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0593191692
| 9780593191699
| 0593191692
| 4.36
| 3,844
| unknown
| Sep 27, 2022
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really liked it
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Jan 04, 2023
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0807014176
| 9780807014172
| 0807014176
| 3.98
| 6,370
| 1964
| Oct 01, 1991
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0996139540
| 9780996139540
| 0996139540
| 4.11
| 324
| Sep 2016
| Sep 2016
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really liked it
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B07PWYFGY6
| 4.15
| 9,737
| Oct 15, 2019
| Oct 15, 2019
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it was amazing
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What a great read. Hubby read one chapter or half of one aloud each night before sleep. We howled with laughter, sighed, and marveled at "the rest of
What a great read. Hubby read one chapter or half of one aloud each night before sleep. We howled with laughter, sighed, and marveled at "the rest of the story" behind famous folks. There were many surprises, twists and turns. It was one heck of a ride. Mike has an intimate writing style that keeps the reader in the palm of his hand. I recommended this to many friends. ...more |
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Dec 18, 2022
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9781509549993
| 1509549994
| 4.35
| 710
| Apr 2022
| Apr 28, 2022
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liked it
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On the off-chance you read no further in this review, I'll share the most important counsel here, information that should be dispensed at freshman ori
On the off-chance you read no further in this review, I'll share the most important counsel here, information that should be dispensed at freshman orientation. "While there is advice within these pages that could be helpful to any reader, it is worth repeating here the points that are most relevant to these particular young women...: • Distrust any person or ideology that puts pressure on you to ignore your moral intuition. • Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives. • Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard. • A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behaviour. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with. • Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims. • The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women aged about thirteen to twenty-five. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: it’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing. • Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company. • Don’t use dating apps. Mutual friends can vet histories and punish bad behaviour. Dating apps can’t. • Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up. • Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children – not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether or not he’s worthy of your trust. • Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family." The author draws upon her work in a rape crisis center to share her observations. Most of the sources she cites are popular articles from mass media, not peer-reviewed journal articles or academic monographs. I was frustrated by that and the feeling that she never quite closes the deal on any of the topics: • female and male attitudes toward sex are different, but our society has permitted the male attitude to eclipse the female and privilege the male; • sexual intercourse has a special quality, but society leads us to believe it doesn't, again privileging the male; • hook-up culture, pornography and BDSM ("simply a ritualized and newly legitimized version of a toxic dynamic"--choking and strangulation have been normalized) are harmful to women and men, but more harmful to women; • marriage is good--for men, for women, and for children. • People have "real value and dignity. It's time for a sexual counter-revolution" (20). It should be self-evident that liberal feminists "have done a terrible thing in advising inexperienced young women to seek out situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are but also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalizes aggression, coercion and pain" (15). Hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women and yet has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. "A truly feminist project would demand that in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites" (79). Magazines now direct women to "emotionally cripple themselves to gratify men" and to believe "that emotionless sex was the feminist thing to do" (81). This book has been making the media rounds as some kinds of contrarian revelation. Maybe it is that to an audience of young women; there is nothing here that provoked in me any new way of thinking about the subjects, but I used to teach Women's Studies before the gender ideology took over. It is another entry in the genre of describing and to a degree prescribing how to cope with existence in "the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one" (Harari 2018). The Pill has been around for 70 years; Homo sapiens for 200,000. "We evolved in an environment in which sex led to pregnancy" and males attempted to mate with as many females as possible. We cannot pretend that contraception has erased millennia of adaptation. Perry made no mention in this book of the impact of contraception on women's bodies. From my summary and review of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences: "It is astonishing that so many women daily take a medication that "influences billions of cells at once from head to toe" throughout the body, without giving thought to the significant consequences these pharmaceutical have on every aspect of their being, how they think, look and behave, "how they see the world...and just about anything else you can possibly imagine." Your likelihood to divorce may even depend on whether you met when you were taking the pill or not. Hormones are powerful chemicals and their impact is far reaching." In a nutshell: Women and men are not the same. Men liberated "their own libidos while pretending they were liberating women" with access to abortion and contraception. The unforeseen consequences and the sexual ethic that have resulted have privileged male sexual experience and innate desire for quantity and variety as desirable. Liberal feminists have unwittingly promoted male experience as normative in so many ways by encouraging casual sex, devaluing marriage, ascribing greater value to women's public representation and work outside the domestic sphere to the detriment of motherhood and home-making, and especially by adopting male attitudes toward sexuality rather than affirming the female need to be choosier due to potential for physical harm and pregnancy. Instead, we should be seeking to "promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension"? (10). There was not enough discussion of the influence of the market, which benefits when individuals are freed from all commitments. And, from Deborah Spar's book, “In purely economic terms,….women are not better off giving away something they once bartered. No, women do not gain by losing the power they once had to force men to buy their favors .... a trio of leading economists [found]…the advent of abortion and contraception in the U.S. may actually have worsened the fate of women, or at least weakened their ability to bargain with men. Specifically, they demonstrate that just as women gained the power to prevent pregnancy so, to, did they lose the power to commit men to marriage in the case of an unwanted pregnancy.” And, a young woman who wants a relationship but does not want to engage in sex will be at a competitive disadvantage to her willing peers. Perry intimates and implies, but is just too subtle (a quintessentially British quality) for my taste. As a Weberian (my doctoral thesis topic), I confess Perry had me in the palm of her hand when she mentioned Max Weber on page 11. Weber described as "disenchantment" (Entzauberung) the condition of the modern world in which rationalism has stripped the world of magic, but not humans of the longing for the transcendent that religion used to fulfill, so they attempt to access it by sensual means (sex, alcohol and other drugs, food, etc.), which does not and cannot work. Sexual disenchantment means that "sex is nothing more than a leisure activity, invested with meaning only if the participants choose to give it meaning....that sex has no intrinsic specialness, that it is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and that it can therefore be commodified without any trouble" (11). Right now, "consent is the only moral principle left standing under the reign of sexual disenchantment" (68). "And the liberal feminist appeal to consent isn't good enough. It cannot account for the ways in which the sexuality of impressionable young people can be warped by porn or other forms of cultural influence. It cannot convincingly explain why a woman who hurts herself should be understood to be mentally ill, but a woman who asks her partner to hurt her is apparently exercising her sexual agency. Above all, the liberal feminist faith in consent relies on a fundamentally false premise: that who we are in the bedroom is different from who we are outside of it" (131). We need "A sophisticated system of sexual ethics need to demand more of people and as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation." We need a return to the "Chivalrous social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women." These "are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But...the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise" (69). But the media and society encourage men in particular not to resist harmful desires, but to cultivate them. "Why do rape and molestation cause more harm, if sex has no more significance than other acts?" (See https://americancompass.org/three-the... ). Perry is convincing when she indicates the many reasons that using consent as the basis for determining harm is useless. Again, sex is quite different from other activities and women, who tend to score high on agreeableness, convince themselves that their participation in certain activities is their choice. Many of the women who denounced Harvey Weinstein consented, but later repented, feeling violated. It is not until much later that hook-up partners, porn actresses, and prostitutes realize how profoundly they were damaged by their activities. False consciousness had taken hold. At the risk of allegations of a "nanny state," a stronger argument for the legal protection of women against ostensible consent would be difficult to find. Further, young women criticize the stereotypical woman of the 1950s for pleasing their husbands, but eagerly read articles in women's magazine about how to please a man sexually. While "sharing the inside of their bodies was expected, revealing the inconvenient fact of their fertility felt too intimate. We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation" (20). Perry mentions various times one of the many rifts between liberal feminism (which I have elsewhere described as emphasizing superficial "personal choice" devoid of analysis of the deeper impetus for those choices and how the illusion of freedom and personal choice affects society as a whole) and radical feminism, which is far deeper, more critical and eager to examine the bigger picture. Freedom for the predator is death for the prey. Liberal feminism promotes a carefree sexual ethic, which aside from the lack of consent, actually undermines the case that rape is a singularly traumatic crime. Radical feminism looks at how and why female experience of sex differs from the male and refuses to capitulate to patriarchy, the establishment of male experience as normative. In the second chapter, Perry refers to evolutionary psychology and biology, but in superficial ways, mainly regarding rape. A Natural History of Rape revealed that rape is not solely about violence, as the liberal feminists have asserted for decades against the obvious; it is very much about sex. "Concluding that rape must be motivated by the desire to commit acts of violence because it involves force or the threat of force is as illogical as concluding that men who pay prostitutes for sex are motivated by charity." Great line. We are primates, so it's informative to see what is normative in other primates to ascertain biological proclivities, but that's not part of Perry's argument. Astonishingly, she never refers to the bonding hormone oxytocin that increase in women during sexual stimulation, while men get bursts of the highly addictive dopamine. That is one enormous oversight. I had high hopes for this book, but Deborah Spar's Wonder Women(2013) is a better book for readers seeking a more academic treatment. Nevertheless, this book would be an excellent discussion starter for a First Year Experience or an Introduction to Women's Studies course. It will be useful for young women or for those who haven't been deeply involved with the topic. Those who have been in the feminist trenches for 30 or more years will only be surprised to learn how far off the rails the movement has gone. ...more |
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Nov 26, 2022
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Nov 26, 2022
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Paperback
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0226028569
| 9780226028569
| 0226028569
| 3.41
| 882
| Dec 28, 2010
| Jan 15, 2011
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really liked it
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This must be one of the most widely cited and depressing and shocking books on higher education to ever hit the shelf. In a nutshell: “American higher
This must be one of the most widely cited and depressing and shocking books on higher education to ever hit the shelf. In a nutshell: “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students." We know that cognitive ability is a heritable trait; students from wealthier families tend to possess it. They are well prepared for college, complete challenging and complex work, and learn a lot in four years. Then there are the other students, from not very good high schools who go on to less-selective colleges that do not challenge them or the students do enough to pass and don't learn much, but are awarded a degree anyway. Graduates who scored poorly on the Collegiate Learning Assessment are more likely to be living at home with their parents, burdened by credit-card debt, unmarried, and unemployed. Why had no one attempted to measure learning before? Why aren't students learning and why are many even losing their ability to reason critically after four years? Why are we making it so easy to earn a degree? Why is this not being addressed adequately? Why are we paying for this? ...more |
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0063162024
| 9780063162020
| 0063162024
| 4.32
| 3,780
| Apr 26, 2022
| Apr 26, 2022
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it was amazing
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Why the War on the West? Why is the Enlightenment "on the firing line"? "The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of Why the War on the West? Why is the Enlightenment "on the firing line"? "The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact....By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: "my truth." The idea that I have 'my truth' and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out. And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: 'me'" (174). I have ten pages of single spaced notes on this book, but waited too long to craft my review. At this point, I'm just going to post it. If you see how few books I award five stars, you will immediately realize how much I enjoyed this book. Read the book. It's well worth your time. When I have alluded to the civil war being waged in the U.S.A., many people have been dismissive. It is, more precisely, a revolution, an overthrow of the social order for a new one. What else would you call a widespread movement that has taken over corporations and cultural institutions, from schools and universities to libraries, houses of worship, museums, symphony orchestras, etc., denounces, fires, silences, and threatens bodily harm or elevates, hires, and privileges people on the basis of specific characteristics and viewpoints? These are tactics employed by Stalin, Mao, Castro, and any number of other revolutionaries. In this book, journalist Murray provides ample examples of the war against the Western cultural traditions being waged in full view, while other cultures are elevated while not being held to the same standards of justice and equality, values which, of course, are products of the Western intellectual tradition. Before I finished this book, I read "https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win , which covered some of the same hypocrisy, holding companies, organizations, and individuals in the U.S. to a high standard while ignoring entirely the human rights abuses in the countries the do business with like China, Saudi Arabia, and many more. In July, 2021, Xi Jinping declared that any “foreign force” which tries to bully or oppress China “will have their their heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people." How much clearer could he be? Politicians, businesspeople, and those with power fall over themselves to kowtow; it really is everywhere you look. Murray focuses on four main areas of influence: Race, History, Religion, and Culture, but they all share common characteristics. The section on religion can be reduced thus: Judeo-Christian tradition bad, anything else good; critical race theory supplants the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. There is an overwhelming focus on Race in this war, since class war didn't work, it seemed a more fruitful bludgeon. Gardens are racist because native plants are often valued over non-native ones. Libraries are racist because they contain the record of white history and cultural production. Every chance I get, I tell people the U.S. Census for many decades has revealed the Black population to be 12%. Many people believe it's 30% or even 50%. No. 12%. And half of those, 6%, are males. The demographic of Black males is responsible for over 53% of the homicides in the U.S. (See FBI Table 43). This is not a broken tail light or a minor drug offense, the snuffing out of someone's existence. That is the sad reality at the core of prejudice. When Black males decrease their participation in violent crime to proportionality and maintain it there over time, prejudice will decrease. It gets worse. 6% of Black males are incarcerated at any given time; 34% are ex-offenders. That means we're down to a viable 3.6% of Black males who can be hired in, say, banks, yet Wells Fargo and other financial institutions state their unwavering commitment to hiring more Black males. Depending on the definition of "more," they will thus be overrepresented, in the same way they are overrepresented on the Supreme Court (22%) or in television commercials. As Sowell stated in 2012, "Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists." This race revolution is not about justice. It is about revenge. As Ibram Kendi, wrote, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” On the one hand, race is a social construct. On the other, we know that there are biological differences. West Africans and their descendants are genetically predisposed to certain diseases like HIV and COVID. For reasons that are purely political, we are supposed to pretend the only possible explanation for differences in disease outcomes is racism, a tragic irony case of lysenkoism that results in lives being lost. The narrative matters more than the reality. Critical Race Theory (see Cynical Theories) "questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law," quoted from Delgado's Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001). "22% percent of people who identified as 'very liberal' said they thought the police shot at least 10,000 unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40% thought the figure was between 1,000 and 10,000. The actual figure was somewhere around 10." If you haven't seen the "aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture" listed by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, stop everything and look . There are 14 categories: “rugged individualism,” “family structure,” “emphasis on scientific method,” “history,” “protestant work ethic,” “religion,” “status, power and authority,” “future orientation,” “time,” “aesthetics,” “holidays,” “justice,” “competition,” and “communication.” It's a shocking and bizarre assault on the cultural expectations that have led to the excellence and high standard of living in the United States. Murray presents example after example of unabashed racism against Whites. "Westerners have become increasingly unaware of what is true and what is not about their own past," and certainly not about other countries like China (79). "In other words, the assault on the West's history succeeds because it speaks into a vacuum of vast historical and contemporary ignorance." To wit, amongst UK 16-24 year olds: 50% have never heard of Lenin. 70% have never heard of Mao. 72% have never heard of Pol Pot. 67% say they would like to live in a socialist economic system. 75% agree with the assertion that climate change is a specifically capitalist problem. 