From chariots to e-scooters: transformations in transport

From chariots to e-scooters: transformations in transport | History Extra

 "‘The topic of horse manure’

‘It sounds silly. And my wife sort of complained for the whole period, when I was writing this book. It's like, there's more stories about horse manure. So there's actually an apology to her in the acknowledgments about, sorry about all the stories of horse manure, but it's much more serious than it sounds, because the reason I think it's worth revisiting the history of wheeled transport now is because what is happening today in the 2020s, is very similar to what was happening in the 1890s. And so I think, you know, going back in and looking, going back and looking at what we did then and, and the decisions that were made, and the consequences of those decisions, I think, is really useful. 

So the problem in the 1890s was that at the time, horse drawn, transport was the dominant form of transport within cities of various kinds. So you could ride a horse, you could go in a horse drawn, you know, carriage, you could go in a in a Hackney cab, which was like a taxi pulled by a horse, there were horse buses, which were essentially buses pulled by horses. And then some of them went on rails, and they were called horse cars. But essentially, it was all horses all the time. And this was turning into more and more of a problem. And in the fastest growing larger cities of the Western world, places like London and New York, there was literally a growing problem, which was that horse manure was piling up on the streets. And for a while, in the 19th century, it was the case that people would pay to take it away, because you could, if you had the right to gather the horse manure on the streets of London, you could scoop it all up, stick it on a car, take it to the countryside and sell it to farmers as fertilizer. 

And what starts to happen in the second half of the 19th century, is that there's so much of it, the the farmers don't want to buy it, the price collapses, and cities have to start paying people to take it away, and they don't know what to do with it. And New York has this massive problem that they have these big horse manure dumps where they're literally piling it up. And they have complaints from people saying there's a horse manure dump in my neighborhood, it's really smelly, there are lots of flies, I'm really worried about the the effect of this on our health. So this is a growing problem. And then it also turns out that the number of horses in these cities is growing faster than the number of people. So both of these cities, and other cities in the same position are essentially becoming more dependent on horses. And you'd have thought that the invention of railways would help to alleviate this problem. But in fact, it made it worse, because as soon as you connect cities, up with railways, the more movement of goods and people you've got between cities, the more you need horses to move those goods and people around once they arrive in those cities. And in fact, railway companies were some of the biggest owners of horses and had the biggest stables and the biggest fleets of horse drawn vehicles. 

So it's very clear by the 1890s, that this is unsustainable. Traffic is absolutely terrible. The roads are clogged not just with horse manure, but with horse drawn vehicles. It's a terrible amount of noise. There are accidents, because you know, horses occasionally get scared and kick people and things like this. So there's this sort of awareness that there's a crisis that cities have become too dependent, urban transport has become too dependent on horses, and something's got to change but no one's quite sure what it's gonna be, what is the future of transport in cities going to be? 

And we are in a similar position today, which is we've arrived recognize that the dominant form of urban transport in our era, the car is unsustainable, it's unsustainable because it produces particulates, it produces C02 that leads to climate change, we waste in some cities as much as a third of the surface area on parking. You look in any street where I live in London, you'll see just lots and lots of cars just parked on the side, they’re used about 4% of the time. So they’re unused 96% of the time, this is really inefficient. And and so there's a general recognition that this is kind of crazy. And we should probably be looking for another way of doing things for the sake of our sanity, for the sake of the quality of urban life and also for the sake of the planet. And so, again, we're in this position that we recognize that something has to change, but we're not quite sure what it should be. 

Now, we know what happened in the 1890s, that advocates of the automobile, the horseless carriage, it was called at the time, won the argument and said, this is the answer, this is going to fix the problem of pollution. Because cars don't produce horse manure, you're going to fix the problem of traffic because a horse and a carriage takes up twice as much room as a horseless carriage. So suddenly, there's going to be twice as much road space, no more traffic jams, it's going to be no more accidents, because cars can't kick people. And therefore it's going to it's going to be much quieter, because cars have have rubber tires, so they're almost silent. So this is going to fix all our problems. It's really, really simple. This is what we do. And of course, we know what the consequences of that decision were, which is that cars completely reshaped cities in the 20th century, and had all of these unintended consequences, both positive and negative, which we're now having to grapple with...

The invention of the wheel is about 3500 BC. And it used to be thought that it was in Mesopotamia because the Mesopotamians invented so many other things. They invented cities and writing and, you know, large scale beer production. You know, really important aspects of civilization, I'm sure you'll agree. And so it was assumed that they must have invented the wheel as well. But the latest archaeological evidence is that actually wheels were invented in Eastern Europe, and the earliest surviving wheel is from Ljubljana. And it's from around that time. And, and so what seems to have happened is that wheels were invented, possibly as a sort of, byproduct of copper mining. So this copper mining is starting to take off at this point. It's the Copper Age, which is what comes before the Iron Age, and, and moving all of that copper ore around, you know, you can imagine that someone might have said, you know, it'd be easier if instead of carrying it around in baskets, we stuck some wheels on the side. And then the idea spreads very quickly around the top of the Black Sea, into the ancient Near East, so into Mesopotamia. And you do see wheeled vehicles appearing there. 

What's really surprising is how slowly they take off. So today, we're used to thinking of the wheel as the greatest invention since sliced bread... there were entire civilizations that for a long time were aware of wheels and decided not to use them. The classic example being the Egyptians. So the Egyptians were aware of wheels because the Mesopotamians next door had them and the Egyptians were quite happy to borrow ideas from the Mesopotamians, writing seems to have been one of them. But they built the pyramids without using wheels at all. And that's because moving big blocks of stone around, it's actually easier not to use wheels. It's easier to use rafts on the Nile, it's easier to use sleds on the sand and pour water in front of them, rollers, that sort of thing. 

And so the, the Egyptians really weren't interested in wheels, and it was only when the Hittites, who are a group of people who are in roughly what's Turkey today, they invent the war chariot and they start invading you know, the rest of what's now the Middle East. And, and the at that point, the Egyptians are like, okay, wheels, now we see the point. And there are different wheels. So the first wheels are very, very thick, heavy wheels, solid wheels made of planks of wood stuck together. They're not made, as a lot of people might think, you know, if you've seen the Flintstones, you might think the first wheel, so you get a big log and you chop a slice off the end of it. 

The problem with that is there are two problems. Firstly, you need a saw. And saws are actually really hard to make. I mean, think about it, you need to make a piece of metal with teeth on it that are really sharp. Saws aren't invented until about 2000 years after the wheels. So that's definitely not how the first wheels are made. And the second problem with it is if you make a wheel by chopping a slice off a log, it's a really rubbish wheel. It's really small, so it can't go over big bumps in the ground. And it turns out that the grain in the wood means that the wood kind of crumbles or the wheel falls apart really easily. So what you really want is planks of wood, which you can make by splitting logs using chisels, and then you stick the planks together and you chisel out a circular wheel. And that's what the earliest wheel that we have, the Ljubljana wheel actually looks like. And that's what the Mesopotamian wheels look like… 

But what happens with the war chariots is that you want speed. And so they figure out that you can make spoked wheels. And the Egyptians get really good at this. In Tutankhamun's tomb, there is a chariot that weighs 35 kilograms. So you could lift it with one arm if you're pretty strong. And it's like the Ferrari of its day. It's like a super, super fast war chariot. And what happens around that period is that kings in the ancient Near East, in Assyria, in Egypt start to depict themselves in murals in wall carvings, as you know, these awesome people who ride around in chariots and smite their enemies. And this idea that you are what you drive. And the more powerful you are, the faster your vehicle has to be, dates from that period. And this is why Tutankhamun has this super duper fast chariot in his in his tomb, and war chariots then become this this big thing. And so the Egyptians are like, yeah, wheels. They're awesome...

You've got this period where war chariots are awesome, and everyone wants to be, and the kings and the gods are all depicted as riding chariots. But the age of the chariot doesn't last that long. It lasts a bit over 1000 years. And what happens is that horses are being bred to pull these chariots and so people are breeding bigger and bigger horses, and they figure out that you can actually get an armed, fully armored warrior on the back of a horse. Once you do that, you don't need the chariot anymore. And in fact, it's better than the chariot because you can go up hills and you can go across bumpy ground. And so cavalry is, it is recognized as you know, superior to having lots of chariots. And the sort of classic example of how this becomes apparentive [sp?] one is the battle of Gaugamela which is between Alexander the Great and King Darius of Persia, and Alexander doesn't use chariots, he uses cavalry, and Darius is still stuck in, you know, oh, yeah, chariots are awesome. And he loses. And there's a depiction of his loss. And it's a, it's in Pompeii. It's a mosaic in Pompeii, which is based on an earlier painting, but it very symbolically shows Alexander triumphant on his horse and King Darius shirking slinking away from the battlefield, in his chariot. 

So at that point, you know, real men ride horses, and we get this whole period from about then, which is sort of fourth century BC, all the way through to the Middle Ages with knights. And like, you know, if you look at the, the way that Roman emperors depicted themselves, they very often had equestrian statues where they would be, you know, looking mighty and powerful on a horse. And, and cap, chariots at this point. Well chariots, kind of, the Romans didn't use chariots at all, except for racing. And for, in triumphs. They're kind of amused actually, when the Romans arrived in Britain, and they discover the locals are still using war chariots. They go, how quaint, how sweet. We've kind of moved on from that. And what happens is that wheeled vehicles become something associated with women. And so Roman noblewomen are allowed to ride in chariots, sorry, allowed to ride in wheeled vehicles, and they have these special sort of carriages for them. And the idea of the sort of Princess in the, in the magic carriage, it's made out of a pumpkin. And the, and the the knight that she marries, doesn't ride in it with her, he always rides on a horse next to it. This is a, you know, this is essentially an idea that comes from that period, where it's actually seen as demeaning for noble men to go in wheeled vehicles. They should be on horseback, because that's the only way for, for a real man to travel around. 

