Montana may be first state to separate from 'Marxist lesbian' leadership of American Libraries Association - "the board has concerns over ALA President Emily Drabinski, who identifies as a "Marxist lesbian." And Montana is not the only state considering distancing their libraries from the far-left, activist American Library Association. Campbell County in Wyoming has cut ties with the ALA, as well as with the Wyoming Library Association, which pays dues to the ALA. .. Her plans for the ALA are entirely social justice oriented, with LGBTQIA+, green initiatives, equity, diversity, and inclusion at the center of all her initiatives. In an academic paper published with The Library Quarterly in 2013, Drabinski proposed changing the way books are catalogued in libraries, saying that "queer theory" should guide a move away from the US Library of Congress system. "Queer theory," she wrote, "provides a useful theoretical frame for rethinking the stable, fixed categories and systems of naming that characterize library knowledge organization schemes and strategies for helping users navigate them. Queer theory is distinct from lesbian and gay studies, and this distinction, while necessarily drawn in broad strokes, is helpful for understanding the potential limits of a corrective approach to classification and cataloging." This is the perspective she brings to her leadership with the ALA, and one that critics of Drabinski's detractors are essentially upholding by dismissing their concerns... James Lindsay has been outspoken against the ALA, saying that the time has come for a new libraries association that is not obsessed with social justice initiatives and pushing sexually explicit graphic books into the hands of children and teens... This comes as parents have become very vocal across the country concerning their rights to be involved in their children's education, and to have a say in the materials made available to them in schools as well as in children's and young adult sections of public libraries. One group that has come under scrutiny from the left is Moms for Liberty, founded by moms to advocate for parental rights in education. While many leftists claim the group is "banning books," the real goal is to prevent what is essentially pornographic materials, under the guise of LGBTQ inclusion, to be guided by librarians and educators into the hands of impressionable children. Drabinski, however, has no interest in parental rights. In an interview after her election as ALA president, she said "If your kid checks out something you don’t want them to read, that’s between you and your child and the way that you’re parenting. And it just isn’t something that the state needs to be involved in." She also shared an article attacking the parental rights group, boosting a hit piece by The Nation that lifted the views of the trans activists who protested Moms for Liberty for three days in Philadelphia during the Moms for Liberty Summit. Some of these activists engaged in violence, surrounding moms as they tried to exit the conference for the day. The quote from The Nation highlighted in Drabinski's retweet was "Making fascists feel unsafe is as much a Philly specialty as a cheesesteak...and it felt awfully nice to indulge."... Moms inside the conference, like Megan Brock, told The Post Millennial "It's a bunch of moms who drive minivans and care about their kids education. I guess that's extremism." The ALA has given awards and accolades to groups like GLSEN which, with funding from US companies including Target and Disney, push LGBTQ propaganda into schools across the country and around the world. The group provides "Rainbow Library Sets," which are described as "LGBTQ+ affirming text sets to schools free of charge." The ALA also attempted to sabotage a book reading series from Brave Books and Kirk Cameron, which has made plans to hold a national book reading event on August 5 to promote books with Christian values. "What if your library decided to offer a whole host of programs in its meeting room on August 5 making it unavailable for the public?" Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director at the ALA said. "We're seeing groups that seek to censor LGBTQA materials or disparage or silence LGBTQA library users exploit the open nature of a public library to advance their agendas," she said. Notably, she did not include ALA president Drabinski in her condemnation, though Drabinski has said outright that she intends to use libraries to further implement her own ideologically based initiatives... In an oped, the Daily Montanan posited that the commission, in considering the move to bail on the ALA, "legitimizes stereotypes about both groups," those groups being Marxists and lesbians, "that may not just be unfair and unfounded, but also makes the people at the leadership level of our state library look rather uninformed." The claim goes further, saying that the entire concept of a library "is already dangerously communistic," the idea being that a little more Marxism would only be a drop in the proverbial bucket. The Daily Montanan's Darrell Ehrlick claimed that only those with "small minds" would take issue with Drabinski's Marxist perspective. He went on to back the same ideas espoused by Drabinski, saying "Many far-right conservatives have spun a narrative that includes libraries being a clearinghouse of pornography, anarchy and history that isn’t red, white and blue enough." Like Drabinski and the vocal critics of Moms for Liberty, including the SPLC, the concerns over truly vile books being made available in schools and public libraries' children and teens sections are of no concern. These include Gender Queer, which has graphic illustrations of a woman fellating the strap-on dildo of another woman, books that tell kids they may have been born in the wrong body and can literally and physically change their sex, and additional graphic novels, like Flamer, which depict sex acts between teen boys. Drabinski tweeted about the book on Independence Day."
