet Union. She spent the first five years of her life in an intolerant society where her “group identity” as a Jew was stamped in her passport. In school she was taught to keep tabs on friends and family, and after one particularly effective lesson, she was inspired to turn in her own father to the local police for “crimes against the state.” Fortunately, no harm came of it. But suffice it to say we are both allergic to forced conformity, especially when young, impressionable children are trained to obsess over “racial differences” and be on the lookout for deviations from orthodoxy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dividing-by-race-comes-to-grade-school-11615144898?st=osv3sq6tiyput3z&reflink=article_copyURL_share
They maybe don’t like the latest iteration of racial ‘justice’ in academia, but are those guys really ready to stand behind proposals to end affirmative action and all that entails? I don’t think so…
Also, once again, DeSantis is leading the way to something better.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Wednesday unveiled his proposal for a civics education curriculum in the state, emphasizing it will “expressly exclude” critical race theory.
“A high-quality education begins with a high-quality curriculum, which is why we’re going to be laser-focused on developing the best possible civics instruction standards,” DeSantis said at a press conference.
DeSantis said there is “no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory,” adding that “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/543742-desantis-says-florida-school-curriculum-will-expressly-exclude-critical
Contrast this with California, which is going in a completely different direction.
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Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology.
https://christopherrufo.com/revenge-of-the-gods/
I’m intrigued by the California proposal. If we’re serious about trying to clean up the stain of colonialism, it seems as though an essential step would be to deprecate the European language imposed by the colonizers. We need to get rid of Spanish in signage and government publications, and to mandate the use of Nahuatl, Miwok, Okwanuchu, Tubatulabal…
Nah, Nahuatl is also, as the kids say, ‘problematic’. Aztecs came in from the North and colonized Tenochtitlan. No, nothing will do until we are able to finish reconstructing proto-Totozoquean, who we can at least provisionally mythologize as a non-colonized tongue due to the absence of any good historical records and until someone digs up some more ancient DNA proving otherwise.
Leading the way to something better is finding ways to persuade and reconcile. All he’s doing is feeding the culture wars.
Let me know when he’s convinced a single person to adjust their views.
He’s started running for President. It will be all culture war all the time from here on out.
+1 ,,,sadly, but truthfully.
MMT, until the next big milk price/ working class CPI inflation increases, means there’s plenty of gov’t cash — so culture war we go.
Inflation tends to help people win immediate term elections. It helped Nixon win in 1972. It takes an election cycle or so for inflation to have its negative effects, usually.
I think Dems sense they are weak in 2022 and 2024, so they are going to goose inflation as much as they can. After 2024 demographics will start to become inevitable.
You don’t seem to understand woke culture. The woke folks have no desire for productive debate, reconciliation or healing.
Question: how many more times do Hughes, Loury and McWhorter need to invite Kendi and others for an honest debate, which they always turn down, before you realize this?
Also, if you don’t like the politics of Florida, then don’t move there. We learned to hate the politics of California, so we moved from there to some place more consistent with our values in raising a family.
Voting with your feet is far more effective than casting ballots or endless townhall debates.
What is mostly needed is to convince people who already believe what you do to stand up for it. For that you need a fighter, not a diplomat. Trump, De Santis, etc are much better for this role than another “Dems are the real racists” bowtie Republican think tanker.
I also think you need to understand that most people respond to a strong horse far more than argument. If CRT continues to get victories, people will believe in CRT. If it loses battles, people will stop believing in it. Not everyone, but a large part of the centre block that responds to power.
Cutting off funding for CRT, like Trump did and Biden reversed, would do more to win the war than the most eloquent argument you can think of. In the article I linked the other day it pointed out that every single school in the county had a paid NKVD agent monitoring people for CRT wrong think. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Make it illegal. Cut off the money flows. Never apologize. Never back down. Never grant bullshit premises. Call out bad faith aggressively. These are the only things that have ever led to successful pushback against this kind of stuff.
