Links - 16th May 2020 (2)

We Forget That Singapore Was Built From Dissent and Resistance - "Lee Kuan Yew himself understood and defended this need for dissent, since he was once the leader of the opposition. The PAP was, in fact, once an opposition party too, until it grew big enough to occupy all seats in Parliament from 1968 to 1980... The USC was “a left-wing student group” whose activism played an important role in “bringing about independence from Britain” and shaping Singapore into a post-colonial nation.Formed in 1953 in the University of Malaya (later renamed National University of Singapore) by a group of medical and arts students, the club was meant to stimulate political discussion and activism. They took in members with “alternative political views”, as long as they were anti-colonialism. Notable members of USC included our late president, S R Nathan, and Professor Tommy Koh, to name a few.One year after their formation, the USC produced a newspaper called Fajar—an excessively anti-colonial read. Surprise, surprise, the British eventually rounded up Fajar’s editorial board and charged them with sedition for an article titled “Aggression in Asia”.At the time, Lee Kuan Yew was the USC’s honorary legal counsel and served as the junior lawyer assisting Queen’s Counsel D. N. Pritt (pictured in the header image) for the trial, which saw the editorial board acquitted... Eventually, USC was deregistered in 1971 due to PAP’s growing social control."

James Woods on Twitter - "For the record, if I do get the coronavirus I'm attending every MAGA rally I can"
Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca: RT: "So that would be willfully spreading a deadly pathogen to others and inciting like-minded activists to do the same. It is called terrorism. When you promote it on a government account, it’s called insurrection. @FBI"

Australia’s PISA Shock - "The results have rightly produced a great deal of comment in Australia because they are further evidence of the country’s long-term decline in education... Finland was the darling of the early rounds of PISA. Plane loads of bureaucrats and educationalists arrived to have a good look at its magic mix of herbs and spices. Unfortunately, the spectacles they were wearing had leaden ideological lenses and they only saw what they wanted to see: Finland does not test students. Finland has no academic selection. Schools are free to teach how and what they like. All of these propositions do not bear close scrutiny. Using a weird form of policy time travel, commentators have even pointed to newly introduced initiatives such as phenomenon-based learning—similar to the project-based learning that’s fashionable in Australia—and implied that these initiatives are somehow associated with Finland’s past success... PISA is an assessment of 15-year-olds, i.e. the products of around 10 years of schooling. If we want to know the causes of Finland’s phenomenal success in 2006, we therefore need to look at what they were doing before 2000.Taking a long view is particularly important in the case of Finland because its results have significantly declined since 2006. That means that those noughties junkets inevitably gathered information about some practices that are associated with this decline. Yet despite Finland’s drop in performance, educationalists have stayed loyal, perhaps because it offers a more ideologically palatable vision than high performers from East Asia with their explicit teaching, memorisation and textbooks... the U.K. is involved in a natural experiment with its four education systems (one for each of the constituent nations) embarking on very different reforms.Scotland and Wales have both listened to progressive educationalists and developed high-level and aspirational policies focused on interdisciplinary learning and so-called 21st-century skills. Scotland is a little further down this rabbit hole than Wales and the signs from PISA are not encouraging, particularly for a country that has traditionally prided itself on the superiority of its education system over other parts of the U.K. Its science scores have slid further than in England and its maths scores have slipped while England’s have risen... One area where Australia stands out from the rest of the OECD is, unfortunately, the climate of its schools. In the PISA survey, Australian students reported very high levels of bullying and classroom disruption. Why this is a particular problem in Australia should be a cause of national introspection, but it is unlikely to move the educational establishment which suffers from an ideological blockage in this area. Australian experts tend to reject any focus on behaviour as a kind of wrongthink. What sort of monster wants students to be managed and controlled? The answer, of course, is the other kids in the class who are being bullied or having their education disrupted... We have known since at least the 1960s that the most effective teachers take an explicit approach to teaching academic subjects. Concepts are fully explained in a fairly didactic way and lessons are highly interactive to retain children’s attention and to allow the teacher to address any misconceptions quickly. Unfortunately, despite being favoured by the high-performing East Asian education systems, such teaching is deeply unfashionable in Australia. Anti-authoritarian social constructivist ideology favours approaches where students have to figure things out for themselves, perhaps as part of a group. This is why inquiry and project-based learning are the current buzzwords. Although it is clear what needs to be done to fix things, the Australian government is running in a different direction... Instead of laying down a standard, teaching to that standard and then intervening when students struggle to reach it, teachers are expected to reconcile themselves to students simply being at different points on the progression."

Jicama: a Low-Carb, Low-Sugar Crunchy Snack - "Maybe you’ve seen a pile of jicama in the grocery store by the potatoes and not known what it is. Or maybe you’ve found it in Paleo recipes but assumed this was some weird food that you’d have to go to a Mexican grocery store to get and moved past it... Jicama is a root vegetable native to South America, and it has a great, juicy-crunchy texture that works equally well whether it’s raw or cooked. It’s good on its own merits regardless of what your diet is like, and if you’re trying to find low-carb substitutions for fruit or potatoes, it’s a very convenient solution... it can make a pretty good substitute either for a hot pan full of potatoes or for a crunchy piece of fruit"
Aka "turnip" or bang kwang in Singapore; Southeast Asia and South America share many edible flora