And so we get this period where the wheel falls out of favor. It's briefly you know, it's been it's been popular for like 1200 years during the chariot period. And then it falls out of favor for about another 1800 years, where people are like, no, no, no, I'm a man, I need horses, and only only girls go in wheeled vehicles. And you know, farmers and, you know, low, low born people like that. But you know, real knights and kings don't want to be dead on a, on a wheeled vehicle. And so, then, things change again. In the 16th century, there's this reversal. Essentially, it comes down to the invention of gunpowder weapons, mean that knights on horseback suddenly look old fashioned. And it turns out you can put gunpowder weapons on the back of a carriage and you can make these sort of forts, fortresses. And this is an idea, it's invented in Hungary, where they put cannons on the back of chariots and then they can take them to a battlefield and they can make an impregnable ring of wagons with, with guns on the back. And then when knights charge at them, they can just shoot at them with these, with these powerful weapons. And this changes the perception of wheeled vehicles again, and in Europe, suddenly, people are interested in wheel vehicles and you get this new vehicle the coach, which is essentially a very, very fast carriage, and it's named after the village where it seems to have been invented in Hungary. And what happens is that that idea spreads very, very quickly around Europe and suddenly the manly thing to do is to be riding, driving your coach as quickly as possible...

Samuel Pepys… he's finally rich enough to buy his own carriage. This is in the 1660s?... And so he goes to the theater with his wife in the carriage, solely, not because he wants to go to the theater, solely so that everyone can see that they've arrived in their own carriage....

Blaise Pascal also came up with this idea of what we would now call public transport or a bus. And so the idea was that you'd have vehicles that could seat several people, about a dozen people, and they would be pulled by horses. And they would follow fixed routes within a town within Paris. And he managed to get permission to do all of this. And, and you had to pay a small amount to go on these these vehicles. But yes, it caused a real stir, because eventually, the city authorities started to worry that this would encourage the mixing of the social classes. And so they said, actually, we're not going to, we're only going to let the rich go on these on these vehicles. And the rich didn't want to go on these vehicles. Because if you went on one of these public buses, public carriages, it showed that you weren't wealthy enough to afford your own carriage. So the rich were like, well, if everyone knows that only the rich are going on them. And I'm on, they'll look at me go, you're a rich person who can't afford your own carriage. That's embarrassing. And by this stage, people are starting to throw stones at the carriages because they're not allowed to use them and so on. So the whole thing gets shut down pretty quickly...

They've been around for a surprisingly long time, electric vehicles. The most, the best selling car in America in 1897 was an electric vehicle, there were various attempts to get them going, the problem has always been the batteries. Those early electric vehicles use lead acid batteries, which are very, very big and heavy, and they don't store that much energy. And you could buy an electric car 120 years ago that would maybe do 80 miles on a charge if you were lucky. The big problem is there's not gonna be anywhere to charge it if you went out. And so you could charge it at home. And then you would have a limited amount of range. But cars were really being sold as adventure machines at the time. And you really could go out if you had a petrol powered car because you could buy gasoline at you know, a hardware store or something like that there. It was sold as a as a solvent as a cleaning fluid. And then you could buy it cans of it. And so it was, there was already a means of distributing it, the petrol pump comes a bit later it comes in the 20s. But, but essentially you could you could head out on the open road and expect to be able to buy fuel for your car. Whereas if you headed out an electric car, then all you've got to do is run out of batteries and be in trouble. So as a result, electric cars really didn't go anywhere. 

And they ended up being sold as cars suitable for women. And this was for a couple of reasons. They were easier to start, they didn't have a crank handle. And women were assumed to be weak and, you know, unable to turn the crank handle on the car. They were less dirty, because, you know, in those days if you bought a petrol car, they gave you the tools to fix it as well. It was expected it would go wrong a lot, you would have to tinker with it. And that was going to mean lots of grease and oil and stuff all over your clothes. And you know, that was something that men were expected to be interested in and women were not. And then the other thing is that I think some men bought electric cars for their wives, not just because they were clean and quiet and easy to start, but because it actually limited how far they could go. And Henry Ford was one of these people, he obviously had this big success with a Model T Ford but he doesn't give his wife a Model T, he buys her an electric car. And this limited how far she could drive. She wasn't going to run away. The car, the battery would run out. So she could drive into town and see her friends or go to the opera then she could drive home again, and she couldn’t go any further than that. So this idea that electric cars are not just rubbish, but they're girly is a, is a 20th century, early 20th century thing. 

And it's only in the 1990s, that that changes. And it's not because the car industry decides it needs to do anything about it, it's because of consumer electronics. The, the first modern, you know, lithium ion battery is is developed, essentially by Sony to put in the camcorder. And it then gets used in laptops. And then it's in the early 2000s, that a couple of car nuts in California, it’s always California, realized that if they bought 7000 camcorder batteries, and they took all the lead acid batteries, they built this electric car, they took all the lead acid batteries out and put 7000 pound camcorder batteries instead, they would have a car that was not just lighter, but it had a longer range because these batteries take, pack more energy in and it would go faster. And that car was called the T zero. And it could do about 250 miles nought to 60 in some ridiculously, you know, like five seconds or something. And that car essentially led to the founding of Tesla. The founders of Tesla saw it and said, this is amazing. We've got to build this. And that is what changed people's perception of electric cars, they went from being rubbish and slow, to suddenly being manly and fast, and they've got great acceleration. And you know, so even people who are obsessed with cars, can, could get into them. And that really, really has changed that, that has changed the perception. Now electric cars are the highest performance cars now, all these electric cars, are these hybrid cars’"

Links - 13th May 2022 (1 - Will Smith & Chris Rock at the Oscars)

Will Smith apologises to Chris Rock for Oscars slap as Academy Awards launches ‘formal investigation’ - "The 94th annual awards show was thrown into chaos when Smith went onstage and hit Rock after the comedian made a joke about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and her hair loss...   Smith appeared to laugh along at first but then strode up to the stage and struck Rock.  When he returned to his seat he shouted twice: "Keep my wife's name out of your f---ing mouth.""

Dr Joke Anderson on Twitter - "Jada Smith's grandmother taught her at NINE years to pleasure herself because she didn't want her to think she needed a man. Four generations of women brainwashed with this anti-relationship absurdity. Will Smith walked into a booby trap fr. He can never satisfy her. NEVER."

Meme - "The Will Smith Slap As Covered By 14 Different News Outlets
Fox news: Oscars Plagued By Rise In Black-On-Black Crime
Huffpost: The Patriarchal Roots Of Slapping, Exposed
CNN: Mostly Peaceful Oscars Threatens To Distract From January 6 Commission
OAN: If They Hadn't Stolen The Election From Trump, This Never Would Have Happened
Salon: White Supremacy Has Gotten Out Of Hand
Snopes: FALSE: Will Did Not "Slap" Chris. Chris's Cheek Struck The Palm Of Will's Hand
Vox: Rethinking The Slap: Why Getting Slapped Is Actually A Good Thing
The Daily Wire: "Will Smith DESTROYS Chris Rock With This One Simple Gesture"
Teen Vogue: "Will Smith's Totally Hot Slap And How You Can Use It On Your Genderqueer Partner In The Bedroom"
Infowars: "Illuminati Members Stage Fake Slap To Distract Us All From Implementation Of The New World Order"
Vice: "I Slapped Myself 100 Times And Smoked Crack To Better Understand The Black Experience In America"
The View: "Hurrr Durrr hurrr duh duh durrrr...."

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Slams Will Smith For 'Perpetuating Stereotypes' - "  “By hitting Rock, he announced that his wife was incapable of defending herself—against words,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote.  “This patronizing, paternal attitude infantilizes women and reduces them to helpless damsels needing a Big Strong Man to defend their honor least they swoon from the vapors”"

Meme - Kimberly Nicole Foster @KimberlyNFoster: "No one (except maybe Tom Cruise) has more carefully crafted their public image than Will Smith and the whites turned him into a Black Brute overnight. It's quite remarkable.
Violence is America's favorite pastime and largest export. We're talking about an open-handed slap. This is hilarious."

Is Trump to Blame For Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock? - "Howard Stern, who thinks Trump created COVID, says Trump’s personality inspired Smith to hit someone...   Whatever code Stern is speaking, CNN understands it. CNN analyst Asha Rangappa, too, says Trump inspired Smith to slap another man on stage...   Rangappa used to work for the FBI. I thought that was worth noting as well...   I will say, I’m a bit disappointed no one has yet blamed white supremacy for the assault at the Oscars. Don’t let generic white people off the hook for Smith vs. Rock, please."

Meme - Black Lives Matter St. Paul / Minneapolis: "I know some of you might be confused about Will Smith, an accomplished actor, slapping Chris Rock during the Oscars on live TV for making a harmless joke about his wife, Jade Pinkett Smith, being bald. So let me break this down for you from a cultural perspective. #1 The joke was not harmless. Jada has spoken publicly about her longterm struggles with hair loss due to Alopecia. #2 Will Smith is a very successful actor, rapper, & producer, but above all else he is a Black man. Furthermore, Will Smith is a Black man who is married to a Black woman. Within the Black community, there is an unspoken rule that you should never disrespect another man's wife. If you do then you could face the wrath of that woman's husband. It's a rule that is put in place as a protective measure to cover the wife. Chris Rock knows this rule because he is also part of the Black community. However, Chris Rock has chosen to violate this rule on more than one occasion & tonight he messed around & found out. While some may say that Will Smith should be arrested for his actions, I believe that at least within the Black community, he will be celebrated for protecting his Black Queen. However, violence isn't the answer."
Isn't it racist to say black people promote toxic masculinity?