78% blame capitalism for Britain’s housing crisis. Of Americans 18-39, 12% didn't think they had heard of the Holocaust and 2/3 had no idea that 6M Jews were killed. In the process of developing the program of study for a new high school, the history teachers in the school I led opposed teaching any history prior to the 20th century because "the kids just aren't interested in anything before that." I surveyed dozens of other high schools and was shocked to find very few that required a course that focused on history prior to that period. There is no "debt" that certain countries owe others. Human history is one of conquest. Why is it that the borders of China, India, the Arab States, etc. should be maintained, but not "Western nations" of Europe, Canada, Australia, and the U.S.? What about the current demand for reparations for historical occupations? How far back in time should we go? What about the Caribbean nations suing the British for granting independence before they were adequately prepared? Why is it that the slave trade is deemed far worse than Mao's famine in which 60 million perished? Racism and preference for one's own group over another has been endemic everywhere. Even the Sixth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, referred to killing other Hebrews, not other groups. "Before the modern era the whole history of our species was one of occupation and conquering. One group of original peoples were [sic] replaced by another group of other peoples. And someone outside the American continent was always going to "discover" America" (96). Slavery has existed throughout human history. Compare the 11 and 17 million Africans were enslaved in Sub-Saharan Africa over 13 centuries of uninterrupted traffic in humans with the 388,000 who were taken to the United States. There are more slaves in the world today than there were in the 1800s, yet what action is being taken to eliminate it? Certainly not as much as the British did from 1808-1860, the West Africa squadron of Royal Navy one of every six all ships was dedicated to the fight against the slave trade. The seamen captured 1,600 slave ships, freed 150,000 African slaves and lost 1,500 Naval seamen. Slavery was horrid, but the conditions for many at that time were as bad or worse: "the life expectancy for slaves in Demerara [Guyana] was exactly twice the life expectancy of an industrial worker in Lancashire or Yorkshire at the same time" (119). Murray concentrates on the way anything European or American is considered bad and we must "celebrate and sanctify anything so long as it is not part of the Western tradition"; "sometimes this manifests as a simple admiration of the exotic. Sometimes it comes across as a form of loathing for Western society itself" (157). This yearning for simplicity and Rousseauian anti-modernism is a radical misrepresentation of the facts. Roger Sandall wrote that the "achievements of modern Western civilization...include...a system that 'allows changes of government without bloodshed, civil rights, economic benefits, religious toleration, and political and artistic freedom.' The alternatives to Western civil society do not enjoy or perpetrate any of these things to any significant extant. 'Most traditional cultures feature domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism and severe artistic constraints'" (162). Kant and Hume and the Enlightenment led to expansion of rights and the use of reason and logic, and advanced toward a society that seeks to regard people as equal in dignity even though we are wildly unequal in our abilities. "Black Studies professor Kehinde Andrews explained the rationale for this: 'A defense of liberalism is the worst possible thing you want to do. Because liberalism is the problem. It is the Enlightenment values which really cement racial prejudice....So we take someone like Immanuel Kant’s universal values of human rights – which is deeply racist – and then we wonder why the world is still racist.” The notion here is that human beings had no tribal, racial prejudices until the Age of Reason dawned. Racial hatred was invented by and is the exclusive property of white people in the last few hundred years. Seriously, that’s what the woke believe" (171). So Kant and Hume are out, but Marx is excused as "a messianic visionary," "a prophet to reorder society to be utopian." "Marx is protected because his writings and reputation are useful for anyone wishing to pull down the West. Everybody else is subjected to the process of destruction because their reputation are useful for holding up the West" (180). "100M people who were killed in trying to change the world along Marx's lines" (175). The Critical Race Theory has taken over. Nature, the scientific journal, stated, "too often, conventional metrics--citations, publications, profits--reward those in positions of power, rather than helping to shift the balance of power," but it is not the task of a scientific journal "to shift the balance of power"... but to " publish the best and most important research, whoever comes up with it and whoever it benefits" (195). Math is suddenly racist due to its emphasis on precision and logic. "How can a system that owes its origins to several civilizations and was refined in the West in the last millennia be seen as systematically racist?" (196). On Reparations “It comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong. It is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.” The very people who committed the wrong must make amends to the very people who were wronged. It's like the dying SS guard who confesses his sins to Simon Wiesenthal, who leaves the room without saying a word, as he has no authority to forgive the guard on behalf of others. Would there be a DNA test? How would these reparations work with people who are descendants of slaves and slave owners; they owe their existence to that coupling. What about the vast majority who are descended from various mixes? People who are descended from a slave on the mother's side but emancipated in the 1700s as opposed to one not freed until the 1860s? What about Black voluntary immigrants? Should people whose families took root in the U.S. after emancipation pay? What about those who fought for the Union in the Civil War? What about the trillions of dollars in transfer payments to Blacks and the 360,000 Union soldiers who lost their lives in the conflict? Some say the check has already been cashed. And it will not work. The cost of abolition to Britain in policing the waters to take into custody any ship found to be involved in slavery, buying freedom, compensate companies that lost income (it took centuries to compensate them, finally paid in 2015), 'the most expensive example' of international moral action 'recorded in modern history'" (146). It will never ever be enough. Those who say that Whites are always responsible for everything bad need only look to the nightmares that are Haiti, and the many African nations that are failed states. Colonialism is not to blame; their corruption and inability to govern are. In the victimhood Olympics, the one who suffers the most wins. Contrast this with traditional value of heroism, not complaining, bearing one's burdens, and realizing that the world is a miserable place in which everyone suffers. By claiming victimhood, you don't make anyone else's life better, you make life worse for everyone and you don't lighten your burden. "I don't grant that people have the right to dominate by dint of what they have suffered; you can't guess what people have gone through in their lives." Murray has made many insightful observations in this book. He concludes that the war on the West has its origins in the way the West has progressed. "Because one of the things that has made the West is its openness to ideas and influences. The history of gathering knowledge wherever it could be found. A history of collecting plants, ideas, languages, and styles. Not in order to subjugate or steal them but to learn from them. Nevertheless, there is now not a realm of life and culture so delicate or so sacrosanct that this era's omnipresent, omnirelevant ideology--asserting precisely the opposite of that tradition of openness--cannot sweep through it" (231). You can only win a war if you know you are in one. We are in one. Read the book. Open your eyes. Don't keep your mind so open your brains fall out. ...more |
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Apr 18, 2022
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Oct 17, 2022
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Hardcover
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0593192761
| 9780593192764
| 0593192761
| 4.25
| 1,245
| Jan 05, 2021
| Jan 05, 2021
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it was ok
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This is the literary genre I call Christian airplane reading. It's a quick read, Christianity light, catchy platitudes, amusing anecdotes, biblical re
This is the literary genre I call Christian airplane reading. It's a quick read, Christianity light, catchy platitudes, amusing anecdotes, biblical references, prosperity gospel...and very bad theology. If you like Joel Osteen, you'll like this. If you're faithful to the actual teachings of Jesus, you won't. A word about the theology: The prosperity gospel is based in Evangelical Christian faith and prayer with material and financial success. [For more, read https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/9... ] Did Jesus of Nazareth preach that God wants you to be rich? Never! Let's refer to the scriptures: Luke 16: 13-14: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” 14 The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. 15 He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight. Luke 18:22–25: 22“There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 23But when he heard this, he became sad; for he was very rich. 24Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (also in Matt 19:24). Jesus did not incarnate as a king, a Pharisee (middle class businessman), a Roman, or anything other than a tektōn, a builder. While it's often translated as carpenter, that is a narrow definition of the original Greek. __________________________ Compare Stephen Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" (be proactive, focus on goals/results, prioritize/work first then play, pursue win/win solutions, understand others, seek synergy and balance) with the six habits Batterson promotes to Win the Day. They read like a series of innocuous and somewhat insipid sermons with illustrative anecdotes: 1. Flip the script: If you change the story you tell about your life, you can change the way you interpret events in your past, and see God working within. Family history matters; we are born into our ancestors' stories. Interestingly, teens who know their family history have higher rate of wellbeing (see https://ncph.org/wp-content/uploads/2...). 2. Kiss the wave: Embrace the obstacles; they bring you closer to God since you wouldn't be able to encounter or surmount them without God. 3. Eat the frog: Mark Twain was said to advise that if you must eat a live frog, do so first thing in the morning so that the day's "hardest task is behind you." 4. Fly the kite: Small successes lead to bigger ones that you never imagined. 5. Cut the rope: Take calculated risks. 6. Wind the clock: Bury the past and "imagine unborn tomorrows." "Newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice." Make the most of every moment. 7. Seed the clouds: "Sow today what you want to see tomorrow"; "See the present from the vantage point of the future." "Identify the daily rituals that have the highest return on investment and the daily habits that are high leverage points and prioritize them." There are a few anecdotes that are mildly amusing. __________ Again, what in the bible suggests that Jesus of Nazareth wanted/wants us to be materially successful people in the public sphere? Jesus gained a reputation as a wonder worker, a lucrative and common enough profession, but distinguished himself by providing his services to the poor and weak free of charge. He was a sympathizer with nationalists opposing Roman occupation and protested the social, political and economic injustice. For contradicting the prevailing order, he was dispatched by crucifixion, a common means of public punishment of those who spoke out against Rome. Had Jesus wanted his followers to be middle class businessmen like the Pharisees or empowered occupiers like the Romans, he would have said so. The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12 and Luke 6:17-26) reveal the costly call to discipleship, focused squarely on the world to come, not the present. Jesus' followers "left everything" to follow him. That's the model. Does that sound like worldly success of the kind Batterson promotes? The concern is that this book can lead Christians astray from scriptural theology into a focus on worldly rather than spiritual affairs. If you are not Christian and want an inspirational self-help book, by all means, have at it, but there are better books to read. ...more |
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Oct 17, 2022
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1119237912
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| 1119237912
| 4.07
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| Jan 22, 2020
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did not like it
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This book is demeaning to Blacks, presuming them to be lacking in agency, victims who require that all institutional structures be changed in order fo
This book is demeaning to Blacks, presuming them to be lacking in agency, victims who require that all institutional structures be changed in order for them to reach the bar attained by impoverished Asian refugees with non-English speaking parents who have only an elementary school education. Somehow, many impoverished Asians manage to flourish without all that must change to accommodate Blacks and provide reparations: • "cultural representation in the board of trustees" • cultural representation in the curriculum (especially focusing on the ways they have been victimized by Whites) and inclusion of Black, Native American and Hispanic authors in every subject, regardless of whether they are the most cited authorities on the subject • teachers who look like them • specialized "high impact practices" • changes to the strategic plan on a macro level and syllabi on the micro level • denunciations of whiteness • a cadre of VERY HIGHLY PAID (Berkeley's Chancellor is given a $325000 a year in salary) Grand Inquisitors to staff the DIRE office, attend meetings, stir up trouble where there wasn't any, and hire other consultants to hold diversity trainings. (UC Berkeley spends $25M a year and pays 400 employees to advance ‘equity and inclusion’). None of the supposed impediments has affected Asians, a minority that has proven to be astonishingly successful. Perhaps they are not "minoritized" by whiteness. "To paraphrase Dr. King...'the real problem underlying racial inequality': whiteness" (117). Good heavens! When did Dr. King say anything similar? That has no resemblance to anything Dr. King ever stated. Centering ethnic origin cannot be defended. To group all blacks together as sharing characteristics is ignorant. The authors mandate disaggregating data on every possible metric only according to race and ethnicity (how are we to ask students that information?), but not in such a granular way. The obsession with the entirely arbitrary category of "Black," is baseless. Immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, or South America have little in common with each other, and far less with the fifth generation Southern Black college graduate (who somehow managed to flourish), the descendant of Boston Blacks free since the 18th century, or the great-grandson of a sharecropper from Mississippi. The authors and their organizations (e.g. USC's CUE et al.) demand the centering of Blacks by all instructors and administrators in higher education, in "admissions, participation in high impact practices, degree attainment in STEM, transfer from community colleges to highly selective four-year colleges, faculty hiring," (28) language, etc. In their ideology, racial inequalities exist only because of institutional practices and instructors' deficiencies, not group averages. We must "stop believing that the accepted norm should be from the dominant culture's viewpoint" (17). Past and current norms and standards of excellence have been "determined by whiteness" and must be summarily discarded. What could possibly go wrong with that? Blacks are 12.6% of the U.S. population. About one-third of all Black men and women have college degrees; that's 3.8% of the population on which we are to center all of our efforts. Preposterous. The authors earnestly believe that by making the instructors and universities the problem, they are reversing W.E.B. Du Bois' famous, "How does it feel to be a problem?", referring to Blacks. They aren't. The problem remains the proportional Black lack of educational attainment and the changes to every single action the university and its employees execute in order to accommodate them, in the view of these authors. This is truly an embarrassment of a book. It does not execute its stated intent (meeting people where they are); it's pure emotional ideology with no empirical foundation, preaching to the already converted to the new religion that is DIRE (Diversity, Inclusion, Race, Equity/Emotion), with no rational basis, no careful analysis, no consideration of any other viewpoints. Embarrassingly, it consistently quotes the opinions and favorite turns of phrase of one of the authors previously published in another source as though they were somehow authoritative. Dreadful in every way, this is not respectable academic writing, but merely racially charged ideology. The authors assert that we must see "racial equity as a project with three aims: 1. Correct the educational injustices perpetuated by policies and practices that resulted in a systematic marginalization of populations whose ties to the United States came about involuntarily through enslavement, colonization usurpation of territory, or genocide. 2. Elevate antiracism as an agenda that higher education must take on if we are ever to truly be the just and good society we imagine ourselves to be. 3. Make whiteness be seen as the problem that undermines higher education from serving as a societal model for racial justice" (101). This is just DIRE dogma with no supporting evidence. The language is so off-putting it needed a glossary. I needed my nighttime bite guard I was clenching my jaw so hard. Examples of the Woke vocabulary: 1. The term "minority," i.e. a group that is smaller in number than a larger group is never to be used. Rather, we must refer to "minoritized," a group subordinated in status to a more dominant group or its members. Still, "underserved" is better because it's "a call to serve such students." 2. The authors use the term Latinx, which the vast majority of those considered Hispanic reject, preferring to use national origin, like Guatemalan, Colombian-Panamanian, etc. First, Hispanic/Latino, etc. are nonsensical and amorphous terms. A German or Hungarian who emigrates to, say, Argentina or Chile, and then to the U.S. suddenly becomes Hispanic, entitled to all the myriad privileges that accords him or her. Second, Hispanic can include anyone of Spanish origin; why would someone of Spanish origin be treated any differently from someone from any other European country? Third, many actually consider Latinx to be a white supremacist term, since it departs from the Spanish term Latino due to considering it patriarchal in its grammar. 3. Even a term like "Inclusive excellence" is problematic "because it implies that there is a group who i) has the power to control access to excellence by deciding who is included, ii) has ownership of what defines excellence, and iii) requires that others must be invited to be part of this group in order to achieve excellence" (5). Instead, the AAC&U must use the term "expansive excellence," which will enable the redefinition of excellence. This is reminiscent of Gina Ann Garcia's assertions that Hispanic Serving Institutions should not be held to the normal standards of excellence, like graduation rates and faculty publications, but rather to revised standards, primarily how well they have transformed students into activists. This entire DIRE project essentially shifts dramatically the proper purpose of the university to activism from the pursuit of truth. 4. The word "equity" is at the center, naturally. "Equity prioritizes the creation of opportunities for minoritized students to have equal outcomes and participation in educational programs that can close the achievement gaps in student success and completion" (7), according to the AAC&U. "Equity is a means of corrective justice for the educational debt owed to the descendants of enslaved people and other minoritized populations willfully excluded from higher education" (20). "The goal of the 'equity as parity' standard is that all racial/ethnic groups achieve an outcome rate equal to that of the highest performing group...in educational outcomes (e.g. degree completion rate, retention rate, course success rate) and reflect the proportional participation of racially minoritized students in all levels of an institution (e.g. high-status special programs, high-demand majors, honors programs)" (55). 