You would say that about any argument you disagree with but can’t refute. You’re not persuading anyone either, but merely adding to the culture wars.
Except I don’t disagree with DeSantis about Critical Race Theory. I’m just convinced he’s not trying to do anything constructive.
I don’t know, stopping the schools from teaching it seems constructive. Of course, the devil is always in the details and I don’t know the details. I also doubt that it will work, because it is so embedded in the schools.
MikeW – I don’t believe it does stop the schools from teaching it. Same with California.
Ask yourself: If a person does believe the truth lies somewhere in between the history texts we grew up with and the severity of critical race theory, who is offering them a place to land on?
What’s the truth Tom?
Growing up my textbooks taught that slavery was bad and civil rights was good. How much current black dysfunction was a result of culture vs oppression was up for debate, but the high status opinion (leftist) leaned towards oppression. There was more of a balance though.
What’s the middle ground between that and Critical Race Theory? Different levels of reparations?
The science says it’s probably genes. If any part of it is culture, it doesn’t seem like leftism helps that aspect.
There isn’t a halfway point between 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5. 2 + 2 = 4.5 isn’y enlightened compared to 2 + 2 = 4.
#1 is absurd on its face, and more than a bit dangerous. Do you really want all teachers to be protected to pursue their personal ideals, unmoored from any institutional constraints, norms or sanctions? Maybe some additional thought is required here.
#2 on the other hand appears to be exactly the response for the moment.
Good points Tom. Let’s not pretend there aren’t always some ideas that are and ought to be beyond the pale.
The point is the line is being drawn in the wrong place in many cases and we all need to go to bat for liberal values that protect conservatives as well as progressives.
I don’t even think this cancel culture will be good for progressive policies in the end. Progressives are raising a generation of “advocates” who don’t even know how to deal with the arguments against their ideas because they have been so sheltered from hearing them. And the whole thing could not be more perfectly designed to create a backlash against against progressive ideas from more classical liberals who might otherwise be their allies on some issues.
Are they supporting the two Google AI ethicists?
Who were fired for trashing their employers’ new products (with, I might add, highly speculative rather than proven accusations of malfunction) then pretended it was because of their race or politics?
Some cancellations are good!
So let me get this right, opponents of ‘cancellation’ must publicly oppose all firings, for pretty much any reason, or they’re being hypocrites?
If you’re an accountant for McDonald’s and you publicly oppose meat-eating, that’s one thing. If you work the counter at McDonald’s and actively try to persuade people not to buy the food, then rather than stopping when your employer asks you about it, you issue an ultimatum with a list of unreasonably demands like you own the company, well, that’s another thing.
I’m getting the impression you didn’t follow what actually happened in the Gebru case.
I believe a private business can decide at any time whether or not they want to keep you employed. And if they fire you you are not being cancelled lol.
Then you’re just engaging in a semantic dispute over the definition of ‘cancellation’ and this is pointless.
2. “Trust the universe is on the side of justice.”
OK, Pollyanna, tell that to democracy advocates in Hong Kong, the Uyghers, Saudis, Iranians,, Tibetans, etc, etc..
In the USA, the government conspires against its people by buying off businesses and their media empires, and taxi exempt propaganda mills. Nice dive into the abyss of corruption here: https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/16/until-lambs-become-lions Morton offers a more meaningful response to the oppressive authoritarianism of the Biden regime and its enablers, yet real legal reform is the only thing that will get the tyrant’s boot from our throats. And to elucidate the specifics of such an agenda, the problem has to be named for what it is, fascism. And the resistance has to hit the tyrants in the pocket book: subscription cancellations, boycotts, General strikes, TV, internet, and radio tune outs. Mass social media account deletions. And mass protests.
Let’s be clear about what fascism is. Encyclopedia Britannica offers a concise explanation: “Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation. “. From the conversion of the Capitol to a militarized zone to the attack on domestic political dissent by the spy agencies, this definition describes the Biden regime perfectly.