Tiffany Haddish Gives Fierce Defense Of Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock At Oscars - "“The Afterparty” star, who was a presenter at the ceremony, called the moment “beautiful”... Rock, trying to stay composed, said: “That was the — greatest night in the history of television.”"

White outrage about Will Smith’s slap is rooted in anti-Blackness. It’s inequality in plain sight - "While it’s justifiable – important, even – to interrogate his motives for delivering the slap (was this really all about defending his wife or more about his own ego?), it’s clear that the backlash against Smith is rooted in not just anti-Blackness, but respectability politics as well... I also find it hard to believe that the same white audiences who consume violence against Black people on screen to an almost fetishistic degree (and are quite happy to have the Academy reward these gratuitously violent projects year after year) are so distraught about an open-palm slap. Again, this kind of performative pearl-clutching is only ever reserved for Black men who mess up... it’s clear that many people (even those in the community who mean well) only find the incident so objectionable because they hoped Smith would perform propriety for white people in that space."
Apparently violence is good if it's by a black man "defending his wife"
Apparently the only violence in movies is anti-black violence
Apparently violence is rampant in the black community, which is why being non-violent is performing propriety for white people

Chris Rock's 'joke' about Jada Pinkett Smith was rooted in racism and male patriarchy - "Since the encounter, there has been a lot of talk about the need to protect Black women. Some argue that Smith was protecting his wife, but Rock, in a room full of his peers, could've decided to not tell a distasteful joke about a Black woman. That is also a form of protecting Black women, especially since our hair and how we choose to wear it has been the butt of jokes for generations"
The only people you can make jokes about are white cis straight men

Amy Schumer alludes to 'month' break with 'out of office' snap after being 'traumatized' by Oscars
A break from what?!

S.E. Cupp on Twitter - "No one’s really talking about how it might have been traumatic to see actual violence - not Hollywood pretend violence - on live TV. It was deeply unsettling to watch it, and to rewatch it as we all have. No one bargained for that."
Jennifer Wiggin on Twitter - "It actually kept me up for two nights. I’m a thick skinned, strong woman and it was troubling to say the least. I felt for a moment that no one can trust anyone. That we’re all on our own. What a horrible feeling."
Why are "strong women" so weak?

Meme - Isabella Maria DeLuca: "Will Smith defends his wife on national TV with violence and gets praised. Parents defend their children at school board meetings with words and get labeled as domestic terrorists."

Facebook - "All anybody can talk about is Will Smith defending his Woman, when last week they didn’t even know what a Woman was."

Meme - Get Her, Jade! @keatingssixth: "Why do we even give this cotton- picking, shuck & jiving, "nooocee CaLVin," brittle hair Cantu using bigot and her Uncle Tom foolery cOOnery any attention #CandaceOwens" Get Her, Jade! @keatingssixth: "Chris Rock's one "joke" was rooted in misogynoir, texturism, & ableism. Degrading a Black woman, in a room full of her peers, on live TV. The fact ya'll don't see that as violent is beyond me."

Meme - "I think that Will Smith shoul- wait. *looks at hands* oh hang on, I'm quite white, so maybe I don't need to have an opinion on what a black man did to another black man because of what he said about his black wife. Maybe, I should just shut up and listen."
Comedian realizes she’s white and doesn’t need to have an opinion on a black man slapping another black man - "We’ve collected a whole lot of hot takes on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards: CNN’s Asha Rangappa, Howard Stern, Rosie O’Donnell, and Steve Schmidt all managed to lay some of the blame on Donald Trump. We’ve heard that white people being upset about the assault “is rooted in anti-Blackness” and also that “black emotions scare white people.” Forbes published a piece asking why jokes are always at the expense of black women (you’ve never heard a joke about a white man, have you?).  Sofie Hagen is a comedian and “fat activist” we’ve never heard of, but she had us preemptively blocked. That’s a shame because we almost missed her hot take: as a white person, she’s realized she should just “shut up and listen.”"
Black lives only matter when they can be used to shit on white people

Herb Powell - 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇩🇪 on Twitter - "There was more violence at the Oscar's than there was at the freedom convoy."

Meme - Michael McDonald @ElectProject: "The people who support Trump think more violence is a good thing"
Michael McDonald @ElectProject: "Will Smith just showed Ted Cruz what a real man does when someone belittles their wife"

Meme - No: "Toxic masculinity"
Yes: "Will Smith engaging in toxic masculinity"
Facebook - "BLM Twitter today."

Jim Carrey 'Sickened' By 'Spineless' Ovation For Will Smith At Oscars - "King pointed out that anyone else besides Smith would’ve probably been escorted out after the assault or even arrested. Carrey said Smith “should have been,” but that Rock — who declined to press charges — simply didn’t want the hassle... Kathy Griffin and Patton Oswalt suggested that Smith’s actions could create open season on comics simply for telling jokes the audience doesn’t like."

Will Smith Appeared to Laugh at Chris Rock Joke Before Hitting Comedian

Dre'Mont Jones on Twitter - "Will better than me I would never defend someone else girl like that"

Facebook - "If Chris Rock was smacked by a white man after he insulted his wife, end of that white man’s career, no questions asked. "

Matt Walsh on Twitter - "Will Smith will not tolerate other men making jokes about his wife. He will however tolerate other men having sex with his wife. This is a man of principle."

Meme - Blake Dylan Pilger: "I talked about in my last post how I was trying to acknowledge all the nuance in the situation with Chris Rock and Will Smith, yet I went right over the nuance that as a white person it isn't my place to comment on it. I apologize for commenting on an issue that doesn't concern me. We as white people can take this opportunity to evaluate how we may be adding flames to the fire of anti-blackness amongst ourselves instead of centering ourselves on public platforms, myself included. Sending love, and again, I apologize."

Meme - ""Black women this "black women that". Yall are so narcissistic and obsessed with your own skin color. Its pathetic. If the only thing you have is your skin color then you have nothing"

Links - 12th May 2022 (2 - Working from Home)

Why the rise of the TW&Ts is dividing the workplace - "Supporters of the government plan will highlight surveys carried out during the pandemic which suggested employees were just as productive, if not more, when working from home.  But research based on hard data tells a different story.  A joint study by the University of Essex and the University of Chicago earlier this year looked at the working practices of 10,000 IT staff and found productivity fell by 20 per cent when they worked from home compared to pre-pandemic levels when they were office-based.  Dr Christoph Siemroth, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Essex who co-authored the research paper, said: “These people were working in complex jobs that required them to work in teams, as in a lot of professions, and the data showed that they took far more hours to get through the same amount of work when they were home-based.”   One of the reasons, he said, was that workers spent much more time in meetings – held virtually, of course – because “something that might have been sorted out in 10 seconds by talking to someone in the office now involved setting up a Zoom call, which takes much longer”.  And while employees spent more time in meetings with their peers, they spent less time in meetings with their managers, which equalled fewer opportunities for personal development.   It reflects one of the constant themes of the WFH revolution during the pandemic; the difficulty in training new staff, who simply can’t learn the job when they are sitting on the end of a bed with a laptop.  Crucially, the research was based on objective data which showed precisely how home workers were spending their time, as opposed to employee surveys that only ever provide a subjective view... waiting times for broadband customers to be connected to customer service workers have doubled since the pandemic struck...   Ironically, but tellingly, the companies that make home working possible, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, are not so keen on the idea for their own staff.  The reason is simple: people are less likely to have great ideas when they are sitting at home on their own...   Sir James Dyson, whose business relies on creativity and innovation, believes Britain is heading for a two-tier workforce in which home workers will become “less and less effective”. Baroness Morrissey, the Conservative peer, has warned politicians that working from home will cause permanent damage to the economy.  If they are right, there could soon be yet another divide in Britain: between companies that stick with traditional office-based working and succeed, and those that go down the hybrid route and fail."

Apple's head of machine learning quits after being made to come back to the office three days a week - "Ian Goodfellow, the director of machine learning, is believed to be the most senior employee to resign so far as a result of the plan.  On April 11, the company began mandating one day a week in the office - a requirement that rose to two days on May 2. By May 23, all staff had to be at their desks three days a week. A survey of Apple workers from April 13-19 found 67 percent saying they were dissatisfied with the return-to-office policy... One Apple staffer speculated that Goodfellow's departure comes ahead of a potential announcement that the company will increase the in-person work requirement up to five days per week... The tech analyst is referred to as 'the father of general adversarial networks, or GANs,' according to the website 9to5Mac - pioneering technology which can be used generate fake media content... Apple and Google are the outliers [among big tech], with Google also demanding in March that workers had to come back into the office three days a week from April 4... 'We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely?' they write. 'How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?'"

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt on why people should return to the office - "“We spent decades having these conversations about people being close together ... the discussion at the coffee table and going to coffee,” Schmidt says. “Remember all of that? Was that all wrong?”  Schmidt says it’s not just a matter of nostalgia: There are practicalities to working together in person. For example, he says that conversations about professionalism — which might be particularly necessary at companies full of young employees — are much harder to have virtually.  When Schmidt started at Google, for example, the company had “an awful lot of college students who were behaving as though the workplace was like college,” he says. “And I used to say to them, ‘This is not college. This is a professional thing, you can’t do that. And, or, it might be illegal. So please stop, now.’” Younger employees, particularly those between the ages of 25 and 35, can also use in-office settings to more effectively develop their management styles, Schmidt says. For him, that includes learning about meeting etiquette, presentation skills, workplace politics and dealing with competitors, both internally and externally... There are exceptions, Schmidt notes: Some workers might have specialized roles that don’t require a lot of in-person communication, others might deeply dislike the office’s social nature and many probably aren’t looking forward to reintegrating lengthy commutes into their schedules.  Still, Schmidt says, a largescale movement to permanently work remotely would deny at least 30 to 40 years of workplace experience.  “I think there is a lot of evidence that humans are social,” he says. “And that the current virtual tools are not the same as the informal networks that occur within a corporation.”"