5. The authors assert that "the term achievement gap....places the onus of redressing educational disparities on the very students who experience inequities because it suggests that students are failing to 'achieve.' The term suggests that students are solely responsible for acting, and the language sends a message that practitioners do not have to engage in critical reflection on their practices. The term equity gap, on the other hand, evokes the notion that institutions have a responsibility to create equity for students" (73). Again, the authors believe Blacks lack agency to flourish without special treatment. The authors cite the work of Association of American Colleges and Universities so often the reader must wonder why they didn't simply refer the reader to the aacu.org website or its America's Unmet Promise (which shares an author, unsurprisingly), and skip this atrocious Little White Book. USC's Center for Urban Education uses the term "equity-mindedness to refer to the mode of thinking exhibited by practitioners who are willing to assess their own racialized assumptions, to acknowledge their lack of knowledge in the history of race and racism, to take responsibility for the success of historically underserved and minoritized student groups, and to critically assess racialization in their own practices as educators and/or administrators" (20). The authors repeat this many times, taking a page from Goebbels: People will believe a lie repeated enough times... Ignoring all the empirical evidence to the contrary, instructors must consider all students as having equal ability to learn and complete assignments and equal motivation to do the work. Any disparity must be attributed to instructors' biases and lack of pedagogical skill. The lack of academic preparation, study skills, etc., must be summarily dismissed. "Rather than asking the Latinx student why they were not doing the homework, Burke decided to get the homework started during class" (111). Even more incredible is that educational institutions are criticized for providing solutions: "From an equity minded perspective, questions such as these are rejected because the framing situates lower performance on Black, Latinx, and Native American students: Why are the grade-point averages of black students the lowest? Why do so many Latinx students fail college level math...The framing of these questions encourages 'solutions' that aim to fix minoritized students by providing them with add-on, compensatory solutions such as intrusive counseling and remediation" (48). "Why is it that my teaching practices create a successful experience for white students but not for racially minoritized students?" (109)."Racialized gaps are a catalyst to ask questions such as:...What causes these courses to underperform for black students?" (boldface mine) (49). Clearly, "minoritized students," perennial victims, lack agency and the entire enterprise of education must be changed to suit. Know what the easiest and fastest way to ensure equal outcomes is? Lower the standards. And that's what you'll do if you're truly committed to equal outcomes for students with lower preparation, academic ability, motivation, work ethic, commitment, etc., regardless of the ethnic group with which they identify. If we assign a "transition team" and personal mentor and tutor to each student (de rigueur in some universities and advocated in The Chronicle of Higher Education), the thinking is that they will be more likely to persist to completion. This begs the question of How much help is too much? At what point do we realize that we are enabling students and lowering standards related to self-efficacy, not merely academics. Many of us have had the experience of working in a place where we felt strongly we didn't belong, regardless of the ethnic composition. An organization, including a university, should not and will not change to accommodate us. It is the responsibility of the one who feels alienated to either find a way to relate and create a place for himself or herself --or find another place. Don't dare imagine that class matters more than race, since "minoritized students pay a cultural tax that is levied only on American minoritized students who are burdened with the legacies of educational apartheid" (31). Nonsense. Proof? None. The following thoughts are forbidden, even if they happen to be true: • "Students are underprepared. • Their culture does not value education. • ...They don't know how to be students • They don't know how to study for a test • They read the book, but they don't understand it. • They lack self-regulation skills. • They go in by high school and don't realize college is different. • They have no idea what it is to be a college student. • ...Their language skills are lacking • The don't know how to read or take notes." (47). If you haven't taught in a community college or non-selective institution, you may be misled. If you have, you know these are empirically true statements. "The American Council on Education's report found that 45% of all undergraduates identified as being a race or ethnicity other than White, compared with 29.6% in 1995-6" (80). Sure. A white complexioned, blond-haired, blue-eyed person like Cameron Diaz is likely to identify as "hispanic" or "other," if there is any justification at all to do so, since it is to his or her very great advantage. This is why there is a movement to create a NAME (North African Middle Eastern) group to further erode the "White" category. All of this ethnic slicing and dicing is nonsense. Why ethnicity, particularly when so many people are of mixed ancestry? Will we subject them to DNA testing? No. It's all subjective identification for advantage. Nevertheless, "Whiteness," as the term is used here, transcends actual complexion or ethnicity. It is whatever these ideologues say it is. Here's a university DIRE statement the authors still find fault with. See if you can find the problem: "College D is a community that includes the form and values voices of all people. As such we recognize the social barriers that have systematically marginalized and excluded people and communities based on race ethnicity gender sexual identity socioeconomic background, age, disability, national origin, and religion. We are committed to the equity of opportunities and strive to promote and advance diverse communities. We value and proactively seek genuine participation from these historically underrepresented in underserved groups and recognize them as an essential component of creating and welcoming a rich academic intellectual and cultural environment for everyone" (85). Did you catch the naughty word? It's "them," because it establishes the underserved as "other" (86). We must all strive to be at the forefront of DIRE as activists, for "[B]eing a first-generation equity practitioner is not stigmatizing and is not a barrier toward being tenured and promoted" (107). Well, they have that right. It's only the ones who question or oppose the DIRE ideology who experience those barriers, who are silenced, shunned, and/or even dismissed. Just ask the 591 professors who have been sanctioned for heresy against the DIRE orthodoxy. ...more |
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Sep 05, 2022
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Sep 05, 2022
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Hardcover
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0385349068
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| 3.77
| 74,844
| May 07, 2013
| May 07, 2013
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liked it
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My husband read me a bit every night before sleep. Gaffigan's real-life tales about having FIVE! children in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC and coming f
My husband read me a bit every night before sleep. Gaffigan's real-life tales about having FIVE! children in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC and coming from a large family and his wife coming from a large family are so different from my experience that they were more interesting than comical. It helps to be able to hear Gaffigan's voice in your mind's ear. Some were humorous, but this wasn't nearly so fun to read as Tom Papa's books. This is less observational comedy à la Seinfeld than real-life anecdotes. ...more |
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1524762938
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did not like it
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Couched in a book purporting to be about the process by which democracies turn into authoritarian regimes, this anti-Republican screed is replete with
Couched in a book purporting to be about the process by which democracies turn into authoritarian regimes, this anti-Republican screed is replete with dire warnings about Donald Trump becoming a dictator. It was published in 2018. The authors hyperbolically and incessantly compare Donald Trump with Alberto Fujimori, Juan Perón, Recep Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, and Hugo Chávez. What's particularly amusing is the prediction of the authors, Harvard professors, that a crisis during Trump's tenure would "directly dismantle democratic institutions" and "exploit this crisis fully--using it to attack political opponents and restrict freedoms Americans take for granted. In our view, this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today" (192). Oh, so very, very wrong. Ironically, it was the Democratic governors who imposed the greatest restrictions on freedom and suspension of the Bill of Rights during the COVID-19 crisis, and Trump and Republicans who continued to defend our freedoms. If you want to save time and get the core ideas of this book, just read this: https://dialogueinstitute.org/challen... What to look out for to evaluate the pending failure of a democracy: 1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) the democratic rules of the game 2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents 3. Toleration or encouragement of violence 4. Readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media (More on those later). It has a singular rhythm: five pages of anti-Trump diatribe and then one modulating sentence. It's as though the editor said to the authors (inasmuch as it's possible to tell any Harvard professor anything), "Hey, guys? You might consider walking that back a bit; it's not exactly true." For example, we read page after page about how dictators arrest, imprison, disappear, and murder journalists interspersed with paragraphs about Trump's arguments with the press, which by any objective measure really did persecute him relentlessly. After pages of implying Trump is verging on dictatorship, we read, "Although President Trump has waged a war of words against the media and other critics, those words have not (yet) led to action. No journalists have been arrested, and no media outlets have altered their coverage due to pressure from the government" (183). This is unprofessional, outrageous and inflammatory. Harvard professors can get away with anything, evidently. These authors would be unlikely to mention Ukraine's Zelinksy, who on June 20, 2022, eliminated all political opposition. The OPPL party's popularity surpassed Zelinsky's. Leaders were put under house arrest, assets seized and all dissenting Ukrainians are being rounded up and arrested by Ukraine Security Service. Yet the U.S. press adores him. Some animals are more equal than others... All of Trump's views, particularly relating to immigrants are "extremist" and Republicans are "white supremacist." Obama deported 1.8M; Trump deported 800,000, but Trump is demonized as anti-immigrant. The authors repeat the Democrats' Great Replacement Theory, that Whites will be a minority very soon, which they expect to greatly reduce the support for the supposedly all White and Christian Republicans. Biden said, “Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent — for the first time in 2017 we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolutely minority … That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.” “There’s nothing really [the Republicans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution,” said Univision Jorge Ramos. “The Republican majority has always been based upon whites and, in particular, white males … The bulwark of Republican electoral strength is disappearing,” said James Carville. The thesis is flawed. The Republican Party is not so homogeneous as some believe. Asians aren't aligning with any party. Many are immigrants. They want to be part of a Great America. They want to Make America Great Again. Further, a 2022 survey found that Black support for Democrats "shrunk dramatically, from 56% in November 2021 to 35% in March 2022 and increased their support for GOP candidates...from 12% to 27% from November to March." WSJ found that "Hispanic voters picked a Republican candidate over a Democrat by 9 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot." Critical Race Theory actually doesn't play as well with Blacks, hispanics, and Asians as it does with Leftist liberals. The authors' recommendation that Americans follow the Chilean path is hilarious in view of the riots there from 2019-2020 and Chile's recent election of an avowed communist in December, 2021. "Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright" (223). According to the Chilean model? The most interesting parts of this book are the very brief descriptions and occasional analysis of the factors that contributed to the decline and fall of democracies around the world. Some of their assessments are astonishingly naïve in the lack of consideration of how other countries, notably the U.S., actively aided and abetted the downfall of democracies in these countries. Are Levitsky and Ziblatt CIA plants? Three-quarters of the way through the book, the authors ascribe blame for the decline in democracy solely to the GOP: "Although it began with the radicalization of the Republican Party, the consequences of this polarization have been felt through the entire American political system" (167). Not social media, not social change, the GOP. Koch and Americans for Prosperity, but not Soros. I tutor AP U.S. History. The rabid, frothing at the mouth nature of politics in this and most other countries has been present since its inception. The assertion that this is a new phenomenon is beyond absurd. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: In 1787 Benjamin Franklin addressed the Constitutional Convention, stating, "…when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." It's no worse in 2022 than it was in previous centuries. When asked by citizens outside the hall what government they had created, Franklin famously replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." Democratic republics are founded upon the consent of the governed and dependent upon their informed participation for their survival. "Over the last quarter century, Democrats and Republicans have become much more than just two competing parties, sorted into liberal and conservative camps. Their voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even 'way of life' (167). Hamilton and Jefferson; same dynamic. Read any U.S. history book. The aberration was the postwar time of prosperity, not what we have now. Levitsky and Ziblatt tell us that in democracies, strong democratic norms, cultural, unwritten, "informal rules, though not found in the constitution or any laws, are widely known and respected. Foremost among these are 1. Mutual toleration, which means "as long as our rivals play by constitutional rules, we accept that they have and equal right to exist, compete for power, and govern." "If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat...we may decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them--and therein lies a justification for authoritarian measures"(102). Case in point would be the hyperbolic and irrational demonization of Trump as an existential threat by the Democratic and liberal media before he even took office, that continued as a daily onslaught past his term of office and ongoing. Their bloodlust will never be satiated. 2.Institutional forbearance, restraint, tolerance, "avoiding actions that...obviously violate" the spirit of the law (106). Beyond checks and balances, there is a need for Congress, the courts, and the POTUS to "routinely underuse" the power vested in their offices. "Presidential power has...swelled over the last century.... built up vast legal, administrative, budgetary, intelligence, and war-making capacities, transforming itself into what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. famously called the 'Imperial Presidency'" (127). The Constitution permits a great deal of executive action, thus "the importance of executive forbearance is hard to overstate" (128). Back to the four signs of a dying democracy: 1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) the democratic rules of the game 2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents 3. Toleration or encouragement of violence 4. Readiness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media Naturally, Levitsky and Ziblatt find that only the Republican party, particularly the administrations of Nixon and Trump fit all four characteristics, when the facts are that both parties are engaged in these practices. That's why this is so dangerous; it's bipartisan. That the authors only lodge accusations against GOP is blatant partisanship, and only contributes to the problem. Proof: 1. Democrats do not play by the "small d" "democratic rules of the game": Former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile acknowledged sending town hall topics to Hillary Clinton's campaign. What about DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz's leaked email to undercut Sanders? What about Tulsi Gabbard being excluded from the debate even though she had earned a delegate? It's like Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes. They make up rules as they play. 2. Just a few of the many Democratic Party assertions of a belief in the illegitimacy of Trump's presidency: The Clinton campaign insisted Trump was aided by the Russians. The headline in The Washington Post on Inauguration Day, 2017 read, "The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun." And they started organizing protests after the election and held marches the day after Inauguration Day, 2017. They arranged for CNN to be present to film Roger Stone being hauled out of his home at 5 AM and for 72 year old ex-Trump advisor Peter Navarro to be taken from the airport in shackles. None of that would have occurred in, say, 1995. And who can forget Clinton's demonization putting "Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.... Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites...tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.” Clinton then said some of these people were “irredeemable” and “not America.” 3. Just a few recent examples of Democrats inciting violence: 2018, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) "encouraged people to harass members of the Trump administration. 'If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gas station, you get out and create a crowd. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore.” Results: “White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was denied service at a Virginia restaurant. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and her husband Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader at the time, were verbally abused while having dinner in Kentucky. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled by a crowd at a Washington restaurant. And someone posted “Wanted” posters with the face of Stephen Miller in the Washington building where the Trump adviser lived. All this only a year after Republican Steve Scalise, then House majority whip, was shot by a Democratic activist at a charity softball game. 2021, Waters called on protestors of the George Floyd trial "to get more confrontational." March, 2020, Abortion rights rally, D.C. Senator Chuck Schumer stated, “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” That's no a veiled threat; it's a bald one. And it came to pass when a California man appeared outside Justice Kavanaugh's home, allegedly prepared to assassinate him. 2016, Creamer and Foval, "two Democratic political operatives with ties to Clinton's White House bid" planned to send violent plants into Trump rallies. 4. In 2019, every Democrat in the Senate supported a constitutional amendment intended to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 decision in which the Supreme Court lifted legal restrictions on what corporations and unions are allowed to say about politics at election time. Hillary Clinton has declared that she would only appoint judges who promise to overturn Citizens United and permit the censorship of political speech. Take a look at Colin Wright's famous cartoon here: https://twitter.com/swipewright/statu... The Left moved further left than the Right moved right. As Wright states, "I’m a lifelong Democrat. I turned 18 in 2003 and have never voted for a Republican. But over the past decade, and especially the past five years, I’ve watched my party distance itself from the values and principles I hold dear. Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt write that partisan "polarization has been so asymmetric, moving the Republican Party more sharply to the right than it has moved the Democrats to the left" (170). I don't buy that at all, even on the clearance rack. The Republicans have been quite stable in comparison with the Democrats' shift. And the fact is that Democrats are far less likely open to conversation and compromise with Republicans than vice versa. Let's look at some data: • The Pew Research Center found that over 70% of Democrats would not consider being in a committed relationship with someone who voted for Donald Trump, but less than 50% of Republicans would not consider a relationship with someone who voted for Clinton. (4/4/20) That is a huge difference. • The American Survey Center found that "Ending friendships over political disagreements occurs more among liberal and Democratic-leaning Americans. Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans are to report having ended a friendship over a political disagreement (20% vs. 10%). Political liberals are also far more likely than conservatives are to say they are no longer friends with someone due to political differences (28% vs. 10%, respectively). No group is more likely to end a friendship over politics than liberal women are; 33% say they stopped being friends with someone because of their politics." This is clearly not a conciliatory, open-minded group of people. The final chapter, "Saving Democracy," provides guidance regarding how Americans should proceed. They recommend reducing resentment and the partisan divide through "a social policy agenda" that reflects "the moral universalistic models found in Northern Europe," rather than "distributing benefits only to those who fall below an income threshold or otherwise qualify" (228). We must regain "egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom, and shared purpose....in an age of racial equality and unprecedented diversity. Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and democratic" (231). That's an understatement. If we follow the dictates of these two Harvard professors comfortably confined to their ivory towers, we are likely to resemble the outcomes of the Scandinavian polls, which in 2016 determined strong opposition to accepting more immigrants and/or refugees. "Sweden has gone from having one of the lowest to one of the highest levels of gun violence in Europe—worse than Italy or eastern Europe, due to the presence of "second-generation immigrants, many from Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco, and elsewhere in North Africa—[who] specialize in drug trafficking and the use of explosives....A recent study written by a senior Swedish migration official concludes that Norway and Denmark, both notoriously inhospitable to refugees, are 'increasingly seen as positive examples of how to deal with refugees and international migration.' In 2016, the country spent a stupefying $6 billion on refugees—more than 5% of its total budget.” In 2021, 44% of Norwegians stated that it should be more difficult to obtain asylum there. Finland is also becoming more polarized. And this month, June, 2022, the UK was prepared to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. It's far easier to govern a nation that is homogeneous, and the admission of critical mass from cultures that do not share democratic values is suicidal. This book has no lasting value and no redeeming feature I can discern. Ziblatt graduated from Berkeley and Pomona; that is a ka-runch granola-y academic formation. Levitsky is a Stanford and Berkeley grad and lives in Brookline, MA, which is just 3% Black. This explains much about their idealistic views on race, extreme Leftist partisanship and dire predictions about Trump. Ethically, they should write some sort of corrective admitting their errors, but a Harvard professor would never admit to being so very, very wrong. ...more |