Georgetown libraries remove dozens of novels that offend some students - "Administrators removed “all but a few books” from the McCarthy and Reynolds libraries after The Georgetown Review asked why they had so many books marked by “racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, fetishization, and pedophilia”... While emphasizing that the Review “does not support censorship in any form,” the publication makes clear that it expected the university to remove books that are “problematic,” a subjective term the report uses six times. Staffers literally judged the books by their covers... the report admits that staff didn’t look inside any of the books that offended them except Death of an Informer, because they couldn’t figure out if it was offensive by its cover (“we flipped to a random page replete with racial slurs and sexually-explicit content”)... The publication then had the gall to accuse administrators of going too far in removing books from the two libraries before its staff could find more “problematic” books, and as the headline emphasizes, leading a “cover-up”... The Hoya itself was worried how readers might react to a story about offensive books. It put a trigger warning at the top of the story for “racist and sexist content” and offered contacts for campus health and counseling services at the bottom."

College prevented student from rolling her ‘free speech’ beach ball around campus: attorney

Academic paper argues crime-fighting dogs teach children to distrust government - "Young children are being brainwashed to embrace misogynistic, racist, pro-police and anti-immigrant sentiments, according to a new academic paper... PAW Patrol, a popular North American animated series featuring helpful canines, is capitalist propaganda and then some, Liam Kennedy argues in the forthcoming issue of the international journal Crime, Media, Culture.The King’s University College professor maintains that the show “echoes core tenets of neoliberalism and encourages complicity in a global capitalist system that (re)produces inequalities and causes environmental harms”... Kennedy’s argument was met with skepticism by Canadian right-leaning news website The Post Millennial, which explained that his unfamiliarity with “early childhood education” led him to rely on his “Marxist goggles” to analyze the show.“[H]e can be forgiven for not realizing that learning about the self is a primary developmental stage for very young children”... The problems explored in the show are too small to be remedied by the state, and are better left to individuals who “work together to sort out their troubles,” they write. “This leftist penchant for relying on the state for solutions … belies the very notion of community.”Kennedy’s article, based on a professor watching hours of “pre-school television,” shows more than anything that “academia is dead,” Emmons and Wilson write. At worst, it shows “the authoritarian impulse behind” progressive ideas for society."

Stunning cowardice at the University of Virginia - "A young black woman stood up in that space and announced that there were “too many white people in here.” The student essentially urged white people to vacate the public student space because their presence there made nonwhite students “uncomfortable.” She was greeted with a round of applause for this little soliloquy. That’s big news: A student standing up in the middle of a university space and essentially declaring it off-limits for members of a specific race. One shouldn’t expect the media to care all that much about it—the media, who will generally cover any event if it has even the slightest whiff of racism, cannot be bothered to do so when the targets of that racism are white—but the response from the university community was even more astonishing... The university administration is sending a very clear message here: If white students are vilified and attacked on campus, the school will be too afraid to even mention it in any official capacity. That’s leadership for you... The woman who delivered the rant, and the one who propagated it on social media both initially reveled in the controversy, mocking their critics and retweeting the criticism directed at them. When the story received a little media attention, however, they both quickly locked down their social media accounts. From gleefully unrepentant to too terrified to even be seen on the Internet: That’s bravery for you."

CUNY adjunct professor: All white people responsible for ‘ideology of racialized terrorism’ - "Gonsalves goes on to wonder why we pay tribute every September 11 to “the once pillars of American capitalism,” but never to “the young Black and Brown” victims of domestic terror. She also claims a race war “is being thrust upon us.”"

Did You Know the US Apologized to Native Americans? - ""The United States, acting through Congress," states Sec. 8113, "apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States;" and "expresses its regret for the ramifications of former wrongs and its commitment to build on the positive relationships of the past and present to move toward a brighter future where all the people of this land live reconciled as brothers and sisters, and harmoniously steward and protect this land together."... The apology also urges the President of the United States to "acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land."... President Obama never publicly acknowledged the "Apology to Native Peoples of the United States.""

The Latest Feminist Idea is 1984 Meets The Office - "If researchers at Northeastern University have their way, one day soon we will go to work and have not only our words but our thoughts and feelings monitored and analyzed by a listening gadget just like the smart speaker in our kitchen. Associate professors Christoph Riedl and Brooke Foucault Welles are in receipt of a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to come up with just such a device... This yet-to-be-invented machine is already being heralded for its potential to revolutionize equality and diversity in the workplace by alerting users to instances of implicit bias. It will record verbal and nonverbal cues, as well as the “physiological signals” shared between members of a team. Then, having noted and analyzed all these tiny interactions and non-interactions, the speaker will make recommendations for improving inclusivity and productivity.To any sane person, this is a truly terrifying prospect—not because we arrive at the office each morning desperate to dole out racist and sexist abuse to our colleagues, but because of the opposite: we want to get on with our jobs and get on with our co-workers. We know that a spying machine, watching, listening, monitoring, and advising, is far more likely to interrupt our work and fuel dissent than it is to increase productivity.The Northeastern researchers want their device to play a role in tackling “implicit bias”... Workplaces are following where universities lead... The drive towards office surveillance suggests that the politics of the campus has entered the workplace. We are all students now. Rather than colleagues with interests in common, we are to see the workplace as divided, not between a business owner intent on making a profit and employees scraping by, but between oppressors—let’s be blunt: straight white men—and the oppressed—everyone else. These machines will be grievance incubators, sowing dissent where none was previously apparent. The perceived need for a speaker suggests that colleagues cannot resolve issues between themselves"