I've seen liberals say they are happy for porn to be in children's libraries, so
...and school asks parents to buy book on 'agender dominatrix' for its library - "A father has described his shock at receiving a 'Christmas' request to buy a transgender book telling the story of an 'agender dominatrix' called 'Daddy' for his daughter's school library. The parent was sent an email last month by his child's secondary school in Dorset, asking parents to order from a wishlist of books it had drawn up. The father said the majority of the books had 'seemed fine' but he was alarmed by one called Gender Euphoria, not least given his own daughter's mental health issues after she recently declared herself transgender. A synopsis of Gender Euphoria on Waterstones' website describes it as an anthology of 19 'trans, non-binary, agender, gender fluid and intersex writers'. Those writers include an agender dominatrix called 'Daddy', and an Arab trans man getting his first tattoo. Agender is defined as a person who does not identify as having a particular gender. 'You certainly don't expect to get requests like this at Christmas,' said the father, who asked to remain anonymous. 'And kids at 11 or 12 don't need this type of ideology drummed into them.'"
CBC reporter accused local paper of Islamophobia, complained of “all-white editors” - "A CBC reporter is being cited for allegedly breaching the public broadcaster’s code of content by slamming a competing news outlet for having “all white” editors. According to Blacklock’s Reporter, CBC correspondent for Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Anam Latif campaigned against the local paper Waterloo Record... According to CBC’s Journalistic Standards And Practices, reporters are prohibited from using their social media to not express personal opinions on social media. "
Addendum: CBC media bias is a myth
Even Homer Gets Mobbed - WSJ - "A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss. Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.” The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles. Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.” Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.” Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.” An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation... The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” “It’s a tragedy that this anti-intellectual movement of canceling the classics is gaining traction among educators and the mainstream publishing industry,” says science-fiction writer Jon Del Arroz, one of the rare industry voices to defend Ms. Cluess. “Erasing the history of great works only limits the ability of children to become literate.” He’s right. If there is harm in classic literature, it comes from not teaching it. Students excused from reading foundational texts may imagine themselves lucky to get away with YA novels instead—that’s what the #DisruptTexts people want—but compared with their better-educated peers they will suffer a poverty of language and cultural reference. Worse, they won’t even know it."
Liberals are only against book bans when it's books they love being "banned"
Massachusetts Teacher Says She Is "very Proud" To Have Removed Homer's Classic From School Curriculum - "The biography of Twitter account @DisruptTexts, says it is “a movement to rebuild the literary canon using an antibias, antiracist critical literacy lens.”"
Reading University bosses remove part of Ancient Greek poem that mentions domestic violence - "University chiefs have removed part of an Ancient Greek poem that mentions Domestic Violence to avoid upsetting students. Officials at the University of Reading cut several lines from the 2,000-year-old Types Of Women, by Semonides of Amorgos, which is taught to first-year classics students. The decision was made on the grounds that the words could 'potentially trigger' distress – even though no student had complained. But critics fear that other works from antiquity may be targeted and warned of a 'slippery slope' towards censorship. Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter, said: 'This is beyond naive. 'It is positively ridiculous and has no place in academia. 'If we applied this same kind of censorship to the news we would end up with a most limited and ignorant view of the world.' The 118-line poem is controversial because of the way women are portrayed. It says Greek god Zeus created ten types of women, each represented by an animal or an element. Nine – those deriving from the pig, fox, dog, earth, sea, donkey, ferret, mare and monkey – have negative connotations, with only the female who comes from a bee considered to make a good wife. Reading – which is ranked number 27 out of 90 UK universities – used a part of the poem in a module on Greek history, alongside works by Homer and Aristotle. Students would have been issued with a verbal trigger alert that the work was an example of 'extreme misogyny in Archaic Greece', but a decision was taken to remove references of overt violence towards women... Ewen Bowie, an emeritus fellow at Corpus Christi College and Prof Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford University, said ancient works needed to be 'understood in context'. He added: 'When you start censoring reading lists you are putting your foot on the slippery slope down towards censoring what is being sold in bookshops.' Students studying Ancient Egypt have also been given trigger warnings about artworks depicting battle scenes."