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Let's start with a few tidbits: "And so if you know 2+2=4, one way you can express your knowing is by writing it. Another way you can express your kno Let's start with a few tidbits: "And so if you know 2+2=4, one way you can express your knowing is by writing it. Another way you can express your knowing is by discussing it. A third way is by creating a model that shows it. A fourth way is by illustrating it and a fifth way is by performing a play. But in too many schools, only one way is considered legitimate. So if you write it, you get an A and that's it. There might be 100 kids in the school who know 2+2=4, but if only two of those kids can write it, then only two of those kids will receive As. That is profoundly discriminatory" (ASCD). "There is no achievement gap: teachers are just measuring the wrong things by asking minorities to demonstrate competencies like the ability to add. Any time schools teach minority children skills required of productive members of society, they 'serve to indoctrinate minorities into the dominant culture so they can further serve the reproduction of their current roles in society through entering the workforce' the document underlying NY State's official education policy says" (120). Trillions of dollars have been spent to improve educational outcomes and so far, nothing has worked. Any educators' conference now focuses on social justice and DIRE (diversity, inclusion, race and equity) ideology (729 mentions at the AERA Conference), while reading and accountability receive 115 mentions (124). Even if you send your own children to charter or private schools (which aren't much better and are sometimes far worse, I can confidently affirm through over 20 years of experience and touring well over 100), "When they grow up, they will live among those people [who did attend public schools], vote with them, and--given the academic results of today's public schools--likely be forced to financially support many of them" (257). The author's expressed intent was to focus on the imperative of paying close attention to local politics and school board meetings. There is far more going on at the local level that will directly affect you. What to watch for: • Find out who is really behind what appear to be grassroots efforts but are really "astroturf" screens for established and well-organized political groups and organizations that deliberately seek to camouflage their support. • Follow the money and ask cui bono? Taxpayer money should not be used to lobby. What real estate developers will benefit from redistricting public schools? Who stands to benefit financially from consulting? Do not trust an institution on the basis of name recognition or prestige. The University of Southern California has outsized influence to truly change the purpose of education to activism, distorts data and issues pseudo-academic papers that become the basis for legislation and policy. • Consider whether the school is promoting as the purpose of education the free exchange of ideas to increase knowledge and understanding, the use of evidence for reasoned debate, and respect for viewpoint diversity or indoctrination in the DIRE (diversity, inclusion, race and equity) ideology hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind--even dismissing staff who don't "buy in." • Consider whether the school is communicating more about "the joy of reading, of learning, of independent thinking, of curiosity, of discovering math and science" (67) or the emotionally manipulative triggers of DIRE terms like the baseless concept of "implicit bias." Consider how terms like "unequal outcomes" are being used to manipulate. What is the rationale for centering race? Why is this ideology being promulgated and enforced with an iron fist? Are higher test scores the priority or equally low ones? The easiest and surest way to guarantee equal outcomes is to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. • Consider that different academic, financial, or other outcomes or representation between Blacks and White do not necessarily indicate racism, discrimination, or "culturally insensitive teaching practices." The American Time Use Survey indicates the hours of homework performed by each of the usual groupings: Asians: 2, White: <1, Hispanics a bit less, Blacks nearly 1/2 hour. Brookings found that they spent the time on leisure activities. Asians spend 4x as much time on their homework compared to other groups. Don't we want to teach the correlation between work and success? Many race hucksters justify their exorbitant fees by creating problems. Some even state that the emphasis on getting the correct answer, perfectionism, punctuality, etc. are all marks of white culture. Hence, authentic anti-racist practice will not use hip hop to teach mathematics, because that only "serve to indoctrinate minorities into the dominant culture" (170). Instead, it will teach hip hop for its cultural value to the exclusion of mathematics, an inherently racist field. • Find out if the school board enforces and supports or ignores the results of surveys of the population, and who is in control of the surveys and view them. (I worked for organizations that deliberately misrepresented the survey results). Boards of all kinds often function as personal fiefdoms and means of compensating for dissatisfactions of all kinds. Bullying of members is common. • Critically attend to what the numbers and statistics mean. Lies, damn lies and statistics. If the graduation rate has improved dramatically, what are the other possible explanations beyond those presented? In my district in Florida, teachers actually earn more for awarding more As and Bs; it sound incredible, but I checked it; it's a fact. It increases the graduation rate. Were students' evaluation procedures changed to less objective measures or an analog of Standards-Based Assessment, (in which what was an F is now a C+)? Was the standardized exit/entrance exam eliminated? In many, many districts across the USA, parents complain that their students earn As but do not pass the standardized assessment; some say their kids "is just bad at test taking." Nonsense. In every other country, in the interest of fairness, a single sitting at a standardized test determines students' future. Only in the USA is this perceived as unfair. Poor Asians outscore the wealthiest of other groups. • Critically examine the claims, methodology and conclusions of any study that is presented. Even peer-reviewed studies that are the basis of state and federal education policies have jaw-dropping errors in both methodology and analysis. • Understand that mergers and centralization of municipalities and suburbs makes larger areas easier to control (Los Angeles County, 1 vs. Pittsburgh, 130). • Question the petition for more money "to improve performance." Enormous expenditures of billions in places like D.C. and Baltimore have actually resulted in diminished academic performance. Not from Rosiak, but apropos and worthwhile: Keep in mind at all times the work of Dr. Edwin Friedman, who wrote that effective leadership will be prevented when organizations (even families), "allow the most dependent, most easily hurt members of any organization to effectively ‘set the agenda’…and promote an attitude of adaptation toward immaturity rather than one of responsibility, effectively shifting power to the recalcitrant, the complainers, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of an institution rather than the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the most creatively motivated. The invasive and destructive nature of these toxic forces is like a cancer or un-self-regulating pathogen, asserts Friedman, and as such, can only be dealt with by taking a stand, i.e. limiting “a toxic agent’s invasiveness” and not through “reasonableness, love, insight, role modeling,…and striving for consensus.” Alas, taking a stand is the least common way of dealing with such members in our schools, and when a leader does so, stakeholders, often including trustees, tend to reactively sabotage. It is easier to join with others who are similarly anxious to displace blame, seek quick fixes, gather more information (e.g. hire a consultant), escalate victimization and indulge in emotion rather than take responsibility. These “counterrevolutionary characteristics” reinforce the stagnation in our schools. Schools are on what Friedman describes as a treadmill, holding fast to the notion that all would be well…if we only cede territory to these invasive carcinogens and give them what they want. This is a grave error. Instead, stand up to them and say clearly, "NO." The enormous surprise in this book is the power and reach of the foundation/NGO-ocracy. If you haven't given much thought before to this particular subtype of kleptocracy, you will once you reach chapter 11, continuing through the rest of the book. In the 1950s(!), Congress set out "'to investigate tax-exempt foundations and comparable organizations,' noting that because foundations and their donors received massive tax breaks, the government was in effect subsidizing them. The peril of the Ford Foundation using American society as its plaything is that 'its errors can be huge errors, gigantic in impact," said Rene A. Wormser in 1958....'A more tight and monopolistic control of great wealth....unchecked by the people...influence our society very materially'" (180). They have guidebooks and use Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals to train people to take over school boards and exercise influence on local levels. "These rogue foundations are perhaps the most radical, powerful, and least understood force in American politics. And their aspirations go far beyond the outcome of the election" (169). This book desperately needed an index so one can look up any foundation and its [mis]deeds. It's not just Gates. It's Carnegie, Ford, Kellogg, Casey, Soros, Andrus/Surdna, MacArthur. It's the NEA and AFT. They strive to "hide their outsize power and manufacture the illusion of organic consensus around an issue where there was none" (190). They "pursue the only challenge left for people with endless ambition and billions of dollars" social engineering. The Ford Foundation came to see itself as the 'research and development arm of society'...with a fixation on race" that started with eugenics (179). Having been involved with many nonprofits, I affirm Rosiak's revelations and warn you about leaving your money in a trust or to a foundation. It is very unlikely to be used in the way that you stipulate. When I pointed out the unethical behavior, I was told I didn't understand how nonprofits work. I guess not. I have applied for over 1,000 jobs at this writing. I was shocked and dismayed (as well as deeply grateful) to read about so many of the schools and foundations to which I applied multiple times. Rosiak exposes them as fraudsters, adding to transcripts courses never taken, falsifying attendance and academic records, seating students in front of computers with multiple choice questions they just "keep clicking till they got it right" (20), and charging districts at inflated rates, all in the name of "dismantling inequitable systems that privilege whites." Evidently, I dodged many bullets. I defy anyone to read every single word of this book; it lends itself to skimming. This book is too long by at least one-third, far too detailed with too many examples, and desperately needed an index. It was heavily weighted toward the Greater Metropolitan D.C. area and NYC. There was absolutely nothing about rural issues in education. The last third of the book had very little to do with education and was about policy in general, particularly issues of development, like the attempt to create greater population density in the suburbs. I think this summary covers the major issues. Save yourself a read unless you want the gory and salacious geographically-specific details. ...more |
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I read this when it first came out, skimmed again due to a pointer from two other books, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win a
I read this when it first came out, skimmed again due to a pointer from two other books, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win and The War on the West. At least the author realizes the extraordinary hypocrisy of these companies' commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, while doing business with China and other countries that are extremely repressive and toxic to the environment and their citizens. They also endanger democracy by possessing too much power. The cancel culture within companies and organizations is rampant; we read about it every day. Ramaswamy suggests making political belief a protected class. This could make activist employees impossible to fire. Companies should consider the long-term risks of engaging in political issues that do not directly relate to the business. ...more |
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This was a steep learning curve. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know any of this. Our national security is completely lost, gifted and sold to the Ch
This was a steep learning curve. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know any of this. Our national security is completely lost, gifted and sold to the Chinese. This is the result of the John Lennon School of International Relations with no borders, globalism, no threats. Everyone gets along astride unicorns crossing rainbow bridges.... Until reality bites, like when the U.S. Reagan administration's promise not to go "one inch further east" than Germany was abrogated, the U.S. placed missiles ON, not near like Russia in Cuba, the Russian border, and the Russian bear was poked too hard. What's transpiring? Feinstein, Pelosi, McConnell, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Trudeau, the diplomatic corps, higher education, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, etc. have received illegal, undisclosed, and massive campaign contributions, forge commercial ties that strengthen the Chinese economy, military, and oppressive surveillance state, disadvantage U.S. economically but benefit them personally, and ignore major human rights violations of dissidents and ethnic minorities (like the concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs), Falun Gong, Hong Kong, and others. A striking double standard is present throughout. Businesspeople, politicos, higher ed, philanthropists, etc. hypocritically promote diversity, inclusion, race and equity at home, while turning a blind eye to Chinese horrors. Joe and Clara Tsai donated $10M to activist groups in the US "to advance social justice and economic mobility for Blacks, Indigenous people and people of color, founded a nonprofit focused on reducing the prison population, while remaining silent on China, its torture, its incarceration without trial, because that is "the system of governance" (338). President Xi: "Science and technology is a national weapon. We should seize the commanding heights of technological competition and future development" through "civilian-military fusion." All those techies like Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk, the folks at Google, YouTube, Cisco, Twitter, etc. are enthusiastic collaborators. Bill Gates said that the effort to censor the Internet would fail, but China quite successfully controls the Internet. The NSA wrote that authoritarian regimes like China (and increasingly, the USA) use A.I face recognition, biometrics, predictive analytics, and data fusion as instruments of surveillance, influence and political control" (145). Peter Thiel seems to be the lone voice sounding the alarm: "A.I. is a military technology." But "in the era of AI, if data is the new oil, then China is the new OPEC," China collects vast amounts of data not available in the USA. "More data beats a better algorithm." And the workforce is cheaper, "smart, hardworking" while "complacency and entitlement" prevail in the U.S. (166). Back to Peter Thiel at the Nixon Forum in 2021, who said, "There's something about the woke politics inside these companies, the way they think of themselves as not really American companies. And it's somehow very, very difficult to...have a sharp anti-China edge of any sort whatsoever" (177). "You know, I criticized Google a few years ago for refusing to work on its AI technology on Project Maven with the U.S. military, but working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers. And since everything in China is a civilian- military fusion, Google was effectively working with the Chinese military, not with the American military. And there was sort of this question, “Why Google was doing this?” And one of the things that I was sort of told by some of the insiders at Google was they figured they might as well give the technology out through the front door, because if they didn’t give it – it would get stolen anyway. The fawning comments of Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedgefund, regarding Wang Qishan, "the second most powerful man in the CCP" are jaw droppingly concerning: "a personal hero....Every time I speak with Wang, I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe" (203). Sounds like a sycophant or acolyte. He also wrote: "One of China's leaders who explained this concept to me told that the word 'country' consists of two characters, state and family, which influences how they view their role in looking after their state/family. One might say that the Chinese government is paternal.Breathtaking and revealing. Cue Tears for Fears and "Everybody wants to rule the world." What can be done is the subject of the ninth and final chapter: "Ban lobbying on behalf of Chinese military and intelligence linked companies, ban Chinese military and intelligence linked companies from appearing on American stock exchanges, and ban joint research by American universities, investors and corporations with Chinese military and intelligence projects." "Journalists need to openly ask questions about links to China and media companies need to insist on truth and transparency when it comes to their experts." "Wall Street firms need to consistently apply ESG standards to Chinese companies." "Use shareholder activism to hold corporate executives to account." Engagement has failed and must be replaced with reciprocity. U.S. newspapers cannot be distributed in China, so the CCP should not be allowed to own newspapers in the U.S. Same goes for Amazon/Alibaba, GE/Avic, etc., etc. Besides Peter Thiel, who is on the right side of this? Well, Trump, Schumer, Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mark Warner, Chris Coons, and Joe Manchin. Former CEO of Docusign Keith Krach. And the final word belongs to Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding" (362). The book is a revelation. There is too much detail for my taste, but those names will matter and be more meaningful to others. Yikes. The U.S.A. has been gifted to China wrapped up with a bow. ...more |
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One huge problem with this book: the typeface. How could the publisher allow this to happen? All fractions--MIGHTILY important in cookbooks-- are diff One huge problem with this book: the typeface. How could the publisher allow this to happen? All fractions--MIGHTILY important in cookbooks-- are difficult to read. 3/4 and 1/4 are nearly indistinguishable. I do not need reading glasses normally, but I found myself in need of a magnifying glass for the recipes. Isn't that the telos of a cookbook? I checked this book out of the public library for a recipe for bolani, which I missed from California. This recipe called for yeast and made for a very bready bolani, more like a calzone, which is not what I wanted. Other recipes for bolani online called for baking powder and baking soda as leavening or none at all. Many of the recipes I shall be tasting for the first time. Afghan restaurants tend to have rather limited menus as kebab houses. There is so much more culinarily to the region than most Americans will know. It's an adventure. Aside from the recipe issue, the history of the region and the Silk Road was excellent and personal histories were interesting to read. ...more |