Workers Are Winning the Return-to-Office War Because They’re Right - Bloomberg - "The masks are coming off. Restaurants are filling up. International travel is resuming. But one thing is missing from this picture of returning normality: the rows of office workers bent over their desks. Just over two months ago, I wrote that returning to the office was the great class struggle of our time. I’m happy to report that, so far at least, the workers are winning.  In the U.S., office occupancy rates seem to have flatlined at about 43% according to Kastle Systems, which collects figures on the number of workers who are working at their desks in America’s ten largest business districts by measuring key swipes... Across the Atlantic, London’s occupancy peaked at 42% last month. This is possibly just a wobble, with the long-term trend still upward. But it seems more likely that companies have gathered the low hanging fruit — the people who were raring to return after the anomie of the lockdown — and will henceforth have to deal with much more resistance. Even elite companies that have made a great fuss about getting their employees back to work such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley are struggling with a resistance army of about 30%. The longer the standoff continues, the more difficult it will be to change people’s habits. Employers are making more liberal use of carrots and sticks to overcome this resistance. Returning workers are greeted with drinks parties, swag bags, complimentary classes and lots of happy talk about how the office should be fun. Alphabet Inc.’s Google treated its staff to a concert by Lizzo. Microsoft Corp. throws parties with local musical talent. Qualcomm Inc. puts on fitness classes for workers in the office. It’s a wonder that anybody can get any work done.  But there is an air of desperation about this... what are we to make of the technology start-up Clions, which has encouraged employees to move their desks to face the cherry blossoms to make work feel more like home?  Hence the sticks. Many companies, including Google, have ordered their workers to turn up for a fixed period of time — most commonly three days a week. Some managers have taken to whispering that there will be a “Zoom ceiling” on workers who stay at home rather than pulling their weight in the office. And the British government has launched a campaign to get stay-at-home civil servants back to the office. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for government efficiency, has compiled a league table of departments by occupancy rates. (The Department for Education comes at the bottom with 25%. The average across the civil service is 44%.)  Rees-Mogg has taken to leaving faux-polite notes on civil servants’ desks saying “sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.” Yet bullying is no more likely than bribery to be successful in today’s tight labor market. The only chance that employers have of winning the class struggle and restoring the ancient regime before the pandemic is if they band together to force employees back to the office. But absent such a grand capitalist conspiracy, employees will vote with their feet and clever employers will use flexibility as a recruitment tool. A series of employee surveys point to the same conclusion: Ipsos found that a third of employees would rather resign than return to the office fulltime;  Korn Ferry found that 64% feared that returning to work would hurt their mental health; two-thirds of Google employees are unhappy about having to return to work three days a week. Employers report that potential new recruits are demanding flexible working as a condition of even thinking about taking a job. The back-to-the office ultras in the business community have been forced to compromise: JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive Jamie Dimon, for example, said in his latest letter to shareholders that half the bank’s staff will spend some or all of their time working from home in the future. At the same time, reformers who concluded that something fundamental has changed in the world of work are increasingly confident in their analysis. The accountancy and consulting giant Deloitte LLP has cut its office space in London by more than a third as the hybrid model becomes mainstream and some employees choose to work from home fulltime. There are many possible reasons why so many people are so reluctant to return to the good old ways: lingering worries about Covid; the darkening international situation; the rising cost of fuel; and the growing disorder of American cities, as crime rates soar, homeless camps proliferate and the mentally ill roam the subways. The Kastle figures show much higher occupancy rates in Austin and Dallas, the country’s leaders, than in New York and San Francisco, where commutes are longer and urban disorder worse. A Harris poll for USA Today found that 78% of employees were concerned about being able to afford gas for their commutes. But so far none of these explanations is completely convincing: In America, restaurant reservations and seat occupancy rates on airplanes have reached 90% of their pre-pandemic levels while Britain saw a mass exodus from the country at Easter. The real reason why people don’t want to go back to the office fulltime is that they don’t see the point. Most knowledge workers think that they can do their job just as well from home — and they can point to endless figures that show that they are right. Why endure the hassle of a commute if you can get that report written in the home office? The clash between workers and employers over returning to work is more than just a struggle over commuting and convenience, though it is certainly that. It is a clash over the meaning of work...  When it comes to passing on the tricks of the trade, generating a sense of camaraderie or solving collective problems, there is nothing better than sharing the same space... Companies need to think hard about how to use new technology to reinforce social bonds and transmit corporate culture. How about “virtual co-working,” whereby colleagues who work at home either keep Zoom on all the time or collaborate over particular projects? (This author co-wrote a book with John Micklethwait over WhatsApp during lockdown.) Or virtual water coolers whereby colleagues drop in on each other at pre-arranged times? Or virtual coffee meetings whereby an algorithm arranges random meetings between colleagues? (The U.K. Treasury was using this device before Covid struck.)  Above all, they need to reconceptualize offices as fundamentally social places — not where people go to do their old jobs interspersed with a bit of “fun,” but where they perform irreducibly collective tasks instead of feeding data to smart machines that don’t give a damn what desk they’re sitting on"

Business casual attire evolves to business comfort among hybrid workers - "With variants like Omicron making it tough for companies to set return-to-office dates, new fashion trends are emerging among hybrid workers, according to the 2022 Stitch Fix Style Forecast. These include a prolonged move toward comfortable attire — and there are no signs of a comeback for the beleaguered business suit... The report found clients ditching the business suit in droves, with about half of millennials saying they’ll never wear one again."

Who pays for the toilet paper? The big questions of the work-from-home era - "As the world convulses in crisis, and tens of millions of us dig in for the long haul of working from home, one question looms large: who pays for the tea and toilet paper?  The answer, according to the Dutch, is your bosses. And how much? About two euros ($2.40) per working day, on average.  That’s meant to cover not only coffee, tea and toilet paper used in work hours, but also the extra gas, electricity and water, plus the depreciation costs of a desk and a chair – all essentials that you’d never dream of paying for in the office. “We have literally calculated down to how many teaspoons there are in an average household, so from there it’s not that difficult to establish the costs,” said Gabrielle Bettonville of family finances institution NIBUD, which is mainly funded by the government and researched the extra costs of remote working."

'I miss remote work already': Workers are back in offices — and it's been very, very awkward - "  As of April 11, an average of 43 per cent of workers had returned to offices across 10 of the United States’ top business centres, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and D.C., according to data monitored by Kastle Systems. In late December, during the Omicron surge, occupancy averaged just 17.5 per cent... Some workers are coming back to the same desks but no longer know their colleagues. Others are braving offices for the first time, having joined the workforce in the remote-everything era... “In my opinion, we’re actually seeing far greater struggles on the human side as people are trying to figure out exactly what the new routines are going to be and as organizations are struggling to adjust to people’s new beliefs about work,” Knight told The Washington Post.  Being around other people feels draining. Swapping flexibility for anything mandatory seems like a downgrade. Old routines have become foreign and taxing: suiting up and commuting, making calls in front of co-workers, navigating run-ins with bosses in the restroom, picking a seat in the company kitchen. And the new stuff is weirder, like schlepping into work just to sit on Zoom calls in an empty office... Katherine has noticed a gap between her colleagues that graduated and started working remotely versus those “who knew what the real world was like.” She’s been trying to help out, offering advice about things she thought were common knowledge: Here’s what you should do with your hands during a meeting. Direct your attention to the person who’s presenting. Take notes, make eye contact. Don’t bring a snack. Don’t touch your phone...   She’s seen some “insane” fashion choices from younger cohorts, too. Recently, a younger colleague came into the bank sporting a plaid suit like the one Cher wears in “Clueless” with white cowboy boots. Someone else wore their Balenciaga joggers on casual Friday.   “What is this?” Katherine said. “There is no world in which this needs to be worn to the office.” Her own style has shifted to prioritize ease and efficiency; “everything needs to look good and be super comfortable.” She’s whittled her makeup routine down so it’s “snatched in five minutes.” She’s noticed the trend toward energy conservation more generally, not just in herself but in her colleagues. She suspects it’s because people are feeling more taxed by in-person interactions."

How employers can navigate the new hybrid workplace - The Globe and Mail - "People tend to be more satisfied when they have control over their work environment, she says, and remote workers save time and money on commuting. Still, there are downsides to remote work. Employees whose social life intersects with their work life, often early-career employees, aren’t going to get that working at home... “For some people, it’s simply lonely to work at home, particularly if you are on your own,” she says.  And remote work also does seem to make it more difficult to work in teams.  “Or at least we have to work harder doing that team-based work, work that requires high degrees of collaboration, brainstorming, bouncing off each other,” Dr. Black says.  Some people are good at setting themselves up to work from home; others are not.  “When the end of the day comes, they shut the door and they’re off the clock; they’re not working any more,” Dr. Black says. “For other people, that’s much harder. Sometimes they literally don’t have a door to shut, so it spills over. They ended up doing more hours of work.”  In the longer term, some fear the impact on career progression, she says."

Goldman junior bankers are publicly threatening to leave Wall Street for tech as CEO demands full-time return to office - "“In GS, the top management says it’s employees choice but internally they track which team has most in office attendance”... Although not all workers are happy to go back into the office, for an industry like finance, and a bank like Goldman Sachs, it can be beneficial to have employees in the office.  In a recent interview, David Solomon explained his logic of wanting workers to come back.  “The secret sauce to our organization is, we attract thousands of really extraordinary young people who come to Goldman Sachs to learn to work, to create a network of other extraordinary people, and work very hard to serve our clients”... Goldman Sachs has an apprenticeship culture. More than 75% of the workforce are Millennials or Gen-Z, and people in the earlier stages of their career benefit from learning from senior leaders. This is crucial to career development and better relationships can be formed if done in person... On Blind, some bankers have shared they’ve started interviewing at other companies that offer more flexibility, like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Netflix, and Google."