Meme - Liberal: "We need to let children be whatever they want to be."
Normal person: "What if they want to be conservative?"
Liberal: *upset*
Forty percent of Brown University students say they are LGBT, suggesting social contagion - "New survey data from Brown University’s student newspaper provides further evidence that the increase in LGBT identification is driven by social pressures. The latest data show that between 2010 and 2023, identification as LGBTQ+ has almost tripled among the student body at Brown (from 14% in 2010 saying they were not heterosexual to 38% now). "The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate ," The Brown Daily Herald reported . "Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown."... The 38% identification tracks with research from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which found similar levels among elite colleges. The researcher on that project, Eric Kaufmann, noted in comments to the College Fix that his research has found sexual behavior has not kept pace with the identification. In other words, bisexual identification outstrips bisexual sexual activity. "If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together," he told the College Fix. "What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT." Coming out as not heterosexual is trendy and wins social plaudits. But the notion that social pressure plays a role in LGBT identification is only controversial because the group is a sacred cow. However, the idea that peer pressure plays a role in our behaviors and lifestyles is acknowledged in other less controversial areas. It follows then that if teenagers can pressure each other to partake in some actions, they can encourage them to identify as LGBT as well. For example, the American Lung Association says that marketing, pressure from friends, and seeing their parents smoke cigarettes can contribute to higher rates of smoking. "Peer relationships" are also linked to alcohol abuse and drug use . On the positive side, peer support groups can be helpful in weight loss and paying off debt"
I asked a liberal defending 21% of Generation Z identifying as LGBT as being accurate rather than reflecting grooming/social pressure and indicating massive repression in previous generations if he would still claim that if 100% of a generation identified as queer, but he refused to answer
Ontario puts $2.6 million toward helping more than 300 newcomers find jobs - "More than half of the funding is going to Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto to give 230 women career coaching and a paid internship"
🇺🇸Travis🇺🇸 on Twitter - "Meet Georgia Rep Mesha Mainor. She’s a lifelong democrat who worked with congressman John Lewis and has been fighting to help the black community. Today she announced that she will be leaving the Democrat party and becoming a Republican. When asked about pushback from democrats she said "The most dangerous thing to the Democrat Party is a black person with a mind of their own. So, it wouldn’t surprise me." Her decision came after recent bills where she supported school choice for underprivileged children and was against defunding the police. She says she was crucified by democrats for standing up for black people. She says she relieved to finally be embraced by a party that doesn’t mind a black woman having a mind of her own. Her focus will now be on increasing the Republican majority in Georgia. It’s great to see more and more people waking up! #blexit"
Joey Mannarino on Twitter - "Ask anyone who AOC is, and they’ll tell you she’s the congresswoman who wore that fabulous gown at the Met Gala. Or that she has millions of followers on social media. Or that she started as a bartender and rose to the heights of American government. And if you google “AOC ACCOMPLISHMENT,” you’ll learn that she’s the “first female member of the Democratic SOCIALISTS of America elected to serve in Congress.” But no one can tell you one single thing that she’s done for her district. Not one law passed. Not one act. And this is why our political system is failing us on a massive scale. Because we’ve created a culture of voters who vote for who you are and what you look like and who you sleep with - but not what you plan to bring to the table. So far, all AOC is bringing to the table is makeup tips and shade. She needs to go back to bringing the only thing she’s qualified to bring to the table. Cocktails."