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The primary reasons that menstruation has been a source of shame are: 1. Patriarchy, the establishment of male experience as normative and the foundati The primary reasons that menstruation has been a source of shame are: 1. Patriarchy, the establishment of male experience as normative and the foundation of power on that conceptual base, ignores the experience of women. This is the one mentioned in this book. That consideration of male experience as normative is also why sexual orientation is said to be fixed in the womb, when it is axiomatic in the field of women's sexuality that female sexuality is fluid and so is the practice of women deliberately choosing to orient toward other women as a way to escape patriarchy. That's not disseminated by the media precisely because it calls into question the prevailing narrative, which is controlled by gay males in the name of promoting their own agenda. 2. Women bled without being wounded or dying, and in the same rhythmic cycle as the moon--28 days, which was mysterious and powerful. Women created new beings and nourished them from their bodies. This immense power caused Venus Envy, resentment. Women thus became associated with the earth, disparaged, maligned, subjugated, while male energy was associated with the heavens, elevated as superior, of course. The desire to control the earth, to dominate Nature is intimately connected with the domination of women. 3. The envy/resentment of women, desire to control nature (biological sex) and association of women with submission and receptivity causes some mentally disordered men to want to live as women, colonize our spaces and claim our experience. The social victimization of women leads some women to want to live as men. In neither case can nature be effectively controlled. Biological sex cannot be changed. Transgenderism and menstrual taboos are both rooted in the perverse drive to control nature, rather than live in harmony with it, and men's desire to claim women's power I used to teach Women's Studies and Women's Spirituality. One woman I know has guided women to create menstrual blood paintings for decades. It's lovely to review the rituals of menarche, but in most households in the U.S., such rituals are not welcome. Why is there no blessing in traditions like Orthodox Judaism for menarche? Because most of the world's religions existing today were created by men for men. The marauding patriarchal hordes had to kill off the Mother Goddesses, the Giver of All and Taker of All, the One who gave birth to their god. The constantly denounced Asherah of the Hebrew scriptures was the Canaanite earth goddess.The sins we know are sins of ego, male sins, will-to-power-over; women's sins are the loss of self, diffuseness, lack of focus, too much acquiescence, which is what we see with the transgender issue. The men want to dominate our spaces and lay claim to womanhood and the women just open the door to them. In the end, it all comes down to Venus envy, doesn't it? None of this is in the book, which means it's incomplete, superficial, and insipid. There are so many better books out there on the cultural history of menstruation. This one is presumably an accompanying bookLET (small pages, lots of white space) to the documentary featuring Muruganathan, the "Pad Man" in India, an amazing entrepreneur who saw a problem: women's access to sanitary products to absorb menstrual flow. Why was it a man who changed this? Joel Barker wrote in 1990 that outsiders are the ones to change the paradigms because they are naive and don't know "what can't be done," and they couple "the power of lack of knowledge...with human creativity" and tinker. Muruganathan is a perfect example of that. My advice is to skip this entirely and find one better, maybe Flow or The Curse, a classic now in PDF online. OR a website like https://www.medicaldaily.com/menstrua... Period is inane, with a few anecdotes that made me giggle. At this point, I must interject: ONLY FEMALES MENSTRUATE. PERIOD. Got that? No need to call WOMEN "menstruators" in order not to alienate those psychiatrically afflicted with gender dysphoria. Let's stick with science. It is an empirical fact that only females menstruate. Hence, no gender neutral pronouns are required. I was enraged from page xix, when the author states that in cultures that see females and males as the two sexes, "female = less than--a prejudice that extends to trans and nonbinary people." No, Anita, honey. Humans are empirically sexually dimorphic, male and female. You either produce female gametes (eggs) or male gametes (sperm), never both. The force of will it required of me to proceed was monumental. Unlike Ketanji Brown Jackson, I can define "woman" as an adult human female, female being the sex that gives birth. There is no such thing as non-binary, for we all conform and reject gender norms to varying degrees and to claim "non-binary" merely establishes another binary. And there is no such thing as "trans." It doesn't exist. Male or female. Period. The incidence of intersex is .018% and they still produce male gametes or female gametes. I shall never ever accept, support or enable in any way males colonizing or claiming female experience --have you seen the YouTube of a girl helping her male friends to have a period? No, no, no, no. I shall never ever accept, support or enable girls seeking the impossibility of changing sex, taking testosterone, hacking off healthy tissue and organs, surgically fashioning phalluses from forearm skin (google it), or laying claim to a sex that is not theirs. I have written about this in many places, not least my review of Irreversible Damage. Menstruators are female. An astonishing number of applications for college admission among the 1000 I read this year proudly stated they convinced their school's administration to provide free period supplies. This, in affluent areas, where the nurse's office has undoubtedly been offering such supplies since the school opened in the 1950s. It's also shocking in view of their simultaneously professed commitment to the environment. The range of figures given regarding the number of pads and tampons is wild; some say 61 million, while Stanford researchers state 49.8 billion tampons and sanitary pads plus their packaging end up in landfills or sewer systems each year in the U.S. In any case, the economic cost [consumers US$26 billion globally in 2019 (Imarc, 2020)] and environmental cost of these products is high. Menstrual cups, which are sanitized and reused save 2,400 other menstrual products over a woman's lifetime, in contrast to other menstrual products. Women have been using various natural and reusable products for millennia. See the website cited above. There is no mention of the defunct Museum of Menstruation in this book. Does the author know how to do actual research? Doubtful. She just gathers anecdotes from the web. How embarrassing. I did appreciate the pointer to Thinx's video MENstruation. You can deconstruct that with Critical Gender Theory on your own. And that's this book in a nutshell. It's a playful romp with no substance for the brain. Cotton candy. Like We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, which is similar to this tripe. Eye roll. ...more |
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To quote the website of Cornell University's College of Human Ecology (formerly Home Economics), "Home Economics as an academic discipline was a prima
To quote the website of Cornell University's College of Human Ecology (formerly Home Economics), "Home Economics as an academic discipline was a primary force in advancing women scholastically and in the professions." There is no question that it's an important story that needs to be told, but for the reader who wanted an overview of the historical trajectory, rather than a 300-pager plus notes and index, just peruse Cornell's excellent interactive exhibition with 16 sections, extraordinary primary sources, visuals and even video. It's focused on Cornell, of course, which means you'd miss the few mentions in Dreilinger's book on the role of Black universities like Fisk, Tuskegee, and Howard. Both tell the story of Flemmie Pansy Kittrell, the first African American to earn a PhD in nutrition Cornell, at a time when only 52 African Americans had earned doctorates in any field. The role of the Seven Sisters colleges in educating women and producing visionaries and iconoclasts in the 1800s is in clear view, as are sex, race and class considerations. So is the author's indefensible presentist fallacy of judging historical figures by contemporary standards, like the exclusion of Blacks and Jews from the Lake Placid resort, not at all unusual through the 1960s, and the Black and White colleges operating in different spheres, rather than collaboratively. We are meant to cluck our tongues in disgust and repudiation that Booker T. and Margaret Murray Washington, a major figure in the development of domestic science, dined in Annie and Melvil Deweys' (of Dewey Decimal fame) home, rather than the club dining room. The blind spots we have today that will be judged by the future are legion. Ella Kellogg, wife of John Harvey Kellogg (of cereal fame) was another early leader. Ellen Swallow Richards, a Vassar alumna, went on to research at MIT to find ways of improving the home through science, and had extraordinary success, in part through Chautauqua marketing. Home economics was "linking to other social-change movements in the Progressive Era, pushing forward social work, pure-food and drug laws, and even temperance--home economists theorized that if men ate properly, they would feel no need for alcohol" (40). Thanks largely to her efforts collaborating with others, 900 elementary and high schools and 200 colleges and teacher-training schools taught home ec. Home economists sought recognition, credentials, implementation of their vision, their own labs, their own department. Cornell's agricultural college was convinced to provide instruction for farmers' wives and hired Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer to start what would become the most important College of Home Economics, now Human Ecology. Eleanor Roosevelt was a enormous advocate. Both world wars underscored the value of the field and the role of the efficient and nurturing home in providing stability to society. While the book mentions "practice babies," in Cornell's website section on "Practice apartments," for example, we read that students lived in "practice houses...to learn the scientific art of childrearing....Cornell secured infants through area orphanages and child welfare associations. Babies were nurtured by the students according to strict schedules and guidelines, and after a year, they were available for adoption. Prospective adoptive parents in this era desired Domecon [Domestic Economy] babies because they had been raised according to the most up-to-date scientific principles." We even see a photo of the first two little ones. What would today's IRBs say about that chapter in university history? I wonder if the descendants will demand reparations. "Was it empowering or repressive to include housework in a college course?" (14). Bryn Mawr's president stated, "There are not enough elements of intellectual growth in cooking or housekeeping to nourish a very serious or profound course of training for really intelligent women" (14), but thankfully, others saw the potential for applying scientific methods to the domestic sphere, drawing upon nutrition, chemistry, accounting, quality control, child rearing, social relationships, etc. Moreover, MIT, Cornell, land-grant and Black universities embraced the "moral, psychological, and deeply political implications" of helping all women, particularly Black women, Mexican-Americans, immigrants, and poor Whites to adopt the morality and ways of the middle class, become more efficient, serve healthier meals, and "lift up their communities." "If poor Black families lived in a respectably middle-class way, then whites would have to recognize their full citizenship. And even if that didn't happen, educated African Americans would have gained the knowledge, self-determination, and financial independence to choose their own path as bet they could in a deeply unjust world" (18)." Enter Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, of the New Mexico extension service. She and many others showed rural folks what consumer goods and newfangled technologies they needed to make their lives better. Even in 1935, 80% of farms were not electrified (103). The trendy Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management were applied to the home, and Lillian Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen fame) was an enthusiastic, visionary, and able evangelist for the effort. Her star rose quickly because she had a brood of children during the heyday of domestic science, with testing and engineering the best ways of cooking one thing or another, the most efficient ways of performing domestic tasks, and the proper techniques to raise children when, "Paradoxically, the field devoted to the home attracted a disproportionate share of women who bucked societal expectations by remaining single" (32). This paradox continued throughout the history of the field. These women then took their procedures abroad to various continents, establishing programs in home economics across the globe from Japan to Liberia, the latter thanks to Flemmie Kettrell. Crowdsourcing and the media even then were important influences, in the form of "Betty Crocker's Cooking Show of the Air" (1924), which drew upon women's experiences with different recipes. Betty's role was played by a local in each station; no one knew Betty didn't actually exist. Mail took on the same role that websites have today, for two-way communication. By the 1950s, the American Home Economics Association had adopted a new definition of home economics: "the field of knowledge and service primarily concerned with strengthening family life" (138), "improve happiness and citizenship by honing self-awareness and helping families function better," but the curricular reality was different, superficial and girly. In the late 1950s, people could take for-credit courses in home ec over TV. Significantly, the field morphed into business home economics and then ...fizzled out thanks to an image problem and a shift in attention to focusing on relationships, rather than science. They came to disparage "stitching and stirring" (219). Home economists (now food scientists) developed saved women time. "They also developed some useful products and processes, "created the clothes-tag icons" with care instructions (186), companies' hotlines like Butterball turkey, and so much more. Feminism sought to liberate women, too often by proposing that women be more like men, disparaging traditional sex roles, and diminishing the value of the domestic sphere. The task force in 1959 that sought to "anticipate and recognize change" for the next fifty years of home economics (200) was as effective as anything librarians (of which I am one) generated to stave off Google as the new information retrieval expert. If we women don't value what we do, we aren't going to convince anyone else of its worth either. Women and men who make the decisions about what is worthwhile are often precisely those who chose to hire "unskilled" labor to care for the home, while they occupy the public sphere. Complementarity of women's and men's roles is wisdom. It is not healthy to abrogate the rules that govern human behavior acquired over millennia of trial and error and reflection. To believe they no longer provide maps for behavior and meaning results in anomie, the sense of being unmoored, lacking purpose, is the greatest threat. Hence the rise in suicide, anxiety, depression, refusal to accept responsibility and adulthood. "'Time is the most valuable resource for most families today. Families use money to buy time. They gladly pay for partly processed food, for automatic washing machines, and for ready-to-wear clothes. We do not want to go backwards and teach our students to spend a lot of their time to save a little bit of money--maybe'" (220). Now, this is GrubHub and DoorDash, totally processed food, and disposable clothing "fast fashion." Dreilinger ends with recommendations to bring Home Ec back. People do want it back. It's relevant. What to do? 1. Change the name back to "home economics." Home is a better term than family, a term that many have negative associations with. 2. Make home economics mandatory. No, they're not learning it at home; teachers can teach it better; and both sexes need to learn these skills. 3. Diversify the profession. Adjust "the content of the field to emphasize science and technology" and to attract more men. 4. Embrace life skills as well as career education. 5. Advance the progressive, scientific, ecological view within home economics. "So we can change the world," as Ellen Swallow Richards believed. Home economics is "an interdisciplinary ecological field that explores the connections between our homes and the world with an eye to addressing the root causes of problems such as hunger, homelessness, isolation, and environmental devastation" (293); "the labor problems of Southeast Asian sweatshops and the urban gig economy; the beauty and significance of the quilts made by formerly enslaved African Americans; the electrical engineering behind e-textiles; ways to limit the pollution caused by fabric dyes and create nontoxic alternatives." Home economists should be the ones leading the charge "redesigning homes and clothes...find resources to lower their power bills," pairing "the American reflex of bootstrapping with structural solutions," and so much more. There are wonderful and intriguing anecdotes from women's herstory here. But a book on home economics that never mentions Martha Stewart who single-handedly elevated our appreciation for the art of the domestic? That is an obscene omission. Moreover, I never really got the sense that the author values the women who dedicate their lives to nurturing their families and creating a beautiful, clean and pleasant home with limited resources. I'm a believer and a proponent of home ec. To quote one of the foremothers, "I do believe that, with enlightened leadership, the profession could play a significant role in shaping what is probably going to be a changing world." YES! Where's the leadership? ...more |
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| Jan 07, 2019
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That a human being would imagine such cruelty and pornography is troubling enough. That a human being would write it down is more so. That a publisher
That a human being would imagine such cruelty and pornography is troubling enough. That a human being would write it down is more so. That a publisher would publish it to put it out into the world is inconceivable. And that's from someone who made it to page 41 and stopped. I was so troubled by the state of our civilization I couldn't sleep. This is why I rarely read novels. Houellebecq's earlier novel, Submission, was important and strangely soothing about a "worst-case" plausible future for an Islamicized Europe. I skipped over the raunch. That wasn't possible here. This was supposed to be "a novel about the decline of Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general;" it achieves that by leading the reader directly into the belly of the beast. The first 17 pages were already too much, but at page 40, I gave up. This is plain and simply pornography--"my partner was at the center of a classic gang bang...masturbating, fellating, and being penetrated by fifteen men, who were unhurriedly waiting their turn." The next sentence was worse. That did it. Close cover, return to public library immediately, shower. And this is what is published in the 21st century. This kind of debauchery and the 7 deadly sins (remember those? pride, greed, anger!, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth) are enthusiastically encouraged in the contemporary university and bleed out into the culture. The Virtues are actively opposed: chastity (universities have Sex Week and elevate those who are "pansexual," i.e. willing to fornicate with anyone or thing), temperance (alcohol and drugs abound), charity (critical thinking has devolved into Critical Theory, which ascribes racist, sexist, cis-heteronormative oppressive motives to all but the privileged groups), diligence (don't fail students; treat all students as though fragile and on the verge of suicide), patience (revolution and change NOW!), kindness (again, assume negative intent), and humility (promote your brand and do whatever it takes to get views and likes on social media). This decline of the level of culture and the revelry in depravity, indulgence, and iniquity are at the center of the culture war and what many countries are fighting to protect their cultures from. If this is modernity, take me back a century. ...more |
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0241407605
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Time to re-read Vonnegut's prescient "Harrison Bergeron," about what equity looks like, because that's what we are hurtling toward, and it can't come
Time to re-read Vonnegut's prescient "Harrison Bergeron," about what equity looks like, because that's what we are hurtling toward, and it can't come soon enough for Sandel. Sandel's basic point is that "helping people scramble up the ladder of success in a competitive meritocracy is a hollow political project that reflects an impoverished conception of citizenship and freedom" (120). "The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality" (122). Instead, the project Sandel promotes is the same one that has wrought misery wherever it was attempted: socialist equity, all people with the same outcomes. That is not "the common good." Despite "common good" appearing in the title, inexcusably, Sandel doesn't get around to defining the term. The closest he comes is on page 208, but even there, he skates around the issue; if that doesn't tell you that's not what this book is about, nothing will. Since the common good is a lifelong preoccupation of mine (I actually stated in the second grade that I didn't want to have children because parents favor their own children over the common good), I was still curious about what Sandel really thought constituted it. In an interview that appeared back in 3/25/20 in the NYT, Sandel stated: "The common good is about how we live together in community. It's about the ethical ideals we strive for together, the benefits and burdens we share, the sacrifices we make for one another. It's about the lessons we learn from one another about how to live a good and decent life. This may seem a far cry from what we see in politics these days. But the common good, like all ethical ideals, is contestable. It's always open to debate and disagreement."The debate and disagreement refer more to expressions of the common good, not what it is, and that is not the same thing. The decline of the notions of the common good, truth, virtue, and beauty is so far-reaching (and far gone) that in academic circles, it is often said that if one encounters someone who claims to know what the common good is, run! But we do know what it is: the common good is that which establishes conditions that contribute to social harmony and flourishing of the many. Socialism isn't that. Capitalism may not be either, but it's closer. We're in a liminal time between the status quo and that which is to come. Read this along with The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, or better yet, The New Yorker article about Harden's work. She states, in a nutshell, 1. Genetics is a matter of luck. 2. Genetics influences one's educational trajectories," and "The educated are rewarded not just with more money and more stable employment, but with better health and well-being" (194) and better behavioral choices that "shape life trajectories." 