'Bet your dog's missing you': Toronto office's return-to-work posters spark controversy - "A downtown Toronto building was forced to remove signage that was meant to welcome employees back to the office last week.  Oxford Properties had placed signs in a building’s lobby, located at 20 Bay Street, "in an attempt to be lighthearted."  One sign reads: "Seriously, we missed you," while another asks: "Miss your sweatpants yet?" A third sign reads: "Bet your dog's missing you.""

IBM Work-From-Home Policy Now a Thing of the Past - "A spokesperson for IBM says the company decided to require in-office work for its marketing teams in batches (as opposed to the other departments, which either started as co-located or gradually moved in that direction) because of the field's modern demands. "Marketing is no longer a 'waterfall' work process, where work is handed from one person to another," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "It is an iterative process, where the effects of changes in a campaign can be understood live, and responded to in real-time."... IBM's spokesperson cites internal research that has found "marketing teams that work in a co-located, agile environment are more effective and have better job satisfaction. In fact, there has been a very positive response to making this universal across marketing.""
Pre-covid

COVID-19 Pandemic Continues To Reshape Work in America - "60% of workers with jobs that can be done from home say when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time"

Remote Work Persisting and Trending Permanent - "54% of employees who work remotely at least some of the time say they would ideally like to split their time between working at home and in the office -- a hybrid arrangement. A little over a third (37%) would like to work from home exclusively, while 9% want to return to the office full time."
Someone cited the previous study to claim that most workers in the US didn't want to go back to the office ever. When I pointed out that "all or most of the time" was not the same as "all of the time" and dug up this disaggregated data, she got very upset and ragequit

US Remote Work Survey: PwC
I hear a lot of people claiming most workers don't want to return to the office at all, but in this survey, 8% don't want to work remotely, 10% want to work remotely 1-3 days a month, 10% want to work remotely 1 day a week, 19% want to work remotely 2 days a week, 16% want to work remotely 3 days a week, 10% want to work remotely 4 days a week and 29% want to work remotely 5 days a week (I'll assume that is full time). So 71% want to go back to the office at least once a week

Will Work-from-Home Work Forever? - Freakonomics - "DUBNER: Let’s take one profession that you’re intimately familiar with, which is college professor. Have you been teaching online during the pandemic?
DAVIS: I have. And I hate it.
DUBNER: Because why?
DAVIS: The students may not believe this, but when I teach, I try to figure out based on body language and the way that they look at me what’s making sense to them and what’s not. I just cannot figure out how to do that online. So, teaching remotely has been, for me, a terrible experience...
So, the teaching part of his job has suffered. But teaching isn’t the only thing an economics professor does.
DAVIS: We used to try to have remote seminars, and it was kind of a disaster. People would walk down the stairs or the dog would bark. Everyone now has learned how to have these remote seminars in my field.
DUBNER: Do you think you’ll ever return to those in-person seminars, at least anywhere near the same degree?
DAVIS: I don’t know. What I think about a lot now is If I’m invited, I could go to seminars anywhere around the world. And that has made me more productive.  This is an excellent example of why working at home and working in the office are complementary for the same occupation...
Before the pandemic, Americans were commuting, on average, 54 minutes a day. Bloom and his coauthors found that people spent about 35 percent of that saved commuting time on their primary jobs, and about 60 percent on all non-leisure activity, including housework and childcare...
DAVIS: So, just for full transparency, we don’t observe productivity. We infer it. We infer that productivity of working at home was on average 50 percent of what productivity of working in the office is.
So that’s quite different from the higher productivity for those Chinese call-center jobs. When you measure across the entire work spectrum, Davis says:
DAVIS: Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always. So that would make you think, “Oh, then you always want to work 100 percent at the office.” But the nature of these goods is that they are complementary. So, on average, that’s true. But at the margin, that’s not true. That’s a little confusing; let’s back up. The central argument here’s that the office creates certain benefits that your home can’t beat.
DAVIS: The real benefit to being at the office is face-to-face interaction — which might be painful if it’s your boss reprimanding you, but this concept of a knowledge spillover — all of that causes, we think, productivity to be higher at the office than at home. But we also think working at home is not as unproductive as it used to be. Because we have all of these tools at our disposal.
So Davis and his colleagues argue that productivity is substantially lower when people work from home, but — and this is a big “but” — work-from-home productivity has increased since the start of the pandemic. And not by just a little bit. They argue it has increased 46 percent relative to the productivity of working in the office.
DAVIS: Here’s the way to think about it. Whatever the productivity was in 2019, we’re better at working from home than we used to be.
This was only possible because of technologies that already existed."

Why Airlines, Cities, and Starbucks Need Remote Workers Back at the Office - "As companies in cities across the U.S. postpone and even scrap plans to reopen their offices, they have transformed once-teeming city business districts into commercial ghost towns comprised of essentially vacant skyscrapers and upscale complexes. A result has been the paralysis of the rarely remarked-upon business ecosystem centering on white-collar workers, who, when you include the enterprises reliant on them, account for a pre-pandemic labor force approaching 100 million workers... Meanwhile, in the air, white-collar workers previously kept a parallel economy buzzing, with business travel accounting for 60% to 70% of all airline revenue. While leisure getaways have also been obliterated, it turns out the bigger punch is the Zoomification of business meetings, a cancellation of business travel that analysts expect to persist for up to two or three years."

The Pandemic Workday Is 48 Minutes Longer and Has More Meetings - Bloomberg - "the workday lasted 48.5 minutes longer, the number of meetings increased about 13% and people sent an average of 1.4 more emails per day to their colleagues... Those additional meetings were shorter... Other analyses looking at VPN data found people were putting in three additional hours in the U.S. and logging in at odd hours. People who spoke to Bloomberg News attributed their harried schedules to child care demands, blurring boundaries between work and home, and the stresses of an economic recession"

Why People Like Working From Home - The Atlantic - "Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, one of the great “disruptors” of our age, deemed remote work “a pure negative” last fall. The 60-year-old Hastings is at the forefront of an existential crisis in the world of work, demanding that people return to the office despite not having an office himself. His criticism of remote work is that “not being able to get together in person” is bad... Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line."

The Big Read in short: Working remotely overseas not as simple as it seems - "some Singapore firms are looking at allowing their employees to work temporarily from overseas for up to six months... Factors such as taxation and labour laws mean that prolonging the period where one works remotely overseas for a Singapore firm will come with complications.   Mr Chris Woo, tax leader of accountancy firm PwC Singapore, pointed out that one cannot expect to stay in a foreign country indefinitely without resident obligations, such as paying taxes and observance of labour laws, coming into play sooner or later.   He added that this is why visitors to a certain country are generally allowed to be there only for a limited period of time and have to be issued work or employment passes, or visas if they wish to extend their stay... whenever a Singapore company has employees working in foreign countries, it “runs the risk of being liable for corporate income taxes in those countries by virtue of creating a ‘permanent establishment’ or taxable presence there”...   Ms Charmaine Neo, the head of employment practice and investigations practice at WMH Law Corporation, gave the hypothetical example of a Singaporean employee employed by a Singapore company posted to work in the United Kingdom. “Your contract is under Singapore law… but if you work in the UK they may have different working hours, and even things like different minimum wage laws,” she said.   “Even though your (employment) contract may be perfectly legal under Singapore law, the fact that you are working in the UK itself could also render you or your company to potential exposure to liabilities for laws in that country.”...   The CPF Board website states that CPF contributions "are not payable on wages given to your employee who is employed to work overseas”...   Experts cautioned that if left unchecked, this phenomenon could have repercussions for the Singapore workforce.   Said Mr Teo from the Elitez Group of Companies: “If this becomes an increasing trend, then the stark reality for many Singaporeans, especially the young graduates, is that they must be aware that they are no longer competing with other local workforce members… They're competing on a global scale.”"

The dark side of working from home - " When all of your work is conducted virtually you end up inviting your managers into your home via Zoom. Your bosses may even make judgements about your lifestyle from what they see... This infiltration of work into our homes robs us of our private space, where we can switch off from work and relax how we please. It is difficult for anyone to wind down if they are constantly taking calls from work or if they know that they will have to return to work once they have put their kids to bed."

Opinion: In the move to remote work, we are losing our sense of connection to the workplace - The Globe and Mail - "As the pandemic drags on, many white-collar workers are realizing that those seemingly banal water-cooler chats in the office during pre-pandemic times were surprisingly important to their mental health. Sure, it ate up valuable time chatting about the latest Netflix series and commiserating about commuting, but it was also a glue that helped us connect with co-workers. The lack of office socializing and collaboration is contributing to the weakening of our work relationships and increasing employee stress.  According to researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, lack of community is one of the root causes of burnout. “The area of community has to do with the ongoing relationships that employees have with other people on the job,” they wrote in a 2016 paper. “When these relationships are characterized by a lack of support and trust, and by unresolved conflict, then there is a greater risk of burnout. On the contrary, when these job‐related relationships are working well, there is a great deal of social support, employees have effective means of working out disagreements, and they are more likely to experience job engagement.”  Spending time with people at work also tends to decrease loneliness. People who spent five or more hours with co-workers in the past week were 1.7 times less likely to be lonely, according to a joint study from the GenWell Project and the University of Victoria that analyzed loneliness during the pandemic... During the pandemic, our research team found that employees were finding it hard to stay connected to their peers while working remotely. Eighty-five per cent said their well-being has declined in the pandemic and around 40 per cent of respondents said they struggled with being so disconnected from co-workers... The ideal is a scenario where teams come in at the same time and are out of the office at the same time. That can mean three days in and two days out. It can be once a week or month – even a few times a year if teams work in different parts of the country or even the world. The point is that investing in consistently reconnecting and finding time together as a team is critical to combatting loneliness at work. Technology can then be used to augment – versus replace – existing relationships."