The legal reforms necessary include federal defunding of taxi exempt propaganda mills, a ban on Sucked beer stopped interfering in local elections, prohibitions on government funded domestic influence operations, and transparency in federal agency campaigns against the citizens of this country.
Anything less is whistling past the graveyard.
“a ban on Sucked beer stopped interfering in local elections”. I’m having a hard time figuring out what this is supposed to say. (I figured out “taxi exempt” after a couple of seconds.)
Oops. My bad. Autocorrect error. Intended tax exempts.
That was the easy one. Now, what was “Sucked beer” supposed to be?
Fine efforts. Necessary.
The negative framing is a problem. We hate CRT. Reasonable. Logical. But nothing to get behind and support.
We need a positive framing. We believe in equality. Everyone is equal. Everyone has value. Everyone should be able to speak their ideas. We are FAIR.
The emergent culture is activism. Give me a cause to fight for. A better cause than the racism.
I particularly liked James Lindsay’s creation of a ‘super anti-racist’ label. Why be just anti-racist (woke) when you can be ‘super anti-racist’ and fight for super-equality!
You might want to check out the proposed curriculum for K-12 ethnic studies in California public schools. It would be required for graduation.
That these organizations had to be created should make the ACLU ashamed, but I doubt it.
I have my kids in Austin Public Schools. Last night, the superintendent sent out an email to all parents:
This is partisan political propaganda.
I’m disappointed to see my kid’s K-12 public school district participate in a coordinated political messaging strategy. Can’t I just receive non-political education service or get a tax refund and purchase my own educational services?
This is a perfect encapsulation of the problem here.
I would suggest seeing this as partisan political propaganda is the wrong way to go. If it wasn’t seen as partisan, it would still be a problem.
Rather, the problem lies with something more fundamental that has been happening slowly for a couple of generations and is now fully baked in and that is an unrestrained notion of the educational mission.
Why does the superintendent of schools think that he has a responsibility to social commentary directed to events wholly outside the school system’s mission as part of his official duties? Why do the teachers want to teach critical race theory? They have greatly exceeded the boundaries of their scope of responsibility in society.
I think the answer is not to debate the merits of what they are saying or complain about which side they are on, but to tell them they need to stand back regardless of side. A superintendent who sends out messages outside the scope of their responsibilities should be constrained, and the nature of the message is beside the point.
Why?
Leaving aside the fact that some are literally paid teach CRT.
And leaving aside broader trends in the politicization of everything (the corporate world is woke too).
I’d say the best answer is that if the Null Hypothesis is true, these people’s jobs, at least in their current form, aren’t really justified. This is especially true of the school administrator class. Having failed to achieve most of the goals they laid out for themselves over the last few decades despite burgeoning budgets and massive policy deference, there needs to be someone/something to blame for that failure. White supremacy is as good and explanation for that failure as any other. It’s unfalsifiable and the script writes itself.
What alternative could they possibly embrace? That either they are bad at their jobs or that their jobs are fundamentally impossible?
Organized and even earlier semi-organized and unorganized resistance is all fine and good.
But as long as colleges continue to secretly discriminate against hiring Republicans, their graduates will tend to be folk that enjoy hating Republicans. One of the very sad truths about humans is how so many enjoy hating.
The Free Speech/ free thought ideas are to listen to all ideas, and discuss the positive & negative results. More organizations supporting more free speech is good. It’s necessary.
But it’s not sufficient.
The USA needs more Republican professors, and Republican K-12 teachers. We need more Reps to apply, even when getting turned down – tho rejection is quite hard – and we need more getting accepted.
This is so hard that homeschooling and alt-schooling seem easier ways to “get the same effect”. But it’s not the same, nor as good for society, nor to reduce polarization.
The related issues include Truth, Fairness, and Justice.
Plus the huge confusion of unfair being equated to unjust – where justice is based on human actions but unfairness is part of reality.
Life is not Fair.
What is to be done?