3. "Emphasizing the role of luck increases support for redistribution" of freedom, resources and welfare. In a survey in Norway, half the respondents stated that "inequalities that stem from factors outside of a person's control should be eliminated." People believe that unearned advantage is unfair and should be corrected. Ergo, we must reorganize society to compensate for luck or lack thereof.Nope. I don't buy that at all. Haiti is one poorest countries in the world and it's not far off shore and no international agency has been able to make any lasting positive impact on it. Sandel focuses on education far too much; education cannot be an equalizer. The only recent education book that got it right was Fredrik deBoer's The Cult of Smart. We simply cannot ignore the empirical facts that cognitive ability is a heritable trait like height and eye color, that millions of children are exposed in utero to drugs or toxins like lead, experience abuse, neglect and malnutrition, and are born severely premature with cognitive disabilities. Sometimes, it's a win for an 17 year-old to be able to read a third grade text. It's time to be realistic and help each student to achieve his or her personal best, which will vary enormously among individuals. Do you know why people with bachelor's degrees are said to earn more over a lifetime? Those stats don't isolate other variables like family's socioeconomic quintile, cognitive ability, motivation, etc. Compare that with a skilled tradesperson who never went to college. They're in demand and can make far, far more than an Anthropology major from Yale. By the way, know how much a Prof. of Neuroscience makes at the area university? $59,000/year. The people who drive inequality are likely to be like you, reader, the ones who don't take drugs, esp. while pregnant, neglect or abuse their child, who read to their child, discuss big ideas, check homework, married before having kids, stay married, have a steady household income, involve their kids in sports or music lessons. That is the empirical reality. If Sandel had stayed in his lane, this might have been an okay book, but he didn't; he strayed into mine, devoting far too much space to college admissions, which he gets wrong. As a college counselor since 1998, after being an instructor in five different universities, I have helped students from all points along the socioeconomic spectrum attend university. Evidently, when you teach political philosophy at Harvard, your publisher believes you are entitled to cherry pick your facts. He has so very many things wrong, both details and important broad assertions, I don't know where to begin and I don't feel like spending hours on corrections and the studies that prove him wrong. What is most worrisome is that those who read only this book and not the actual studies that attest to the opposite or provide essential nuance to what he writes, they will not have the correct empirical evidence. The SAT, which Sandel doesn't know has not been an acronym for a scholastic aptitude test or anything else for 24 years, does not strictly correlate with income; impoverished Asians achieve higher scores than the highest socioeconomic quintiles of other ethnic groups, yet they are not proportionately granted admission at universities. Asians are An Inconvenient Minority who (see my review of the eponymous book) demonstrate that our society is not a meritocracy. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if every one of my doctors or attorneys all had ancestors from the same village in rural China if their work were superior to everyone else's. I'm not a member of the new DIRE (diversity, inclusion, race, equity) religion that demands orthodox adherence to its dogma and cancels, silences, and fires heretics, and would surely burn them at the stake if it were possible. I will paint a picture of what the vaunted goal of equity looks like in the university: Jack, whose parents were refugees from China who never completed primary school, submits a perfect assignment at the next class meeting. He earns an A. Joe, whose grandparents all emigrated from Germany to Argentina and is therefore labeled with the nonsensical "Hispanic" in the USA, struggles, is required to go to Learning Support Services, is provided with significant assistance, then is directed to the Writing or Math or IT Center, where he receives more support and a tutor, hands in the assignment, receives critique, returns to learning support, etc. cycle repeats. He may give up and pay an online assignment mill guaranteeing an A or B the going rate of $7/page with a 2 week turnaround or $12/page for 24 hours. (Google it if you don't believe me). In either case, several weeks later, he turns in the assignment and earns an A. Those GPAs will look the same to a grad school or employer, but Joe will be extolled for his grit and perseverance. After all, he actually went to Learning Support Services as required! This is precisely what universities now want to happen, so it does. And, as a "Hispanic," Joe is hired as diversity candidate by a tech company. Jack doesn't qualify for diversity initiatives in tech due to a surfeit of Asians. And this is why Asians are indeed an inconvenient minority. More problems with Sandel's analysis: People who graduate from the most highly selective universities don't have better health, more happiness or more meaningful lives worth living. Isn't that the highest good? Yes, "we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make" (212). My talented, idealistic students who enter these ivy-covered institutions have high aspirations to make a positive difference in the world, but 30%(!!) are redirected into money making consultancies. Ergo, those institutions are actually guiding students away from working toward the common good. Those who do manage to resist those forces often earn less than a community college graduate with a degree in engineering, correcting for family's socioeconomic quintile. The very fact that an LGBTQ Studies major (yes, such a major exists) earns less than an engineer is an example of inequality due to market forces that are always nefarious, we are meant to believe. In my presentation to NACAC's Guiding the Way to Inclusion Conference, I pointed out that students who want their degree to help them to jump socioeconomic quintiles should be considering more lucrative majors, like accounting, nursing, engineering, etc. That didn't go over well, but personal choice accounts for a great deal of inequality in earnings. The vast majority of students are not appropriate candidates for the most highly selective universities and such institutions should be able to determine their own admissions criteria. As it is, the average college graduation rate is 60%. On the other hand, thousands of students now earn an associate's degree along with their high school diploma. In many areas of the country, students can then go on to finish a bachelor's degree at the community college at no financial cost to them. I read admissions essays for a private university. Some kids start their own lucrative businesses before the age of 17, even though their parents never graduated from primary school, are immigrants and don't speak English. Some kids work over 40 hours a week during high school and still manage to earn good grades. Some kids spend all their time watching TV or playing video games and fail. The current global push for entrepreneurship education K-16 is an excellent way to blame individuals for their lack of success. After all, Jeff Bezos had a rough start in life, but generated a great idea and now he's a billionaire. All you need is a good idea and BLAMMO! you, too, can be a gazillionaire. What's behind Bezos's success? Vision, intelligence, motivation, hard work, timing, and luck. Luck is the most underrated. Regarding timing, keep in mind that the characteristics a society values are astonishingly dynamic and the conditions were not present just a few decades ago to enable the development and implementation of Bezos's vision. Here's the thing. Anyone can take a leap off the meritocratic treadmill. Readjust your values. The scriptures of the great religious traditions teach that if you want to live a life of meaning and purpose, it will be a challenge, but not insurmountable to also make a lot of money. Can you serve God and Mammon? You can accumulate wealth and use it to serve others, but the habit of accumulating makes it difficult to know what is "enough." In any case, the desire and effort to make all people equal when they are not equal in terms of inherited cognitive, athletic, creative, and other abilities, motivation, and goals is a pernicious idea that should just be stamped out like the DIRE fire that's spreading through the world. ...more |
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it was ok
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This is a case of an admissions officer dangerously generalizing from very specific experience at one college that is not representative of the landsc
This is a case of an admissions officer dangerously generalizing from very specific experience at one college that is not representative of the landscape, especially the rapid social changes occasioned by Diversity, Inclusion, Race, and Equity concerns. Don't bother with this book unless Dartmouth is your top choice. Dartmouth, where there are no leaves on the trees from October through the second week of May, where snow can be so deep that it rises above the first floor windows, where it's pitch-black dark before 5 PM November through January. Dartmouth, one of 38 colleges in the U.S. that enrolls more students from the top 1% than from the entire bottom 60%. Hey, if that's your heart's desire (and only if), it's worth a read. Everyone else should make a beeline for what is simply the best, most informative, comprehensive and correct book on college admission out there, co-authored by a high school counselor and the Georgia Tech Director of Admissions: Truth about College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting in and Staying Together . I do not know the authors personally and I do no derive any personal benefit whatsoever from recommending their book. Jeff Selingo's Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions was better than Valedictorians, and that was a 3-star review. Valedictorians could have been cut to perhaps 30 pages if the far too numerous anecdotal conversations with bragging and clueless parents were eliminated. The main takeaways: 1. Use the Additional Information section on the Common App judiciously. It can reveal qualities, events, and achievements that would be otherwise unreported. 2. Details that reveal character matter throughout the application. I read 1000 applications this cycle. The biggest surprise was how many high schools do not provide a school profile, which should give evidence of the grading scale and distribution, the AP/IB/GCSE/AICE, etc. course offerings and exams taken with median scores (I like to see mode...) on those exams as well as SAT/ACT, graduation requirements and policies like students may not take more than 3 AP courses in one school year, % students attending 2- and 4-year institutions and what those were, and some other information. Inquire as to whether your school does and obtain a copy. CAUTION: Some of the advice in Valedictorians is just wrong. An athlete can write an excellent essay about his/her sport. I have read many, so "Do not write an essay about one's sport", when that sport is the center of a young person's life and has been for his/her entire lifespan is very bad advice indeed. Telling students to follow their interests is doing them a grave disservice. A nursing or engineering major that has not taken the requisite science or math courses will most definitely be at a disadvantage, even disqualified in the admissions process . They can study underwater basketweaving at some other point in their lives. Further, her advice is quite specific to small, élite private colleges and not relevant to larger universities, especially public one. I'm grateful she spent only 8 pages on the college essay. We read them so quickly that they are far less significant than many schools and the gazillion dollar college essay industry seem to believe. I lobbied NACAC to make a National College Essay Writing Day, in which all students across the USA write their college essay in a proctored environment at the same time with different prompts each year and time zone, and the result sent, unscored to prospective universities. This needs to be done. Otherwise, Advisor Annie and Unscrupulous Uncle Oscar are writing those essays, for anywhere from $7 to thousands. I help students, from the least resourced to billionaires, with their essays and know how much aid I provide, from choosing an appropriate topic, to outlining it, to suggesting changes to structure and phrasing. For universities that accept them, the teacher recommendation matters more than families know. It really can make or break some applications. I put many students in the ADMIT pile on the basis of the teacher's rec. Families have no control over those, however. Some teachers can capture a moment in the classroom that distills the student beautifully; others can't or don't. Counselors and teachers in many schools are so overburdened (or there is so much staff turnover) they don't write letters. That can adversely impact students in comparison with smaller or better resourced schools. There are far better books on university admissions. Sabky enjoys writing and telling stories. The reader is likely to want the information promised by the title, which is in short supply and Darmouth-specific. That information is provided far more competently by The Truth about College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting in and Staying Together, by Brennan E Barnard, Rick Clark. ...more |
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1250240395
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| May 12, 2020
| May 12, 2020
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it was amazing
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What a great book. Each night before sleeping, hubby read one story aloud to me from this book just as he had from Tom Papa's previous book. Almost ev
What a great book. Each night before sleeping, hubby read one story aloud to me from this book just as he had from Tom Papa's previous book. Almost every story was funny, but those that weren't were poignant and memorable. This is a family book: no violence, no foul language, no sex, just lovely and loving observations about family and how to live a good life. We are mourning the end of it and hope he writes another soon.
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it was ok
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This is a 263 page syllogism. The knowledge gap, some students' possession of more general knowledge than others, is at fault for the achievement gap,
This is a 263 page syllogism. The knowledge gap, some students' possession of more general knowledge than others, is at fault for the achievement gap, opportunity gap, test-score gap, etc. because some students have more knowledge, i.e. are smarter, than others. Another journalist writing a much too long book about education and how to fix it. What do we want? "[A] system that equips all students to lead productive and fulfilling lives and carry out their responsibilities as members of a democratic society" (263). That's a low enough and general bar. How to get there? Use empirical evidence to determine what works and implement it and "give students access to knowledge during elementary school" (263). Natalie Wexler has clearly made a valiant effort and cares. Most books on education are like the blind men and the elephant. It's the tail or the ears or the trunk or whatever one has at hand that's the problem. This is no different. In his final book How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation, avowed socialist [whom she calls a "political reactionary"(!!)] E.D. Hirsch much more adeptly, convincingly and concisely deals with this very same topic, without all the dull anecdotes. And he's the one who founded the Core Knowledge program that "probably does the best job of giving [students] a sense of history" (248), so why not just read his book? It's preferable to this journalistic foray into education stating the obvious. Could there be any more self-evident assertion? In my house as a child, geo-politics, ethics, and ideas were discussed daily at the breakfast and dinner table; the TV was for watching documentaries; and everyone read books, the newspaper, and National Geographic. Bs were not acceptable grades. Another kid sits in front of the TV or video game console while he eats Cheese Doodles and Hot Pockets. His single parent doesn't know or care to access the grading portal. It's not difficult to determine who is likely to have the better academic outcome. Education writers tend to center on the injustice of the Matthew effect theory in education, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer [those who begin with advantage accumulate more advantage over time and those who begin with disadvantage become more disadvantaged over time-Science Direct]. The fact is that whatever you may try to ensure equal outcomes is not going to work, not pre-K, not phonics, not grit, not Common Core. Gates, Zuckerberg, and other billionaires won't fix it. Lemov, Calkins, Moskowitz, Coleman, KIPP, Bank Street, Harvard, and Columbia Teachers College won't fix it. Lowering the educational bar certainly will not. The only recent education book that got it right was Fredrik deBoer's The Cult of Smart. We simply cannot ignore the empirical facts that cognitive ability is a heritable trait like height and eye color, that millions of children are exposed in utero to drugs or toxins like lead, experience abuse, neglect and malnutrition, and are born severely premature with cognitive disabilities. Sometimes, it's a win for an 17 year-old to be able to read a third grade text. It's time to be realistic and help each student to achieve his or her personal best, which will vary enormously among individuals. Who drives unequal outcomes? **YOU DO** if you don't take drugs, esp. while pregnant, neglect or abuse your child, if you read to your child, discuss big ideas, check homework, married before having kids, stay married, have a steady household income, involve your kids in sports or music lessons. That is the empirical reality. I've wearied of this nonsense. There are so many things that should work to improve students' learning, theoretically, but just don't. You might be persuaded that students who write about or create in-depth projects about what they are learning will retain the information better, but it often doesn't work. You might be convinced that better teacher preparation will result in more achievement, but that doesn't work either (although it must be said that the folks who go into teaching are too often the bottom of the academic barrel--50th percentile on the SAT). The anecdotes are just too numerous in Part 1, which led me to resort to skimming. Part 2: "How we got here: the history behind the content-free curriculum," is better, but here again, Hirsch's and deBoer's books are more concise and cover the same territory of Rousseau, Dewey, and 1960s progressive education leading to a romanticized idea that young people should be freed to learn only what they want to learn: Princesses and dinosaurs for all! That is not very different from Critical Race Theory and postmodernism in general, in which it is the power dynamic that is problematic; [White cis-heteronormative] adults exercising power over young people [increasingly "of color" BIPOC] in determining what they learn. Wexler alludes to the negative perception of authority obliquely several times. The refusal to be a mature grownup drawing upon and implementing empirically effective pedagogy results in high school graduates who can't locate the United States on a map or globe, can't tell you the difference between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, or what photosynthesis is, but that's what we have now. Seriously. "Perhaps the most powerful belief teachers absorb during their training is that education should be a natural, pleasurable process and that learning or (heaven forfend) memorizing is inherently boring and soul-destroying. And if teachers directly impart information, progressive and constructivist educators argue, they will produce automatons who can regurgitate disconnected facts but are unable to think critically about them" (142). Instilling those facts however you can is crucial. When I was the founding head of a very diverse high school, I was invested in raising the social capital and background knowledge of the more disadvantaged students. The teachers didn't like this; they wanted to have fun and read contemporary literature. I wanted them to teach Hamlet and they couldn't understand why. "Some progressives are loath to acknowledge...that students from less-educated families have different needs or less knowledge of the world than other students, fearing they'll be labeled racist or reactionary. But ignoring or denying that fact puts them in the position of ascribing the undeniable gab in test scores--and in educational achievement generally--simply to 'poverty,' as though it were poverty itself that prevents poor kids from achieving at the levels of their wealthier peers" (146). Writers' workshops should teach content and skills so that students develop the ability to "write about material beyond their own experience," but "their own experience" is centered by the DIRE diversity folks, to the exclusion of general shared knowledge. This is nothing new. Almost 30 years ago, in 1994, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council published standards very much in keeping with the current DIRE agenda. Even then, we were meant to focus students' attention squarely on the sins and oppressiveness of the U.S.A., never on its positive contributions to human flourishing. It begs the question Why? In those standards, George Washington is never described as our first president. The Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women, McCarthyism and the Ku Klux Klan warrant mention, but not the first gathering of the U.S. Congress. Harriet Tubman, the heroic conductor of the underground railroad is mentioned 6 times, but Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is mentioned once and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is never mentioned. Presumably because they were White males, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and the Wright brothers are all omitted. 30 years later, we continue to present the nation's history in the most negative light imaginable, rather than striving for a balanced view and instilling the knowledge we have deemed significant for over a century. Why the shift? To what end? Cui bono? I don't know. The purpose of education has shifted to social activism. The over 500,000 students in California public schools and the Cal State University system are now required to take an Ethnic Studies course, the characteristics of which are the following components: "affirmation of their cultural identity [not American, of course, but their "identity" group], external attribution for difficulties [!], forewarning about stereotypes, etc." This is Critical Theory at work. It is divisive and un-American. We are Americans all, not tribes. E Pluribus UNUM. In his book, E.D. Hirsch's point is that "The results [of this recent educational philosophy] have been devastating: It's not simply a matter of ignorance...[but] also the loss of a shared knowledge base across the nation that would otherwise enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions at the local and national level" (5). Ergo, we must return to knowledge-centered schools, in which the specific content, not merely skills or nebulous standards, to be covered is explicitly stated and the same throughout the nation. The best part of the book for teachers is really Part 3: "How we can change: Creating and delivering a content-focused curriculum." Here we read about how to teach writing effectively. We also read about the absurdity of the discussion-based classroom, which is "not only less rigorous than writing, it's often dominated by the same few kids" (223). Take that, Harkness; we see you. And the wrong way to do project-based learning: "Similarly, the details--and fun--of creating a project can easily obscure the learning objectives....if students bake biscuits as part of a lesson on what slaves ate on the Underground Railroad, they're likely to remember more about baking biscuits than about the Underground Railroad" (223). Remember how your high school English teacher taught you never to introduce new material in the conclusion? On the very last page, she mentions other interventions that each appeared only on one page in the body of the text: "improving teacher training, ensuring that students living in poverty get the mental health and support services they need, and engaging families in their children's learning" (263). Bad form, and the first and third interventions do not hold up to empirical scrutiny for student success. Improving mental health is a community issue in most places. Support services abound. Again, let's look at what we are working with here and be realistic. In the end, Natalie Wexler confesses, "I have yet to see an American school that consistently combines a focus on content with an instructional method that fully exploits the potential of writing to build knowledge and critical thinking abilities for each child" (260). And you won't. That's my point. You can highlight curricula and programs that work here and there, but you're not going to find a panacea. Read DeBoer or Hirsch and skip this one. ...more |