Bring back the commute and office attire. A growing sense of isolation and lack of belonging shifting feelings on remote work | The Star - "those who work exclusively from home say they feel more isolated than those who work on-site or do a mix of both. And almost 40 per cent of people who work at least part of the time from home say they do not feel a sense of belonging or acceptance at work or were unsure about it, up 12 percentage points since before the pandemic... 44 per cent of those who work exclusively from home said it became more difficult to maintain a sense of community with their colleagues, compared with 33 per cent who continued to go to a workplace... employees working from home get more done, but they also work longer hours... two thirds of respondents want to return to the office full time or at least part of the time."

What Meetings Will Look Like After the Pandemic - The Atlantic - "I believe we’ll also see an eventual reduction in the time spent in meetings. Meetings used to feel special because of the pomp and circumstance of physically gathering, but reducing them to a link has removed the mystique that pressured us to “take up all of the time.” In my own experiment of offering clients the opportunity to end a meeting when we are done talking, I’ve found that they’re elated—if we can get a call done in 10 minutes, that’s 20 to 50 minutes of their time that they’ve just gotten back, because our meeting culture has shifted from performance to pragmatism.  All that being said, fully remote meetings can have downsides. Relying on a dozen or more different internet connections regularly leads to people inadvertently misjudging speaking cues (something you can gauge a little better in person), or missing parts of conversations, or having someone unexpectedly drop out at the worst moment. It can also be hard to tell whether you’ve actually engaged someone with your comments—for better or for worse—because everybody’s staring at separate parts of the screen. And by now most of us have taken to browsing other tabs while someone else is speaking, sort of half-listening with our cameras on (or off). It is indeed challenging to give a virtual speaker your undivided attention for more than a few minutes."

When All The Media Narratives Collapse

When All The Media Narratives Collapse - by Andrew Sullivan

"The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree...

I haven’t watched the whole trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you’ve been led to believe a media narrative that was way off... The judge is already being targeted. I’m not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there’s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate,” even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. We were told that the “2021 Inflation Scare is another in a series of false alarms going back several decades.” We were assured that “the numbers at least for now are on the side of those expecting the trend to subside and then stabilize at lower levels.” Any concern was “fearmongering politics.” And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. Still, they tell us, all will be well.

We were told that vaccines would end the Covid pandemic. But they merely altered Covid to a manageable disease that you could still contract while vaccinated. We were told that the migrant surge at the border was just seasonal, and nothing out of the ordinary, even as 1.7 million migrants were illegally trying to get into the country in the last year. We were told that sending migrants back to their home countries was a wicked and unconscionable Trump tactic — even as the Biden administration swiftly copied it with Haitian immigrants — to much success. The cruelty is the point, eh?

We were — and still are! — being told by most of the media that critical race theory isn’t in high schools at all. Meanwhile, a tsunami of evidence is out there showing that it absolutely is — in every subject, and every class, as the central philosophy behind many states’ education policies.

We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit? One comes to mind: the assurance that the insane amount of debt we have incurred this century is absolutely nothing to be concerned about because interest rates are super-low and borrowing more and more now is a no-brainer. But when inflation spikes and sets off a potential spiral in wages to catch up, will interest rates stay so quiescent? And if interest rates go up, how will we service the debt so easily?"

Links - 12th May 2022 (1 - Critical Race Theory)

Is wokeness the West’s new religion? - "Critics of wokeness often compare it with a religion. Like religious fundamentalists, woke believers tend to be self-righteous, dogmatic and puritanical. Anyone who thinks this comparison is stretching it should see what is happening in British schools. While woke ideas about race and gender have been in the school curriculum for some time, one teachers’ group wants to take things a step further. It wants woke precepts like ‘white privilege’ to be taught as part of kids’ religious studies. New curriculum guidance from the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), which represents RE teachers in the UK, says that primary-school children aged between eight and 11 should be taught an ‘anti-racist’ RE curriculum... in a clear nod to the iconoclasm of last summer’s BLM demos, apparently children should also learn why Bristol’s Colston statue is ‘racially offensive’. Teachers are even urged to confess their unconscious racial biases."

Where Have the Honest Liberals Gone? - WSJ - "  Stanley Crouch, the cultural critic who died last month at 74, was a tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy.  In the 1980s and ’90s, when he wrote for publications like the Village Voice and the New Republic, he was sometimes referred to as a “black conservative,” the lazy label applied to any black person who strays from civil-rights orthodoxy. Crouch was liberal but decidedly not doctrinaire, and black intellectual elites often came in for bruising in his work. Crouch wrote that the black-power activists of the 1960s did little more than “transform white America into Big Daddy and the Negro movement into an obnoxious, pouting adolescent demanding the car keys.” He observed that “Afrocentrism is another of the clever but essentially simple-minded hustles that have come about over the last twenty-five years” and “has little to offer of any intellectual substance.” His essay on Derrick Bell (1930-2011), a black scholar who popularized critical race theory in the 1980s, was titled “Dumb Bell Blues.”... Critical race theory attributes social inequality to racial power structures. It posits that problems within the black community are entirely the fault of whites and the responsibility of whites to solve. This thinking has grown in popularity over the past decade through the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Its jargon—“white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “unconscious bias”—has entered the vernacular. It has moved beyond college campuses and into our elementary schools via Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” It has entered workplaces through “diversity” and “racial sensitivity” training...   Many people are learning for the first time that the government has been paying “diversity consultants” to teach employees that the U.S. is inherently racist. But what’s also been revealed is the dwindling number of Stanley Crouches on the political left who are willing to call out today’s Derrick Bells. Progressives have succeeded in bringing into the mainstream a school of thought once relegated to the fringes of the academy. There is no shortage of conservatives willing to push back against this pernicious nonsense, but where have the honest liberals gone?  In 1989, Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law School, published a devastating law-review article on the “empirical weaknesses and inflated rhetoric” of critical race theorists. He also noted their “strategic use of accusations of prejudice.” Toward the end, Mr. Kennedy revealed that black colleagues who had seen earlier drafts of the article urged him not to publish it. They feared that it might undermine their arguments for racial preferences in hiring. Mr. Kennedy suggested that they come up with better arguments.  Liberal black elites claim to speak on behalf of everyday blacks when in reality they are just speaking for themselves. School choice and crime control are two obvious examples. Blacks favor charter schools and putting more police in their neighborhoods, while civil-rights leaders call for charter-school moratoriums and reduced funding for law enforcement. Nor is this divide a new phenomenon. In 1993, a Gallup poll found that 75% of black respondents wanted more cops on the street; 82% said that the criminal-justice system didn’t treat offenders harshly enough; and 68% favored building more prisons so that longer sentences could be handed out.  Pushing “white supremacy” or “systemic racism” as a blanket explanation for racial disparities is a parlor game for better-off blacks who can afford to play games. It helps activists raise money and intellectuals secure cushy posts in the academy, but it does nothing to help the black underclass, which is more interested in safer neighborhoods and better schools than in making white people feel guilty."

Op-ed: White teachers who refuse to teach CRT should leave profession - "This fight to uphold white supremacist values and beliefs that perpetuate psychological, emotional, and physical violence against Black and Brown students is being played out on a national front in schools of all classifications throughout the United States.  Why am I not seeing more teachers outraged by this? My inclination is to believe that the lack of outcry is over- shadowed by the even bigger and collective exhale of teachers — White teachers — who are relieved by the denouncement of culturally relevant, responsive, and sustainable curriculum. These are teachers who have never had a desire to and who never will teach about anything not based in White privilege. This apathetic approach to education, in my years of experience, is too often rooted in the educators own lack of learning. It’s rooted in their racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic beliefs. If you’re an educator who has let this year go by without attending to the issues and events that matter most to our shared humanity and that directly or indirectly impact your students, their families, and their communities, then there’s no longer room for you in the proverbial inn. Exit stage left. The show is over. Your leading role has been cancelled without renewal...
Vivett Dukes is an educator and social activist."
From May 2021. This won't stop liberals gaslighting about how CRT is not taught in schools