Lord’s Prayer opening may be ‘problematic’, says archbishop - "The archbishop of York has suggested that opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, recited by Christians all over the world for 2,000 years, may be “problematic” because of their patriarchal association. In his opening address to a meeting of the Church of England’s ruling body, the General Synod, Stephen Cottrell dwelt on the words “Our Father”, the start of the prayer based on Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4 in the New Testament... Canon Dr Chris Sugden, chair of the conservative Anglican Mainstream group, pointed out that in the Bible Jesus urged people to pray to “our father”. He said: “Is the archbishop of York saying Jesus was wrong, or that Jesus was not pastorally aware? It seems to be emblematic of the approach of some church leaders to take their cues from culture rather than scripture.”... In February, the C of E said it would consider whether to stop referring to God as “he”, after priests asked to be allowed to use gender-neutral terms instead."
Why politically guided science is bad - "The other day, a paper was published in the American Economic Review about incarceration’s effect on children. It caused quite a stir, because it concluded that kids can sometimes benefit in certain ways from having their parents locked up... Uncomfortably, this is not the first paper to find some sort of effect like this. Here’s another from 2020, which uses a similar methodology but looks at education instead. Some defended the paper, but very many people were upset about it. Negative reactions from various academics on Twitter ranged from “yikes” to barf emojis to allegations that its publication represented a breach of ethics. Defenders responded that these negative reactions were merely cases of people encountering inconvenient facts... I think calls for the suppression of findings like this are wrong. (And saying that papers like this should not be published, or should have to clear greater-than-usual hurdles for publication, is definitely a call for suppression.) In fact, this reaction is part of what I see as a growing movement in recent years to make scientific inquiry more governed by political ideology. And I think that’s a very bad idea. Scientists can’t ever be fully free of biases, but being less political and more devoted to seeking the facts is a worthy goal that should not be abandoned... Some people frame the question of politically guided science as a conflict between science and ideology. But in fact, that’s not really what it is, because the idea that science should be devoted to finding the fact is itself an ideology. It’s an ideological belief that humanity is better off knowing the facts than not knowing them. That’s a deeply humanistic ideology. Knowledge is power, and the idea that human society always deserves more power — that in some general sense, we’ll eventually do the right thing with the knowledge science gives us — is an article of faith.. I think it’s probably good, on balance, for humans to know more true things, instead of being tricked into thinking false things (to the extent that there are “true” and “false” things in the Universe, epistemological disclaimer blah blah blah). That includes knowing about the true effects of incarceration. Armed with that knowledge, we can make better policy. “Better” for whom? Some people assume that research showing benefits of incarceration is inherently anti-Black. That’s understandable, because Black people are disproportionately incarcerated, and thus have the most to lose if policymakers were to decide that we need to lock more people up. Some Twitter commentators went so far as to allege that the AER paper wouldn’t have been published if the journal’s editorial board were more diverse — that the very publication of this result is a manifestation of structural racism. But here’s the thing — the kids and siblings of incarcerated Black people are also Black! If incarceration (conditional on being arrested and going to trial) is good for kids, that means that we’re looking at a tradeoff between the welfare of some Black people vs. the welfare of other Black people. If this research is right, and you suppress it in order to try to help Black people, you might just be hurting different Black people... the usefulness of research like this goes beyond simply recalibrating the tradeoff between incarceration and decarceration. It also helps point us in the direction of potential new and better policies than simply “lock up more people” or “lock up fewer people”. John Pfaff, a dedicated opponent of mass incarceration who wrote one of the most famous books on the topic, had a good thread in which he explained the practical value of research like this... knowledge is useful in large part because it leads to more knowledge. Suppressing a piece of knowledge also suppresses everything else you might subsequently learn as a result. One worry that’s commonly brought up in these debates is that if bad people get a hold of these research results, they will do bad things with it... In fact, you can make a similar argument for almost any piece of research, especially for scientific discoveries. The same technology that can cure disease might be used to create bioweapons. The same chemistry discoveries that can create useful new materials can be used to blow people up. And so on. It’s reasonable for scientists (including social scientists) to be concerned about the evil uses to which their discoveries might be put. But to suppress or modify those discoveries is akin to the Noble Lie... Maybe historians of science and political scientists have a little bit of predictive power. But these are just very hard things to predict... Introducing political considerations into research methodology is not exposing bias; it is embracing bias... 'W.E.B. Du Bois…has a defence of value free ideals in science that is rooted in a conception of the proper place of science in a democracy. In particular, Du Bois argues that value freedom must be maintained in order to, first, retain public trust in science and, second, ensure that those best placed to make use of scientifically acquired information are able to do so.'"