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| Oct 26, 2021
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McWorter's premise is that Third Wave antiracists and Diversity, Inclusion, Race and Equity adherents spend all their time "smoking out" and decrying
McWorter's premise is that Third Wave antiracists and Diversity, Inclusion, Race and Equity adherents spend all their time "smoking out" and decrying "remnant racist bias," "rather than on seeking and measuring the results of efforts to make black people's lives better" (49), which they denounce as solutionism. They savage those "championing common sense, reason, and treating people as genuine equals, while being told that doing so is inappropriate when black people are involved" (137). Their insane inversions are disempowering, like "cries of weakness are a form of strength, that "it is a form of heroism to embrace the slogan 'Yes, we can't'," that "the most interesting thing about you is that the ruling class doesn't like you enough, or "that to insist that black people can achieve under less than perfect conditions is ignorant slander" (148), and "giving black thought a pass" even when it defies logic. All of this clearly sets blacks back and infantilizes them. McWorter is really gifted at imagery and his language is fun to read and drives the point home effectively. Like many Black scholars, McWorter distinguishes among the waves in the anti-racism movement. In stark contrast to First Wave (segregation is barbarism; "the concrete political activism of Martin Luther King") and Second Wave (Blacks and Whites are equal), the Third Wave strives to re-divide people into racial classes. Read Cynical Theories! In postmodern Critical Race/Gender/Whatever Theory "Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized" (11). "Critical race theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses--and that if you are not Caucasian [I'd add cis-hetero-normative-male] in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains" (63). "Society is changing not out of consensus, but out of fear" (15) of being cancelled, silenced, ostracized, fired. That could be preparation for resentment, a backlash and a very divided, unhealthy society. Why become one of the Elect? It is easy and provides pleasure and relief, makes a nobody into a somebody, and fills the vacuum left by the shift from religion to secularism. The Elect, the chosen, the "bearers of wisdom," are fundamentalists who "espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists, and to pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism and privately almost hope it doesn't because it would deprive you of a sense of purpose" (22). McWorter doesn't mention the quote, but in this book, he certainly centers Booker T. Washington's statement over a century ago, back in 1911, "There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.” McWorter does "not mean [the antiracism] ideology is 'like' a religion...I mean that it actually is a religion" (23). And, "To recognize something as a religion is to subject it to certain restraints" (175). A former sociologist of religion, I can't professionally agree with his layman's conception of religion, but it just doesn't matter; I'm on board with his premise (which many others have also shared), but I expand it to include woke activism of every stripe (environmentalism, LGB, transgenderism, feminism, etc.). It is a religion in the Abrahamic tradition that brooks no heretics, has an Elect, clergy, and sacred texts. Its DIRE KenDiAngelonian dogma includes "identity" ("how a non-white processes their not being white and their relationship to white people's oppression" (112), "unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity," and original sin (slavery, e.g.), the absurd and indefensible assertion that the existence of slavery has been denied and hidden, and that historical figures like the Founding Fathers who weren't woke on race must be canceled. It is evangelical, apocalyptic, supplants other religions, and cannot be reasoned with, since reason, logic, and empirical facts are tools of the oppressors, while subjective "lived experience" and emotion take precedence. In successive chapters, McWorter reveals the marks of "The New Religion," "What Attracts People to This Religion," "What's Wrong with It Being a Religion," and "How Do We Work Around Them?" Great quote from Freud, "If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence" (70). Language and imagery in this religion are paramount sources of power, disempowerment, and prosecution. We are meant to understand that the history of Black contributions [and women's, gays, Hispanics, transgendered, left-handed, disabled, etc.] have all been kept from us. "Denied, lost, disregarded--all couched in the artful use of the perfect tense: These things have been denied, not were denied. The perfect tense implies that the past reaches into the present....allowing this writer to imply that what has happened eons ago is still something that is rather than was" (43). When the typical high school history curriculum spends no more than a week or two at most on the Civil War, when, exactly, would often-named events like the burning of Black Wall Street in Oklahoma or the Stonewall riot fit in and why? In this DIRE religion, Eden was Africa and 1619 the date of the Fall, the introduction of chattel slavery in the United States; White people are demonic; and there can be no real progress, because the Elect would lose their sense of purpose and it will never, ever, be enough. The trillions of dollars in transfer payments in the war on poverty? Not enough. Half-Black POTUS? Not enough. Racial preferences in college admissions and hiring? Not enough. It will never, ever be enough. This book is worth reading for his perspective, though I definitely do not agree with much of what he writes. Take a look at his three-part platform in chapter 5 "Beyond 'Dismantling Structures': Saving Black America for Real": 1. End the war on drugs. He tells us that Black men are primarily incarcerated due to drugs. Nope. Not true. Read Thomas Abt's Bleeding Out (2019) and Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005). Sowell's view, that "black criminal violence was the product of the southern-male honor culture that, among black men of lower socioeconomic status, manifested as a violent response to petty insults, sexual rivalries, etc. Since African Americans interacted socially with other persons of color much more than with whites, the victims of such honor-culture assaults were overwhelmingly black. This violence continued when African Americans migrated to the North. Indeed, it escalated in the northern cities, where there was greater freedom and less oppression." This is sadly evident in my 30% Black community. Nope, not drugs. Honor culture, the inability to let a "diss" go. 2. Teach reading properly. That is, through phonics. Good start, but the fact is that "Black youth watch far and away the most television: almost 3.5 hours per day, or 1.25 hours more than young whites. Almost 80% of black youth say they "usually" eat meals in front of a TV....Racism may have turned the TV set on. Anti-racism won’t turn the TV set off." (Atlantic 6/2014). Then there's the fact that public schools have been engines of equal opportunity for well over a century, teaching children from every county the same way, in English, who flourished, like my parents. Who drives unequal outcomes? **YOU DO** if you don't take drugs, esp. while pregnant, don't neglect or abuse your child, if you read to your child, check homework, if you married before having kids, stay married, have a steady household income, involve your kids in sports or music lessons. That is the empirical reality. Once again, the research is crystal clear regarding how to get out of poverty: 1. Finish high school. 2. Get a full-time job. 3. Wait until age 21 to get married and have children. Systemic racism? Nope. Choices. 60% Black families who follow this sequence have incomes 300% over the poverty level for their family size. 3. Get past the idea that everybody must go to college. Bravo. Right on. I'm a college counselor and wish this were the motto. The economists John Schmitt and Heather Boushey found that among 24-to-35-year-olds, almost 20% of college graduates “actually do no better than their counterparts who left school after high school,” even before taking college debt into account. The major matters. Skilled trades pay far, far better than most college majors, nursing and engineering notable exceptions. The final chapter is a cogent warning against considering the Elect "just some kids" or academic wackos, acting just in the BosNYWash corridor, but no, they "have a stranglehold on institutions" that were normal quite recently. Instead of capitulating to them, "The Elect must be othered" (152). McWorter tells us that "There is no discussion to be had;" we will have no better outcomes trying to reason with these people than we would trying to convince any true religious believer of the absurdity of his/her beliefs. The claim to victimhood and the "arbitrary, punitive, and purposeless etiquette" can be unwarranted. "There is nothing about experiencing racism [sexism, cisheterosexism, etc.]...that makes it cancel out what we otherwise assume as common sense about human nature" (163). He echoes what I state constantly, don't be afraid to be called a racist, as though it were the worst possible epithet, because they will, no matter what you do. Do not apologize; do not focus and center on this religion; they must "conduct themselves as one voice at the table out of many" (183). Be courageous. Be Spartacus. Stand up. ...more |
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really liked it
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Marissa Mayer birthed twins during her tenure as CEO of Yahoo! and famously said that a woman steps back temporarily but later "her career takes off"
Marissa Mayer birthed twins during her tenure as CEO of Yahoo! and famously said that a woman steps back temporarily but later "her career takes off" (234). No, the research indicates, it most certainly does not; in reality, it never recovers. The thesis here is important: the gender pay gap results from women's actions (career interruptions and average weekly hours), rather than systemic sexism. Women prefer positions with predictable schedules and flexible hours, which offer less pay and they tend to remove themselves from the labor force to care for children, which disadvantages their careers in various ways, especially in jobs where personal relationship is important, like law and finance. Hence, the usual suggestions for redress "ridding the labor market of biased managers and organization, encouraging women to compete more, teaching them to bargain more effectively, and revealing to all what others learn...But those, and even the more challenging fix of eliminating all occupational segregation, would have only a modest impact." The gap was less "for those who did not take a break of more than six months" (175). If Harvard economist Goldin had stuck to that thesis, which she repeats over and over again, we would have before us an article rather than a book. Unfortunately, she ventures into territory that relies on presumptions that are incomplete at best and misguided at worst Here's the rub: "Women who never had a child (and never took a leave of more than six months) are almost at parity relative to men, although they still earn less [9 cents lower on the dollar], whereas those who have had a child keep on doing worse" (163). Even here, "there is compelling evidence...that choice, rather than paternalism or bias, is the major factor" (166). Women with top-earning husbands and children are those with the largest reduction in hours of work and employment. Surprisingly, this holds true even in Nordic countries with the "most generous family-centered policies in the world, including subsidized childcare and extensive paid leave for both parents" (167). In order to maximize earnings potential as a couple with children, one drops back, and it is usually the female. But what happens when it's the male; does it hold true? That's crucial and Goldin doesn't tell us. Insufficient data? In the first seven chapters, Goldin looks at five distinct chronological cohorts, which share "constraints....and aspirations" and "differ by their combinations of career, job, marriage and family" (23). In Group One (born 1878-1897), women tended to remain single in order to maintain their independence, hence the low rates of marriage and childbearing. However, with Group 5 (born 1958-1978), "the gap widens with age...[and] grows at various moments in life, such as having a child or making a geographic move. The gender earnings gap is, therefore, a series of numbers, and thinking of it as a series over an individual's life cycle can reveal more of the reasons for its existence than the conveniently cited single number" (162). The "largest gaps...are found in professional occupations with considerable self-ownership, such as law firms, as well as those dealing with finance, sales, administration, management, and business operations," (77 cents on the male dollar), while the "lowest gaps are in math and computer science, health care (excluding physicians), science, and engineering, (94 cents on the male dollar)" (170). In "up-or-out" jobs, like academia or consulting, women "must begin their families before their careers are solidified" (199). While by no means does it necessarily follow that childfree academics have blind spots when analyzing women's decisions regarding career and bearing and raising children, Goldin does. The feminist lens can too easily mask empirical fact; the struggle is to maintain objectivity. The sexes are different. Why is that hard to affirm? Why is that even politically incorrect? Goldin is all about couple equity. Her astonishing assumption is that, if it were possible, women and men would prefer to have careers and raise children equitably, since both parents would want to spend more time at home if they could. "46% of all fathers would like to spend more time with their children." This is so off-base it's laughable. Not even close. Women and men have different values. 29% of college-educated men and nearly twice as many, 56% of college-educated women value flexibility in their work schedules. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 56% of U.S. women and 75% of men "would prefer to work outside the home rather than stay home and take care of the house and family." Study after study has indicated the same, including the 1997 bestselling book Time Bind, in which sociologist Arlie Hochschild found that home life had become so stressful for many Americans that "the workplace was now a refuge from home rather than the other way around." A majority of both sexes prefer the challenges of work to the challenges of the family; work is their refuge. A few other articles indicate that women registered more positive mood outside of the home, even if that were at work. Goldin's astonishingly unconvincing solutions are saved for the end, like changing the structure of work. She thinks pharmacists are a model because the substitution among the pool "is the key to reducing disproportionately high hourly pay for long and on-call hours." That already happens: the male or the childfree person in the office gets saddled with picking up the slack, and often is not compensated for that, just as she recommends. Next, she wants "the greedy [time-intensive] job" to "not pay as much for on-call, weekend, long-hours work," so it will be less enticing. Professional people are taking on side gigs and extra jobs to increase their income and Goldin thinks they will forego an opportunity for extra money at their primary job? Nope. My dad worked overtime every chance he got. "Better yet, make the flexible job more productive and have it pay more. That would go a long way toward couple equity because the male parent will gladly switch to the flexible job and the female parent "would earn more in the flexible position and be less likely to leave her job entirely. The family will be slightly poorer in terms of their income, but they will be monumentally richer in terms of couple equity" (219). Finally, decrease the cost of childcare (many of the childfree like me don't want to subsidize that, actually; they're your kids, you pay for them or don't have them) and "alter social norms so that tradeoffs do not depend on gender;" but, as she indicates, "that might serve to greater equalize economic outcomes by gender but would not fix the problem of couple equity." The final chapter contains various observations about the impact of COVID on gender and career, and this: "For women to achieve career, family, and equity, fathers will have to make the same demands at work that women make, and they will have to take charge at home so women can take charge at work....We need men to lean out at work, support their male colleagues who are on parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize childcare, and get their firms to change their greedy ways by letting them know that their families are worth even more than their jobs" (235). Goldin, they do not want to. We want different things. Women and men have been tested left, right, and center, six ways north of Sunday to value relationships more than men. Stop denying this and making women into men; that is really what she means by equity. _______________ Part 2 : On wives of top earners ______________ Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman needs to expend a greater moral effort than the male to resist temptations of dependence. This is a truism, simply put. Evidently, Goldin does not know this, doesn't believe this, doesn't grasp this, or discards this entirely, but it's true. She does mention that women married to top earners are "three times more likely to be out of the labor force than others." She intimates that among the various cohorts of women who leave the labor force despite having advanced degrees must have intended to use those degrees. These are the women I have most contact with and hence, who most interest me. Several sociological studies have been published focused on ultra high net worth women. Does Goldin not leave Harvard's ivory tower to actually get to know women in the area around Cambridge? Do wealthy women really want to have a career? Goldin seems to believe they do. That's a central question Goldin raised for me with this book and she answered it poorly. Anecdotally, many of the women I know in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida, who have wealthy husbands and leave their careers also have professional degrees like J.D., M.D. and Ph.D. Many, many women I've spoken with in passing and others I've known well have left tenured professorships, C-suite jobs, etc. because they just didn't find them fulfilling, with or without children. Some hated the office politics. Some realized they wanted to be present for their kids' games and plays, etc. Goldin even confesses it is a mere presumption on her part that these women had fully intended to have professions, but leave only or primarily due to the aspects of the childcare calculus related to economics and time. This is off base, has no empirical support, and is refuted roundly by these women who surround me. For decades, I have had the opportunity to observe such women in their natural habitat. I identify three categories with some overlap: the Ladies who Lunch and Leisure, the do-nothings, and the professional volunteers. In the first category, true to popular portrayal, are those who play golf, pickleball or tennis (some really do have affairs with their tennis coaches) and ride their horses. Some maintain their figures and faces with constant fillers and lifts, personal trainer, nutritionist, Pilates, spin classes, etc. Lunch takes hours including hair and makeup, travel, drinks and conversation. Planning dinner parties can take weeks, even months, what with the décor and flowers, caterers, entertainment, guest list, attire, etc. They redecorate their various homes endlessly. Aside from all this and their psychotherapist, their attention is fully focused on the husband and children if they have them. Do you wonder what the life of a do-nothing looks like? This from Brooke Kroeger rings true: “Thursday. My son missed the bus so I had to take him to school. I wanted to get my hair washed and take a shower, but no, I had to throw on a pullover without even washing my face, and with the traffic I wasn’t back to 54th St, until 9:30 A.M. So forget the shopping I had planned to do. I took care of the house. There was an appointment at school at noon, and after shopping for the groceries, it was 3 P.M. and the day was gone and what had I done? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Of course, this leaves me furious. So my husband comes home and can’t understand why I am in such a state. “What do you have to be upset about and unhappy about?’ he says. ‘You do nothing all day long.’ ...What there is to do expands to fill the amount of time there is to do it....For most, there is no leaving the house before 10 A.M., and errands that could be handled by phone easily burgeon into daylong chores. There is also a tendency not to schedule more than one major event per day." Wives have to be free to deal with anything that comes up. If hubby has to travel somewhere and wants her companionship or has time to go on vacation, the wife has to be able to travel with him. One of my friends said, "I didn't love being a corporate wife. It was soul sucking. I was literally treated like a very well dressed domestic. No one loves that. You can't convince me that they do." The professional volunteers can swoop in and out as their schedule demands, but they contribute to their communities in genuinely significant ways through serving organizations, [breaking into some of which requires some seriously sharp elbows], or on boards, planning and organizing gala events, engaging in philanthropic activity, and, possibly, forging a social network that buttresses the couple's social status. One friend put it this way, "Think on this for a second. Most volunteer positions are held by WOMEN. WOMEN telling other WOMEN that they are worthy and doing great things. WOMEN working together toward a common goal. There is no patriarchy here. I LOVED my time with Junior League and [organization to end local poverty]. I learned more about dealing with organizations and people doing volunteer work than any time I spent in corporate situations. Are there awful women volunteering? Of course there are but that's true of all scenarios." It has become abundantly clear to me that men like to have their wife's attention and quite often enjoy being the provider as much as women enjoys being a trophy and cheerleader and having the freedom to do whatever the spirit moves her to do. Even if they don't have children, she has to be available to travel when the husband can and it doesn't always make financial sense for her to work because it can raise their tax bracket. Co-workers and demands in the workplace were often too stressful to be worth continuing. If they do have school aged children, the mother's self-worth can be dependent on how successful her children are in the meritocracy. Goldin does not understand how much is involved. When very young, there are nannies and pre-school (over $50K in several schools in my community), but with school, the children are entirely centered in the mother's attention and are the secondary focus for the father. It's a wonder more don't send their children to boarding school, for life becomes an endless and utterly exhausting cycle of athletics (with the expectation they will stay and watch), music lessons, test prep, tutoring, meal preparation or, more commonly Door Dash/Uber Eats/some analog thereof. I used to teach Women's Studies. I am fascinated by and keep up with the research in my field. Goldin is an economist. We have different lenses, even though we both use statistical databases, but I have a habit of asking women about their lives. They tell me that they found their careers far more fulfilling than motherhood. They tell me that motherhood surprised them by being far more fulfilling than their career. They tell me that they wish they hadn't had children or adopted. They tell me that having children or adopting gave their lives meaning. They tell me they had always wanted to have children. They tell me they didn't intend to have children. [The current statistics indicate that approximately 45% of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned, and the anecdotal evidence certainly bears that out.] Young women tell me they want to have children while they are young enough to enjoy them. Young women tell me they want children only once their career is established, maybe without a partner, ignoring the staggering statistics about the non-viability of freezing eggs for later use in IVF, as well as the costs. Some women tell me they are working in this country while their parents care for their kids abroad, usually in Latin America or the Philippines. Some women have professions and others do not, but many from both groups grapple with childcare. It is evident that some children are better off cared for by day, evening and/or weekend nannies and boarding schools. Some mothers don't know which room in their cavernous home is their child's (yes, true story). Some tell me their greatest regret is hiring a nanny when their children were young. With those hundreds of stories in mind, I kept recalling Simpson's paradox, which reveals the limitations of statistics all the way through this book. I am grateful for Goldin's valuable thesis, but when she ventures into ultracrepidarian territory, it's a frustrating enterprise because she truly believes men and women want the same things and we just do not. Besides which, to quote James Brown, Baby, it's a man's world. ...more |
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0525572996
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did not like it
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Having spent four years living with Trinidadians, I could hear the dialogue cadence in my head and it brought back memories I thought long gone. Trini
Having spent four years living with Trinidadians, I could hear the dialogue cadence in my head and it brought back memories I thought long gone. Trinidad and Tobago is an endlessly intriguing place, due to its location and demographic diversity: one-third ancestry from India, mostly Hindu, 6% Muslim; one third African ancestry, mostly on Tobago and mostly Christian; and the rest variously mixed, including Chinese and White minorities. The family at the center of this book is Indian, but neither their family nor the culture of the country is fleshed out with any depth. Is there any light in such a vibrant tropical island where the sun is constantly shining? Not in this story. It's all so very dark. If you ask a fish about the water, the fish replies, "What's water?," since it's all the fish knows. Author Claire Adams grew up in Trinidad and lives now in London, so she knows how the Trini waters differ from others, but inexcusably omits the most intriguing cultural characteristics of life there, like the Hindu jhandi flags, the cremation ghats, obeah (mentioned only briefly), the omnipresent tattered remnants of British rule, the astonishing diversity of homegrown music from calypso, steel pan, soca, soca chutney, dancehall, and more, the way foreigners, gays, and rasta men are regarded, etc. Trinidad and Tobago has no redeeming feature here and that's sad. Clearly, Adams, like Trini Nobel Winner Naipaul, is glad to be gone, like so many in the islands. Maybe she left too young to notice those elements? [To be fair, the U.S. State Department gives Trinidad and Tobago the highest Level 4 Do NOT Travel warning. WHO data published in 2018 ranks Trinidad and Tobago #4 in the world for violence, after Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Afghanistan, and Honduras.] In this tale, one brother is the Golden Child, smart, lucky; the other decidedly not, a story told throughout the ages, c.f. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau. What does this iteration add to our understanding of the human condition? Nothing. The characters are superficial, not at all dimensional. We could know far more about characters in a short story than these, and that's a bug, not a feature. All of that represents the majority of what I detested about this book, which I had to read in order to tutor a student. I did not want to be back in Trinidad, about which my ambivalence is enormous. I was reminded of its sick elements. Page 244 features a very graphic sexual assault that is all too common for Caribbean boys. Trinis told these stories and more about incest so many times I came to expect them. Don't you dare to blame the remnants of colonialism for those. Want empirical data on the prevalence of child sex abuse in Caribbean? “Most alarming, however, is that 47.6% of females and 31.9% of males described their first intercourse as forced or somewhat coerced and attributed blame to family members or persons known to their family.” Sandra D. Reid, Rhoda Reddock & Tisha Nickenig (2014). "Breaking the Silence of Child Sexual Abuse in the Caribbean: A Community-Based Action Research Intervention Model." Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 23:3, 256-277. Moreover, "[T]here is considerable agreement that among Afro-Caribbean males there is a fairly entrenched value system which defines masculinity in terms of dominance, virility and sexual freedom." Patricia Anderson. (March 2012). "Measuring Masculinity in an Afro-Caribbean Context." Social and Economic Studies Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 49-93. See also Michael A. Bucknor. (November 2012/April 2013). Dangerous Crossings: Caribbean Masculinities and the Politics of Challenging Gendered Borderlines. Journal of West Indian Literature>Vol. 21, No. 1/2, Caribbean Masculinities , pp. vii-xxx (24 pages). And Dave Ramsaran and Linden Lewis (2018). "The 'New Indian Man' Notions of Masculinity among Indo-Trinidadian Men" in Caribbean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad. That covers it. Stay out of Trinidad and Tobago. Avoid this book. ...more |
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Feb 26, 2022
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Feb 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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0578636980
| 9780578636986
| 0578636980
| 5.00
| 1
| unknown
| Sep 12, 2020
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it was amazing
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If your child has a sibling on the way or is asking about how babies come into the world, this is the book to use. This is a delightful book that meet
If your child has a sibling on the way or is asking about how babies come into the world, this is the book to use. This is a delightful book that meets a constant parental need. Accessible and entirely accurate information is presented by Billie the umbilical cord (of all things!) with a penchant for amusing rhyme. "Mom rubs her belly 'cause you kick so much, and you get excited when you feel her touch." Endearing illustrations feature the pregnant mom on the left page and the growing embryo, fetus, and neonate on the right. This book does double duty as a baby book, where you can make notes for your little one(s) and paste a photo of the sonogram. Don't miss the acknowledgements giggle for grown-ups at the very end. ...more |
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0691190801
| 9780691190808
| 0691190801
| 3.94
| 967
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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Instead of reading the book, save time and get the general idea by reading
The New Yorker
article about Harden's work. You won't miss anything. You Instead of reading the book, save time and get the general idea by reading The New Yorker article about Harden's work. You won't miss anything. Your responses to this quiz are likely to influence your opinion of this book: 1. Should people's status in society correspond with their natural ability? 2. Should people and social groups be treated equally, independently of ability? 3. Should some people be treated as superior to others, given their hard-wired talent? 4. Should society allow some people to have more power and success than others--as the law of nature? 5. Should society strive to level the playing field, to make things just? (11) Science (particularly genetics and neuroscience), environmentalism, and Diversity-Inclusion-Race-Equity (DIRE) are the leading candidates to supplant traditional religious paths for explanations about how we arrived at this point in time and place, establishing a sense of purpose and meaning and right relationship to the interconnected web of life or some subset of it, why bad things happen, why some people have more than others, and how to make a better world. These new ideologies have varying degrees of success in providing a sense of community, establishing in-group and out-group identities, doctrines and dogmas, and even ritualistic formulas. They cannot provide the most essential of religion's functions, however: transcendence. Science can be as easily manipulated as religion. If you don't know about lysenkoism; it refers to Lysenko, the Stalinist agronomist who predicated agricultural policy on the theory politically congenial to communism that plants from the same “class” never compete with one another. It resulted in famine and the deaths of tens of millions. Harden is a psychologist who works in the field of behavior genetics, "which investigates the influence of genes on character traits." This would seem to indicate that most of the book makes empirical assertions, but the science isn't anywhere near there yet. We have here a book at the dawn of the science of genetics, which I suppose can be rather thrilling until the reader pauses to realize how much of this deals with unproven hypotheses. We know for sure at least that "the mechanisms linking genes to education start very early in development," namely in the womb. Exposure to drugs, stress, lead, etc. can adversely affect development and the inheritance [or not] of pernicious or auspicious genetic combinations that affect cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Harden tells us over and over again that most aspects of who we are proceed from our genes, which means it comes down to random luck. But what are the implications of that fact? The central question Harden wants us to consider is that posed by David Reich in his op-ed NYT piece, "How should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible--indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd--to deny those differences." (Keep in mind that the characteristics a society values are astonishingly dynamic. Certainly, the standards of beauty shift dramatically over time and place. Currently, we value the ability to perform certain tasks quickly and accurately. Computer technology also values precision in hand-eye coordination with on-screen tasks, but it has not always and everywhere been thus.) Returning to the question, how should we deal with inequalities that are caused by differences in biology? In the 1980s, gay males used "science" as the foundation for their push for acceptance of their sexual orientation by stating that there was a gay gene (no; we now know there isn't); that homosexuality is biological, fixed in the womb (axiomatically and definitely not true for females, whose sexuality is far more fluid and who often deliberately choose to orient toward females); and that 10% of the population is homosexual (again, no; more recent research finds 6.2% in the U.S. and 4.5% in the U.K.; a huge, but HUGE difference). Nevertheless, the mere claim to a scientific basis that didn't exist in reality was the successful rationale for greater acceptance. So why does this not happen with, say, the scientific basis for intelligence of the kind measured by the SAT or GCSE? Or what about the scientific basis for why East African runners beat all others? Like a politician, Harden answers the question she wishes she were asked. She repeats many, many times in this book her view that "our responsibility [is] to arrange society so that it benefits all people, not just people with a certain set of genetic characteristics." What does this mean, precisely? That is the subject of Part Two. Part Two ventures into that ultracrepidarian territory: the implications of such genetic findings for ethics and that new religion, equity. Alas, Harden is not an ethicist; this is not her expertise, and it shows; there is so much to take issue with here. If a criminal perpetrator has a certain version of the MAOA gene, which is thought to correlate with criminal behavior, does that serve as an excuse? Harden says, "genetic information is dismissed when we want to punish people" (195); but "We should not interpret genetic influences as deterministic." What do you think the probability will be of the data not being misused in a fatalistic way? Then, "If you take genetics seriously as a source of differences between people, then what does that mean (if anything) about the responsibility that we bear for how our lives turn out?" What are the ethical ramifications of this? Should we test people for that version of the MAOA gene and incarcerate them pre-emptively? It's the same with fMRIs and neuroscience. Many, many people have asserted that once we unlock the secrets of the brain, we can take pre-emptive action. Think concentration camps. There is no room for free will, consciousness, karma, morality, religion and spirituality, lessons the soul must learn; no, it all comes down to genes and/or the brain. Follow this logic: 1. "[G]enetics should be taken seriously as an accident of birth that influences one's educational trajectories," and "The educated are rewarded not just with more money and more stable employment, but with better health and well-being" (194). "Behavioral choices shape life trajectories," and those are shaped by genes, which means luck. 2. "Emphasizing the role of luck increases support for redistribution" of freedom, resources and welfare and in a survey in Norway, half the respondents stated that "inequalities that stem from factors outside of a person's control should be eliminated." 3. Genetics is a matter of luck. People believe that unearned advantage is unfair and should be corrected. Ergo, we must reorganize society to compensate for luck or lack thereof. Comrade, this equality of outcomes is what communism has sought to do, inflicting misery upon millions. There are many, many other ethical corollaries beside the one she posits to the premise that genetics influences everything and is a random advantage. Of course, Harden is well aware of the dangers posed by eugenics and "inquiries into the genetic differences among us...appropriated to justify inequalities in the distribution of social power" [Elizabeth Anderson would add: freedoms, resources, and welfare]. She wants to be sure you don't venture down that path. Harden writes, "I hope to start the conversation about what it means for science and policy to be actively anti-eugenicist, by offering five general principles," from three perspectives: the eugenic, the genome blind, and the preferred anti-eugenic. 1. "Stop wasting time, money, talent, and tools that can be used to improve people's lives." "Use genetic data to accelerate the search for effective interventions to improve people's lives and reduce inequality of outcome." --Recall Lysenkoism. See how well the effort for equal outcomes worked in Maoist China, the USSR, Cuba, and everywhere else it has been tried. 2. "Use genetic information to improve opportunity....maximize the real capabilities of people to achieve social roles and positions," not "classify people." --We naturally classify people. It's evolutionary biology to protect our group and defend against the out-group that competes for food, mates, resources, etc. And genetics is particularly apt for classification: people who have this particular expression of this gene and people who don't. 3. "Use genetic information for equity not exclusion." "Create healthcare, housing, lending, and insurance systems where everyone is included regardless of the outcome of the genetic lottery." --This isn't logical. Actuarial science determines statistical probability regarding who is a risk for any number of issues, like foreclosure or non-repayment, and who isn't. We are to ignore this data? That is the cause of the mortgage crisis of 2008. 4. "Don't mistake being lucky for being good." "Recognize genetics as a type of luck in life outcomes, undermining the meritocratic logic that people deserve their successes and failures on the basis of succeeding in school." --But genetics is not deterministic, we are meant to know. Do we segregate by genetics so that lottery winners study together so they can zoom ahead, and lottery losers study together, so their feelings aren't hurt? 5. "Consider what you would do if you didn't know who you would be." "Society should be structured to work to the advantage of people who were least advantaged in the genetic lottery." --Again, communism provided a vision for how this might look. __________ The final page could well be a sermon conjoining the religions of genetics and DIRE (Diversity-Inclusion-Race-Equity), employing the language of the current anti-racism ideology. Best to stick with The New Yorker article and skip the details. ...more |
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Jan 30, 2022
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1250144388
| 9781250144386
| 1250144388
| 3.78
| 1,183
| Jun 05, 2018
| Jun 05, 2018
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really liked it
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I checked this book out of the library with this idea of reading aloud to my husband one story a night before going to sleep. Instead, he read to me.
I checked this book out of the library with this idea of reading aloud to my husband one story a night before going to sleep. Instead, he read to me. It was a great way to chill out and laugh. Read this way, there are about two months worth of stories, each one funny and heartwarming, not snarky or sarcastic or obscene. Each piece takes about five minutes to read aloud and features some thoughtful reflection about family. We both really enjoyed this and will start the next book he published in 2020 tonight. It probably helps to be able to "hear" Tom Papa's voice as you go. We like his stand-up material and appreciate that he doesn't work "blue." ...more |
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0865475873
| 9780865475878
| 0865475873
| 4.10
| 11,483
| 2002
| Apr 22, 2002
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it was amazing
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