Kendi and Reynolds' Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, a Remix—A Partial List of Errors - "  The "hot" book to "spur discussion" about racism or teach about "antiracism" for middle and high school students is Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi's book, Stamped a Remix, which is a dumbed-down version of Kendi's book Stamped from the Beginning.  Kendi's antiracism ideology is pernicious. He divides the world into segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists. The assimilationists, like the segregationists, are in Kendi's telling all racists (pages xii-xiii). This includes almost everyone prominent who has ever worked for civil rights, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois (at least until he became a Communist), Martin Luther King, Jr., and more. Any book that depicts these individuals as racists should raise more than a few eyebrows before getting assigned to middle-schoolers. The hero of the last third of the book is Angela Davis. For some reason, even though she was Communist who devoted most of her life to advancing Communism in general rather than civil rights specifically, and was an over-the-top apologist for every brutal action ever taken by the USSR, she becomes the exemplar of antiracism. Davis' attitude toward Soviet Jewish dissidents fighting for religious and cultural freedom, for example, was worse than dismissive. The Harvard Crimson reported in 1972 that Davis "explained that the situation of Jews in Russia 'has been totally blown out of proportion by the bourgeois press because they're going to do everything they can to discredit socialism.'" Not incidentally, she was and remains [link has her engaging in a modern version of blood libel by ridiculously linking Israel to police violence against blacks in the U.S.] an antisemite, and it's rather difficult to see how a racist against Jews can be an antiracist heroine. (One wonders more generally if it's a coincidence that every one of Kendi's modern heroes–Davis, Malcolm X, Jeremiah Wright, Stokely Carmichael–has a history of antisemitism.)   But plenty of other people have taken on Kendi's ideology. I had occasion to read the book, and made a running list of errors, which is undoubtedly incomplete. The list is extensive enough that no reputable academic institution should assign the book... Along with gross errors, I'm including examples of where the authors gloss over reality when it suits their agenda. Some of these errors go to the heart of Kendi's project, some are minor. But together they reflect authors who are indifferent to fact...
Page 162: Malcom X and the Nation of Islam. The book's description of NOI's philosophy makes it sound rather benign, ignoring both the overtly racist and crazy elements of it...
Page 170: Angela Davis. The books suggests that she was unhappy with the "white activism" she found at Brandeis, and created her own Afrocentric ideology after the Birmingham bombing. In fact, she was mainly influenced by the white, Jewish, Communist Herbert Marcuse, who was her professor and mentor at Brandeis. The authors need to distort the history because Davis adopting ideas she learned from a white Communist wouldn't fit with the Afrocentric theme of the book...
Page 174: The book states that Senator and 1964 presidential candidate's Barry Goldwater's opposition to federal spending was because it was going to black people for the first time ("This racist epiphany hit Goldwater once Black people were receiving government assistance, too."). This is utter and pernicious nonsense. There is no evidence that Goldwater's views on government spending, which long predated the civil rights era, had anything to do with black people, and they reflect a longstanding American libertarian tradition of being in favor of limited government that has existed independently of whether black people were potential beneficiaries (or victims) of the government. Goldwater, of course, came to these views while growing up in Arizona, where the black population was small, and whre his own family had a deserved reputation for racial tolerance.
193-97: Discussion of Angela Davis' arrest and acquittal for smuggling guns used in a kidnapping and murder. The book spins a fictional tale. The truth, via historian Ron Radosh: "Eventually, she was acquitted in 1972, despite her proven ownership of the murder weapons and a cache of letters she wrote to George Jackson in prison expressing her passionate romantic feelings for him and unambivalent solidarity with his commitment to political violence."...
206 "Reagan's economic policies caused unemployment to skyrocket." Unemployment went up at the beginning of the Reagan administration, then went down for the rest of it to lower levels than when he started...
216: The authors criticize a Black women's organization being "racist" for being opposed to misogynistic "gangsta rap." As if one can't imagine other reasons for Black women criticizing misogynistic rap lyrics."
So much for CRT being "teaching accurate history"

Kyle Kashuv on Twitter - "Also, to Republicans, a thought: Don't "ban" Critical Race Theory. You can't (and shouldn't) ban ideas, particularly if they are impossible to delineate (something deeply true of CRT)."
"There is no “market place of ideas” in a Kindergarten classroom…"

Race education in preschool? How some daycares teach kids about racism - "On one of their first days back to school, a group of 3-year-olds at Little Sun People preschool in Brooklyn, New York, spent the morning learning how to write their names"
Indoctrination must start early for best results

Meme - "Iowa teacher with a "sinister agenda": "If it wasn't for teachers, more kids would turn out like their parents."
"That's the point."
It's still a "myth" that teachers see their job as indoctrinating children

Desperately Seeking Sunlight | American Civil Liberties Union - "It has been said that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”" - ACLU, 2008
ACLU on Twitter - "There can be no accountability without transparency. Journalists, advocates, and lawyers must have access to the places where immigrants are held." - ACLU, 2021
ACLU on Twitter - "Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools." - ACLU, 2022
Comment: "“CRT isn’t being taught in K-12 schools!”
“CRT isn’t being taught in K-12 schools, and parents have no right to know if it is!”
You guys are hilarious."

Facebook - "The ACLU - American Civil Liberties Union - comes out against transparency!  Imagine that?!  This is why we set up Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) last year. To pick up the mantle the ACLU dropped. To have a national organization that actually stands for civil liberties.  Today, FAIR filed a federal lawsuit to stop New York City from enforcing its unconstitutional order prioritizing Covid-19 treatments based on racial categorization and ethnicity*"

Meme - Jesse Singal @jessesingal: "As a Jewish person I'm concerned that wildly popular people like Robin DiAngelo are ACTIVELY ENCOURAGING whites to view themselves as a unified collective without a moment's thought as to how reviving this sci..." "As a White Nationalist person, I'm rubbing my hands together in glee that critical race theory, BLM thuggery, & other rogue Golems are increasingly driving self-respecting white people toward unapologetic white identity politics."

Meme - "You'Re A BAD PERSON! YOUR MoM Is A BAD PERSON! YOUR DAD IS A BAD PERSoN! YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE BAD PeoPLe! YoUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS ARE EVEN WORSE! EVERYTHING THEY GAVE YoU WAS STOLEN, AND YoU NEED To APoLOGIZE FoR ALL oF it!"
"How WAS YoUR FIRST DAY BACK, HoNEY?"

Is "Critical Race Theory" the Wrong Term? - "People just make these things up on the fly, reveling in the overthrow of prevailing attitudes, even if the overturned standards are ones they themselves set ten minutes ago. It’s fashion, not politics... Critical race theory,” said the Washington Post’s Colbert King, “is simple truth-telling.”  The war over “Critical Race Theory” in this sense has become a political marketing campaign that’s uniquely double-edged in its cynicism. Democrats are pretending they don’t know what the fuss is all about. Republicans are pretending there isn’t a dog whistle in their backlash campaign. At the center of it all is the concept itself, which does exist but is much broader, and both more interesting and more frightening, than the narrow race theory that has Republican politicians in maximum wig-out mode.  Two years ago, writer Wesley Yang penned a series of tweets about the “new language of power throughout the non-profit sphere,” giving it a name: the “Successor Ideology.”... What Yang went on to describe in a series of articles and appearances isn’t narrowly about race, or trans issues, or feminism, or American history, but a much wider concept that argues that our foundational notions about everything are wrong and need to be overturned... Attempts by conservatives or even critics on the left to question any of this are usually described in news accounts as efforts to clamp down on something uncontroversially right and necessary, e.g. “educational discussions about race.” This ignores the fact that the movement seems also to be about things like ending blind auditions for orchestra applicants, or redefining mathematics to discourage a focus on “getting the right answer,” to classics teachers canceling the classics, and many other bizarre things"

You Have to Read This Letter - "It was written by a Brearley parent named Andrew Gutmann.  If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission... Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week...
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died... I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism... If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought. And if Brearley really cared about “inclusiveness,” the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto “One Brearley,” instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors. l object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, a Marxist, anti family, heterophobic, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests... I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive (something that has already happened in my daughter's 4th grade class). I object to the lowering of standards for the admission of students and for the hiring of teachers. I object to the erosion of rigor in classwork and the escalation of grade inflation. Any parent with eyes open can foresee these inevitabilities should antiracism initiatives be allowed to persist... Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters’ teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of “consequences.” I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality, and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home. I object that Brearley is fostering a divisive community where families of different races, which until recently were part of the same community, are now segregated into two. These are the reasons why we can no longer send our daughter to Brearley."

Meme - Ryan James Girdusky: "CRT is in private schools including religious, charter, and nonsectarian schools. Saying we should increase school choice as an answer for CRT is like being in a horror movie and choosing to stay in the killer's house but just switching rooms."

Critical race theory in medicine - "Deeply rooted in theory-informed action, critical race theory can be used to understand the structural forces that drive racial inequities in society, and to work toward their dismantling. Studying race and racism, even structurally, is insufficient and must be coupled with tangible action at multiple levels. Critical race theory is organized around 4 main ideas, referred to by the terms “race consciousness,” “contemporary orientation,” “centring the margins” and “praxis.” Race consciousness refers to an understanding of racialization, or the creation of “race” as a social process that assigns meaning and value to physical and cultural differences between people... In medicine, it means thinking critically about what makes it possible to perceive race as a biological fact, and why it is so easy to use race as an explanation for health differences between people while overlooking the effects of political and social forces... Critical race theory forces us to reassess the racist practices we take for granted and the policies we perceive as “neutral.” For example, routinely obtaining a history from patients without seeking professional translation services when there is language discordance between patient and provider is wholly inadequate care, yet widely accepted... In the context of critical race theory, “centring the margins” means shifting our focus from the dominant group to those who have been pushed to the margins. It means valuing the expertise of people who have been marginalized and oppressed, in addressing inequities and creating new alternatives. A growing body of medical scholarship informed by critical race theory, published over the past decade, has shed light on how racism affects the way physicians care for patients from primary care to rheumatology and obstetrics. However, there has been little discussion of how critical race theory can be woven into the very fabric of the medical profession... Praxis, or theory-informed action, urges clinicians to move beyond mere recognition of racism to intervening to eliminate race-based health disparities... Racialized health care workers face microaggressions and other forms of everyday racism at work... Critical race theory prompts reflection on the structural foundations underpinning these everyday experiences and action to address them. Rather than everyday racism being disregarded as isolated, minor incidents, critical race theory encourages centring of the experiences of racialized trainees and physicians and shifts focus from intention to impact. It can drive measures such as reviewing and modifying hiring practices and training programs, and the creation of communities of support to foster safe and inclusive workplaces."
Weird. Liberals keep telling us CRT is only about the law. I guess all these papers (like the microaggressions paper) need to be retracted since they have misunderstood CRT