Fund Science on the Basis of Scientists‘ Work, Not Their Identity - "According to Nature, “at the most senior level … there were about four times more male than female applicants”—an 80/20 male-female applicant split that corresponds almost exactly to the $81 million/$21 million split in awarded 2021 grants. This pattern has an obvious explanation: There are simply more men than women in the senior ranks of Australia’s health and medical researchers... Notably, Nature glosses over the fact that, as NHMRC CEO Anne Kelso points out, funding rates for men and women are nearly equal in regard to the NHMRC’s entire $1.1 billion funding budget as a whole, of which the $398 million earmarked for investigator grants (the subject of the petition and the Nature article based on it) is but one component. This overall pattern is hardly compatible with the suggestion that the NHMRC is a hive of sexism. (Note that of its CEO, General Manager, and three executive directors, only one is a man.) Nor is it compatible with the broad accusations against NHMRC repeated by Nature, such as the claim by quota advocate Megan Head, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, to the effect that “Australia has a terrible record with gender equity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” We have gone down this road before, when strict quotas were placed on Jewish scientists within my own academic sphere, physics, as a means of excluding Jews (including very nearly, future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman) from US graduate schools."
Thread by @JohnFPfaff on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "To say that incarceration reduces some bad outcomes is NOT to say that it does so OPTIMALLY. Think this points to a vulnerability in reform rhetoric. A lot of anti-prison rhetoric starts at “prison has entirely negative effects.” And it’s true that studies increasingly indicate that the effects are, on net, much weaker than proponents suggest. But some ppl are imminently dangerous. Removing them likely has some gains. But that does not mean prison is the EFFECTIVE way to do this. It doesn’t mean it’s the MORAL way to do this. None of this accounts for how we ignore the social costs of how we’ve done it. But assuming these results replicate, they’re useful to have. If replicated—and while they go against the conventional wisdom, the literature on the parent-to-child prison connection is actually fairly thin and ambiguous—they point to issues reformers have to plan for in advance. But don’t conflate “prisons work” with “prisons work WELL.”"
Meme - *Soyjaks vs Liberals' Photos*
Meme - Joel D. Anderson @byjoelanderson: "If you're not black and started using "woke" pejoratively sometime post- 2018 or so (or worse, don't know anything about the earlier iteration of the term), I think it's fair to consider it a racial slur. And it doesn't mean I'm gonna do anything to you, or that anyone else will. But it doesn't mean I won't either."
Grant Lorrell @GrantLorrell: "I'm not surprised by it any more, but man every time I see one of the usual crowd tossing that around I really just want to be like "You know you're not as slick as you think you are right?""
Joal D. And Anderson: "man, sometimes violence - or threatening it - is the answer, I gotta say."
"When people show you who they are, believe them the first time"
Meme - "When the historical fiction character uses modern talking points to criticize their own time period
???"
The largest teachers union in America recommended educators include ‘Gender Queer’ in their summer reading - "The National Education Association (NEA) on Monday recommended that teachers include the controversial book "Gender Queer" on their summer reading lists. The book was featured in the NEA's "Great Summer Reads for Educators!" list that showcased 11 books. Among those books are "White Fragility," a book that insists that White Americans use anger, shame and guilt to avoid taking responsibility for racial inequality... "Gender Queer" has as courted major controversy among America parents for being in public school libraries throughout the U.S. and has been challenged for its depictions and descriptions of oral sex as well as discussions on masturbation... This list of books comes after the president of the National Education Association declared that racial and social justice is a "pillar" of the NEA's efforts."
SHOCKING: Images from book 'Gender Queer,' which is stocked in school libraries across Iowa
We'll still be told that sexualisation and indoctrination by leftist schools is a paranoid far right conspiracy theory