Critical Race Theory: NEA Gaslights Parents - "Twenty twenty-one is shaping up to be the year of one of the largest grassroots movements since the Tea Party movement in 2009. Millions of parents across the country are fighting back against the spread of critical race theory (CRT) in their schools, recognizing it as a dangerous ideological movement meant to divide Americans. The movement is so widespread that CRT was Googled more in June than Joe Biden. Understandably, parents are upset that some teachers are telling white students that they are perpetuating racism while telling black children they are locked out of the American dream.   While the Left pretends this racist ideology isn’t being taught in grade school, new business items adopted by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, show that there is a coordinated effort by the education establishment to force teachers to promote CRT in the classroom and to work to destroy its critics.   Let’s rewind to last year, when parents participating in their children’s at-home learning received a front-row seat in their children’s classrooms for the first time. What they saw disturbed them. Instead of trying to improve America’s failing grades on math and science, schools spent class time indoctrinating kindergartners, teaching five-year-olds about “racist police,” and telling students that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.”  That was the spark for a nationwide movement to reject racist, neo-Marxist teaching that spread like wildfire... CRT supporters brought in the big guns: the National Education Association. At their annual conference last weekend, the nation’s largest teachers’ union announced a six-figure campaign to “have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric” and an official position that “in teaching these topics, it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory [emphasis ours].” The announcement exposed the source of CRT in schools: not necessarily individual teachers, but a coordinated left-wing campaign that includes massive teachers’ unions. Pushing CRT in schools behind the scenes wasn’t enough for these teachers’ unions, however. They doubled down and are attacking the groups opposing their agenda. A separate business item, costing nearly $60,000 in new union dues, was also adopted: NEA will research the organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work and/or use the research already done and put together a list of resources and recommendations for state affiliates, locals, and individual educators to utilize when they are attacked.
Which organization did they single out? The Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action’s partner organization and the leading conservative think tank exposing CRT.   The official left-wing talking point, “CRT is not being taught in schools,” was repeated ad nauseam over the last two months by liberal think tanks, the mainstream media, and progressive politicians alike, in an attempt to gaslight Americans and convince them that they were crazy for wanting to protect their children from the Left’s indoctrination. But the NEA resolution destroyed that narrative — and their woke allies noticed. Soon after the NEA convention concluded on July 3, they removed every business item from their site, including all items mentioning CRT. I noticed the deletion within an hour, and Heritage Action immediately spread the word. Soon after the news broke, the NEA redirected the old links to their homepage. But this flimsy cover-up attempt was too little, too late: Parents nationwide have concrete proof that the education and progressive political establishment are willing to support racist CRT education, lie to Americans about its presence in their children’s schools, and then delete their pro-CRT stance to cover their tracks.   American parents aren’t falling for it. They know that CRT-based curricula are infiltrating their schools, and they overwhelmingly reject it. According to polling conducted by Heritage Action, 79 percent of voters say children should be taught about the American dream instead of the idea that their destiny is tied to their skin color, and 61 percent reject the idea that America is “fundamentally a racist country.” As more parents begin to learn about what CRT really is, they will continue to reject it...   This battle won’t be easy. Grassroots Americans are going head-to-head with some of the nation’s most well-funded and politically connected organizations. The American Federation of Teachers has added $2.5 million to their legal fund to “defend” teachers who insist on breaking the law and indoctrinating students against the will of their parents — even while insisting that CRT is not being taught. Under Biden’s “whole-of-government equity agenda,” the Department of Education is directing grant money to schools for “culturally responsive education.”  The good news: Americans are on our side."

Portland Teacher Says NEA Is Working to Purge Teachers Who Aren't 'Antiracist' - "A Portland-area teacher likened her colleagues who don’t want to teach “anti-racism” to pedophiles, adding that anyone who doesn’t “evolve” with critical race theory will be fired for doing “racist things” and “abusing” the children.  “If you’re not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you’re making yourself obsolete in this field of profession,” warned Cedar Park Middle School teacher Katherine Watkins during a Zoom conference that was later posted to social media."

Rutgers professor calls white people 'villains' - "A professor at New Jersey’s Rutgers University said she believes that white people are historically “committed to being villains” — and that her unfiltered solution to addressing white supremacy would be to “take them out.”  Brittney Cooper, a professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies, addressed the history of colonialism during a discussion last month about critical race theory... She said white people don’t trust society to redistribute power to diverse groups of people “because they are so corrupt.”  “You know, their thinking is so murky and spiritually bankrupt about power that they … they fear this really existentially letting go of power because they cannot imagine another way to be”...   She argued that white people are already “losing,” noting the rising cost of living and that demographics are shifting.  “White people’s birth rates are going down … because they literally cannot afford to put their children, newer generations, into the middle class … It’s super perverse, and also they kind of deserve it”...   “‘Kids actually can grasp critical race theory because the issue that the right has, is that critical race theory is just the proper teaching of American history”"
Apologists slam the right for not knowing what critical race theory is. But here we have a professor promoting it who doesn't either. Ironic

Texas School District Shames White Students As Part Of ‘Cultural Competence,’ Parents Enraged - "An incident involving white students singing along to racial slurs in rap lyrics led Texas’ most successful school district to adopt a radical approach to combating racism.  The Carroll Independent School District of Southlake, a Dallas suburb, is the “top-achieving school district in Texas”... because of videos showing students singling along to rap lyrics and the media attention they received, the district overreached and instituted programs meant to combat “institutional racism” but that in reality shame white students for the color of their skin... “administrators were also told that being white is a bad thing.”  “It includes ‘white fragility,’ ‘a state in which even a minimal amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves (anger, fear, guilt.. silence),’ Pullman reported. “Ironically, the presentation also warns against ‘stereotyping,’ which it says ‘happens when you generalize about a person while ignoring the presence of individual differences.’” One parent, Juan Saldivar, told Pullman that he didn’t want his kids taught this because it was “poison.”"

Opponents of critical race theory win Texas school election - "A Texas school board has scored an overwhelming election victory to stop “critical race theory” and a new “cultural competence action plan” from being forced into classes.  The elections in Southlake on Saturday were so divisive that backers of the new anti-racism measures called on the Department of Justice to intervene — and even pop star Demi Lovato ripped opponents of the plan."

Students claim soap dispensers are proof of systemic racism. Here’s my rebuttal. - "As one UCLA student claimed during the debate, automatic soap dispensers “don’t see her hands” due to the dark pigment of her skin. As another student reiterated, soap dispensers are racist because they force “black and brown bodies” to show their palms — “the only light areas of the skin” — in order to get soap out... students at UCLA actually thought that they were designed with white supremacy in mind.  This, and other claims like it, were not unique perspectives shared by one lone student, but rather a world-view that was reiterated and supported by the over 80 students who attended, or more accurately zoom-bombed, the debate.  Wild dispenser-eque claims abounded: from the argument that “white people fed black babies to crocodiles” to “I had a racist teacher who was racist because she asked me where I was from.”  The scary thing about these claims aren’t the ideas themselves, but rather the world-view that informs them: that systemic racism and white supremacy is all around us, and in everyone, and everything, a person encounters.   These students go about their daily lives and when anything goes even slightly wrong, they immediately conclude that white supremacy, systemic racism, or racism is to blame...   For them, racism is not a viewpoint held by shrinking group of misguided individuals, but rather a secret force that exists everywhere, permeates all things, and wields power over society. Sound familiar? That’s because it has a name: conspiracy theory...   There are, after all, no institutions left in this country which by law are permitted to promote or allow racist rules, unless you count racial promotion through quotas. Often, as I saw at the UCLA debate, there is little point in arguing with the theorists themselves. They have become so entrenched in their far-fetched beliefs that they consider all opposition to be inherently evil (many of the pro-systemic racism students claimed all opponents to their ideas were simply racist themselves).  Instead, the most we can do is confidently defy their claims publicly to prevent more unknowing people from falling into their grip. This dangerous ideology is no longer confined to debates on college campuses, but has already permeated many aspects of our lives and is seeping into many more, from the news media’s insistence on framing every story to fit its predetermined narrative, to creating biased Ethnic Studies curriculums for public schools (to see the real world ramifications that this is already having, I suggest you read the recent works of some courageous Asian American activists such as Asra Q. Nomani, Wenyuan Wu, and Kenny Xu).   Especially here, in California, we can see this change occurring rapidly, evidenced by the recent approval of the new ethnic studies model curriculum, which still contains many flaws despite going through three edits, and which at its core promotes the Balkanization of California students through race, rather than making them all proud Americans first, not to mention the fear many parents have toward standing up against it.  In order to stop the advance of these ideologies stemming from the toxic and abusive orthodoxy of critical race theory, systemic racism and its proponents must be pushed out of the center of American discourse."

Yes, There Really Is a War on Math in Our Schools - "The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics,” an education trend that argues, “among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer”... not only are x and y under attack but so is 2 + 2 = 4... One of the earlier proposals was to abolish algebra at community colleges. By 2017, a growing number of educators wanted to dump it... It has become clear that a much more ambitious project is now in hand: to replace math with social justice math, including, perhaps, a name change. Educator Rochelle Gutierrez, whose specialty is “equity issues in mathematics education,” was to give a keynote presentation, “Mathematx: Towards a way of Being,” at a Mathematics Education and Society Conference in India in early 2019, according to whose abstract, “Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles — mathematx.”*... One target has been the equals sign, =, once considered the bedrock of mathematics... The bizarre tricks that critical theorists use to try to make 2+2 come out to 5 underline a lack of acceptance of the need for rigorous thinking.  Thus, when Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel announced in early August that 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy,” she was speaking for surprising numbers of academics and teachers. Many rightly ask, what about the disadvantaged children who depend on public schools to provide basic literacy and numeracy skills? Well, there are two ways of looking at that. One would be to emphasize the skills; the other would be to undermine their value across society. Critical theory is firmly decided on the latter.   Is there a way of critiquing this mass flight from fact? In the current environment, that’s harder than some might think. For example, in an excerpt from Cynical Theories, Pluckrose and Lindsay note that the new progressive theory explains too much: “It reduces everything to one single variable, one single topic of conversation, one single focus and interpretation: prejudice, as understood under the power dynamics asserted by Theory.”  But why should that be seen as a problem when it is precisely the intention? They then argue, “The entire backbone of the theory is affirming the consequent. True logical statement: if there’s prejudice, then there’s disparity. Logical fallacy: there’s disparity, so there’s prejudice.” But, with the abolition of logic, logical fallacies are no longer a problem. People who don’t accept fallacies, however, are a problem."